I spent the last 2 hours of my life writing this post and I've clearly got Feelings about it so I would like to make it clear that while my tone here is obviously upset, tbis post is not directed at anyone in particular. Like actually. It probably seems like it is but please take my word for it.
Okay so to make it abundantly clear I really want nothing to do with this tier. The responsibility was fsr left to someone who's not qualified to lead it to begin with. Maybe it wasn't? Maybe I took it on myself. Nobody else was doing it so idk. I didn't even fucking vote, this'll likely be my last post on the matter but I can't just leave it as long as I'm still getting notifications.
It is frankly ridiculous that this vote could be called illegitimate or for it to be said it was not run properly. We followed every single procedure necessary and none of you spoke up for weeks. I agree it's not perfect, the voting list could've been better even if it involves adding only one or two more people, but I am not perfect either, nor am I a mind reader. If you don't make your opinion known to me or to whoever else is running the vote then expect to be ignored. This thread was up for a month with at least 2 pages of support for some form of action, 1 post opposing and a couple of posts half opposing, mostly opposing a Blissey ban in particular rather than action on stall. Only after the vote was put up did that change.
Was I unprepared for that? Yes, because I expected that a *month* is long enough for discussion in a policy review thread. I don't know what you guys are thinking and like I'm sorry but reacting to tdks post just isn't good enough for me to gauge what the fuck is going on, figuring this out as I go is hard enough as is but expecting me to literally be clairvoyant is just flat out unfair. Were you all afraid to go against the grain? Why did these viewpoints only show up when things started to happen? Did you want this thread to die out and get ignored like a sea of other pr threads? Were you just not taking the thread seriously or what? I literally cannot comprehend why it went from no opposition to maximum opposition in an instant.
If time isn't a constraint then we surely should have no problem waiting until December to think this one through, and we even get some games without Quag to see what that's like in the meantime. I'm not even opposed to having a third check up vote just to be absolutely sure. Or maybe we'll just go the full way until then without saying a word and only kick up a fuss if people vote to keep it banned. I don't want the latter to happen again but if this is how the initial discussion has gone I don't have a whole lot of faith. This decision originally was supposed to be reached before SM UU Cup - a circuit tour! - went up, which gave way for about a month and a half of discussion. I already had to reverse the order of classic bc this vote was delayed too much and I absolutely do not want to go overturning it with that tournament on the horizon.
Now with the emotionally charged part of that out of the way, let's establish a few things:
- Most, not all, of the SM UU playerbase sees stall as an issue. Whether you think that's a result of Scizor, Latias, Blissey, Quagsire or whatever else is irrelevant to this point - it is a problem and it cannot be ignored.
- Nobody has a surefire way to tackle stall. This is extremely evident given we've had the options: Blissey, Quagsire, Unaware, Alomomola, Regenerator, Scizor and Mimikyu all come up as appropriate ways to deal with stall.
- There is no established leader of this discussion and communication has clearly been pretty awful. I did it because I felt like I had to since nobody else was going to do it. Not really sure whose job this is supposed to be but we could definitely use someone.
So from all this as well as the other posts in this thread we can gather that this tier is intrinsically fucked and borderline impossible to work on. Since we have actually had minimal discussion on this, I'd like to ask those who voted Keep UU on Quagsire this question:
what do you want to do about the stall problem?
If you don't think stall is a problem to begin with then feel free to make that clear but personally I would disagree and I think that attempting to dismiss what the significant majority of players wants is just selfish. They are over 60% of the people playing this tier after all.
As I've been writing this Finch replied so let me go through some of these points:
Take the voter pool for example, why not establish uniform standards for what will constitute a lower tier old generation voting pool? Right now we have some disarray that is causing people to discredit the legitimacy of the vote as it stands. It would eliminate this entirely if the voter pools were set-in-stone through prior agreements.
I don't know how it is for OU but lowers don't have the playerbase for that. We do have effectively uniform standards right now and I've tried to explore other methods such as suspect tournaments but pretty much everything I've brought up has been either shot down or gotten no feedback so I stopped trying. We are running small tiers that don't see all that much playtime and they don't have active members, there is no one size fits all as a result. If you have ideas then I'd absolutely love to talk about them, you have my discord (not tonight though please, I'm already annoyed that I'm up writing this as is) and I have absolutely no doubt that something cleaner can be arranged but there definitely should not be a hard precedent here.
Stall is not "different" and no playstyle should be isolated as such. We tier Pokemon first and foremost, followed by non-Pokemon variables in unique cases, not archetypes. Say what you want about Quagsire, but this entire suspect is obviously stall being put on trial with Quagsire as the scapegoat. I feel strongly that we should not employ scapegoating something that is clearly not banworthy as an individual Pokemon as a potential suspect regularly. I get that this limits what can be done, but we must realize that this sets all sorts of precedent that can be abused moving forward. If we are going to isolate an entire playstyle, regardless of how limited or versatile it may be, and suspect any given staple of it that has the least collateral, then suddenly the nature of our suspects and how we define them has to be changed pretty drastically.
You are right that this does get philosophical but personally I don't agree with valuing simple and clean precedents over metagame health. I didn't mean to imply that stall or any playstyle is to be treated differently from a tiering perspective. I meant that SM UU stall is a unique case where we can't just solve it with one universal Pokemon ban.
For example if you wanted to remove, say, sand offense from SS OU for some reason, you would have two logical targets - Sand Stream or Excadrill. Most people would not oppose acting on one of these two. With SM UU stall, any Pokemon or Ability on my list above can be seen as a problem. This means that established precedent just doesn't work here straight up, so our options are either to go against precedent or leave the tier as is. And most people don't want to leave it.
Above all else I feel like we threw out any idea if tiering integrity when we gave time of day to the idea of cancelling a vote that reached not only its original 50%+1 majority, but also its revised 60% majority. I understand this is entirely hypocritical of me to say given I brought the idea up in the first place but if there's any precedent we should be worried about establishing it's that one.
To end this off I'd like to say that I also do not personally think Quagsire was what needed to be removed. My own preference would've been a ban on Unaware as a whole as I believe that more accurately tackles the root of the problem, no scapegoating necessary. Still, I'm completely aware that I could be wrong. Anyone could be wrong. This decision could be wrong. There has yet to be a better presented alternative, though; all recent discussion has come down "wait, I don't want this" without telling me what you actually want, and as a tier leader that's effectively a slap in the face.
Final note: if you think there are other issues with the tier that are genuinely worth addressing, ho/sciz/lati or whatever else, please make another thread for it. Derailing this one won't do any good and the focal topic is not being changed.