bugmaniacbob
Was fun while it lasted
Introduction
In this thread, we will hopefully be sorting out all of the slightly confused rules pertaining to VGMs and what moves are allowed or disallowed in any given situation (note that we will not be talking about such other details as movepool limits and required moves yet) - At this point in time, we simply want to decide on how we want to go about creating a list of VGMs and then, later, proceed to create one. As some of us may not necessarily be aware of how the VGM lists and philosophy came to be established, I feel it is worth going over the threads that led up to the status of the VGM lists today.
Philosophy
The concept of "Very Good Moves" came about in response to the growing realisation that CAP movepools tended to include far more moves than were strictly necessary, as documented in this thread, which introduced the idea of strict movepool limits in response to the Pokemon's BSR, with different limits on good moves and total moves in order to preserve movepool flavour (type-move and move-move requirements were also added for similar reasons). Here, a "V. good move" was defined as "any move that has ever been a "most commonly used move" for any "good Pokemon"", where a "most commonly used move" was "any move that has EVER been used enough on a pokemon to get listed distinctly on the monthly detail reports for that pokemon on any competitive ladder" and a "good Pokemon" was "any Pokemon that has ever been used more than 3000 times in a month on the Standard, Uber, or UU ladder". This gave an objective list of 280 Very Good Moves and was the standard for the latter part of DPP, as well as all the DPP CAPs being revised to comply with the new regulations added.
When BW rolled around, we no longer had Shoddy Battle server statistics that would allow us to calculate VGMs in the same way and no longer had a stable metagame from which to draw them. As such, I proposed here that we change our method of assigning VGM status from an objective to a subjective measure, through eyeballing. This was not entirely a new idea, as a list of "competitive moves" as a resource for movepool makers had existed for a while prior to the introduction of Very Good Moves (and indeed still remains on-site). As a consequence, the definition of the VGM was changed to "a move that is considered by the combination of its power, accuracy, effect chance, move priority, power points, and overall type coverage to be of distinct individual competitive advantage in a given movepool". In practice this typically meant having more than 70 Base Power, weighted by accuracy, unless it was of a type that could hit a relevant Pokemon for 4x damage, such as Fire Fang for Scizor, or was the best available option for its type, such as Night Slash. There were a couple of problems that accompanied the changeover from objective to subjective means; first, that certain moves that were only competitively useful under certain conditions, such as Curse and Dynamicpunch, were difficult to place, and second, that this opened the floor to errors of judgement, and these were things that led to a number of problems with the VGM lists in late BW, when we had more information to work with. The first was partly solved with further rules that also lessened the strain on fitting moves into movepools, while the second I attempted to solve by re-assessing the VGM lists here, though nothing ever came of it.
Current Discussion
Why is any of this relevant? Well, before we begin anything we ought really to make a final judgement call on how we are going to go about making this list and how we are going to go about making updated lists in the future, as well as what if any of the current guidelines as to allowed moves we are going to keep, or further guidelines we wish to introduce. As the last link makes clear, Doug was working on finding a new objective measure for Very Good Moves around a year ago, though from what I've seen of CAP6 it does not look like this was finished in time. Even so, now that we have Pokemon Showdown! and Antar is pulling up vast amounts of stats every month, it doesn't seem at all implausible that we might be able to create an objective list again in the future. Hence, I feel it is worth first going over the options that we have going forward:
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What to expect next
In this thread, we will hopefully be sorting out all of the slightly confused rules pertaining to VGMs and what moves are allowed or disallowed in any given situation (note that we will not be talking about such other details as movepool limits and required moves yet) - At this point in time, we simply want to decide on how we want to go about creating a list of VGMs and then, later, proceed to create one. As some of us may not necessarily be aware of how the VGM lists and philosophy came to be established, I feel it is worth going over the threads that led up to the status of the VGM lists today.
Philosophy
The concept of "Very Good Moves" came about in response to the growing realisation that CAP movepools tended to include far more moves than were strictly necessary, as documented in this thread, which introduced the idea of strict movepool limits in response to the Pokemon's BSR, with different limits on good moves and total moves in order to preserve movepool flavour (type-move and move-move requirements were also added for similar reasons). Here, a "V. good move" was defined as "any move that has ever been a "most commonly used move" for any "good Pokemon"", where a "most commonly used move" was "any move that has EVER been used enough on a pokemon to get listed distinctly on the monthly detail reports for that pokemon on any competitive ladder" and a "good Pokemon" was "any Pokemon that has ever been used more than 3000 times in a month on the Standard, Uber, or UU ladder". This gave an objective list of 280 Very Good Moves and was the standard for the latter part of DPP, as well as all the DPP CAPs being revised to comply with the new regulations added.
When BW rolled around, we no longer had Shoddy Battle server statistics that would allow us to calculate VGMs in the same way and no longer had a stable metagame from which to draw them. As such, I proposed here that we change our method of assigning VGM status from an objective to a subjective measure, through eyeballing. This was not entirely a new idea, as a list of "competitive moves" as a resource for movepool makers had existed for a while prior to the introduction of Very Good Moves (and indeed still remains on-site). As a consequence, the definition of the VGM was changed to "a move that is considered by the combination of its power, accuracy, effect chance, move priority, power points, and overall type coverage to be of distinct individual competitive advantage in a given movepool". In practice this typically meant having more than 70 Base Power, weighted by accuracy, unless it was of a type that could hit a relevant Pokemon for 4x damage, such as Fire Fang for Scizor, or was the best available option for its type, such as Night Slash. There were a couple of problems that accompanied the changeover from objective to subjective means; first, that certain moves that were only competitively useful under certain conditions, such as Curse and Dynamicpunch, were difficult to place, and second, that this opened the floor to errors of judgement, and these were things that led to a number of problems with the VGM lists in late BW, when we had more information to work with. The first was partly solved with further rules that also lessened the strain on fitting moves into movepools, while the second I attempted to solve by re-assessing the VGM lists here, though nothing ever came of it.
Current Discussion
Why is any of this relevant? Well, before we begin anything we ought really to make a final judgement call on how we are going to go about making this list and how we are going to go about making updated lists in the future, as well as what if any of the current guidelines as to allowed moves we are going to keep, or further guidelines we wish to introduce. As the last link makes clear, Doug was working on finding a new objective measure for Very Good Moves around a year ago, though from what I've seen of CAP6 it does not look like this was finished in time. Even so, now that we have Pokemon Showdown! and Antar is pulling up vast amounts of stats every month, it doesn't seem at all implausible that we might be able to create an objective list again in the future. Hence, I feel it is worth first going over the options that we have going forward:
- We create an objective list of Very Good Moves based on usage stats. The current subjective Very Good Moves list will be taken and updated for XY, and used to update the currently on-site Competitive Moves article.
- We create a subjective list of Very Good Moves based on competitive worth, with a view to creating an objective list in the future for use in later XY CAPs.
- We create a subjective list of Very Good Moves based on competitive worth, and continue to use this list with periodic updates for the duration of XY.
- Curse only counts as a Very Good Move for Pokemon that are not of the Ghost-type.
- Legendary Pokemon signature moves are automatically disallowed for all CAPs.
- Move copies count as VGMs, but only count once as Very Good Moves when more than one are present in a movepool.
- If a VGM is completely outclassed by another VGM in the movepool, the two moves only count together as one VGM.
- All moves made competitively viable by an ability are also considered VGMs.
- If a VGM is of absolutely no competitive use to a specific CAP, then the Movepool Leader has the ability to make it not count as a VGM for that CAP.
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What to expect next
- Formulation of the VGM and Competitive Move lists
- Discussion of movepool limits and their relationship with BSR
- Discussion of required moves and the move-move and type-move tables
- Updating the relevant on-site articles
- Anything else I've forgotten