Proposal Separate Classic Gens (1-5) from Modern Tiering Policy

[peng]

I will be mostly referring to BW OU in this post as its where I'm most familiar, but this will be pertinent for DPP OU + other Classic gens also.

Proposal - Bring back flexible tiering policy in classic gens, let the playerbase decide on more nuanced action that is tailored to their metagame

Flexible Tiering History
Smogon tiering policy was historically quite lax; we were open to a pragmatic approach to tiering depending on the needs of the metagame. BW OU is probably best characterised by this era, with an early complex ban of Drizzle + Swift Swim (Aldaron's Proposal) which was borne out of the community's hesitance to ban Drizzle multiple times but a wider acceptance that the playstyle needed a nerf of some kind. Multiple other votes of this style followed - a variety of restrictions on Baton Pass, and complex bans of Drought + Chlorophyll and Sand Stream + Sand Rush to bring the other weathers in line with Rain, and then eventually a full Sand Rush ban. The latter was used purely as a justification to re-allow Rapid Spin Excadrill into the tier in 2016, in order to limit Spikes + Psychic strategies which had been dominant. Other generations adopted similar approaches, including a complex Snow Cloak only on Pokemon with other abilities ban in DPP OU.

Despite much furore about how bad complex bans are, the majority of these decisions have to be heralded as successes. With Aldaron's Proposal, the community was given many many opportunities to reverse the decision and implement a straight Drizzle ban, and this option never gained a majority. Today, BW tiering is still active but Drizzle rarely, if ever, is raised as an issue with many players consider Rain giving the tier much of its character. Likewise, the gymnastics required to bring back Excadrill would widely be considered successful - sure, Spikes and Psychics are still incredibly strong but far more playable than in 2015, and in general Excadrill's Rapid Spin has been a great enabler of strategies in the tier in the last 8 years.

Today
Old Gens have now been brought under the tiering policy that dictates modern generations, which is generally more strict and favours entire Pokemon bans wherever possible. I should state that in current metagames that are actively evolving quickly, this is sensible - making bans to preserve X or Y when you have no idea if those strategies will even be that good in 6 months time does needlessly complex tiering. However, for generations over a decade old, I think it is reasonable to want to limit collateral effects on our metagames and tiering policy should reflect that. Sometimes, limiting 10+ year old generations to Pokemon bans or nothing all but guarantees no change will happen, or forces unwanted change.

I can talk about how this affects Gen 5. Excadrill, the Pokemon we have repeatedly bent over backwards to fit into the metagame for Rapid Spin, has after 8 years found a way to be annoying again. Swords Dance paired with Sand Force is considered by some to be slightly too strong at breaking Sand balances and stalls, repeatedly proving its ability to break even physically defensive Skarmory in SPL. If this were several years ago, I think its clear that we would begin to look at Sand Force at this stage. Adding Sand Force into the "list of Sand-abusing abilities we ban to let keep Rapid Spinner Excadrill":

• does not make the ban list any more complex than it is.
• has historical precedent with Sand Rush, and does not introduce any new precedent that does not already exist (if people wanted to push for Blaze Blaziken they could already use the Sand Rush ban as justification, but nobody does).
• does not have collateral effects on any other relevant Pokemon (Sand Force is not used at all outside of Excadrill).

And yet, tiering policy forces us into acting on Excadrill only, with no nuance to vote on Sand Force. I speak for many when I say that the idea of banning Excadrill as a whole, considering the reasons we broke convention to bring it down to begin with, is entirely unpalatable to the point that I see no way that it would reach a majority vote. This is a Pokemon that is number 3 in SPL usage, the vast majority of that usage not as a Swords Dance Sand Force breaker, but as one of the best glue Pokemon in the game, a limiter of Spikes, essential partner to many grounded support pokemon, and enabler of a diverse variety of weatherless, Sun, and Hails too. Regardless of your feelings on SF SD drill, banning it entirely would be scarily destabilising and the added bans required on top could be many. To do so sets the tier back almost a decade, but it is the only option that the council can present to us under current policy. But Sand Force feels such an obvious thing to look at considering our tiering history. This is not to say that Sand Force would definitely reach a majority, but at least give us the option.

I don't have the expertise to comment much on other generations, but I know this is relevant in DPP also. Recent polling suggests that the majority of players think Iron Head Jirachi is problematic and would be open to a specialised tiering option if it was offered, but under modern policy this can't be done. Much like Excadrill, even those who hate Iron Head Serene Grace tend to be worried about the destabilising effect of losing Jirachi in the tier and its knock-on effects. Some kind of option on Iron Head / Serene Grace feels like it would be welcomed with open arms by the community but is not presented as an option. More niche, but a similar decision was made regarding Snow Cloak Froslass - previously falling under the banner of "Snow Cloak can be used if the Pokemon has no other ability", Froslass was OU legal alongside Abomasnow leading to problematic evasion strategies. The only tiering action that was allowed last year was to ban Froslass in its entirety, losing a useful lead Spiker, all because a complex ban of Snow Warning + Snow Cloak was not allowed despite many historical precedents.

ADV is also really out of my comfort zone but I believe there have been similar headaches with SpeedPass vs Ninjask voting etc, playerbases being given some kind of Monkey Paw versions of suspects tests that then don't actually lead to change rather than the option of a nuanced vote

The tightening of tiering policy in old generations no longer serves the metagames or their communities. Allow us to be more flexible.

 

[Karxrida]

I cannot speak for any other part of your post but your proposal for Excadrill is honestly luscious. This frankly reminds me of the embarrassment of how Gen 6 Baton Pass was handled until we pulled our heads out of our assed and just outright banned the move.

If Excadrill is still causing problems after we went out of our way to nerf it it's clearly worth getting rid of again lmao. A Sand Force bad is stupid. The only way I can Excadrill kept is if the bullet is finally bitten and all forms are permaweather are banned like they should have been over a decade ago.

 

[Eeveeto]

I was and still am very against unbanning Excadrill in BW, it killed many Pokemon's viability (Sand Rush and Chlorophyll Mons) and didn't even solve the problem of Spikes dominating the Tier. The best course of action would be to return to 2015 Metagame.

That being said, banning Sand Force it's not inconsistent with what has already been done. Sand Rush was only considered Broken on Excadrill, Sand Force is also considered only Broken on Excadrill. Therefore, given that no one else wants to return to 2015 Meta, Sand Force Ban is not worse than Sand Rush Ban, so it makes sense as a tiering decision and could balance weather wars a little (Sand is by far the strongest weather currently).

 

[peng]

I cannot speak for any other part of your post but your proposal for Excadrill is honestly luscious. This frankly reminds me of the embarrassment of how Gen 6 Baton Pass was handled until we pulled our heads out of our assed and just outright banned the move.

If Excadrill is still causing problems after we went out of our way to nerf it it's clearly worth getting rid of again lmao. A Sand Force bad is stupid. The only way I can Excadrill kept is if the bullet is finally bitten and all forms are permaweather are banned like they should have been over a decade ago.

If you read my post and thought “just ban Excadrill lol” then you have entirely missed the point. BW Excadrill and DPP Jirachi are such ingrained mons in their tiers that they are highly unlikely to ever reach a majority ban vote, despite having some problematic elements.

In old gen suspect votes people are always going to be thinking of the “what happens if we ban X” scenario, and it prevents any action on high usage glue Pokemon despite their negative traits. Old gen tiering needs to accept that their playerbase will think this way in the voting process and give more nuanced tiering options. We had these nuanced options in the past.

 

[DarthTyros]

I will be mostly referring to BW OU in this post as its where I'm most familiar, but this will be pertinent for DPP OU + other Classic gens also.

Proposal - Bring back flexible tiering policy in classic gens, let the playerbase decide on more nuanced action that is tailored to their metagame

Flexible Tiering History
Smogon tiering policy was historically quite lax; we were open to a pragmatic approach to tiering depending on the needs of the metagame. BW OU is probably best characterised by this era, with an early complex ban of Drizzle + Swift Swim (Aldaron's Proposal) which was borne out of the community's hesitance to ban Drizzle multiple times but a wider acceptance that the playstyle needed a nerf of some kind. Multiple other votes of this style followed - a variety of restrictions on Baton Pass, and complex bans of Drought + Chlorophyll and Sand Stream + Sand Rush to bring the other weathers in line with Rain, and then eventually a full Sand Rush ban. The latter was used purely as a justification to re-allow Rapid Spin Excadrill into the tier in 2016, in order to limit Spikes + Psychic strategies which had been dominant. Other generations adopted similar approaches, including a complex Snow Cloak only on Pokemon with other abilities ban in DPP OU.

Despite much furore about how bad complex bans are, the majority of these decisions have to be heralded as successes. With Aldaron's Proposal, the community was given many many opportunities to reverse the decision and implement a straight Drizzle ban, and this option never gained a majority. Today, BW tiering is still active but Drizzle rarely, if ever, is raised as an issue with many players consider Rain giving the tier much of its character. Likewise, the gymnastics required to bring back Excadrill would widely be considered successful - sure, Spikes and Psychics are still incredibly strong but far more playable than in 2015, and in general Excadrill's Rapid Spin has been a great enabler of strategies in the tier in the last 8 years.

Today
Old Gens have now been brought under the tiering policy that dictates modern generations, which is generally more strict and favours entire Pokemon bans wherever possible. I should state that in current metagames that are actively evolving quickly, this is sensible - making bans to preserve X or Y when you have no idea if those strategies will even be that good in 6 months time does needlessly complex tiering. However, for generations over a decade old, I think it is reasonable to want to limit collateral effects on our metagames and tiering policy should reflect that. Sometimes, limiting 10+ year old generations to Pokemon bans or nothing all but guarantees no change will happen, or forces unwanted change.

I can talk about how this affects Gen 5. Excadrill, the Pokemon we have repeatedly bent over backwards to fit into the metagame for Rapid Spin, has after 8 years found a way to be annoying again. Swords Dance paired with Sand Force is considered by some to be slightly too strong at breaking Sand balances and stalls, repeatedly proving its ability to break even physically defensive Skarmory in SPL. If this were several years ago, I think its clear that we would begin to look at Sand Force at this stage. Adding Sand Force into the "list of Sand-abusing abilities we ban to let keep Rapid Spinner Excadrill":

• does not make the ban list any more complex than it is.
• has historical precedent with Sand Rush, and does not introduce any new precedent that does not already exist (if people wanted to push for Blaze Blaziken they could already use the Sand Rush ban as justification, but nobody does).
• does not have collateral effects on any other relevant Pokemon (Sand Force is not used at all outside of Excadrill).

And yet, tiering policy forces us into acting on Excadrill only, with no nuance to vote on Sand Force. I speak for many when I say that the idea of banning Excadrill as a whole, considering the reasons we broke convention to bring it down to begin with, is entirely unpalatable to the point that I see no way that it would reach a majority vote. This is a Pokemon that is number 3 in SPL usage, the vast majority of that usage not as a Swords Dance Sand Force breaker, but as one of the best glue Pokemon in the game, a limiter of Spikes, essential partner to many grounded support pokemon, and enabler of a diverse variety of weatherless, Sun, and Hails too. Regardless of your feelings on SF SD drill, banning it entirely would be scarily destabilising and the added bans required on top could be many. To do so sets the tier back almost a decade, but it is the only option that the council can present to us under current policy. But Sand Force feels such an obvious thing to look at considering our tiering history. This is not to say that Sand Force would definitely reach a majority, but at least give us the option.

I don't have the expertise to comment much on other generations, but I know this is relevant in DPP also. Recent polling suggests that the majority of players think Iron Head Jirachi is problematic and would be open to a specialised tiering option if it was offered, but under modern policy this can't be done. Much like Excadrill, even those who hate Iron Head Serene Grace tend to be worried about the destabilising effect of losing Jirachi in the tier and its knock-on effects. Some kind of option on Iron Head / Serene Grace feels like it would be welcomed with open arms by the community but is not presented as an option. More niche, but a similar decision was made regarding Snow Cloak Froslass - previously falling under the banner of "Snow Cloak can be used if the Pokemon has no other ability", Froslass was OU legal alongside Abomasnow leading to problematic evasion strategies. The only tiering action that was allowed last year was to ban Froslass in its entirety, losing a useful lead Spiker, all because a complex ban of Snow Warning + Snow Cloak was not allowed despite many historical precedents.

ADV is also really out of my comfort zone but I believe there have been similar headaches with SpeedPass vs Ninjask voting etc, playerbases being given some kind of Monkey Paw versions of suspects tests that then don't actually lead to change rather than the option of a nuanced vote

The tightening of tiering policy in old generations no longer serves the metagames or their communities. Allow us to be more flexible.

As an ADV player myself and as someone that was heavily invested in the Speed Pass Suspect test I can say for certain that we as a playerbase as a whole is frustrated with the inner workings of tiering policy. Speed Pass has always been a controversial part of advance as it has always been the primary stat used to break full pass chains and made other other powerful combinations like Salacc Drum Pass Smeargle and SD Pass Ninjask viable in the past so the suspect of speed as a whole wasn't inherently bad.

The issue stemmed from the division of how to deal with the issue itself. For much of the playerbase, the reason Speed Pass began becoming a problem once more was because it was possible to enable degenerate strategies with it. Speed Pass teams began using things such as Swagger (Which has been banned) and Sand Attack to punish teams for using direct offensive pressure, forcing switches and allowing the speed pass user free turns to set up/ Pass. The playerbase at large wanted to take action against these moves and Ninjask to prevent future abuse of these degenerate strategies as Zapdos and by extension Salacc Pass Vaporeon were not seen as problematic for the tier.

There were top players however that didn't see it this way. Given that tiering policy doesn't allow us to Add moves like Sand Attack or other confusion moves to evasion clause (or even add a confusion clause seeing that confusion has almost zero competitive value in gen 3 competitively). The council believed that because sand attack and confusion moves have little competitive value outside of enabling degenerate speed pass strategies it was speed pass that was seen as the problem as was promptly suspected. While the suspect was fairly close, speed pass was not banned. But the degenerate Sand attack Speed Pass strategies still exsist and it does represent a negative part of the tier that we want to axe but can't without unnecessary collateral due to current tiering policy. I believe that old gen councils should have the freedom to change tiers at there own will, rather then be bound to the tiering councils rules and regulations, otherwise why should the councils even exsist if they have no power to really make decisions that would be beneficial to there prospective tiers?

(Also i posted a few replays of said degenerate strategies in action in case there are a few non ADV Players who are curious to what I am referring to.)

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen3ou-2016397566

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen3ou-2017206800

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen3ou-2017792322

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen3ou-2022911830

 

[Monai]

I think this proposal is great. Old gen playerbases are very interested in keeping as many key elements of the tier as possible, so "opening the can of worms" seems like an overblown issue when very few players would be interested in dumb complex bans like "free manaphy without tail glow" or "free landoi without sheer force." The old gen council needs faith in the playerbase and the individual gen councils that they will uphold what's best for the playerbases rather than be faced with problematic decisions like the froslass ban.

 

[elodin]

I think this proposal is great. Old gen playerbases are very interested in keeping as many key elements of the tier as possible, so "opening the can of worms" seems like an overblown issue when very few players would be interested in dumb complex bans like "free manaphy without tail glow" or "free landoi without sheer force." The old gen council needs faith in the playerbase and the individual gen councils that they will uphold what's best for the playerbases rather than be faced with problematic decisions like the froslass ban.

i find it funny that you refer to these examples as "dumb complex bans" when they are literally the exact same as the proposed ban in the op. there is no inherent difference between them. you can run laps around drill and try to argue that it is "healthy" for bw ou (an argument which i have personally always disagreed with), but the fact of the matter is that if you need to ban 2 abilities because of 1 individual pokémon when everyone knows the pokémon would be broken if it was allowed to run either of them should very much be considered a "dumb complex ban" by these standards. this isn't about "opening a can of worms" in my eyes, it's simply about the fact that all these bans are inherently the same, the only difference being the bias of people who idealize some of them as being "healthy" for the tiers they have more affinity with; biases which are often not even accurate.

there is no inherent difference between unbanning landorus-i with a sheer force ban, unbanning blaziken with a speed boost ban, unbanning manaphy with a tail glow ban or unbanning drill with a sand rush + sand force ban. trying to argue that there is seems very silly to me. the logic behind keeping drill in ou was so flawed to begin with that a pokemon like sandlash now exists in a weird limbo where it is an nu pokemon that you actually cannot use in ou ever, because it has 2 banned abilities (sand veil, sand rush). on the same note, if we adopt the suggested ban in the op, dugtrio would be an ou pokemon that would have no usable ability (sand veil, arena trap, and sand force are all banned), so what exactly happens to it? would it just be an ou pokemon that you cant use in any tier because we need mold drill in bw?

despite these pokemon not being used, these situations make it very clear to me as to why adopting tiering policies like the one suggested in the op should absolutely be avoided. stating that the decisions of yore that adopted said policies are hailed as a "successes" is also completely incorrect, because they stem from a false premise on how tiering should be done/optmized and are the reason why we're in this position to begin with. if we want to properly tackle the issues with current gen or old gens alike, we should do so with a proper understanding of how tiering should be done to begin with.

 

[Oatmon]

Provided that membership in an old gen council continues to be based upon merit playing their tier, I fully support old gen councils being given greater freedom to tier the generations they are the council of.

I also encourage other posters in this thread to focus on the proposal of letting tiering decisions be made this way, rather than the specific examples listed in the op. This thread isn't about excadrill or BW issues in particular, they were just examples raised of what could be voted on if the tiering rules were changed.

[...] the only difference being the bias of people who idealize some of them as being "healthy" for the tiers they have more affinity with; biases which are often not even accurate [...]

Could you please elaborate on why having an affinity with a tier introduces a bias, and why this bias is often not accurate, or is a bad thing? I think this will help others understand your position better.

 

[peng]

The problem elodin is that if people actually want meaningful change in Gens 4 and 5 then this is now the way to do it. We have had multiple years of the same conversation topics being on the chopping block to know that the community doesn't back tiering action on these Pokemon as a whole because the majority do not want to throw their tiers into disarray by losing their some of their best support Pokemon. We have generational identities that voters seek to preserve - fighting for an Excadrill ban only does nothing but preserve the status quo.

I think you can very clearly differentiate between Gen4 Jirachi / BW Excadrill and the other stuff you have mentioned above. You hand wave away things like positive metagame influence, bias but like... this is the entire crux of the discussion? How can you just dismiss this? "Whats the difference between Sand Force Excadrill and Sheer Force Lando-I aside from supposed metagame benefit" well thats it. Thats currently the basis on which old gens players vote on anyway, not brokenness. So yes, introducing an element of "can you argue this benefits the metagame" into our suspect selection seems like a fine thing, as our own voting system self-selects the good ideas from the bad ones. Tail Glow + Manaphy does not have a predictable metagame benefit, let alone would it get a 60% majority by a playerbase that infamously can't ban Latios or Cloyster. The stupid ideas would be shot down so quickly. Especially since considering the precedent to allow these votes to happen has been around for 8 years and nobody has brought up Manaphy, Blaziken, Lando-I.

And you know what, if they DID somehow get a vote and hit a supermajority? I'd accept that maybe I actually don't know the game as well as I think and that those people see a genius metagame improvement that I don't. If 60%+ of qualified people want something they tend to be right, no matter how stupid it looks to the minority.

We can also aim to write new rulings such as one, or a combination of the following:

1. Action that breaks tiering policy must hit a higher supermajority in suspect tests than a normal vote - set this absurdly high, I don't care, but the way things are right now even 100% support behind an Iron Head ban in DPP would be insufficient to make it actually happen, which is just fundamentally wrong. Not sure what the sweet spot for this would be, but I think if say 70% of a playerbase really really want action in a certain way, we need to wake up and be open to it.
2. We can no longer use this reasoning to bring down ubers.
3. All Pokemon affected collaterally must be below a certain usage threshold (Yes, I am very very happy to lose Dugtrio to nerf Excadrill)
4. Limit the number of these types of ban that a generation can have - say 3. DPP would have Freeze Clause, Baton Pass, and Iron Head as their 3 permitted, metagame-benefiting-but-rule-breaking decisions. If a situation ever comes up again where they want a 4th (already unlikely) then they'd have to axe one of the above, with the argument being that the banlist becomes too complex above 3. For BW, you could say that Weather + boosting ability, Baton Pass, and Sand abilities as our three. Most old gens already have 2 of these already.

 

[Ortheore]

I'm adamantly against this proposal. The reason we have these tiering standards is to ensure we have a simple, logical and sensible ruleset and apparently we're supposed to throw those improvements?

The idea that the playerbase will always be able to identify the correct solution and that this somehow redeems a system that doesn't implement proper standards is just wilfully ignorant of history, both within the sphere of competitive pokemon and even extending outside of Pokemon into broader society. Like "the people will always know what to do" is something that doesn't make sense when you look at the world right now, nvm throughout history

The idea that old tiers shouldn't change much but still actually change at the same time is absolute nonsense. There is no obligation for a format to be a certain way and trying to insist on it conforming to some ideal of the past is futile in the face of an ever-evolving metagame. They're still very much alive today, so why treat them as if they're historical artifacts? This approach isn't even remotely consistent either, like unbanning G5 Exca and G4 Latias have been huge changes for their respective tiers, but suddenly you have to come up with all of these nonsense rules to avoid taking the reverse action to solve a problem?

I think elodin is right to argue that supposed metagame benefit can be dismissed as reasoning for implementing some absurd complex ban. The issue is that such cases are generally built entirely on theorymon, which should not be considered valid reasoning. Additionally, I think supposed metagame benefit is about as well-defined and subjective as "fun". Meanwhile banning things through the lens of being broken/uncompetitive is also benefiting the metagame, but at least we've established well-understood definitions for those that are generally accepted by the community as a whole

 

[ABR]

We should pick either

1) "Older gens have loose rules so we can be somewhat looser with them going forward"

or

2) "Older gens should be held to modern tiering standards"

What I dislike is simultaneously letting past "errors" remain in effect and saying that those rules should not be replicated today. It leads to philosophical fence sitting which causes confusion and threads like this. I understand the merits to both, but we should seriously choose a side.

 

[DarthTyros]

I'm adamantly against this proposal. The reason we have these tiering standards is to ensure we have a simple, logical and sensible ruleset and apparently we're supposed to throw those improvements?

The idea that the playerbase will always be able to identify the correct solution and that this somehow redeems a system that doesn't implement proper standards is just wilfully ignorant of history, both within the sphere of competitive pokemon and even extending outside of Pokemon into broader society. Like "the people will always know what to do" is something that doesn't make sense when you look at the world right now, nvm throughout history

The idea that old tiers shouldn't change much but still actually change at the same time is absolute nonsense. There is no obligation for a format to be a certain way and trying to insist on it conforming to some ideal of the past is futile in the face of an ever-evolving metagame. They're still very much alive today, so why treat them as if they're historical artifacts? This approach isn't even remotely consistent either, like unbanning G5 Exca and G4 Latias have been huge changes for their respective tiers, but suddenly you have to come up with all of these nonsense rules to avoid taking the reverse action to solve a problem?

I think elodin is right to argue that supposed metagame benefit can be dismissed as reasoning for implementing some absurd complex ban. The issue is that such cases are generally built entirely on theorymon, which should not be considered valid reasoning. Additionally, I think supposed metagame benefit is about as well-defined and subjective as "fun". Meanwhile banning things through the lens of being broken/uncompetitive is also benefiting the metagame, but at least we've established well-understood definitions for those that are generally accepted by the community as a whole

While I don't disagree, current tiering policy isn't flawless, I don't think the alternative that is being proposed is either mind you but what is to be done when uncompetitive aspect of a metagame comes up and the community becomes divided with how to deal with the issue? There are more in the ADV player base that are dissatisfied with tiering policy then not, it was proven as much by the speed suspect back in December. The frostlass situation in dpp was similar.

There comes a question if it's a fault of the playerbase not agreeing one way to deal with the issue itself, or tiering policy dictating it being one way

[For context the ADV Speed Pass suspect was controversial because the playerbasehad already identified the problem which was speed pass could use luck based strategies along with Ninjask and AgilityPass zapdos to create potential instant win conditions. Many wanted to compromise by banning Swagger, Add all Accuracy Lowering moves to evasion claws and Banning Ninjask while preserving AgilityZapdos and Salac Berry Pass Vaporeon. But tiering policy dictated that to be impossible, so the speed pass suspect was created which only annoyed the playerbase at large even more.]

We have proof that certain solutions (Banning Sand Attack and other degenerate strategies in tours such as Muushi League and ADV Revival) basically solved the problem of speed enabling degenerate strategies.

While banning speed completely would stop all potential degeneracy in its entirety, that's something the playerbase wouldn't entirely enjoy doing. Perhaps ADV is more of a special case then say DPP and especially BW since it's a bit more clear cut of how to solve the problem and maybe the ADV playerbase should have bit the bullet when we had the opportunity to do so, but I can't speak for everyone. I only point out what I've seen over the past few months. Maybe the playerbase will become more open to the idea of banning speed pass as a whole, but you have to ask yourself what if they don't? It's something that has frustrated me very greatly for the past few months, and I only seek to find a solution to it that everyone (or rather the majority) would be satisfied with.

 

[Legitimate Username]

It's honestly insane to me that we exist in a community that used to ridicule all of the casual scrubs on GameFAQs begging us to just unban Blaze Blaziken because they didn't like their favorite guy being disallowed from standard OU play, only for the exact same principles to be parroted across the community as a genuine argument for adopting this as our new tiering policy.

We should pick either

1) "Older gens have loose rules so we can be somewhat looser with them going forward"

or

2) "Older gens should be held to modern tiering standards"

What I dislike is simultaneously letting past "errors" remain in effect and saying that those rules should not be replicated today. It leads to philosophical fence sitting which causes confusion and threads like this. I understand the merits to both, but we should seriously choose a side.

Why the hell is the complex Aldaron's Proposal clause still an active part of the modern BW OU ruleset? Like, all it does is preserve completely unviable matchup fish shit like Kingdra Sand or like, manual weather setters??? There's absolutely no reason to clause in an extra complex rule that literally preserves no meaningful collateral whatsoever when you can just add a couple of abilities to the "do not use" list and leave it at that.

Like obviously a ban of some sort was necessary here to the point of justifying ability bans over just several individual Pokémon. Doubling speed under permanent weather is fundamentally broken for OU. It broke Kingdra, Kabutops, Ludicolo, Excadrill, Venusaur, Victreebel, it's clearly a core problem with the mechanic even if a few individual things like Stoutland or Luvdisc might not be able to leverage it into game-ending power. We absolutely needed to ban either Drizzle or Swift Swim, either Drought or Chlorophyll, and the speed abilities were the ones that were chosen to die. What's the point in a complex clause that preserves no actual collateral when half of the combination can be easily removed anyway?

I genuinely believe that preserving some level of clean intuitive ruleset clarity actually matters for accessibility. Several years back I decided I wanted to try to get back into the old nostalgic BW OU meta I hadn't played since it was the current generation, and I found the policy and rules around it to be...legitimately confusing. Oh yeah I remember the old complex weather+speed ban, that's still a thing, but I heard they brought down Excadrill as a new spinner? Neat, so I can try out that cool new Sand Rush toy on weatherless HO or something? Wait, why are all of these things being treated totally differently with weird contextual complex clauses surrounding them? At that point people in a Discord server had to explain to me the entire history behind Excadrill Rain and how things turned out the way they were, when it would've been easier to just hear "yeah all three speed doubling abilities are banned they're broken in permaweather". Modern generations do adhere to this principle as a priority and I think it's a good thing, I don't see any benefit to older generations breaking this priority for any kind of misaimed attempt to preserve a metagame's identity.

And yeah I know this has been brought up before but maintaining the status quo of a tier's identity is such a misguided ideal to chase after. The BW OU I grew up with, where rain nukes and Chlorophyll sweepers and sand chip teams would all battle it out in an effort to win the weather wars against each other and go in with plans to enable their weather abuse against all those other matchup threats, the one that is so iconic that people only vaguely aware of the tier and community STILL think of it when reflecting back on BW's identity as the broken Rain/Sun/Sand weather wars generation, is long dead. More discovered broken stuff got banned. More natural optimizations, discoveries, and metagame shifts took place. Latias got unbanned in DPP, no shit something like that had a huge impact and we're a long way from being able to hop back onto that old classic ladder experience where Choice Band Scizor topped the usage stats. It's not the same game anymore and never can be again, so why are some arguably broken things treated as sacred ground so we can instead just complex clause the problems away by freeing Blaze Blaziken? Change is inevitable, it's healthy, and it's already taken place, I can understand wanting to shift ban priorities based on healthy/unhealthy elements over raw power level (like getting rid of Cloyster over Latios) but I always thought that this argument about bending over backwards to preserve some nebulous concept of tier "identity" was a ridiculous one. If you care about it enough to bring up as a top priority when it comes to actually FIXING the tier then you should be talking about freeing fucking Chlorophyll to see how it shakes out without Dugtrio rather than trying to justify which random broken threats need to stay for arbitrary identity reasons.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

In all honesty I'm not even a hard purist about prioritizing Pokémon or non-complex bans at all costs over anything else. Just that, I should be able to read a metagame's ruleset page and immediately and clearly understand why each ban exists from a perspective of obvious brokenness.

• Sleep moves: Wildly overpowered
• Evasion moves and abilities: Clearly uncompetitive
• OHKO moves: Clearly uncompetitive
• Moody: Overpowered and uncompetitive
• Weather speed abilities: Overpowered in permaweather OU just remove the fucking complex clause please
• Gems: Nuke option that broke several Pokémon, could be potentially preserved but it was either banning them or multiple abusers
• Baton Pass: Fundamentally busted move (I disagree with complex preserving drypass just to try and artificially uptick Celebi specifically while continuing to ignore the actual source of the meta problems, but I can at least see the intent there)
• Trapping abilities: Wildly overpowered
• Swagger: Powerful uncompetitive strategy
• Assist: Bullshit enabler, not instinctively obvious but anyone who sees Liepard cheese should be able to understand from there how manipulating a team to let a Pokémon call broken priority-bypassing move combinations it was never meant to have access to is completely fucking stupid
• Soul Dew: lol
• King's Rock: Clearly uncompetitive

Like at least I can read the rules of the tier and they make obvious sense. I've always been in favor of taking an extreme approach with banning shit like Scald, because if Scald was added to the banned moves list, what would that say? That Scald is a fucking broken overpowered move with almost no practical safe switch-ins that simultaneously puts entire games in the hands of an RNG-triggered permanent crippling effect. Which it is. There is no lack of intuitive clarity in the ruleset and its implications here, it's one of the dumbest moves of all time and I'm baffled at how much of the community seemingly wants to turn a blind eye to this fact and how much it singlehandedly ruins games in a way that even its peers like Lava Plume and Discharge can't even manage due to lacking its inherently punishing typing+status coverage combination. This is just the most simple targeted way of taking an actual problem with the game and removing it to make things better. If the BW community wanted to ban Spikes under this reasoning, I think it would be an entirely valid and justified approach to take for fixing things.

But I literally cannot say the same thing about Sand Force. If I see that ability on the banlist, is it because it was a clear overpowered or uncompetitive game element that shouldn't exist as a part of the core ruleset? Nah, it just pushed broken Excadrill over the edge but we really wanted to keep it around because hazards are a pain so we kicked this entire ability out of the game despite having no fundamental overpoweredness or breaking any other mons in the meta. Like the similar modern case of Gorilla Tactics, this is an ability that is purely and mathematically outclassed by Huge Power yet people are scapegoating to the chopping block just because it breaks an actual ridiculously powerful Pokémon that it's attached to. If the ability gets kicked out then Dugtrio will be left completely unusable in OU and kicked up to Ubers by technicality based on three entirely separate ability bans, which would absolutely be the funniest thing that could come out of this whole ordeal but the level of nonsense on display is just absurd.

This entire line of thought holds equally true for Iron Head. Oh hey why is this standard Steel-type STAB move restricted from the meta? Oh no it's not a fundamentally overpowered move or anything that breaks the game just by existing, it was just REALLY annoying on Jirachi specifically but we also REALLY wanted to keep it around! I'm sure that you can argue that taking a main STAB option off of Scarf Scizor isn't a significant collateral for the greater health of the metagame, but it's still a direct and tangible harm to the ruleset clarity and accessibility, and any kind of consistency in the ruleset design.

Blaze Blaziken this, Blaze Blaziken that, I keep bringing it up because it's LITERALLY where we are right now. The explanation back then went "We don't tier PARTS of Pokémon, we just tier Pokémon" and it still holds true today. There's absolutely no reasonable policy justification for deciding that even though a Pokémon is broken in a metagame, the right approach should just be to find some complex ban or overreaching move/ability ban to just nerf it and keep its crippled presence down in the tier we want it. No Zen Mode G-Darmanitan, no STAB-less Kyogre, we never did or should try to make these things happen.

(If Excadrill DOES get banned I don't think there's any reason not to free Sand Rush, no point in not letting Stoutland run free when Sand Rush breaks zero actual remaining mons in the meta, it's just that I don't think that the current Sand Rush ban is an unreasonable choice from a tiering policy perspective and is not at ALL comparable to use as a precedent for banning Sand Force.)

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

On another note I still think that the Froslass ban was kind of ridiculous. An entirely reasonable and balanced Pokémon with a unique role in the lead metagame as a fast Ghost-type Spiker with Destiny Bond was taken out of the metagame because it can situationally break Evasion Clause. Okay cool, so just ban Snow Cloak with Snow Warning and let it stay. Froslass is clearly not an actual Uber threat here as opposed to just another typical example of easily clause-able RNG cheese. Obviously we can't do this kind of thing with Sand Veil and Sand Stream because Sand is so omnipresent that Sand Veil becomes a broken ability in isolation and because of that we can't exactly find any reasonable approach for freeing things like ADV Cacturne, but Hail is niche enough that this kind of restriction to extend Evasion Clause is actually a completely viable problem-solving approach. Nobody can argue in good faith that bringing Froslass with the intent of trying to RNG cheese a hard read into an Abomasnow team is a remotely viable means of trying to win at the video game.

I might sound like a hypocrite for saying this after going on my entire rant about Aldaron's Proposal and how complex bans like this should be avoided whenever possible, but the point that I'm trying to get at is that sometimes context actually DOES matter. Aldaron's Proposal was a complex restriction that did nothing but allow completely unviable cheese strategies like matchup-fish weather counterteaming and could be simplified without negative consequence, Froslass was an actual collateral to an Evasion issue that lowered option diversity just because we didn't want a slightly longer but still totally clear sentence on the ruleset page. "Snow Cloak is allowed under a complex ability combination ban that extends Evasion Clause in order to preserve a perfectly healthy Pokémon in the metagame that would otherwise be gone due to no other ability options" is kind of a valid reason to use a complex clause with a clear and intuitive design intent, removing the source of the RNG cheese without resulting in any full species bans, for the sake of allowing an extra unique and relevant gameplay option. If there was ever a case of clear and unjustified administrative policy overreach actually negatively affecting a metagame's ruleset, it would be this. "Froslass was completely banned just to slightly shorten the wording of Evasion Clause" is definitely not a comparable situation to "Sand Force should not be banned because it is literally not a broken or uncompetitive ability and is only being leveraged to make tiering nerfs".

(I have no comment on complex clauses and rulesets from ADV or earlier like the Baton Pass stuff, I only play DPP and BW so I'm just going to keep the post focused on those.)

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

If there's one point that I'm trying to get at here in this long-winded rant across all of tiering policy, it's that we're looking at two entirely different problems that I think are being placed into the same bucket of judgment. Complex bans like ability combinations, Sleep Clause, or assorted non-Pokémon bans of broken elements are being judged in the same category of logical consistency alongside proposals that serve the SOLE purpose of trying to artificially nerf a Pokémon's viability by removing elements from their toolkit in order to rebalance the game, while pretending that these bans aren't complex by applying them as a universal metagame-wide overreach rather than locked in a complex nerf to the target Pokémon. I could see the reasonable policy justification for the Sand Rush ban to free Excadrill considering the long and storied history of permaweather doubled speed fundamentally breaking the game, but if Excadrill is considered broken even without that consistently overpowered game element, then trying to manipulate policy to force a nerf onto it is an absolutely horrible approach to balancing the game that should never be up for consideration.

I do wholeheartedly believe that tiering inconsistencies and complex ban issues SHOULD be re-evaluated and cleaned up and that there would be a genuine benefit to doing so (fuck Sleep Clause I mean seriously what the fuck are we still doing here we could be DONE already with cheesy RNG wakeup bullshit from the most obvious free positive turn-economy click imaginable and we had to break fucking cartridge mechanics to preserve a made-up nerfed version of this STILL indefensibly stupid gameplay element), but the context of why they exist and how EXACTLY they are meant to affect the game should be evaluated rather than trying to force some kind of universal blanket solution. Tiering policies do absolutely exist for a reason and have a meaningful benefit for the community, moving outside of them for the sole sake of arbitrarily preserving an impossible-to-maintain desired metagame status quo is a wildly irresponsible direction to be moving in and even among the messy history of complex bans, there is no reasonable historical justification or precedent for trying to do these things.

TL;DR

• Complex bans should be avoided whenever possible and weighed heavily critically against non-complex alternatives
• Leniency can and should be given for removing non-Pokémon broken elements for the sake of minimizing collateral
• Tiering "parts of Pokémon" over the actual Pokémon themselves is a horrible approach that should never be on the table
• If getting the community to agree on a direction for positive change among mass metagame dissatisfaction is hard then the solution isn't to ask for permission to dole out ruleset-wide arbitrary nerfs that will keep us only slowly moving within a continued near-identically fragile balance status quo, it's to take an actual proven approach in the Kokoloko method and rebuild the tier from there
• If BW really needs a quicker fix to the Excadrill problem then it is way easier and more coherent from a tiering policy perspective to argue that Spikes is broken than that Sand Force is broken and I do hope that the administration can allow for such "complex" approaches to be on the table that don't break the "banning parts of Pokémon" idea.

 

[baddummy]

Greetings all, I'll try and keep this concise.
There is no slippery slope that leads to "Groudon is allowed but it must be level 80 and holding a pokeball". The reason for this is that the proposed bans that are causing such controversy here aren't actually complex bans. "The ability Sand Force is banned" is no more complex than "the ability Moody is banned". Similarly, "the move Iron Head is banned" is no more complex than "the move Sheer Cold is banned". That's a judgement the reader has made concerning the ban, it is not inherent to the actual wording itself.

With regards to the old gens in question, I think ADV OU currently has a pretty good deal. TTar and Sand Force Drill could certainly be said to be one of the dominant strategies in BW OU. The same could be said about setting Jirachi up for para flinch strategies in DPP OU. This is not true about Ninjask chains in ADV OU. They are fundamentally a matchup fish and not one with a high degree of effectiveness at that - they might win against Zap Dug offence but will lose against teams with multiple phazers, or in some cases the right phazers. All this to say, that I'm more concerned with not having awkward collateral than I am with getting Ninjask chains out of the tier, and I genuinely don't see it as a pressing issue.

I don't enjoy the concept of a new player who is entitled to fully understand the ins and outs of our ruleset after reading the tier's ban list for only one minute. The actual mechanics of the gen will often prove to be more complex, and of course all of this pales in comparison to understanding the competitive metagame. In reality, what's going to happen is they're going to struggle with learning how ADV Sleep Talk mechanics work, won't fully understand the implications of the turn ending when a pokemon faints, and will be much more concerned about understanding the meta rather than precisely why x ability or move is banned. I have seen many people confused about why the opponent's Camerupt suddenly moved first (quick claw doesn't have an activation message in gen3) and nobody outside of PR threads confused about our clauses surrounding Baton Pass. Keeping the rulesets relatively simple should certainly be a concern, but the respective councils of each old gen should not be hamstrung so a new player can spend time in the 1300s on ladder and be 1% less confused.

We have a good understanding of old gen metagames, and maintaining tiers that are expressive of skill and are enjoyable to play should be of paramount importance, rather than somebody who is playing their first game of the tier being able to instantly understand every single clause in place. This ought not to result in entire paragraphs of overly complex restrictions, but as I outlined in my first paragraph, I think the tiering councils are currently having their hands tied to a far greater degree than is necessary.

 

[Legitimate Username]

Greetings all, I'll try and keep this concise.
There is no slippery slope that leads to "Groudon is allowed but it must be level 80 and holding a pokeball". The reason for this is that the proposed bans that are causing such controversy here aren't actually complex bans. "The ability Sand Force is banned" is no more complex than "the ability Moody is banned". Similarly, "the move Iron Head is banned" is no more complex than "the move Sheer Cold is banned". That's a judgement the reader has made concerning the ban, it is not inherent to the actual wording itself.

I didn't think I'd have to make another identical post repeating exactly what I just wrote prior but I might as well, because I can understand that maybe my point was lost in the sheer overwhelming length of things and breadth of subjects I rambled about in an attempt to be thorough about my critical perspective on tiering issues.

Moody is blatantly overpowered. Sand Force is not.

Sheer Cold is inherently uncompetitive. Iron Head is not.

It is literally that simple. We ban overpowered and uncompetitive elements of the game, we don't nerf things because we want to keep parts of Pokémon we like and universally throw out parts we don't. There is no fear of any kind of slippery slope towards allowing Groudon, we just...don't do any of these things to begin with.

Pretending that banning Sand Force is an equally simple universal ban in the ruleset as Moody, as if logical adherence to a specific form of wording is the sole point of tiering, is just a means of trying to manipulate semantics in order to frame banning half of a broken threat as some kind of universal game-wide balancing choice. Which it isn't. It is literally not comparable to Moody and there is no remotely good-faith argument that can contextually justify the intent behind it as equivalent. It is a complex ban in obvious intent that is cosplaying as a simple one to meet an arbitrary semantic threshold rather than actually trying to remove something that is universally broken. I'm not even AGAINST complex bans, but we don't ban parts of Pokémon and none of the existing history of complex bans has served as comparable precedent.

I'm not sure how I can possibly simplify this any further than my two bolded sentences to make the point of consistent tiering frameworks absolutely clear here. If you need to jump through absurd hoops to preserve broken Excadrill in order to serve as a nerf to broken Spikes, then just ban both and be done with it, and you will make the game better than with the alternative nerfs, without even having to break tiering policy and consistent ruleset design by only aiming to adhere to the fucking semantics of the tiering policy rather than its actual functional purpose.

 

[chimp]

Tiering "parts of Pokémon" over the actual Pokémon themselves is a horrible approach that should never be on the table

Every draft league ever- whether run by the sweatiest of Youtube sweats imaginable or by a group of college day-drinkers- has complex bans, and a lot of them. They're accepted. They're expected, even. I can no longer really pretend that Smogon, a community much more discerning & draconian than the average draft league, can't make this work for purposes where the majority of accomplished players agree.

If the purpose of our rulesets is for anything but achieving the maximum competitiveness in high-level tournaments... then what are we really doing?

 

[Stories]

Every draft league ever- whether run by the sweatiest of Youtube sweats imaginable or by a group of college day-drinkers- has complex bans, and a lot of them. They're accepted. They're expected, even. I can no longer really pretend that Smogon, a community much more discerning & draconian than the average draft league, can't make this work for purposes where the majority of accomplished players agree.

If the purpose of our rulesets is for anything but achieving the maximum competitiveness in high-level tournaments... then what are we really doing?

The issue with this is (forgive me for saying this I hate when people do) the "slippery slope" it makes that we all know about. Once we allow ourselves to separate variables from a whole, we can really justify any combination. SV Ursaluna Bloodmoon but Blood Moon is banned, ORAS Greninja with Protean banned, Skymin without Air Slash, Latias without Draco Meteor, Mewtwo without Recover. You can get as mundane as you want and I really don't trust every council to make such subjective decisions when they can barely be held to the standard of our preexisting objective tiering standards.

 

[peng]

If you are still posting about "just ban excadrill then" or "what about Recover on Mewtwo" then you do not understand the proposal.

There are legit counterarguments to the proposal in this thread, but these two arguments just prove you don't understand what we're talking about, sorry.

 

[Oglemi]

To say that past tiering decisions have been flexible is revisionist at best and just straight up wrong at worst. Our tiering policy has always been extremely rigid and every "complex" example that's happened over the past 20 years (which are few and far between when examined with that in mind) has been fraught with resistance and met with disdain. I don't want to get into semanitics but to say that Aldaron's Proposal was a flexible decision to save certain aspects of the metagame is missing a lot of context.

I don't actually have a problem with revisiting metagames and making changes as they're needed. In fact, I believe this proposal should instead be advocating for the absolution of the "generational freeze" and instead propose that all past gens continue to receive active tiering decisions as they're needed. The issues of "dead playerbase" would need to be addressed, but so long as past gens continue to affect our major tournaments they should be receiving continued support to address problematic elements as they arise. This said, I agree with Legitimate that more solid bans should be preferred over piecemeal, especially if this road were taken.

 

[baddummy]

I didn't think I'd have to make another identical post repeating exactly what I just wrote prior but I might as well, because I can understand that maybe my point was lost in the sheer overwhelming length of things and breadth of subjects I rambled about in an attempt to be thorough about my critical perspective on tiering issues.

I understood the point you made perfectly fine the first time.

It is a complex ban in obvious intent that is cosplaying as a simple one to meet an arbitrary semantic threshold rather than actually trying to remove something that is universally broken.

But it isn't a complex ban, the wording of the ban is that of a simple one. We've already agreed that moves and abilities individually can be banned, and are now arguing over which ones are on the chopping block. A "complex ban in obvious intent" only describes how you feel about the ban rather than the phrasing of the ban itself.
Ability X is banned, move Y is banned: these are both simple ban frameworks.
Why one ability is banned might not be as obvious as why another is banned. However, as I outlined in my paragraph here, I think that should be of little concern to us:

I don't enjoy the concept of a new player who is entitled to fully understand the ins and outs of our ruleset after reading the tier's ban list for only one minute. The actual mechanics of the gen will often prove to be more complex, and of course all of this pales in comparison to understanding the competitive metagame. In reality, what's going to happen is they're going to struggle with learning how ADV Sleep Talk mechanics work, won't fully understand the implications of the turn ending when a pokemon faints, and will be much more concerned about understanding the meta rather than precisely why x ability or move is banned. I have seen many people confused about why the opponent's Camerupt suddenly moved first (quick claw doesn't have an activation message in gen3) and nobody outside of PR threads confused about our clauses surrounding Baton Pass. Keeping the rulesets relatively simple should certainly be a concern, but the respective councils of each old gen should not be hamstrung so a new player can spend time in the 1300s on ladder and be 1% less confused.

The new player who is simply confounded by a clause they don't fully understand is a policy review fictional character. Anyone who is genuinely attempting to get good at a tier will be much more concerned about understanding the gen's mechanics and its metagame.

If you need to jump through absurd hoops to preserve broken Excadrill in order to serve as a nerf to broken Spikes, then just ban both and be done with it, and you will make the game better than with the alternative nerfs

Says who, exactly?
Banning an ability or move because it makes the tier better isn't an "absurd hoop", and these decisions are being made by people who have a high level of understanding about their respective tiers, then are voted on by the community. No wildly unpopular decision is going to pass, on the contrary any decision made will have overwhelming community backing. Given that the default state of pokemon is utter chaos, it makes sense that we would have to implement some unintuitive bans in order to try to make the game as competitive as we can. Yet when tiering leaders try to improve their tier by banning X move or Y ability, they are faced with the choice of either dealing with massive collateral damage or abandoning the idea, because of a feeling that simple banning this thing would be too unintuitive to people with little experience in the tier. We're having to use a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel because we're in denial about the consequences of trying to turn a game marketed for 10 year old children into a competitive playing experience.

 

[Legitimate Username]

I understood the point you made perfectly fine the first time.

Let's go over this then because everything that I'm being counterargued with is being taken blatantly out of context. I understand that this is not a result of a lack of understanding on your part but rather an inherent philosophical difference that can't objectively be argued against, but your framing of my points is still incredibly misleading.

It is a complex ban in obvious intent that is cosplaying as a simple one to meet an arbitrary semantic threshold rather than actually trying to remove something that is universally broken.

But it isn't a complex ban, the wording of the ban is that of a simple one.

So this is bizarre to me because you're arguing against the specific details of an isolated sentence where, in the VERY NEXT one, I clarify an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT problem being the actual root of the issue, which is context that you kind of just left out for some reason to argue against this point on its own.

I'm not even AGAINST complex bans, but we don't ban parts of Pokémon and none of the existing history of complex bans has served as comparable precedent.

Fuck, I even said that people are trying to argue the semantics of wording over actual design coherence RIGHT THERE in the actually quoted sentence, how does this not prove my point. And in my original post:

We're looking at two entirely different problems that I think are being placed into the same bucket of judgment. Complex bans like ability combinations, Sleep Clause, or assorted non-Pokémon bans of broken elements are being judged in the same category of logical consistency alongside proposals that serve the SOLE purpose of trying to artificially nerf a Pokémon's viability by removing elements from their toolkit in order to rebalance the game.

I spent an honestly embarrassing number of paragraphs trying to explain, in-detail, that I'm not actually anti-complex ban and actually argued directly in favor of several of them. I've directly stated as well that Sand Force is indeed not a complex ban as written, AND even if it were that wouldn't actually be a problem. The actual issue at hand is using bans as a form of nerfs to partially cripple threats when they're meant to be for removing actual in-isolation broken game elements. It's extremely weird that you singled out one sentence, not even PARAGRAPH, but isolated sentence right before the very next one where I elaborate on the entirely different core issue, to make the point that the ban isn't technically complex and should be allowed on that semantic technicality, when that has nothing to do with my actual argument.

I know that you didn't misunderstand my post. I know that you philosophically disagree with what I'm saying and that you are trying to outline a specific logical framework in which your view of the game makes sense, while ignoring rather than counterarguing against the one that I put forward. The fact that you're taking sentences out of context and using them to try and argue against points that I didn't make as if they were the core idea I was putting forward kind of shows how flimsy your framing of the situation is. Arguing that the ban isn't complex is completely irrelevant to any of my points when I'm trying to focus on the reasons why bans actually happen in-practice.

I know that on a technical level of how a ban is defined in formal logic that a Sand Force ban is qualitatively equivalent to Moody ban. This is WHY I said that the problem at hand was not ban definitions, but nerf-focused balancing, and that nerfs cosplaying as universal bans should be evaluated as an entire separate issue from other complex bans in historical precedent. Regardless of how you want to choose to view things and the manipulated framings that you want to use to make them seem equivalent, Smogon has NEVER used bans as a means of nerfing a Pokémon to a desired tier through targeting non-broken elements. "But Moody and Sand Force are both abilities!" doesn't change this fact.

The new player who is simply confounded by a clause they don't fully understand is a policy review fictional character. Anyone who is genuinely attempting to get good at a tier will be much more concerned about understanding the gen's mechanics and its metagame.

This is going to sound maybe a little shocking but...this is your PR fictional character, not mine. I didn't make them up, you did. All I did was talk about my experience getting back into BW and said that I got briefly confused before a Discord server clarified things and from there on I continued to play the tier and understand its systems despite any semantic criticism of some rule choices.

I'm not saying that any new player who tries to join an old legacy metagame is entitled to any full understanding of the metagame and history behind every decision and perfectly understand the state of things and why they're the way they are. That was your strawman of my point, not my actual argument. What I said was, I tried to re-learn the metagame a while back and I got confused by things, and that is a sign of bad ruleset design. Not a dealbreaking issue, but just a practical example of the kind of thing that Smogon policy has explicitly always existed to try and avoid, why we started tiering Pokémon the way we do without resorting to Edgar Clause. Smogon policy wasn't born in its final state out of a rock, it was invented for actual problem-solving purposes and exists the way it does for actual practical reasons. ABR said we should pick a side, I said here's the side we should pick and why. This wasn't even ABOUT or RELATED to Sand Force, it was just about DrizzleSwim, I have PLENTY of entirely unrelated issues to criticize the Sand Force decision on. Sand Force is not an accessibility issue, it is an "everything on the banlist is a literal broken game element and this thing clearly isn't, that is the literal fucking point of bans" issue.

Please don't try to frame your strawman of my point as an actual issue with the core of my argument. I was not the one who made up a character to try and make my argument appear more logically sound than it actually was.

Banning an ability or move because it makes the tier better isn't an "absurd hoop"

"We don't tier PARTS of Pokémon, we just tier Pokémon" is the absurd hoop. That's it. That's the entire historical precedent and entire PURPOSE behind usage-based tiering in the first place where threats can rise and fall depending on their inherent viability, outside of abuse of universally broken elements.

I am not exaggerating here when I call this the entire fundamental system that Smogon is built upon. Here is a policy thread that dictates this exact principle, how banning part of a Pokemon instead of separately tiering an entire Pokemon, completely fucks with the system and was decided that the issues it caused were breaking tiering policy. The only difference is that it's about Mega stones instead of scapegoated abilities, but the core of the principle, that banning a part of something to nerf it was never allowed by the system because it inherently fucks with it and makes it all not function properly, still completely applies.

I'm sure there's room for weird semantic arguments against this. That Sand Rush counts as a precedent, even though it's quite possibly the only weird edge case where the ability's inherent brokenness can be called into question to argue on the fence either way, and there is NO other even remotely comparable example of this kind of thing ever happening in Smogon history. That this is past generation tiering of frozen legacy metas, therefore arguments that were meant to accommodate to a current generation active usage-based tiering system are irrelevant. I don't really care what kind of weird brand-new made-up framing of tiering policy people want to make up to try and argue for their desired hyperspecific ban to take place. Nerf-focused balancing and "tiering parts of Pokémon" has historically NEVER been something that was meant to happen in the system. There is no existing precedent to ever allow it because it was explicitly against policy, and it is against policy for a LOT of good reasons that LED to this level of historical tiering consistency in the first place.

This was too many words for me to try and re-explain what the actual problem I'm arguing about is when people seem hell-bent on believing that I said completely different unrelated things for some reason. If you need Excadrill in the tier because Spikes is singlehandedly ruining the metagame's playability, then just ban fucking Spikes. I am in favor of less administrative overreach over non-Pokémon banning, but nerfs like Sand Force are the wrong hill to die on that have so many actual reasons why they will never pass through.

 

[peng]

i think the excadrill discussion is beginning to become too much of a distraction as its probably the least compelling of the examples (compared to rachi, froslass etc) but:

“If you need Excadrill in the tier because Spikes is singlehandedly ruining the metagame's playability, then just ban fucking Spikes.” Legitimate Username

Please stop oversimplifying how this works. If you honestly believe it is easy to get a 60% majority on stuff like this then I don’t know what to tell you. Its a bloody entry hazard that has existed since like 2001. Spikes ban is an even more destabilising action in the tier that goes far beyond Excadrill and whilst it could have positive outcomes (and is being discussed) the idea you can “just” do this easily is incredibly ignorant.

You make good points but your oversimplification of how easy it is to take any tiering action in old gens is very very shortsighted. What may seem obvious to you has a decade of additional context that prevent people from “just” doing these things

We are not proposing things like sand force and iron head just for fun. We are doing so because the other options that tackle the issue are often incredibly excessive ways to solve it, have huge amounts of collateral effects and would forever change their metagames, with none of us knowing if it would be for the better. To the extent that many many many players in the community have said they would never vote ban for them. For old gens, people are always going to be conservative.

Like I said, some of your other points are good but we simply cannot talk in terms like “just ban excadrill” “just ban spikes”. Are they fine idealogically? Sure. Is it realistic to expect playerbases to vote out things we have taken as standard for 20+ years..? THIS is why the proposal is even being presented!

edit: i will also point out that a lot of peoples posts are kinda “we can’t do this because here’s the policy document and it says its not the way we do things” - er, yes? This is a thread proposing changes to that policy document, it has changed several times over the years and there is no actual reason we can’t change it again if there was support. This is a fan game that we make the rules for, so “these are the rules” isn’t much of a counterargument

 

[Monai]

Let's go over this then because everything that I'm being counterargued with is being taken blatantly out of context. I understand that this is not a result of a lack of understanding on your part but rather an inherent philosophical difference that can't objectively be argued against, but your framing of my points is still incredibly misleading.


So this is bizarre to me because you're arguing against the specific details of an isolated sentence where, in the VERY NEXT one, I clarify an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT problem being the actual root of the issue, which is context that you kind of just left out for some reason to argue against this point on its own.

Fuck, I even said that people are trying to argue the semantics of wording over actual design coherence RIGHT THERE in the actually quoted sentence, how does this not prove my point. And in my original post:

I spent an honestly embarrassing number of paragraphs trying to explain, in-detail, that I'm not actually anti-complex ban and actually argued directly in favor of several of them. I've directly stated as well that Sand Force is indeed not a complex ban as written, AND even if it were that wouldn't actually be a problem. The actual issue at hand is using bans as a form of nerfs to partially cripple threats when they're meant to be for removing actual in-isolation broken game elements. It's extremely weird that you singled out one sentence, not even PARAGRAPH, but isolated sentence right before the very next one where I elaborate on the entirely different core issue, to make the point that the ban isn't technically complex and should be allowed on that semantic technicality, when that has nothing to do with my actual argument.

I know that you didn't misunderstand my post. I know that you philosophically disagree with what I'm saying and that you are trying to outline a specific logical framework in which your view of the game makes sense, while ignoring rather than counterarguing against the one that I put forward. The fact that you're taking sentences out of context and using them to try and argue against points that I didn't make as if they were the core idea I was putting forward kind of shows how flimsy your framing of the situation is. Arguing that the ban isn't complex is completely irrelevant to any of my points when I'm trying to focus on the reasons why bans actually happen in-practice.

I know that on a technical level of how a ban is defined in formal logic that a Sand Force ban is qualitatively equivalent to Moody ban. This is WHY I said that the problem at hand was not ban definitions, but nerf-focused balancing, and that nerfs cosplaying as universal bans should be evaluated as an entire separate issue from other complex bans in historical precedent. Regardless of how you want to choose to view things and the manipulated framings that you want to use to make them seem equivalent, Smogon has NEVER used bans as a means of nerfing a Pokémon to a desired tier through targeting non-broken elements. "But Moody and Sand Force are both abilities!" doesn't change this fact.


This is going to sound maybe a little shocking but...this is your PR fictional character, not mine. I didn't make them up, you did. All I did was talk about my experience getting back into BW and said that I got briefly confused before a Discord server clarified things and from there on I continued to play the tier and understand its systems despite any semantic criticism of some rule choices.

I'm not saying that any new player who tries to join an old legacy metagame is entitled to any full understanding of the metagame and history behind every decision and perfectly understand the state of things and why they're the way they are. That was your strawman of my point, not my actual argument. What I said was, I tried to re-learn the metagame a while back and I got confused by things, and that is a sign of bad ruleset design. Not a dealbreaking issue, but just a practical example of the kind of thing that Smogon policy has explicitly always existed to try and avoid, why we started tiering Pokémon the way we do without resorting to Edgar Clause. Smogon policy wasn't born in its final state out of a rock, it was invented for actual problem-solving purposes and exists the way it does for actual practical reasons. ABR said we should pick a side, I said here's the side we should pick and why. This wasn't even ABOUT or RELATED to Sand Force, it was just about DrizzleSwim, I have PLENTY of entirely unrelated issues to criticize the Sand Force decision on. Sand Force is not an accessibility issue, it is an "everything on the banlist is a literal broken game element and this thing clearly isn't, that is the literal fucking point of bans" issue.

Please don't try to frame your strawman of my point as an actual issue with the core of my argument. I was not the one who made up a character to try and make my argument appear more logically sound than it actually was.


"We don't tier PARTS of Pokémon, we just tier Pokémon" is the absurd hoop. That's it. That's the entire historical precedent and entire PURPOSE behind usage-based tiering in the first place where threats can rise and fall depending on their inherent viability, outside of abuse of universally broken elements.

I am not exaggerating here when I call this the entire fundamental system that Smogon is built upon. Here is a policy thread that dictates this exact principle, how banning part of a Pokemon instead of separately tiering an entire Pokemon, completely fucks with the system and was decided that the issues it caused were breaking tiering policy. The only difference is that it's about Mega stones instead of scapegoated abilities, but the core of the principle, that banning a part of something to nerf it was never allowed by the system because it inherently fucks with it and makes it all not function properly, still completely applies.

I'm sure there's room for weird semantic arguments against this. That Sand Rush counts as a precedent, even though it's quite possibly the only weird edge case where the ability's inherent brokenness can be called into question to argue on the fence either way, and there is NO other even remotely comparable example of this kind of thing ever happening in Smogon history. That this is past generation tiering of frozen legacy metas, therefore arguments that were meant to accommodate to a current generation active usage-based tiering system are irrelevant. I don't really care what kind of weird brand-new made-up framing of tiering policy people want to make up to try and argue for their desired hyperspecific ban to take place. Nerf-focused balancing and "tiering parts of Pokémon" has historically NEVER been something that was meant to happen in the system. There is no existing precedent to ever allow it because it was explicitly against policy, and it is against policy for a LOT of good reasons that LED to this level of historical tiering consistency in the first place.

This was too many words for me to try and re-explain what the actual problem I'm arguing about is when people seem hell-bent on believing that I said completely different unrelated things for some reason. If you need Excadrill in the tier because Spikes is singlehandedly ruining the metagame's playability, then just ban fucking Spikes. I am in favor of less administrative overreach over non-Pokémon banning, but nerfs like Sand Force are the wrong hill to die on that have so many actual reasons why they will never pass through.

Why are all your posts a short story lol no one is going to change their mind if it involves trying to parse an argument through 1k+ words. Banning snow cloak + snow warning is literally just common sense to preserve a tangible part of the metagame. Councils for these metagames should be allowed this flexibility since old gens have a very clear and cohesive identity, while current gens are still very much developing and don't need to preserve an identity to keep their core playerbase.

 

[Legitimate Username]

Please stop oversimplifying how this works. If you honestly believe it is easy to get a 60% majority on stuff like this then I don’t know what to tell you. Its a bloody entry hazard that has existed since like 2001. Spikes ban is an even more destabilising action in the tier that goes far beyond Excadrill and whilst it could have positive outcomes (and is being discussed) the idea you can “just” do this easily is incredibly ignorant.

Okay I know this and I agree with it. It's a very good and valid point straight-up.

My intent here isn't to oversimplify the process of both garnering administrative support AND the playerbase to actually agree on a targeted ban. Spikes isn't even a personal top banlist approach of mine. My intent was just to outline a potential path forward for actually solving the metagame problems that Excadrill's presence is designed to manage because, well, if I went on an obstructionist rant explaining exactly why a certain metagame problem can't be fixed a certain way, I'd feel like an asshole if I didn't at least allude to an alternative way to fix things rather than only pushing us back to the deadlocked status quo. I agree that administrative overreach blocking tiering solutions can broadly be a problem and I want to at least avoid being a part of the forced status quo issue.

I could've phrased my judgment on Spikes more tactfully and in-depth, but at the end of the day I'm not trying to singlehandedly solve the metagame here, just trying to outline a path forward that that I think is a viable one for avoiding "banning parts" and "broken checks broken" in adherence with the tiering policy side of things, since I do actually care about seeing the metagame improve. I am, perhaps, personally less concerned with more extreme destabilizing change as a potentially necessary long-term approach, but that doesn't mean I'm not fully sympathetic to the other side of that issue and understand the lack of easy solutions that can be pushed to please everyone.

BW has like 14 competing approaches on how to fix it. When I jump in with my two cents on how to totally best compromise things, it now has 15 competing approaches. I'm aware it's not useful or productive for me to share any kind of opinion on how to fix the tier. But admins already said no to Sand Force. I'm saying it's a dead-end subject for an actual good reason and worth trying to focus that effort pushing for change elsewhere.

Banning snow cloak + snow warning is literally just common sense to preserve a tangible part of the metagame.

Yeah I said this too in my first post. It's totally common sense. Yet it didn't happen. Tiering administration wasn't exactly going to be convinced by everyone who complained it's "common sense" since the ban indeed did take place, so I tried to outline a detailed framework that showed why it shouldn't be lumped with other complex issues due to meaningfully preserving collateral. I'm sure I didn't change anyone's minds but I do care enough about the politics of Smogon tiering to at least give a decent argument an honest shot.

I'm done with this thread, I can only hope that my attempt to raise the point about "complex bans that preserve collateral", "grandfathered in complex bans that don't preserve collateral", and "forced Pokémon nerfs" all being different things that should be treated differently was a productive one, and makes it easier for necessary precedented types of complex bans that don't break tiering policy to take place.