MikeDawg
Banned deucer.
From my understanding, Smogon is quite conservative when it comes to bans, both in the amount of them as well as what is actually suspected. Heck, until Drizzle+Swift Swim, a complex ban was unheard of. Now, I have only entered into the realm of competitive battling rather recently, so my opinion is being shared at risk of sounding uninformed, but I feel as if remaining so conservative while GameFreak is making all of these radical changes is purely illogical. In the last few gens we have seen the creation of Stealth Rocks, an entry hazard with extremely wide distribution and a ridiculously potent effect with only 1 turn of required setup; U-Turn, which, essentially, reduces skill drastically by reducing the need for, and even punishing, prediction while even inflicting damage in the process. The rise of trappers, whether through the physical/special split, new ability distribution, or even just new abilites, that reduce skill even further by eliminating the sheer ability to make predictions, bar "predicting" (ie. inhibiting oneself) to avoid these checkmate situations. It is extremely evident both on paper and in practice that all of these things, plus many others, have changed competitive pokemon, though this may be for the worse. Smogon is attempting to create the most skill based metagame possible, yet is inhibiting itself by limiting its suspects to pokemon and nothing else. This is without even consideration that it may be concepts, moves, items, abilities that create the bulk of the problem. Recently, discussion over stealth rock testing has occured, and I believe that, even if SR is not found broken, the sheer fact that it was tested is a step in the right direction. As GameFreak becomes more innovative/radical/stupid/whatever, Smogon must follow suit with its policy, lest the real issues will never be targeted and removed.MikeDawg said:I think this needs to be re-iterated:
This thead is not about MORE bans; it's about different ones
In fact, it's not even so much about bans at all, rather suspect tests.
Conservative is referring to traditional suspects (ie. pokemon) whereas less conservative is referring to most everything mentioned in this thread (moves, abilities, etc.)
So how does the community feel about suspect testing, namely in Gen 6 at this point. Should we be looking more at moves and abilities and other "unorthodox" suspects?