A Plea For Less Conservative Suspect Testing

[MikeDawg]

Remember that makes a metagame "ideal" is largely subjective. I personally STRONGLY disagree with basically ALL the subjective sentiments expressed in the OP-- SR, U-Turn, Weather, etc. are all awesome and give BW something distinct and new from other gens. BW is its own distinct strategy game as worthy and entertaining (or more entertaining!) than any older one competitively. My opinion.

Just for the record, I was not villainizing the mentioned items. I was bringing them up simply to outline the rather radical changes that gamefreak has made to serve as a basis for why smogon should also become more radical. They were simply the most relevent inceptions that had come to mind, and I in no way intended for it to function as an "all of these things are bad" statement (though I can certainly see where that was assumed (via "this may be for the worse"), but I did indeed intend that statement as an open hypothesis: that one of these large changes may or may not have something to do with the arguably poor meta.

It could...but you would need more detail as to how you would want this to work. As it stands, the suspect council are in charge of OU tiering, and under their care the OU tier has (in my opinion) never really found itself in a slippery slope situation. The offshoot of this is that (from this thread), people have felt the council (or the suspect test process) is 2 conservative and we need to change that. So I guess on the one hand you can have the council continue doing what they do, and avoid the snowball, but then you have people pushing for tests on moves, combinations, abilities etc etc which is sorta against the status quo. Like im just saying as it stands you cannot have the slippery slope with the OU council and the suspect test process as it currently stands, but on other hand your not getting Scald banned with the OU council and suspect test process as it stands either.

Hm... I see. I feel as if one feasible step in the right direction would be the continuation of the aforementioned informal "How do you feel about x in the meta." Keeping the userbase distant from the process but still technically involved and have the capacity to have some form of influence seems a healthy medium, assuming the council does indeed take the discussions into consideration, that is.

 

[Lady Alex]

Irrelevant. They all set a clear precedent for move/ability bans, no strings attached. Furthermore, Soul Dew, which has nothing to do with luck, was also banned, thus setting a precedent for item bans. Smogon's suspect test already allows non-Pokemon bans. If Stealth Rock, U-turn, etc. isn't being tested, it has nothing to do with the format of suspect tests.

I'm not suggesting that a precedent for move/ability bans hasn't been set. My saying that something like stealth rock has never been considered for a suspect test isn't because there isn't a precedent for move bans. Stealth rock and u-turn, unlike OHKO moves, have zero luck factor, but are still debatably unhealthy for the metagame. They're a completely different monster than OHKO moves, and to say "well, we've banned moves before, and since we're not testing SR/u-turn, it's definitely because they're totally ok and there's certainly not any other reason" is being presumptious.

 

[kd24]

i personally hate following old set precedents and doing things the "safe" way. if the meta could be better, i say go for it. i'll just cp what i said on irc about this:

<kd24> i agree with banning abilities on mons and banning moves in general
<&pockaway> testing drizzle; testing sr, u-turn, etc
<kd24> i would be against banning moves/items on pokemon
<kd24> so like
<&pockaway> so you agree with moldbreaker excadrill / blaze blaziken?
<kd24> id be in favor of a sr suspect test, an exca with moldbreaker test, a drizzle politoed test
<kd24> etc
<&PKGaming> i'd be down with that dude
<kd24> but id be against a "kyogre w/o surf"
<&PKGaming> precedent is fucking shot at this point
<kd24> or a "groudon without earthquake"
<&pockaway> i see
<&pockaway> i'm personally okay with moldbreaker excadrill and blaze blaziken, too
<kd24> when u start involving movesets or certain items i think its going too far
<&pockaway> more options in OU / lower tiers, the better
<kd24> because the meta will never be perfect
<kd24> and the next logical step would be to just suspect a new combnation
<kd24> with abilities, you're at least setting a standard
<kd24> for yourself
<kd24> with we can only do so much with these abilities

i personally hate the slippery slope argument of "well if you're testing certain abilities on certain pokemon, why not test certain moves or items". the issue with that is too many variables. like i said, meta could always improve, we'd be diddling around with that forever. i dont know why we have to apply that logic to testing abilities on pokemon, which will be very few and far between, not to mention they can be easily traced onto which ones would improve the meta or make no difference. imo, its just people trying to cause a big stink instead of looking at progress.

 

[shrang]

I'm not a fan of banning Pokemon + single trait. However, I reckon banning a single thing, whether it would be a Pokemon, move, ability, item, is fine. We should keep our suspect testing as simple as possible, and that would be consistent with what we have, with the exception of Aldaron's Proposal. So, we can ban *insert Pokemon*, or *insert ability* or *insert move*, or *insert item*, however I'm not a fan of banning Pokemon A AND ability B, for instance. For example, ban "Blaziken" or ban "Speed Boost". Whichever is more comprehensive, yet allows for the greatest freedom in teambuilding should be the one that's picked. Either ban Pokemon A or ability B. Otherwise you're just making a more and more convuluted system and it'll be even harder for new players to get into our metagame.

 

[yee]

I personally have to ask why we're worried about a slippery slope at all. Human restraint is possible, and our new council system prevents any test that higher ups think is too silly.

On another note I think it is time for this perception change to happen. I'm as ban-happy as anyone and besides weather I'd be fine if only 2 or 3 individual pokemon got suspected. Outside of that I have previously thought "man Volt Switch / U-Turn above a pathetic BP of 20 or something low is really decreasing competitiveness" and not made much of it. Coming up on old DPP ladders on shoddy I found you could defeat another team without much of a plan, but going into learning ADV and GSC the question comes up "how do things die" because of the lack of SR (among other things) making it so much more difficult and involved. There are people all over who think Scald / U-Turn / hazards are more detrimental to the metagame than any pokemon and I think we ought to keep looking down this road for the future.

As for things less people think of, a longtime pal pointed out to me that Leftovers is unhealthy as an undisputed #1 item choice. This hasn't led to any bans obviously, but it got me thinking about just how much of a monopoly it is and how much of an impact items / moves have compared to a single pokemon at times. As a whole I believe the separating factor deciding whether or not to test is if we see that we can make a simpler banlist to reach a balanced metagame, it ought to be done.

 

[X5Dragon]

I always thought that complex bans and similar demands were not viable because of the how complex it would be to implement it...right until Rough Skin Garchomp was allowed into OU, that suddenly made not retesting the other abilities of Excadrill, Blaziken and others somewhat strange.

I don't think that smogon is conservative in it's ban approach as much as it is going about it in the wrong way. Take for example this suspect testing, we are testing Landrus before testing Keledo, with some arguing that Landrus would look a lot more broken with the availability of the Keleo-TTar core than without it.

Instead we could have made this suspect test as is, THEN make a suspect ladder test without Keledo, THEN we have a vote on both at the same time.

EDIT: If the rumor for a SR-less test tier is true, then we should test and go about exploring the many options that we have (testing moves, etc.) before Gen VI arrives so we can be 100% ready and with clear policies on our hands.

 

[Lady Alex]

Although it's not a priority for the council, before Pokemon X\Y come out, we'll set up an (informal) stealth rock-less ladder so that we can have an actual idea of what the metagame looks like without the premier entry hazard in the game. According to the results of this test and to what the new games bring to the table, we might take a different approach in regards to SR for the next generation of Pokemon.

 

[Katakiri]

I'm for this but also against this to an extent.
Less conservative banning was the very start of this weather-centered meta-game we've made for ourselves. I truly blame Alderon's Proposal for how ridiculous OU is today. It was the first in a long chain of small nerfs to something we should have outright banned. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that a repeat of this banning style in 6th Gen would greatly test my love for the OU tier and Smogon in general more-so than ever before. I believe Drizzle was broken, not Swift Swim, Manaphy, or Tornadus-T. We've nerfed it manageable levels, but "manageable" is a poor man's balance. I highly doubt Gen 6 could do anything to change that unless we do it ourselves.

I do however find that abilities have the power to define and redefine Pokemon as to what they are and I would absolutely not object to treating specific Ability + Pokemon combinations as entirely different Pokemon as far as banning goes. Seeing "Sand Rush Excadrill" on the ban list isn't going to confuse any Smogon newcomer anymore than seeing just "Excadrill" would so long at it's listed with the other Uber Pokemon and not some sort of sub-category. Our ban-list stays looking clean and simple and we get to keep one or two Pokemon out of Ubers for everyone to use. No one loses, everyone wins, right?

I mean what's the difference between having "Soul Dew Latios" banned and "Speed Boost Blaziken" banned? Essentially there's no difference other than the fact that Smogon gave Soul Dew its own special spot for items (of which it is the only one) on the ban list. In Balanced Hackmons, I have to choose between Soul Dew on Latias or Poison Heal Latias, which one is better? It's a toss up. Maybe a comparison that's closer to home would be Huge Power Azumarill vs Sap Sipper Azumarill, two completely different Pokemon damage-wise; it's no different at all from what Lati@s gets from Soul Dew except that it's an ability. We've been making this exception for the Lati since Gen 4; it's high time that we start treating other Pokemon the same way.

A conservative mindset isn't a bad thing; it all depends on what's been put on the table. I only want compromises when they make sense and don't end up getting 3 other Pokemon banned later on, which I have high hopes will be everything proposed in Gen 6 onward.

 

[haunter]

but on other hand your not getting Scald banned with the OU council and suspect test process as it stands either.

Before making such a claim, I'd ask Jabba about that :)

Don't assume that we're not going to test individual moves or more complex bans in the future, as PR discussions on these aspects are already planned and will be up soon. The Council is always open to the requests that come from the user-base and the pre-suspect threads that someone mentioned are the proof of it.

 

[Lavos]

haunter 2016

 

[Soul Fly]

I don't get this "Slippery Slope" argument. We have been flirting with the slope from as long back as Aldaron's Proposal.

You said that if we allow A to happen, then Z will eventually happen too, therefore A should not happen.

The problem with this reasoning is that it avoids engaging with the issue at hand, and instead shifts attention to extreme hypotheticals. Because no proof is presented to show that such extreme hypotheticals will in fact occur, this unsubstantiated 'ban brigade' argument, tries to go past reasoning by leveraging fear. In effect the argument at hand is unfairly tainted by unsubstantiated conjecture.

While I understand all your concerns I might also remind you that Smogon is also pre-biased against 'complex bans' and generally tend to maintain the spirit of the game.
So I'm against the notion of move/item/ability+pokemon bans because tbh it's retarded and can be applied to n number of cases. But in extending the precedence to banning moves/weather (in an isolated manner), this shouldn't be an issue.


PS: imo alexwolf's account is compromised. he's been agreeing with Lavos today, and that too on opinions he's usually biased against.

 

[shrang]

I mean what's the difference between having "Soul Dew Latios" banned and "Speed Boost Blaziken" banned?

The difference is that Soul Dew as an item is banned. Individually, Soul Dew is banned, but Speed Boost Blaziken requires two things to be banned in conjunction.

 

[Stratos]

I am totally in favor of trying new things, as long as those things are justified and for the right reasons. For example, imo Aladaron's proposal was justified and had many good reasons behind it, so i support it. I don't think that SR should be suspected not because it is a move, but because it isn't a broken move (once again, this is my opinion, and there is no point to argue about it in this thread) and i am mentioning this certain move because it was the most recently mentioned for suspecting. I think we should be willing to try new banning methods and criteria where we need to, and not make it a general moto which would result in a ban-happyness that is equally bad with the rejection of change and being conservative.

hey man did that PS! hacker get your smogon password?

i personally hate following old set precedents and doing things the "safe" way. if the meta could be better, i say go for it. i'll just cp what i said on irc about this:

<kd24> i agree with banning abilities on mons and banning moves in general
<&pockaway> testing drizzle; testing sr, u-turn, etc
<kd24> i would be against banning moves/items on pokemon
<kd24> so like
<&pockaway> so you agree with moldbreaker excadrill / blaze blaziken?
<kd24> id be in favor of a sr suspect test, an exca with moldbreaker test, a drizzle politoed test
<kd24> etc
<&PKGaming> i'd be down with that dude
<kd24> but id be against a "kyogre w/o surf"
<&PKGaming> precedent is fucking shot at this point
<kd24> or a "groudon without earthquake"
<&pockaway> i see
<&pockaway> i'm personally okay with moldbreaker excadrill and blaze blaziken, too
<kd24> when u start involving movesets or certain items i think its going too far
<&pockaway> more options in OU / lower tiers, the better
<kd24> because the meta will never be perfect
<kd24> and the next logical step would be to just suspect a new combnation
<kd24> with abilities, you're at least setting a standard
<kd24> for yourself
<kd24> with we can only do so much with these abilities

i personally hate the slippery slope argument of "well if you're testing certain abilities on certain pokemon, why not test certain moves or items". the issue with that is too many variables. like i said, meta could always improve, we'd be diddling around with that forever. i dont know why we have to apply that logic to testing abilities on pokemon, which will be very few and far between, not to mention they can be easily traced onto which ones would improve the meta or make no difference. imo, its just people trying to cause a big stink instead of looking at progress.

i agree that the slippery slope stuff is bullshit, but I don't want to do a pokemon+ability ban anyway. My problem is that tiering would simply become far too complex. We'd have OU Thundurus, OU Excadrill, UU Thund-T, and RU Blaziken, and then we'd have four more entries on this page saying that you can't use their respective broken abilities. Furthermore, would this apply to lower tiers? We now have NU Gothitelle, NU Wobbuffet, and UU Chansey with shadow tag / natural cure bans (maybe even RU Venomoth with Tinted Lens banned). I personally like the fact that each of the entries in the banlist section starts with "A Team cannot." I think that's the proper way to maintain simplistic banlists, and after that we get a nightmare.

 

[X5Dragon]

^^Uber is a playable banlist, everything underneath it is determined by usage. Or am I getting this wrong?

 

[Houndoomsday]

the argument that gamefreak has made radical changes therefore we need radical bans is a load of bullcrap. that have made radical changes every generation. take evs. they are a huge shift and force the player to specialize there mon more. but those pail in comparison to ITEMS and ABILITIES, both introduced in a later gen. or lets look at specific items, like choice items, or gems. hell, the physical special shift was a pretty important change too.

my point is this generation has implemented some big changes but so have every other generation. we dont need to all of a sudden overhaul our current system because we got a new move or two.

 

[SmashBrosBrawl]

Im completely against banning specific combinations of. pokemon+ability/moves/items. Theres no reason to do this, it will only make tiering more complicated. I have no problem with moves/abilities/item bans by themselves though. Those have happened in the past and have been benefitial to the metagame. I dont think we need to be ''less'' conservative because we have already got to the point where anything can be suspected be it pokemon, move, item or ability. This system works and theres no need to change it now.

I always thought that complex bans and similar demands were not viable because of the how complex it would be to implement it...right until Rough Skin Garchomp was allowed into OU, that suddenly made not retesting the other abilities of Excadrill, Blaziken and others somewhat strange.

We didnt allowed Rough Skin garchomp. Sand veil was simply banned under evasion clause which made garchomp available with an alternative ability.

 

[MikeDawg]

Let's keep in mind, guys, that the point of the discussion is not complex bans. It is the idea of suspecting things like moves and items and whatever else 6 gen might bring. I feel as if it is the complex ban idea that is contributing most to the snowball effect fear, when that is not even the matter at hand.

 

[Eo Ut Mortus]

I'm not suggesting that a precedent for move/ability bans hasn't been set. My saying that something like stealth rock has never been considered for a suspect test isn't because there isn't a precedent for move bans. Stealth rock and u-turn, unlike OHKO moves, have zero luck factor, but are still debatably unhealthy for the metagame. They're a completely different monster than OHKO moves, and to say "well, we've banned moves before, and since we're not testing SR/u-turn, it's definitely because they're totally ok and there's certainly not any other reason" is being presumptious.

This is a complete contradiction.

"I'm not saying a precedent for move/ability bans hasn't been set."

"...there isn't a precedent for move bans."

If a precedent has been set, then it exists. If you intended some other meaning by your post, it is unclear.

It furthermore doesn't matter that these things have a luck factor. Consider that we could have banned Smeargle, Octillery, and Bibarel instead of banning the ability Moody. Assuming that we did not ban abilities, this would be the logical method to follow in order to eliminate Moody from OU. But we didn't.

I also never said we're not testing SR/U-turn because they're definitively not broken. The only thing I presumed to know was that the council was not being held back by some false conception of precedent; I never purported to know the its exact intentions. If you are attributing that statement to me, you drew that conclusion on your own and are putting words in my mouth.

---

I think one thing to consider is that the OU metagame is produced by imposing restrictions on a generation's complete pool of Pokemon; in other words, we start with what is currently the Ubers tier (minus clauses) and set restrictions on it to make it more playable. We then set usage restrictions on OU to create UU, and so forth. In this way we create multiple playable metagames, but through the imposition of different restrictions. The fact that most enjoy a decent amount of play shows that there are multiple processes by which we can create playable, enjoyable metagames. There is no doubt in my mind that suspect testing could produce a playable metagame that allowed lower-leveled Ubers or a metagame that banned certain move/Pokemon combinations or a metagame that banned all legendaries from OU. What these metagames gain (or lose) in diversity, lose (or gain) in simplicity, both generally considered to be desirable characteristics for a metagame. How are we to judge which of these metagames is the best, though? How are we to assign weight to these characteristics and others? It is difficult to quantify either diversity or simplicity; it is ultimately arbitrary, and this is why setting and adhering to a certain precedent is important.

 

[X5Dragon]

We didnt allowed Rough Skin garchomp.

We had a test with Rough Skin Garchomp in OU before he was OK'd.

Edit: Anyway the point is, we have differentiated between the abilities of the same pokemon, there is no reason to do the same for other banned pokemon like Excadrill and Blaziken. I know that the pretext for banning Garchomp was banning sand veil therefore Garchomp as whole wasn't considered broken, just the ability, but still..

And honestly with Nintendo saying that it's up to players to define the metagame and it banning "legendaries" regardless of how good they are in actual competitive gaming should kill any notion that by defining our own, arguably more rigorous criteria that we are ruining the game.

 

[Stratos]

We had a test with Rough Skin Garchomp in OU before he was OK'd.

no.

in the test, ALL sand veil was banned, not just sand veil with Garchomp. it was never a complex ban of sand veil + chomp.

^^Uber is a playable banlist, everything underneath it is determined by usage. Or am I getting this wrong?

we have BL, BL2, and (the currently empty) BL3 for lower tiers to ban shit they don't like. Those are what i was referring to with chansey / venomoth / gothitelle / wobbuffet.

It furthermore doesn't matter that these things have a luck factor. Consider that we could have banned Smeargle, Octillery, and Bibarel instead of banning the ability Moody. Assuming that we did not ban abilities, this would be the logical method to follow in order to eliminate Moody from OU. But we didn't.

Lady alex's point was that the abilities/moves/items that OU has banned in the past (Moody, OHKOs, Brightpowder, Sand Veil, Minimize) are so special-cased because they were obviously designed for a noncompetitive environment that it doesn't really set any precedent for banning abilities/moves/items. When I look at all those bans, the only precedent they truly set for me is that we ban stupid bullshit that proves GameFreak hates us. Until we get a ban on a truly COMPETITIVE move/item/ability, i (and others) don't really see the ones we have in place as proof that it can happen.

(of course, we already do have competitive bans on moves and abilities in lower tiers—RU banned SmashPass while UU has banned Drought and Sand Stream. And of course there was Aldaron's proposal. And I agree with OP that these bans should be on the table in the future. But the point still stands that the banning of bullshit hax doesn't give us much precedent in the competitive sector).

 

[Curtains]

We will never get a good gen 5/gen 6 metagame until "we" (you) start banning things that are actually broken instead of trying to shape the metagame into something you think people would like (*cough* politoed/rain). Hopefully in gen 6 we will get to the root of the issues early and make the game competitive again and not a game where you have to stack water resist. I am probably the most conservative of them all when it comes to banning but somethings are just too obvious. Smogon needs to learn to get a feel of when something in the metagame has too much impact on teambuilding. Water monotype teams shouldn't be that good.

edit: dawg you misread my post. read again. no contradictions buddy.

edit: Jukain... not all teams have those and you still aren't guaranteed to win easily.

 

[MikeDawg]

We will never get a good gen 5/gen 6 metagame until "we" (you) start banning things that are actually broken instead of trying to shape the metagame into something you think people would like (*cough* politoed/rain). Hopefully in gen 6 we will get to the root of the issues early and make the game competitive again and not a game where you have to stack water resist. I am probably the most conservative of them all when it comes to banning but somethings are just too obvious. Water monotype teams shouldn't be that good.

I don't understand. You don't think rain is broken/unhealthy/whatever.

But you think an ideal meta os one where we don't have to stack water resists?

Right...

And the point of this thread isn't to ban things to shape a subjectively good meta. It's to point out that it may be new moves/abilities/entities that are broken rather than the "norm" of just considering broken pokemon.

And when have we ever tried to shape the meta into what we think is good, rather than just banning thins that are broken? Unless I missed something, that has been smogon's policy forever, and you still believe that is all that is neccesary to get a good meta, even though gen 5 ou (as you mentioned) is arguably awful?

Right...

Too many contradictions, curtains.

edit: dawg you misread my post. read again. no contradictions buddy.

Reread it... Still a big ol' mess of contradictions (which I convienently pointed out for you right up there)

 

[Jukain]

We will never get a good gen 5/gen 6 metagame until "we" (you) start banning things that are actually broken instead of trying to shape the metagame into something you think people would like (*cough* politoed/rain). Hopefully in gen 6 we will get to the root of the issues early and make the game competitive again and not a game where you have to stack water resist. I am probably the most conservative of them all when it comes to banning but somethings are just too obvious. Smogon needs to learn to get a feel of when something in the metagame has too much impact on teambuilding. Water monotype teams shouldn't be that good.

On that last point...you can't be serious. Water monotype teams are and will always be abysmal. Jolteon / Thundurus-T? gg. Celebi? gg.

 

[X5Dragon]

it was never a complex ban of sand veil + chomp.

I didn't say that, I said Garchomp with Rough Skin was tested before he was OK'd, obviously the ban on Sand Viel was an ability ban:

http://www.smogon.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3471600

They could have just simply said Garchomp is banned the same reason why Excadrill is (because it has one broken ability), but this new approach opened lots of good doors that we should embrace.

 

[Eo Ut Mortus]

Lady alex's point was that the abilities/moves/items that OU has banned in the past (Moody, OHKOs, Brightpowder, Sand Veil, Minimize) are so special-cased because they were obviously designed for a noncompetitive environment that it doesn't really set any precedent for banning abilities/moves/items. When I look at all those bans, the only precedent they truly set for me is that we ban stupid bullshit that proves GameFreak hates us. Until we get a ban on a truly COMPETITIVE move/item/ability, i (and others) don't really see the ones we have in place as proof that it can happen.

(of course, we already do have competitive bans on moves and abilities in lower tiers—RU banned SmashPass while UU has banned Drought and Sand Stream. And of course there was Aldaron's proposal. And I agree with OP that these bans should be on the table in the future. But the point still stands that the banning of bullshit hax doesn't give us much precedent in the competitive sector).

First of all, are you talking about bans or tests? Your post says bans, but if you are unhappy with the lack of bans, then your frustration should lie with the voters, and the onus is on you and those who share your opinion to convince the voting majority that these things are broken. This thread is an appeal to the council, though.

If you are talking about tests, then I disagree...because Drizzle, Drought, Sandstream, and Shadow Tag were all suspects in the past. There is no precedent being broken, and I therefore don't think the council is refusing to test these things out of a reluctance to break precedent.