Announcement SV National Dex Suspect 4 - Change (Terastallization Re-Test)

[Srn]

Good day folks. My name is 2020 idm boomer but you may also know me as Flutter Wayne, The Chief Hurt Officer of Whole Lotta Agents, and most importantly The Godfather of Terastallization.

At this moment, I am a mere single game away from hitting reqs. I’d like to take this time to offer my input on not only Terastallization as a mechanic, but also to share my thoughts on the National Dex metagame as a whole.

Dick in one hand while loading games on my phone with the other, I have returned to a realization I’ve come to many times before. Helen Keller could get reqs for this metagame without even knowing what a Pokémon is. You could hit 2k on the ladder in this tier and still be unable to win on Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader because that is how Fuckin low the bar is in this metagame to hit suspect test requirements. Frankly, I’m appalled at how easy it is to attain a vote whose level has the same degree of impact on the voting outcome of this suspect test as someone who leads the tier or is on the council and is tasked with cultivating an enjoyable player experience. I’ve said this to R8 before, if you want players to vote seriously, make it harder to vote - easy as that. Until you’ve subjected the voters to the struggle against the subject of the suspect test, there’s really nothing I’ve come across during my run that has convinced me that this mechanic is broken. Even during the Zama suspect test, I did not see that Mon even once during my run. How is it the same ladder that we use to get our requirements is completely devoid of these seemingly significant threats to the metagame? I have a Hawlucha doing the shit it’s been doing since Gen 7 still absolutely boddybagging ladder shitters terastallizing hisuian Goodras and I’m supposed to think tera is broken? If you want us to consider the impact on tours, then maybe you should make it more difficult to qualify so that legitimately good players are the ones that get to vote rather than shitter suspect test requirement getters like myself who are able to vote with ELOs in the 1600s or barely 80 GXEs.

Let’s switch gears and talk about Terastallization for a second. Fun ass mechanic, certainly not balanced, yet we find ways to adapt. Whether it’s offensive threats getting even stronger, or defensive juggernauts flipping matchups in a pinch and becoming threatening sweepers in their own right, I’ve come to realize what GameFreak has been trying to tell me all this time. They tried to get rid of stall last gen with Dynamax but obviously went overboard with it, hence the unanimous ban that kept the generational mechanic out of competitive play for an entire generation so we could grow complacent and accept 200-300 turn balance matchups that spam boots regen pivot cores.

You know why singles play gets no attention from GameFreak? It’s because singles players that want to spend 20 hours a day on their computers with their cheeto-dust covered keyboards want to make boots regen pivot balance cores great again. Terastallization is healthy because it gets your ass off your musty PC within 20 turns and encourages you to go touch grass while you mald about wasting your tera on the wrong turn, or a Gliscor flipping a 4x ice weakness against Kyurem into sweeping the opposing team with Facade. The fact of the matter is, Tera forces progress. It is not as predictable as Z-Moves and Mega Evolutions are, and that’s why it’s harder to make educated guesses when playing around certain Pokémon. Which is why you should abandon fat and learn how to play offense, just as we see in VGC (the pretty girl of competitive Pokémon).

Furthermore, I’m a big believer in having different generations that have their own feel to it. If this is how generation 9 feels, then we’ll leave it as that. If you don’t enjoy it, play a different generation. I think it was wrong to remove the gen 8 ladder as that format still has enough support, and could certainly run concurrently with the generation 9 metagame. Another suggestion I have is the preview of Terastallization option that the SV OU metagame had presented as an option in their last suspect test. I’m not sure why that’s not even considered here but I suspect it has a lot to do with a majority of our council suffering from severe brain damage and not being able to count past the number 10. It’s a respectable midground and would always allow future suspects if they still find the mechanic to be overbearing, because trust me when I say if you vote to ban Tera then there is no way in hell council would ever consider bringing it back.

So while there is obviously a bunch of cons to having Terastallization in this metagame, I think there were a lot of different options to explore here that have been overlooked and/or ignored. And so I return here to express my disdain for the mishandling of this metagame and the administrative decisions that have taken place here since November. And with that said, I will firmly be voting DO NOT BAN. And I do hope that the people here will understand how poor a job our metagame leaders have done this generation, so to help them ban Terastallization is to give them a free pass. Hold them accountable for their poor showing, continue keeping them on the backfoot, and demonstrate your influence as someone with a vote to express your disappointment.

DO
NOT
BAN

Shout out Mamoo and my team

Thanks for making me laugh with that opening lol, I'd like to offer my own climb as proof of that: I'm being serious when I tell yall that I have not played a single game of natdex in gen9 before this suspect test. I just grabbed a sample that suited me and went 36-7. Is this a mark against the tier? Not necessarily. There are some ladders with, to put it kindly, more scrubs than usual at the bottom, who are just there because this is a tier where they can use their favorites. A more clear case of this are the ubers ladders, where you are unlikely to fight anybody serious until you hit top ~300. But I will be frank when I say that my losses felt somewhat out of my hands. There is a lot of bullshit like z-hypnosis xurkitree and cm id tapu fini that even a consistent sample simply couldn't account for.

I agree that is difficult to feel the broken effects of tera until you reach very high ladder/tour play, because tera is a mechanic that requires a lot of skill/knowledge to use in the first place. Even more so in a tier as volatile as this one. You are unlikely to feel that tera is unhealthy during the course of your suspects run for this reason. Still, I think this system of getting voters is the best and most inclusive we have, and I'm not sure I would have it any other way.

But come on bro, is this really your argument to keep tera? Bc u dont like fat teams? This is natdex bro, OU is already bursting with tons of creative ways to break teams and offense is super dominant there as a result. On top of that, you got lele, megas, Z-moves, kartana, PURSUIT KINGAMBIT, etc etc. If you are still losing to fat regen cores when you have all these tools, and you were relying on tera to break them, you only have yourself to blame.

If it wasn't clear, I got reqs just to vote ban on this mechanic. I hate tera with a passion and will gladly help yall kick it from this tier.

 

[Kyo]

*mucho texto*

I can't believe I even have to respond to this given it's borderline copypasta material and the last one you tried to submit was chat GPT generated...
There are like a dozen different bad faith arguments made here, and some of them are straight up contradictory.

I don't think it's exactly a shocking revelation to anyone that the skill level of the average NatDex player isn't that high if they're not engaged in the tournament scene. The constraints (or lack thereof) of the tier obviously attract players who are playing the tier because they want to use their favorites, not because they want to sweat all over their keyboard with Garganacl. This might help you figure out why the ladder often feels "devoid of these seemingly significant threats to the metagame" if you're only playing high enough to achieve suspect reqs. There is no way to force someone to use only B rank viability or higher mons, and they're only going to become less visible on the ladder as the dex expands in later generations. Also, for reference, being able to vote with roughly 1600s ELO is pretty standard for suspect tests in any tier. That's about as high as you're going to get if you're only playing the minimum required games so I'm not sure why it was even brought up. If there's one thing I do agree with you on, it would be making reqs a bit harder. I actually mentioned this in one of the mod channels not even a couple hours before this post went up.

The point of suspect tests is to make sure that players have a certain baseline knowledge of a tier's metagame before casting a vote. I think that, in general, suspect tests have never been perfect at achieving that. In this tier it may be a bit more noticeable because you get more "free" wins at lower ladder than you would in some other tiers. I don't really know how feasible it is to make these changes or similar changes to reqs since we're operating off of long-established precedent for how suspect tests should run and what their requirements should be. If you want my opinion, the bar would be higher for voting in a metagame where you can't get a dozen quick wins with a mechanic that turns a not insignificant number of mons into setup sweeping machines.

While we're talking about tera, I think you made a couple of pro-tera arguments that don't exactly pan out.

I have a Hawlucha doing the shit it’s been doing since Gen 7 still absolutely bodybagging ladder shitters terastallizing hisuian Goodras and I’m supposed to think tera is broken?

I feel like if you can call some of the people you played against in your suspect run "ladder shitters" in one breath while simultaneously pointing out that they burned their tera on a mon with zero tournament play that is unranked on the VR, you're probably smart enough to realize that they played suboptimally and that this doesn't reflect on tera's impact on the tier in any capacity. And you do recognize almost immediately afterwards that tera is "certainly not balanced" but it's fun. I'm not going to stop you from getting reqs and voting based off of what you think is fun in the moment, I just think you're sort of shooting your argument in the foot here. I don't understand railing against lower ladder players because you know how to abuse a powerful or arguably broken mechanic better than they do.

Terastallization is healthy because it gets your ass off your musty PC within 20 turns and encourages you to go touch grass while you mald about wasting your tera on the wrong turn, or a Gliscor flipping a 4x ice weakness against Kyurem into sweeping the opposing team with Facade. The fact of the matter is, Tera forces progress.

This tier, in all honesty, has a million different things that force progress. More than any OU-based tier before it in my opinion. In SS OU, forcing progress was often incredibly slow and centered around knock off spam or future sight support. Some people like that kind of gameplay. I personally don't. Gen 8 NatDex didn't suffer from any of those same gameplay loops because, even with bans, we have a massive level of power creep in the tier. What exactly has changed with the new generation? Defensive teams received Clodsire, Garg, Dondozo, Gholdengo, and the occasional Scream Tail. Meanwhile offensive teams now have access to new incredibly powerful mons like Kingambit, Iron Valiant, Zamazenta, Sneasler, Baxcalibur, Dragapult, and Hisuian Samurott's signature move that straight up sets hazards on contact. Call me crazy but this seems like a pretty even exchange if not one in favor of offense. My whole point here being that we don't *need* tera to force progress. It certainly does force progress, but we aren't exactly lacking in that regard. I would much rather vote to remove what we apparently both agree is an unhealthy element than keep it because we suddenly decided the current power creep isn't high enough.

They tried to get rid of stall last gen with Dynamax but obviously went overboard with it, hence the unanimous ban that kept the generational mechanic out of competitive play for an entire generation so we could grow complacent and accept 200-300 turn balance matchups that spam boots regen pivot cores.

Let's be real, I don't think the Pokemon devs spared a thought to singles when they created Dynamax lol. SS OU did degenerate into a pretty bulky metagame, I'll never disagree with that point, but I feel like dex cut is a way more obvious culprit there. NatDex last gen wasn't the most stall-friendly metagame. It saw a reasonable amount of high-level play from individuals who are committed to that kind of playstyle, but it was never a dominant force in the meta. Why would we expect gen 9 NatDex to be any different with the mix of newly introduced mons *and* the PP of recovery moves being cut in half? This is probably the most dishonest argument made here because there's just no precedent for that outcome. I don't want to be too rude cause I have some respect for you, but this feels like complete fearmongering. The idea that Smogon tiering only aims to force longer games is so tired, and applying it to a tier like NatDex of all things is kinda wack.

Furthermore, I’m a big believer in having different generations that have their own feel to it. If this is how generation 9 feels, then we’ll leave it as that. If you don’t enjoy it, play a different generation. I think it was wrong to remove the gen 8 ladder as that format still has enough support, and could certainly run concurrently with the generation 9 metagame.

No notes. I understand people want different metagames to have their distinct identity. I'd also enjoy a gen 8 ladder, that was one of my favorite tiers. Would totally run some games on gen 8 ladder if it was available.

Hold them accountable for their poor showing, continue keeping them on the backfoot, and demonstrate your influence as someone with a vote to express your disappointment.

Last thoughts, you and anyone else can agree or disagree with council decisions as is your prerogative. Not saying tiering has been perfect, it rarely ever is. The idea that a tera ban would be a coverup for other tiering decisions doesn't make a lot of sense though. It just ignores that tera had a massive impact on NatDex from day 1, way before any tiering decisions came about. The way this is phrased feels more like encouraging people to vote in a way that you think will sabotage the tier because you're unhappy with certain tiering decisions rather than voting in a way that will be the healthiest long-term. A second tera suspect wasn't pushed exclusively by the council, and we waited a very long time out of an abundance of caution to the point that we had many people complaining that tera hadn't been revisited yet. Instead, we did extensive tiering polls before making this decision and *only* after those polls was a decision finalized. I'm not even going to link the polls because you know where they are and you probably voted in them.

 

[Joseph Gomes]

I’ve come to realize what GameFreak has been trying to tell me all this time. They tried to get rid of stall last gen with Dynamax but obviously went overboard with it, hence the unanimous ban that kept the generational mechanic out of competitive play for an entire generation so we could grow complacent and accept 200-300 turn balance matchups that spam boots regen pivot cores.

You know why singles play gets no attention from GameFreak? It’s because singles players that want to spend 20 hours a day on their computers with their cheeto-dust covered keyboards want to make boots regen pivot balance cores great again. Terastallization is healthy because it gets your ass off your musty PC within 20 turns and encourages you to go touch grass while you mald about wasting your tera on the wrong turn, or a Gliscor flipping a 4x ice weakness against Kyurem into sweeping the opposing team with Facade. The fact of the matter is, Tera forces progress. It is not as predictable as Z-Moves and Mega Evolutions are, and that’s why it’s harder to make educated guesses when playing around certain Pokémon. Which is why you should abandon fat and learn how to play offense, just as we see in VGC (the pretty girl of competitive Pokémon).

Furthermore, I’m a big believer in having different generations that have their own feel to it. If this is how generation 9 feels, then we’ll leave it as that. If you don’t enjoy it, play a different generation. I think it was wrong to remove the gen 8 ladder as that format still has enough support, and could certainly run concurrently with the generation 9 metagame. Another suggestion I have is the preview of Terastallization option that the SV OU metagame had presented as an option in their last suspect test. I’m not sure why that’s not even considered here but I suspect it has a lot to do with a majority of our council suffering from severe brain damage and not being able to count past the number 10. It’s a respectable midground and would always allow future suspects if they still find the mechanic to be overbearing, because trust me when I say if you vote to ban Tera then there is no way in hell council would ever consider bringing it back.

So while there is obviously a bunch of cons to having Terastallization in this metagame, I think there were a lot of different options to explore here that have been overlooked and/or ignored. And so I return here to express my disdain for the mishandling of this metagame and the administrative decisions that have taken place here since November. And with that said, I will firmly be voting DO NOT BAN. And I do hope that the people here will understand how poor a job our metagame leaders have done this generation, so to help them ban Terastallization is to give them a free pass. Hold them accountable for their poor showing, continue keeping them on the backfoot, and demonstrate your influence as someone with a vote to express your disappointment.

DO
NOT
BAN

Shout out Mamoo and my team

Ah yes, the classic Smogon loves stall

 

[sh0shin]

after playing about 1000 games of this format (including pre home), I concur with those who find tera frustrating, be it in tour, ladder, or the builder.

it's fun to stack broken wincons on both fat and HO, but I'm super tired of playing the what-set-is-kingambit game in particular. sucker punch mindgames are well and good, but it's a bit annoying needing a gambit check that can also hit common gambit teras, as well as having to guess whether or not low kick is slotted in for gambit vs gambit showdowns.

anyway, tera is indeed fun and broken, but I think the tier feels way too chaotic and rewards some really weird stuff. it also feels a little cheap to click tera defensively to get a KO or two that would absolutely never have happened otherwise, but I also understand the sentiment that the uniqueness of the tier should exist. I think the tier remains unique by virtue of being able to click flyinium z on moltres-g while running booster energy mixed iron valiant with a kee berry cresselia all on the same squad.

I have fun with tera in official tiers & tera preview draft modes. I haven't really played any Ubers or NDUbers, though. this reqs run was full of ups and downs, but I've never been more mad at this ladder lol. not to say my losses aren't my fault, since I usually lose from bad positioning and/or throws... but oh my god, delete this mechanic. I miss regular games. maybe also bring back gen 8 natdex ladder so tera fans have a glimmer of hope. fingers crossed. I miss that ladder a lot right now.

 

[Phyn]

Good day folks. My name is 2020 idm boomer but you may also know me as Flutter Wayne, The Chief Hurt Officer of Whole Lotta Agents, and most importantly The Godfather of Terastallization.

At this moment, I am a mere single game away from hitting reqs. I’d like to take this time to offer my input on not only Terastallization as a mechanic, but also to share my thoughts on the National Dex metagame as a whole.

Dick in one hand while loading games on my phone with the other, I have returned to a realization I’ve come to many times before. Helen Keller could get reqs for this metagame without even knowing what a Pokémon is. You could hit 2k on the ladder in this tier and still be unable to win on Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader because that is how Fuckin low the bar is in this metagame to hit suspect test requirements. Frankly, I’m appalled at how easy it is to attain a vote whose level has the same degree of impact on the voting outcome of this suspect test as someone who leads the tier or is on the council and is tasked with cultivating an enjoyable player experience. I’ve said this to R8 before, if you want players to vote seriously, make it harder to vote - easy as that. Until you’ve subjected the voters to the struggle against the subject of the suspect test, there’s really nothing I’ve come across during my run that has convinced me that this mechanic is broken. Even during the Zama suspect test, I did not see that Mon even once during my run. How is it the same ladder that we use to get our requirements is completely devoid of these seemingly significant threats to the metagame? I have a Hawlucha doing the shit it’s been doing since Gen 7 still absolutely boddybagging ladder shitters terastallizing hisuian Goodras and I’m supposed to think tera is broken? If you want us to consider the impact on tours, then maybe you should make it more difficult to qualify so that legitimately good players are the ones that get to vote rather than shitter suspect test requirement getters like myself who are able to vote with ELOs in the 1600s or barely 80 GXEs.

Let’s switch gears and talk about Terastallization for a second. Fun ass mechanic, certainly not balanced, yet we find ways to adapt. Whether it’s offensive threats getting even stronger, or defensive juggernauts flipping matchups in a pinch and becoming threatening sweepers in their own right, I’ve come to realize what GameFreak has been trying to tell me all this time. They tried to get rid of stall last gen with Dynamax but obviously went overboard with it, hence the unanimous ban that kept the generational mechanic out of competitive play for an entire generation so we could grow complacent and accept 200-300 turn balance matchups that spam boots regen pivot cores.

You know why singles play gets no attention from GameFreak? It’s because singles players that want to spend 20 hours a day on their computers with their cheeto-dust covered keyboards want to make boots regen pivot balance cores great again. Terastallization is healthy because it gets your ass off your musty PC within 20 turns and encourages you to go touch grass while you mald about wasting your tera on the wrong turn, or a Gliscor flipping a 4x ice weakness against Kyurem into sweeping the opposing team with Facade. The fact of the matter is, Tera forces progress. It is not as predictable as Z-Moves and Mega Evolutions are, and that’s why it’s harder to make educated guesses when playing around certain Pokémon. Which is why you should abandon fat and learn how to play offense, just as we see in VGC (the pretty girl of competitive Pokémon).

Furthermore, I’m a big believer in having different generations that have their own feel to it. If this is how generation 9 feels, then we’ll leave it as that. If you don’t enjoy it, play a different generation. I think it was wrong to remove the gen 8 ladder as that format still has enough support, and could certainly run concurrently with the generation 9 metagame. Another suggestion I have is the preview of Terastallization option that the SV OU metagame had presented as an option in their last suspect test. I’m not sure why that’s not even considered here but I suspect it has a lot to do with a majority of our council suffering from severe brain damage and not being able to count past the number 10. It’s a respectable midground and would always allow future suspects if they still find the mechanic to be overbearing, because trust me when I say if you vote to ban Tera then there is no way in hell council would ever consider bringing it back.

So while there is obviously a bunch of cons to having Terastallization in this metagame, I think there were a lot of different options to explore here that have been overlooked and/or ignored. And so I return here to express my disdain for the mishandling of this metagame and the administrative decisions that have taken place here since November. And with that said, I will firmly be voting DO NOT BAN. And I do hope that the people here will understand how poor a job our metagame leaders have done this generation, so to help them ban Terastallization is to give them a free pass. Hold them accountable for their poor showing, continue keeping them on the backfoot, and demonstrate your influence as someone with a vote to express your disappointment.

DO
NOT
BAN

Shout out Mamoo and my team

Damn thats tuff

 

[about15guys]

As someone with far too many games on this ladder (somewhere close to 2k) I feel like it's pretty safe to say that tera feels really annoying to play against. I'm not going to write a college thesis statement on tera and its effects on the local trout population of atlanta georgia, since other people much more qualified than me have written much more coherent arguments than I ever could (for some great examples, see Aera's, R8's or sh0shin's posts in this thread alone to see what I mean) but in my experience that was attempting to get reqs, it feels like tera played a massive part in it, just for psyspam as an example, polteageist is a great example of what tera does to a metagame, On HO It's normally a niche mon, but having a relevant use, that being stored power + shell smash, however, it's got one major flaw that holds it back: it's inability to hit dark types reasonably. That is, until tera came along and gave it access to a stab 80 bp fighting move that it can use now to hit the defensive darks that'd normally check it. One thing I will give the pro-tera group is that they were right, tera did make a lot of pokemon more viable, in fact, you can see a pretty good list of mons made viable by tera if you look at the bottom of the ubers list, as almost all of them are pokemon that were broken with tera. Banning tera would massively open up the metagame if anything, as we'd add bare minimum 5 new pokemon to play around with, all of which have shown to have legitimate use cases in ou, that I'd love to build with, as they all seem really cool

(tl;dr tera made mons so viable they got banned, unban tera so we can use the cool pokemon that were broken with tera but fine without)

 

[Kyo]

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...terastallization-re-test.3724266/post-9698424

Tera remains legal in National Dex! Locking this thread. Please continue any further discussion here.