I think a lot of you are not understanding that they would Individually test each of the banned Pokemon in the tier 1 by 1. If they prove to be manageable and the community wants them to stay they would not remain banned forever. It's an alternative method to tiering. "Too many Powerful threats" also would've probably been better wording than "Too many Viable Pokemon." It's fine to disagree with this ( I personally think it's a little extreme) but please be civil, relax and try to at least understand the intent. These guys are not an evil group trying to ruin your fun, they're unpaid volunteers doing the thankless and difficult job of trying to balance the mess that is Gen 9 OU. And they're engaging with the community more than I've ever seen in Gen 9. If you disagree with this: Vote against the idea in the upcoming survey. the issue
Letting fans ban Pokémon via vote is insane, people will complain about the last thing that beat them no matter what. This meta has never had a chance to settle and if this continues it never will.
You simply misunderstand us. We are fully aware that they would retest each and every mon until the council gets the answers they want. That's not the problem in the slightest. What we want is the council to understand that this isn't gen 8, 7, 6 or any previous gens meta and their old standard isn't what the game is today. So many of us flocked from OU to UUbers because of this and stay away from OU because of the council. They claim to want a diverse metagame but now that we have on where your standard steel + bulky ground isn't the one answer to EVERY team, they want to ban a lot of mons so we go back to the same offensive balance teams that has the 1) lando-T type Mon, 2) the defensive steel that makes sure physical gets no time to shine, and 3) blissey/pex stand in. (And atleast two of these 3 have over a 40% usage) Simply put, we are tired of their idea of what the metagame should be and what the metagame can be.
Yeah but still the issue is neither does the OU community get the time needed to come up with other ways of dealing with these threats, nor will anyone this way notice if #3 + #4 would be easily managed by some OU mon + #6 because #6 also takes away part of the burden of that OU mon to check other OU threats so they together have the capability to deal with that stuff - simply because that's not gonna be able to be tested this way, like it would be if you gave players time to come up with these kinds of counter measures.
As a national dex player. banning gholdengo was such a breath of fresh air. lol running taunt over just blanking a corvs defog period is completely different when it comes to turn action economy. The only pokemon that had to go as a result immediately has been sneasler which is fine since it was on the ballot anyways.
We get it; but this could take months. They remove 10 pokemon for months only to find out some of them were fine the whole time. This is a new system too, meaning it will probably take longer.
Mr cheese strings ability "Good as gold" has a surprising hidden interraction with the OU banlist since it prevents the people on the smogon team from using the move "suspect test" on it, since it is considered a "status move" .
The year is 2935. By this point, all pokemon have been banned for from OU for being overpowered save for two. Now that caterpie has been banned, we enter what can only be described as “the magicarp era.”
I think banning a batch of pokemon and bringing them slowly back one at a time would make the pokemon banned all at once seem stronger when they are brought back. The bans would lower the power level and remove potential checks to mons in the ban list, so when they reappear there's less to stop their rampage. It would also lock us in to retesting all of the mons which, in a way, is slower than suspecting them one at a time. We would have to unban and suspect each pokemon and for 10 that would take awhile plus it leaves us less open to suspect other mons, we're deciding ahead of time everything we want to look at. This one could be solved by still doing the surveys and suspecting mons as regularly happens. It feels like this gen's power creep has outpaced the speed of the smogon tiering system.
I think making these mons feel stronger is the point. Like Jim said in the video, at the start of Gen 9 mons like Chien Pao and Espathra didn't feel overpowered because of all the other threats running around. But right now there are so many powerful Pokémon that, if you aren't prepared for them, basically win the game from team preview. So many in fact that it is impossible to have a team capable of handling all of them. Banning each mon one by one helps to alleviate this, but the ones that are suspected last will have an advantage in staying in OU since teams will have less threats to cover for at that point. Banning all the mons with this "demolish a team without specific counters" threat level at once allows less ludicrous mons to establish themselves in the tier, and the banned mons can be retested to see if they truly sweep teams without specific checks in this format.
@@kadabraguy9846 "Too many powerful Pokemon" That's called variety. More powerful mons are naturally going to create a space where more viable teams are present within the meta. As a result the team that YOU pick might work well against another but get utterly demolished by another. That's the way things work.
@@i_s_u-c_l_o_n_e637 variety isn't helpful when it's just a wide selection of bad choices. Like the problem in DPP OU wasn't that Garchomp was the only mon with its power level, it was how it restricted teams in order to not autolose to it. Having five different Garchomps in DPP OU wouldn't have made the tier balanced, it would have made it a guessing game of which Garchomp your opponent would bring and whether or not your team stood a chance against it
@@i_s_u-c_l_o_n_e637you ideally don’t want teams that auto win some matchups and auto lose some to make up the majority of the meta. It’s ok for some team matchups to have a significant advantage but you should always have a fighting chance. That’s not really a competitive experience it’s a coin flip on if you win or not based on what team the opponent you get matched up with runs. Having some 7/3 matchups is ok. 10/0s are not
i think it’s funny that even when finch, the tier leader of ou, disagrees with the idea of kokoloko tiering, the entire council is thrown under the bus even when this is just njnp’s idea
Props to NJNP for taking the time to elaborate and expand upon his thoughts from the post and props to Jimothy for being the platform for NJNP to come on and speak on.
Honestly at this point Tera might be worth looking into. Lot of these moms are out of control because they can randomly turn into a completely different threat. Maybe we introduce Tera preview or something?
I'm not really sold on the efficacy of this method, because it fails to test how these different Pokemon interact with each other. What if Volcarona looks reasonable while using this method, but is actually way more threatening because it also checks Gholdengo, Kingambit, and Serperior? I'm still in the camp of re-examining Tera, because it seems to me like a lot of the volatility in the metagame still stems from Tera being unchecked. I think another thing to consider is that maybe Smogon's approach to making a balanced metagame has become flawed, since SV OU is so far removed from older metas like gen 4 OU in terms of power level. We have to accept to a certain extent that with a large number of extremely powerful and competing Pokemon, the metagame isn't going to become stable or streamlined. That's why we have ranked ladders for older gens of OU, so people who don't like how the current gen plays can go play something else they'd prefer. I am not opposed to bans if they're for legitimately overbearing Pokemon, but I feel like to a certain extent Smogon is trying to mold OU to resemble some idealized abstract version of the tier instead of managing and regulating the natural flow of evolving power levels. I by no means think poorly of anyone involved in the banning decisions like NJNP, I just think it would be worthwhile for them to reexamine what they want OU to be and what are the best actions to take to make it so.
This is how I feel with them nowadays honestly and it's only becoming increasingly more clear as time goes unfortunately everyone will be to busy fighting amongst themselves to realize this
That's the problem though. All of these mons are overbearing and require specific checks to handle them. And there are so many of these threats that it is impossible to cover even a majority of them on one team, let alone all of them. This essentially means that your team can matchup great against teams with Kingambit, Serperior, Kyurem, etc. but lose near-automatically to a team with a Stellar Enamorus. Obviously not every team will have a positive matchup into every other team, but losing matches because you simply can't cover for every single boost sweeper and they happen to have the right one isn't a sign of a healthy competitive environment. Arguing that the meta is simply changing and Smogon needs to accept the power creep is essentially arguing for singles to turn into convoluted Rock Paper Scissors, where you see their team at the start of the match and either win or lose based on which mons they have.
agreed and i think another consideration to help with this is to create a new tier. there have been a lot more pokemon added. so adding a new tier and changing the usage % cut-off rates, can help keep the number of pokemon per tier to a reasonable level. the power level would be high (like u said), but the number of threats to consider when team-building would be less (his point).
It's funny, we're having the same issue of variance in Yu-Gi-Oh TCG right now where 6 decks are really good and like 20-30 more decks are viable. it's currently impossible to cover every match-up with a 40-card (or 55 depending on how you look at it) deck and a 15-card side deck. The less competitive players are loving this format because they're able to play what they want, but the top players hate it because a tournament run can be decided entirely by luck.
We strive for a balanced metagame where threats are manageable, while there is diversity and room for creativity. I think people just wanna play Gen 3 OU, but they don't know yet
They're trying to ruin it now too with the Speedpass suspect test, which is wholly unnecessary and just more persistent whining against things that specifically beat the teams they happen to prefer building, instead of adapting. Gen III OU will not remain this haven from Smogon's madness for very much longer.
@yourdagan as somebody who has been in the top 15 on gen 3 OU ladder, I think Ninjask is lame and oftentimes uncompetitive. Yk how annoying and dumb it is when a Ninjask just clicks sand-attack and now you have a 30% chance to just lose on the spot? I have nothing against Zapdos agility pass, but Ninjask is lame af.
@@MalphoriaI just don't like baton pass teams in general and ninjask is so annoying because it can and will click sub then baton pass its speed boost and it sticks around purely because of sub and sand attack
I'm glad someone finally mentioned the hazard remover problem. The problem isn't Ghold, it's that we have ONE viable rapid spinner and ONE sort of viable defogger. Banning Ghold would barely make their jobs easier, especially since it would make other powerful mons much more dangerous.
In my opinion, the reason we have so few hazard removal options is because most "anti-meta" hazard removal options physically cannot beat Gholdengo. Or require some very specific tera and set to do so, ruining their viability next to Great Tusk who can beat Ghold sans tera. It's hard to commit a team slot to a pokemon that flat out loses to the most common answer to it's niche. THAT is why Great Tusk is the only truely viable hazard removal option right now. It is the only spinner that can threaten to KO Gholdengo reliably without sacrificing what it wants to be doing.
isnt the reason for why some other defoggers and spinners arent made viable by their removal options gold tho? with the top threats being culled along with ghold I could see drill getting back to spinning, corv going back to defogging, and scizor and mandibuzz maybe making an appearance
I am absolutely fine with bans when there is a centralising threat that is unhealthy for the tier, but to ban potentially 10 Pokémon at once because "there are too many" is insane.
What I fond interesting about the proposed method is how it's checking the pokemon on an individual basis. It shows that the concept is these 10 pokemon aren't currently over centralising because amongst them are their respective checks. But if that is the case it raises a question of wether the metagame is diverse if teams generally need a certain number of these top threats to function. If this went through I'd be a bit surprised if all 10 pokemon were to remain banned, and if that were to come to pass, I think it could be indicative of a problem depending on how you personally draw the line for an overcentralized metagame
@@Protectorofgod well they tried "no snorlax GSC", and the game actively became stallier, which is what GSC is known for. Basically no snorlax = pace goes to slowpoke level. Snorlax = Slugma level, so barely tolerable.
I’m actually not opposed to the “reverse suspecting” proposed, but I agree with you Jim that now that new content is slowing down there is more time afforded to do things slowly. I think the immense power creep in SV and the massive number of viable pokes is also forcing us to confront how tiering and tiering actions are done in general.
I understand the frustration of having a lot of strong threats and feeling like you can't beat every team structure. As a VGC player I've experienced this quite a few times myself, playing in a meta where there are no bans and players are forced to adapt to strong and even broken pokemon. Players do always adapt though, and I believe having multiple strong threats is better than the alternative as it allows more creativity in teambuilding and opens up the possibility for uncommon anti-meta picks to shine. Getting rid of all these threats at once might make teambuilding feel restrictive, especially in those moments when only one of them is tested back into the tier. I think that letting the meta play out and naturally develop is better than taking drastic tiering action for a format that has only been around for a month. If there is a standout broken pokemon, it will reveal itself through usage stats and through in-game interactions with the other pokemon in the meta.
Players adapt in vgc that's why I love it too, but when zacian and dark horse was allowed, i gave up the meta. It was not at all fun, and in few months, that meta will return 😢 again... So, there needs to be a ban system in vgc too, to some extent. Atleast for pokemon that just ruin the game like zac, caly and shifu.
@@daphenomenalz4100 Zacian got its well deserved nerf going into gen 9, and Calyrex might be balanced by the ruin quartet being around (though it could also pair with chi-yu to be absolutely devastating). I agree that urshifu is way too strong at the moment, but it also fulfills a very specific niche that no other pokemon does and I think that's good for the game. GameFreak definitely should've considered the impact of leaving urshifu as is in gen 9 with the removal of dynamax though... hitting through protect for free is too strong. I think that they should've reduced the damage from unseen fist to 50 or even 25%, and then it would've been perfectly balanced.
@@riverpasta6114 yeah urshifu really should only hit for 1/8th through protect, like moves/dmax did. And then you drop the auto crits on surging strikes and wicked blow but let them hit through protect fully. Caly-shadow is going to be insane with chi-yu, may arceus have mercy on our souls when restricted Pokémon are legal.
I liked hearing NJNP talk about the thought process around which bans and i would love to see more from council members and their thought processes and I found the discussion to be extremely interesting
Does the OU council ever consider bring a powerful defensive mon down from Ubers to handle these insane threats instead of just banning every single "threat" until the power level is back down to last generation's OU?
Unbanning n powerful defensive mon to deal with the new powerful offensive mons would result in all the average offensive mons being left in the dirt and resulting in very boring meta.
defensive pokemon can easily becomes broken offensive threats in lower tiers. in general mon have a role based on the power level and lower power levels create new possible roles deoxy speed is a good example.
Coming from a TCG background (Yugioh/Magic) what you described as to much to prepare for sounds like our ideal world where you have more options then time to play
"it's just not practical to be able to prep for everything in the tier" That is the compromise one has to accept with a game like Pokémon where there are multiple viable options, and I think it's actually to the tiers benefit that there is no one size fits all solution, no team that can account for everything, you should not be able to prep for everything, that's what checks and balances are. Just my view but I think it's extremely silly, I also cannot believe we're doing this with Volcarona AGAIN in a tier where we have Stellar Enam and Serp as well as Kingambit, Boulder, and even a cover legendary... I cannot believe the moth is where the line will be drawn
@zwadveg918 I'm sorry, do you have alternatives for this because this was eventually gonna happened as the generations go on hell it'll be worse in gen 10 and it's powercreep we need better alternatives then this because all this is gonna do is just have everyone fighting among themselves and once that happens nothing is going to be done
Don't know who your arguing with here cause guess what? I don't even agree with the guy but if you're going to make an argument at least understand the fucking point he's making.
Since the gen 9 OU metagame is in a bit of an unstable state, one of the OU council member NJNP has suggested something drastic. NJNP wants to ban up to 10 pokemon immediately and then perform something called the "Kokoloko method" where each of the banned pokemon is tested in the format, one by one.
I feel like the mods and council are just going mad with power. Some of these bans are just silly, especially when the community has been asking for certain Pokemon to be banned since nearly the start of gen 9 that have never been touched, and certain mons that seemingly weren't too much of a problem were banned. When it's become a common talking point and a meme that there are too many bans in just a year, I feel like you're too ban-happy. That might just be my fighting game interest, though. Bans used to be a lot more frequent, but looking back at old games where the top-tier most dominant threats often turn out to be bad or just mid long-term, the FGC now mostly says "Okay, it's a problem now, but maybe you all just need more practice," and wait a while before even considering a ban.
@@mrschrubelhupfyay6397 you should of given a better example. Brawl didn't ban meta knight cuz the majority of players who lived near or came from abroad were meta knight mains so they said they wouldn't veto a meta knight ban. And with bayo smash 4 was basically over so there was no reason to ban her. A better example would be akuma from SF2 or lab 21 from fighterz
I’ve played many an Ubers UU game against NJNP, so if he has an idea, I can vouch it has some merit. That said, this certainly does seem a bit strange, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about how it’d play out. I think a lot of these new mons have really added some much-needed variety to the tier, though, which have in turn made it a lot more enjoyable to play than pre-dlc2 so I don’t wanna just throw em all out immediately. I guess we have a good while to figure out what to do though.
Screens uninteractable? Brick break and psychic fangs exist my guys, maybe singles players will actually have to use a move with less than 120 power to deal with problems? Oh noes :C
This is an issue of opportunity cost and I can tell by your comment that you don’t play the game. Run brick break? That means running a low BP move which will fail to hit lots of benchmarks against strong opponents just in case you run into screens.
@@MrPatrickbuit this is exactly the issue lol. If they run screens, you cry there's no answer. If you run the answer, you cry you can't ohko everything. Might be a player issue lmfao
@@BusinessSkrub No it’s a metagame issue. All the good players agree that it’s a metagame issue. It’s literally just the 1100s and 1200s that claim it’s a skill issue because they don’t get what competitive integrity looks like. People should not be forced to run niche (and otherwise useless) sets just so they don’t get 6-0’d in team preview by screens.
@@BusinessSkrub And then lose to ANYTHING ELSE? Seriously, that's why you should NEVER be game designers. And is not like psychic fangs is a terrible move, but only 2-3 pokémon who are good can use it. I'll give you a tip, you're not facing only 1 team, you're facing 20, and you need to be broadly prepared for most of them, not overinvest in checks who sell your butt to half of the meta.
"you can't make a team that accounts for every single threat in the metagame" I don't see why this is a problem, given that the focus for smogon is to make the metagame as diverse as possible, if the game has tons of variety just let it have it, bans for the case of centralization I can get behind, but bans for sheer ammount of viable mons? thats ridiculous, also, not being able to account for every threat kills stall, which is a plus in my book.
That was never Smogon's focus. Smogon is for casuals who want to pretend to be hardcore while throwing tantrums and having aneurysms at anything that disrupts their narrow ideas of "fun". The subject of this video is just one of the most brazen demonstrations of that fact, as the org has become increasingly unhinged with respect to maintaining the pretense that it's at all about "competitiveness". Competitiveness is about adapting to emerging threats. This, is the complete and exact opposite.
I guess you could make the argument that if it's impossible to prep for every major threat, then it's impossible to make a strategy that isn't reliant on matchup fishing. I don't know if that's actually the case in current OU, but it's at least consistent with how Smogon has treated matchup fishing in the past.
We simply don’t live in a world anymore where u can check ALL threats with one team. These high latter tryhards are gonna need to figure that out or go play an earlier gen where they can use the same defense core to wall the tier. This option will transform the meta game into an unrecognizable stally mess. Ou council need to catch up with the times.
These pokemon interact with each other in the meta. Testing them 1 by 1 separately is not a good method given the number of pokemon they want to ban. Honestly, the council seems to be unable to accept power creep. We have UUbers now, which indicates that the OU meta is already contrived and limited. OU and Ubers need to be revamped.
On the contrary, banning them all and then retesting one by one would be a great way to see how well these mons can be answered without the insane added pressure of all the other stupidly overepowered threats placing literally impossible restrictions in teambuilding. Their interactions with each other do not realistically represent an added way to answer the other mons on like 80-90% of the cases, and the remaining 10-20% aren't enough to make keeping all of them worth it.
If we’re at the point with 1000 options, obviously bringing 6 will never be enough to cover every viable team structure and set. If we take a look at competitive card games like Magic, an archetype or play style will always have bad matchups. I think the tiering system based on usage might be a little too outdated at this point, and that’s the direction we should look toward
@@Dstagheavy agree. For numerous reasons like the sheer number of options and the ever rising powercreep, this issue needs to be addressed at a fundamental level of how we play and go about the game as it’s certainly outdated to a point
Great interview guys. Ive personally been overwhelmed by the power level of current ou so this tiering method could be interesting for sure. As for gholdengho i think it was understated how much itd change the hazards metagame, since great tusk would have so many more options to rapid spin as well
Tbh I think the problem here is with Smogon's inherently destructive tiering. There's simply way too many Pokémon nowadays to account for where every single one should naturally shake out and it makes this worst of both worlds option where OU feels artificially constructed while also having major balance issues. The game could be a lot healthier and allow for a larger variety of Pokémon to take the spotlight if a constructive approach to tiering were taken, with a smaller rotation of allowed Pokémon being actively chosen, including some that would normally be lower/higher tier. I've seen some really fun mini-formats emerge from people playing like this among friends, and it opens up a lot of really unexpected mons/sets because people are forced to think outside the box.
"Let's balance the tier by removing a third of it" at what point do you decide to just play UU? Smogon was complaining the meta was too small, too stale. Now they've got a glut of pokemon, and of course over a dozen pokemon are broken. Never mind that that's half the pokemon in OU. You can never make a pokemon team that covers everything. How high are you to think you can make a perfect pokemon team that covers every single potential team.
Because they are trying to create an OU by force: Ban everything "too overcentralizing" to the tiers above, and let the sh*tmons drop to the tiers below. And there you have a small pool of usable Pokemon you can focus all your attention upon without having to think about any others. That's their ideal.
Except you should also be able to make a team that doesn't auto loose to anything either, which can't really happen when just about half the tier is incredibly strong setup sweepers. Also your complaint about this being a massive chunk of the tier ignores the fact that most, if not all, of the mons being suspected either primarily or have the ability to act as very setup sweepers. And finally too many powerful threats can make a metagame more stale as you either exclusively run them or have to focus your entire team on keeping them in check.
The logic is that if there's too many, varied threats the tier actually becomes less skilful. If we "slippery slope" it, a format with too many things you have to cover eventually devolves into a pure rock-paper-scissor format where you lose in team preview, regardless of skill. This isn't "hard match up", it's "I lose because I had literally no way to prep for this or outplay it". For a comparison; VGC has been at it's best when the format had variety, but it wasn't completely all over the place, Z-moves were an example of too much variety and a lot of games devolved to a random Z-move blowing a hole in your team and reduced player skill, it became a guessing game. The opposite is true too, a good guess leading to a wasted Z-move, was too impactful to the gamestate. This wasn't skillful, it was you just "guess which of it's 4+ viable Z-moves the Koko was running, if it was even the Z-move user". Not saying OU is quite there yet, but it's worth thinking about, and reasonable to discuss if the skilful aspect of a format is being eroded.
Completely agree. This is also why I dislike UUbers. It's like a sorry attempt to make up for all the bans instead of just letting power creep happen and letting the meta develop. It's not even "these mons are broken" anymore. Now It's "these mons are viable and functioning, let's ban like 10 of them".
To me, it seems that game freak and the Pokemon companies idea for creating pokemon is increasingly becoming more at odds with the concept of tiering like how Smogon does it, and it's only becoming more apparent each generation. We may need to look at the horizon instead of what's in front of us, and decide that core changes to the Smogon tiers are needed.
@@MasanTheDwarfI fully agree. Especially on Tera, it’s definitely broken but so is weather in gen 5. Meta games having an identity is important in my opinion.
Tera should be banned. It should have been banned months ago, in fact. Weather, or at least drizzle (and almost certainly drought too) should have been banned from gen 5 OU, and the fact it wasn't resulted in the worst OU generation to date. Don't let Tera make the current gen usurp gen 5's throne of ass just because "muh identity".
I understand where this is coming from but i have one big issue with banning deo speed is that ribombee will benefit from having no Pokémon that would be a better lead and honestly deo speed has been the main reason why that HASN'T been a recent issue
If we remove ghold too, then webs becomes much easier to deal with. This is part of why the kokoloko method is a good idea, actually: without the other mons warping the metagame, we can much better evaluate whether specific ones are harmful or actually good additions. The proposal isn't to just permaban everything, it's to do an emergency ban on them in order to let a stable baseline meta to form and then retest them one by one.
The thing with all these bans is that these pokemon just go to ubers and end up never being used… at lesst they creates the UUbers tier, but still it’d be fun to play with them
This is such an interesting discussion. I think this idea has some merit after Smogon Premier League has passed, but I wonder what the council other than NJNP and Finch think about this
This is why I play AG. I just fully accept the nonsense that Gamefreak has unleashed upon the game. Tera Water Aqua Step Moxie Metronome Quaquaval is still a god over there.
Sounds to me like he's describing exactly what's cool about OU. There's so many choices in a dex this balanced. Perhaps letting the DLC fully run its course will help settle the tier, the trickle down of weird things ending up being UU by a technicality is going to be interesting to watch.
the Kokoloko Method is just a very flawed method of testing just because the other temporary banned pokemon could be a check or counter to the current one being tested and that can effect the results of the testing and there's really no reason for it new games won't be out till next november unless gamefreak's going to take there time and make a goodgame for once lol
Most, if not all of the mons being suspect tested are incredibly strong setup sweepers that do little to check each other. If one switches in on another that's already set up, it just loses.
I’d rather have open Team Sheet in OU that this sort of ban. The power level of Pokemon is shifting and has been shifting for years. The hesitation to accept that the game needs to be played differently is killing Gen 9 singles. Gamefreak is just going to continue making powerful Pokemon each generation. Are we going to ban half of the new Pokemon every generation now so we can preserve how we played 5 years ago? 10 years ago?
Yes, becausr Smogon's goal has always been making a competitive game. If broken shit that ruins that is introduced, its going to get banned regardless of the gen. Broken is broken, and that spans across power levels.
@@royalgelly8948 What a black and white take that ignores the fact that Pokemon isn't the same game it was last generation. Gamefreak is continuing to raise the power ceiling of Pokemon and is clearly designing with VGC in mind more than Singles 6vs6. What's the point of having a new generation of Pokemon if most of them are banned because they don't play nice with old Pokemon. Adapt and grow with the game, don't try and force Gen 9 to be Gen 6 or whatever gen you started with
@@DaiQilinnobody is asking to ban most new mons. Even with the kokoloko method proposed, we'd be banning only a small fraction of new mons. Hell, if you were to actually look at the proposal, you'd see that almost half of the proposed bans (and more than half of the suggested bans rather than 'maybe' bans) are old mons rather than new ones. Even if all eleven mons there got banned, this meta would still be very different from previous generations, between dexited mons and new mons that are still around, like Great Tusk, Iron Valiant, non-hearthflame Ogerpons, Archaludon, Hydrapple, Clodsire, Dondozo...
@@DaiQilinyou say Pokémon getting banned is problematic, and the game is meant to be played differently, but for each powercrept defensive Pokemon, there are three or four very strong offensive Pokemon in the meta game, meaning that these Pokemon get overwhelmed and many become far less viable. One of the many reasons that those offensive Pokemon get banned is so the game doesn’t become bland or stale with only one prevalent play style in hyper offense, and lets different Pokemon get more usage in the tier. If you want all of the broken OU threats, just play UUbers.
Is tera type still not shown in team preview? I think that would be something to consider testing myself. It may not be like cart, but neither is sleep clause or freeze clause
Or just let a downward shift happen. The "broken" mons become the new OU while the old staples drop to UU and so on. There are too many "broken" mons to justify banning them all. Just let the power creep happen at this point.
A thing that makes me unsure of what would happen with this method is that many of these mons exist in a common environment, and one might be op in regards to the others. If you ban those 10 mons who now seem to work more or less even if dominant, and bring them back one by one, it would probably make it so that the pokemon being tested would lack many checks and counters that are currently banned. Not only that, but the order in which you bring them back would also impact the meta significantly.
Most of these mons are not effectively checked or countered by the majority, if not by none of the others. You can't realistically tell me any of them except maybe Iron Boulder check Gouging Fire, for example, and even that one cannot reliably switch in. Similar issues pop up with Volcarona, Serperior, and Iron Boulder itself. That aside, yes, the order you bring them back would impact the meta, but so would the order in which you suspect test them without using the kokoloko method (and most if not all of those mons would eventually get their test), so I don't see why that would be a big issue.
This seems like a stupid idea and the easiest way to prove it would be to think about if you did it in another gen. Imagine if you banned the 5 best mons in gen 3 OU all at once then reintroduced them one by one. Regardless of the order you reintroduce them would you still come to the conclusion that all 5 should return every time? Is there no combination of some of the 5 that would result in a ban for one of them? Is looking at them in a vacuum at all helpful if they're balanced when they're all included? This method is flawed if you don't think gen 3 OU will come out the same as it currently is every time.
@@Brandonutss So are you saying if we did it in gen 3 we _wouldn't_ get the same balanced meta that we currently have? If this is a viable balance strategy you should be able to use it on an already balanced meta and get the same balanced meta at the end every time. Otherwise you aren't balancing with this strat; you're just arbitrarily changing shit.
@@cmck362 you completely missed my point. My point is that gen 3 ou is a completely different tier with balanced setup sweepers. In gen 9, there is very little defensive counterplay to all the new powerful pokemon introduced. A better example is gen 5 ou, a metagame with many broken pokemon and strategies similar to gen 9 ou. What the smogon council is trying to do rn is to prevent another gen 5 because a metagame where the only stategy is to out offence the other team and every game is a matchup fish results in a metagame that becomes stale and less skillful.
@@Brandonutss honestly this gen is going to go the way of gen 5 ou, and for a very similar reason too: "muh gen identity" leading to not banning a clearly broken mechanic that is harming the meta (weather, especially rain, in gen 5 and tera in gen 9).
@@Brandonutss Alright now explain why what they're proposing is a good balance strategy. I'd really like you to focus on how lobotomizing a tier then reintroducing only one powerful element won't lead to the rebanning of that element. That one element will be significantly stronger than the rest of the lobotomized tier so if only by comparison it'll be too strong. Please explain why this method isn't predisposed to false positives. And do feel free to use other games to justify why this method works. There's no reason to only apply it to a single tier in a single gen in a single game in a single genre. Branch out. It's a balancing strategy after all so it should be generally applicable.
Something no one is saying, is now that 6v6 singles are 20 minutes in the real game itself, game freak is optimizing pokemon to fit the time limit including nerfing most recovery pp. They even added an anti heal move to further cut through walls/stall
There's over 1k pokemon. You can't expect to prepare for all of them, even with the smaller pool of viable mons. Bans should be for mons that are too strong or centralizing being unhealthy for the metagame, not because you don't like that your team isn't prepped for it.
It's not about preparing for every pokemon it's about preparing for Pokemon that only need one turn to completely take over the match. How is that so hard to understand the guy practically spelled it out for you
Now that the DLC is all out, I strongly believe we should start fresh, unban everything, have some fun, and work through it without banning anything for the first few months. I miss when we used to let the metagame fester for a while. I also believe we should try a Tera format AND a no Tera format.
Wouldn't go so far as to unban everything banned during this OU so far but I think the metagame being given time to settle is a good idea. Time to adapt, and when adaptation becomes no longer reasonable for a threat, then examine it
This is an awesome conversation and I’d love to see more of these. Theres a channel called the group up podcast run by a guy svb where he has 1-3 guests and they discuss monthly metagame changes and events in overwatch as well as having episodes for individual new heroes or discussing “the great tank debate, the great dps debate , the great support debate” for the 3 roles in the game. A Pokémon centered “great sweeper, Great Wall, the great hazard stack debate, & etc debate” would be awesome with blunder, aim, sama, Ctc, emvee, suave, njnp, finch, and etc
This just seems so weird to me. Every game I play everyone wants a wide variety of characters they are able to play. Then this argument is no we dont want it to be this wide because you cant prepare for everything. In a game with this many options you shouldnt be able to prepare for everything.
‘There’s too many viable threats’ imo that’s a bad reason to start banning things. Also, if you bring back one to test, but another banned mon was a major counter to it and kept it in check, that can cause it to stay banned even if the other Pokémon doesn’t stay banned if it’s tested after. To me, they should try banning Tera and then see what’s van worthy after because Tera has been the problem all along, it’s the reason why the ban list is so long and why the top tier threats are top tier rn
I don't think you're suppose to prepared for every single threats in the metagame when you team build, there are too many type combinations and abilities nowadays to cover then all with just 6 pokemons and 24 moves. Your team may be good against the top meta threats but weak against less common one or more niche pick, is part of the rock paper scissors core of the game.
You actually explained the issue in your own point. A stable team that beats the top threats may still be weak to lower tier threats thus helping those weaker mons viability right, and that helps the tier overall! But when you have a situation where no matter what your team can’t even handle even just the top threats around that means there is no stability it’s no longer “oh this team is really good we can handle the top threats that one niche mon gives us issues but otherwise we can play around most the tier” and instead “this team is good unless they’re one of the many teams using this top threat in that case you’re screwed” see the difference? One is a situation where players can use stable archetypes that can handle the top teams leading the complex skilled gameplay trying to get around one another’s counterplay, and even then that meta could be subverted with lower tier threats to try and counter top teams. But when you have an over saturation of top pokemon it just creates a situation where there is no stability games are defined by weather or not your opponent has one of the common mons your team can’t really handle yk? That doesn’t promote complex gameplay it promotes short games where the player with the team that had the obvious advantage just wins (which might have something to do with gen 9 ou having the lowest average turn count of any generation) furthermore this also discourages that lower tier niche counterplay right, why use some niche mon to handle a style you’re weak too when you could just throw on an already super common top threat that does the same thing with way less downside? Idk
Well, yeah. But the problem is that no team is good against all of the top meta threats, is what they're saying. Though, i don't think banning them, even temporarily, is a good solution to this... In fact, i don't really think there's a good solution to this problem...
@@henriquepacheco7473 Given that there is no good solution in sight (yet) and we have plenty of time to figure things out as the meta seems to be in a more stable position.... Yeah, my proposal is to NOT ban a bunch of pokemon at once (and throw the tier into chaos when it just seems like things have stabilized) and actually take our time analyzing how healthy or unhealthy each of them are to the metagame, so that a proper assessment of the situation can be made.
At this point with the number of banned mons, might be time to see if there's an underlying issue with soooo many bans happening (not saying terra, but terra) or if they dont want to outright ban it, just only allow stellar as the only usable type to avoid all the problems that defensive terra is clearly causing.
I don’t agree with the logic behind not suspect testing gholdengo. I understand the thought process behind what’s being said about valiant potentially being a problem and certain patterns of play remaining but suspects haven’t been circumvented in the past (to my knowledge) due to the potential trickle down of their effect. While gholdengo isn’t like dracovish for example, forcing highly specific checks and counters, it has influenced the tier heavily. Beyond being immune to defog, it’s very resilient with good bulk, immunity to status, and recovery. Which has made removing hazards daunting enough that full boots teams aren’t a meme or uncommon on ladder. It’s still POSSIBLE to remove hazards, but even if gholdengo isn’t on the enemy team you build teams with the mindset that it could be and removing hazards isn’t always consistent. If gholdengo was suspect tested and then removed, it would change the climate of gen 9 OU. If not in a flowchart of play sense, certainly in a playstyle and team building sense. I don’t personally dislike or hate ghold, it’s just a very consistent mon to use and has changed the meta around itself.
Hopefully this gen helps a lot of people realize that Smogon is not this almighty know it all unit where they know how to exactly dictate everything perfectly inside a metagame and that Showdown itself as testing should only be used as a suggestion
I think year on year that's grown ever more apparent, since at least say 2015. Unfortunately, their policies appeal to many kinds of gamers who shy from such challenges as the org itself does.
I mean making your own alternative is always an option, but for some reason no one wants to do that unpaid labor, they would rather shit on the people doing so...
Honestly my main issue with this is just the potential situation where mons get banned simply for coming last, if you have 10 or so mons, non of them are particularly bannable on their own but together they clutter the meta so you ban them all at once then start testing them, would that not inherently lead to a senario where the first few mons get unbanned (because they weren’t broken before) but once you reach that critical mass where it’s too many threats you’re then gonna stop unbanning but that means that the remaining mons are now banned for the crime of… being tested last? That just doesn’t seem ideal at all. But I do entirely agree with bans and find the entire “let the tier develop” argument quite silly because it just isn’t meaningful, like what level of “development” how long is long enough and what level of change is acceptable?
As opposed to what, mons getting banned just because they came first? There isn't an alternative that avoids an analogous problem to the one you have. This proposal at least allows a semblance of a stable metagame to form and thus gives us the ability to actually evaluate whether some of these mons are a problem in and of themselves.
@@henriquepacheco7473trying to figure out which individually is the most broken and banning them in that order? Naturally that introducers a whole load of issues itself but every proposal will. I wasn’t presenting an alternative in that post, naturally every proposal has its issues and I was merely making clear one I was seeing with the one presented in this video. I struggle to understand why you see a problem with this. I’ll admit my post was largely reductive and failed to propose a solution but as is the nature of the RU-vid comment section. To be clear I support the pursuit of a balanced metagame above the avoidance of so called drastic measures but I also think if we’re going to try and prioritize a inherently nebulous notion such as “balance” it’s weird to try and pin outcomes on who comes first in a list as opposed to simply going all the way and trying to make the best metagame by force.
@@billettebutventi8821 How do you figure out which individual one is the most broken when all of them being around at the same time makes the meta an unstable mess in which no team can have answers for all of them even if you include really shaky ones? The kokoloko method was proposed exactly because on the current state of the meta it's really hard to tell which mons are the most pressing issue - by banning all of them and slowly reintroducing them back, we'll actually have a workable baseline. Right now, I'd vote ban on a traditional test for any of them, regardless of which, simply because we need less threats, even if the one they chose to go first was one I don't think is a big deal (say, raging bolt, serperior or enamorus). Traditional testing right now will lead to pinning results on who comes first on a list. With the kokoloko method, we'd at least have a workable baseline to test whether a few of the threats are actually fine by themselves. If we're going to go by guesswork on which is the bigger deal and which is less pressing, why not do that and test the ones guessed as less warping first with the kokoloko method so we at least can check those in a more stable meta? The Kokoloko method is going all the way, it's just a more refined way of doing it than bruteforcing suspect tests through in a tier that simply is too unstable to allow accurate assessment of how warping each individual threat is. With bruteforcing suspect tests, if one of the threats is actually responsible for most of the instability by itself and it doesn't get prioritised in tests because people didn't trace that issue back to them, odds are you'll have banned a bunch of mons that could have stayed just because they came first in the list and the tier desperately needed change. Even if just one of the threats would have been a good and fun addition and came before the actual problem mons, you'll have a ban just as unfair as the hypothetical "came last on the list" situation you proposed. And, important factor here, at least with the kokoloko method we'll be able to identify the actual impact of each individual threat on the meta rather than having to formulate educated guesses on who's doing what. To be entirely clear, I don't think either of our suggestions is trying to pin the results on who comes first or last on a list. But I do believe that your preferred option would in practice come closer to that than the kokoloko method, simply because our current baseline is untenable. We both agree that some action is needed, right? Do you, after hearing me out, understand why I think the proposal is reasonable and a good idea? If you still disagree with me, feel free to point out where you think I'm wrong, I'd be glad to hear it!
@@henriquepacheco7473 you’re 100% right. I don’t disagree at all with the need for action to be taken. I’m more thinking about possible alternatives that could achieve a theoretically better meta somehow. I’m trying to argue that we shouldn’t take action and if this went up for a vote I’d probably vote yes just because if we don’t do it now it’ll be dragged on until it ends up never happening despite it being best for the tier *cough cough* tera *cough* lmao but yea.
First thing that should be done is a terra preview so you know every ponemons terra before the battle begins. It’ll fix the uncertainty of each pokemon
The way the smogon guy describes the current gen 9 situation honestly reminds me alot of the month i was completely obssessed with Yugioh Master Duel. For a while there i was genuinely enamoured with how surprisingly fun modern yugioh was to pick up. Then i completely lost interest. b/c its impossible to have an answer/out to every single thing you could run into on ladder - it just feels like a waste of time when not having a direct check/counter to ONE thing decides an entire game, regardless of anything else you could have done to play around it. Most grassroots master duel tourneys use a bo3 + side deck format to singlehanededly fix this balancing issue. Maybe it could be something to consider if sticking to the classic system of "kicking shit up to Ubers" is proving controversial this time. Have 3 "side slots" that you can swap out between rounds. Now you have 9 slots to work with instead of 6. Make them hiddden from team preview, unless a species was swapped out for a different one -Have it so that you can have a duplicates in there with different loadouts/evs/etc That would ensure some element of tension during rounds 2/3 in treating your opponents team as the movesets/held items/etc from round 1. idk i havent plyed showdown since they quickbanned my gen 6 swagger klefki/ditto (choice scarf)/togekiss team. and this exact idea has probably been thrown around before in this space i would be very surprised if it hasnt
I feel like people are generally misinterpreting the suggested plan. The language I'm seeing is sorta of reducing the idea to 10 quick bans, which is not what I'm getting from the description in the opening of the video. It sounds like 10 contiguous suspect tests, with each of the 10 mons being put back into a meta without the other 10. I'm not sure how long such a process would take and it would certainly be valid to not like the idea of that either, but I think it'd be a shame for an idea like this to be shot down for a misinterpreted version and not for what it actually is.
It’s dumb, you have to see how the 10 would interact with each other, putting them in a vacuum gives an incorrect idea of how the mega game would turn out
High ladder players have some of the most wild and unhinged opinions sometimes, like that guy that was top 10 and thought chien pao was balanced because it was checked by FREAKING FAIRY DOG. Also, Finch has a lot of personal tastes that are in the opposite direction of the playerbase, both low-mid ladder and high ladder.
Bro, almost anything can kill Gholdengo. Even a Great tusk can resist one hit of it and then defeat it with a Headlong rush. Gholdengo is not a big deal
@@orangeman3505the whole point of gholdengo is that the best players can utilise it to the max and make sure that it sticks around for the majority of the match
I think tera blast should be suspected too It gives coverage to mons that aren't supposed to have, the best examples are regieleki and volcarona, but now with the stellar tera it becomes problematic in enamorus and serperior. In all honesty the move is only used in broken mons to have that specific coverage they lack and blow up all checks it had.
You're a good interviewer. Asking good questions, actually letting your guest have the room to speak... I was very impressed! Keep it up. Maybe in your next title mention that it's an interview. I would go out of my way to watch way more of these
> people are enjoying the game > but “blah blah health of the tier”. What is the health of a tier if its not how much people are enjoying it? Battles are about defeating your opponent not defending yourself from every threat. Risk is normal. Teambuilding shouldn’t revolve around being able to stop other teams, it’s supposed to be about building around a strategy to defeat your opponents. You’re not supposed to “prep for everything”. If you come across a bad matchup, so be it! Take a risk to win! The kokoloko is a flawed methodology because these suspect mons may be too strong when they’re the only allowed mon, but may not be when all the suspected mons are. The problem is the mindset of smogon is they focus on creating a meta that mitigates your chance to lose quickly as if being stuck in a drawn out battle is a more “authentic” or “strategic”. Do you forget that in real life, some fights are blowouts. It is what it is. So long as a pokemon doesnt freely switch in and sweep within ONE turn and has absolutely NO counterplay then banning it makes sense. But banning mons because they have strengths that one may not be able to account for in the teambuilder is unfair because taking risk and adjusting during a match is ALSO a part of being a good battler. Tiering deciders use fancy words, but it always boils down to the fact that they’re just mad that “standard team cores” may not be able to account for every offensive threat in the meta without risk. And that’s a crappy reason to ban things.
This is certainly a surprise with how few bans we've seen this gen. (In all seriousness, they banned so many Pokemon that they had to create a new Ubers tier, UUbers. I think we need to have some sort of discussion.)
Uubers isnt even needed because of the mons banned from OU, modst mons in UUbers wouldnt even have been OU to begin with cuz of OU having the 600 BST cutoff, its mainly needed due to the busted new cover legends centralizing Ubers sround themselves, invalidating a lot of weaker legends
I think powercreep is the bigger problem to blame than the council banning so many of these mons. Serperior going from a UU staple a couple gens ago to being suspected is beyond new additions to the game and is an example of gamefreak TWEAKING with balance the past couple of gens
@@jimtsap04 its the cutoff of whether u start in OU or in Ubers by default, zamazenta and Kyube started in Ubers but were freed later on, idk the case with regular kyurem but Id assume its similar The cutoff is basically the arbitrary line that defines what powerlvl OU "should" have and is pretty much smogons version of the whole "muh standard play cant just be the big legends where muh charizord" mentality thats still very dominant among casuals
"You can prepare for X Mons but then you lose to X Mons" He's saying it like it's a bad thing. If there was a team that can handle everything, the metagame would be solved and there would be nothing left.
He argues that assembling a team of six for battling becomes exceptionally challenging when confronted with the extensive variety of threats in the metagame. While effective team building involves creating counter measures to the prevalent top-tier strategies, the overwhelming diversity often results in a scenario where you can’t cover one general pool without being completely eliminated by the other, creating a scenario akin to rock, paper, scissors. In this situation, your team may struggle to handle not only the general top-tier threats but also the more niche ones, leading to a dynamic where victories are often decided at team preview. This meta game is literally just a big game of matchup fishing. It’s not fun.
@@chukaval7009 I get that but there simply is no good way to combat that. If we start banning in batches just so there aren't that many viable mons anymore, how do we pick? Where do we draw the line? At which number of "viable" mons can we say "yea that's enough". It just doesn't work and is super subjective. I'd much rather have a bunch of viable mons in a chaotic meta game than an artificially held alive meta where half the mons are banned. Besides, in a few months the best strats will be filtered out anyway and then we'll have a more centralized meta again. The rest of those "too many viable mons" will just be a byproduct of power creep and fun alternative options.
@@jaydee5312it's not about numbers, it's about severity. The "variety" is far too punishing because every Pokemon has a good way of winning the game singlehandedly. We draw the line at a varied metagame that allows for in-game counterplay that can still enable victories in unlikely situations, not unwinnable mind games.
@@jaydee5312 it doesnt matter where the line is drawn its about to many good mons that can do to many things. You can build a team that beats faster threats like boulder and deoxys but still loses to bulkier slower mons like raging bolt or gambit. and if you prefer a chaotic meta over any type of stability then your opinion is invalidated because the councils entire goal is to be as stable as possible.
@@jaydee5312 the proposal here isn't to just ban the eleven mon and wash our hands, it's to ban them and immediately go into individual suspect tests for each. The way the meta is now, there are way too many threats that can singlehandedly win a match and require really different answers and counterplay each. A meta where you can build a team with answers to every viable threat is something to aim towards - it's where the greatest metas, like gens 2 and 3 OU, are at. This doesn't mean the meta is solved, it means that you can build teams that have a realistic fighting chance against any other team. Continuing with gen 2 as the example, having an answer to drumlax doesn't mean you'll win if your opponent brings drumlax either, it means you don't immediately lose if their snorlax clicks belly drum safely. Banning all of these threats to then retest them makes it possible to evaluate them in a meta where you don't have to answer ten other stupidly overpowered threats, and makes it possible to discern whether they're actually too much for the meta by themselves or whether they're just a part of a bigger problem caused by a different, actually broken mon.
These mons have only been available for a week.... There is absolutely no way whatsoever that TEN untenable threats have already been identified as having no answers. There has barely been enough time to learn how to use them, let alone how to play against them. Give it some time for heaven's sake
The proposal isn't to permaban them, it's specifically to ban the identified problem mons and then retest each individually in order to have a more stable baseline. Besides, a week is more than enough time to identify issues - eleki got banned in less than a day and nobody sane thinks it was uncalled for.
@@henriquepacheco7473 regieleki was an incredible outlier and only one mon. That’s such an unfair comparison lol. Banning and retesting 10 mons is essentially going to create a new metagame which introduces another slew of problems that, judging from this video, is not being properly considered by NJNP
@@JustMeSavy Magearna, iron bundle, floating mane. This gen has several other analogous examples, even if Eleki was the most extreme one. Furthermore, the intention of the kokoloko method is to create an entirely new metagame, because that new metagame will be far more stable with less simultaneous extremely restrictive threats. This makes isolating which of the threats are actually too much for the tier to deal with and which are just strong threats driven over the edge by the rest of the unbalanced, unstable metagame. And the reason it's being proposed here is that it has been done before and it worked successfully - gen 6 UU benefitted much from the approach, in a similar moment in which it received a large number of powerful threats all at once. Yes, the new meta won't be perfect, but it doesn't need to be, it just needs to provide a workable baseline during the testing period. Not doing it simply won't give us a workable baseline to properly access the effects of the individual threats on the broader metagame. The current meta is a mess, and defensive play with such variety of major threats is basically impossible - most games are just a combination of who manages to outoffense who and whose tera swings the game state harder by enabling a stupid setup sweeper to muscle past its checks effectively.
Nobody said they have no answers, did you even watch the video instead of making stupid points irrelevant to it? The idea is you can't reasonably build a team that is viable against all of them, meaning you'll get baton pass type matchup victories, which is uncompetitive. At least try to engage holy crap
I quit OU this gen and have been playing VGC. These bans keep getting more ridiculous, and yet hyper offensive has stayed as the best play style the entire time. No mid range, no stall, just hazard setting and sweep.
that's because they keep treating the symptoms instead of getting rid of the actual problems that are gold and gambit gold makes it to hard to get rid of hazards which make's sweeping easier until you get down to last pokemon normally being gambit in which you play a guessing game to find out who wins the match
@@kotzer71 Even if Smogon bans gold and gambit Game Freak made so many hyper offensive tools in gen 9 OU and nothing to slow the game down. They even went as far to nerf every good defensive tool in OU.
also it's only been two weeks! Like give it at least a month to sixty days before suggesting mass bans! Also shouldn't many strategies be a good thing? Metas that only have like, three pokemon to pick (Calling the dogshit that was ORAS!) is just an unfun to play! If these ten pokemon outright counter all strategies and impossible to play the game WITHOUT THEM, THEN you should consider banning.
I kinda disagree with Serperior tbh. Yeah, it's powerful, but thing is... It's still got decent checks. Mainly to my head comes Skeledirge, seems like a decent check, due to resisting Leaf Storm and ignoring all the stat boosts, and always taking attacks from Serperior's meager 75 base special attack. And although Tera Stellar is an amazing offensive tool, it doesn't change anything defensively, and defensively you're still a pure grass type, one of the worst defensive typings you could possibly have. Besides, Serperior works very well in keeping Gliscor and Landorus in check. (And even if Serperior was banned, there would still be other good alternatives like Triple Axel Meowscarada). I think Serperior requires some degree of skill to use, because although it's really strong, it's definitely not a single button Pokémon because of the typing that hinders it, and although it's really fast, there's still things out speeding you.
Surely with all the Pokémon they have banned some of them actually check each other? Maybe they should just accept this gen has crazy power creep and stop trying to bring OU down to previous gen levels. The way it’s goin UUbers is closer to what gen 9 OU should have been
If you "ban a problem if it exists" you run the risk that you never stop slowly banning things. There's always a best mon or couple of mons dragging things down and there will always be complaints, so you have to either commit to banning forever or arbitrarily decide which problem mon is "the last one we *have* to ban" and risk stopping too early and leaving the meta worse off, or too late and leaving the meta dull. Group ban into retest strategies like this have the benefit of: 1: ensuring a large swathe of problems are cleaned up at once. 2: ensuring that through testing g the mons get a fair chance to be unbanned in a way that we can see if their overpowered niche is necessary for the meta or if it really is making things worse, at which point we can just put things back. 3: Ensuring that it's harder to overcorrect because you need a large number of mons to do this, and if the meta really is more boring or degenerate without their presence they can just stay brought back when their turn comes up. 4: For the same reason making it harder to undercorrect because, again, a larger number of mons being tested in succession means a bigger sample size of metas. Everyone's seeing ten bans and acting like there's no second chances which are the important part. This strategy *is* the better one for a long term meta. The one by one bans are great in short term metas where content is coming out because they can afford to take longer as the less threatening mons have the chance to be countered by the next wave. The long term meta has time to drop everything and then put them back in one at a time in this more thorough manner.
How tf do you expect the meta to stabilize when there are so many stupidly overpowered threats it's literally impossible to build a team that has adequate answers for all of them? Banning all of them and gradually retesting individually would give you a far more stable baseline to make figuring out the actually problematic from the simply very strong possible.
@@henriquepacheco7473 what if they check and balance off of each other? You would remove any possibility of that component by banning them outright. The pokémon do not exist in a vacuum, but rather in play with one another.
@@81dnomyar They don't, not to any significant extent. Some of the threats in the list arguably check some of the others, but they most definitely wouldn't be what you pick as an answer in 99% of the cases. Meanwhile, their coexistence in the meta makes building a team that avoids just losing essentially on matchup to one or more of them basically impossible. You can't even fit shaky checks to all of them in a team of 6.
I don't think its a bad method but like many have said in the thread itself, I don't think this dlc is the time to use it. I think the longer suspect test method is probably a better idea, its going to take a while to go through mons but having already had all these mons in the tier, taking them all out at once only to see if they can be introduced slowly isnt really what people are going to want.
It's literally the best proposal on how to balance gen 9 ou since the last time a sane soul said we ahould ban tera. The only issue is that people will get pissy because they want to use the broken mons that would get banned if the proposal went through
I don't even expect that many bans from this, especially after seeing some of the candidates. Serperior and Enamorus? Yeah, totally in the same ballpark as Roaring Moon. It, Kyuurem and Deo-S are the only ones i'm confident in saying that they're gonna be banned, with Volcarona not far behind. They're the only ones that truly jump put to me at the moment
Either accept the power creep or retest tera cuz this is the stupidest thing I’ve heard all year which is a big accomplishment seeing as it’s almost over, it’s not gen 8 anymore
@@PatrickArcato regardless they’ve been too bad happy this gen, immense power creep and nerfs to stall changed the fundamentals of the game, again it’s not gen 8 anymore
I honestly really like the Kokoloko method. I suggested something similar during the Gliscor suspect, banning both Gliscor and Gholdy and then individually suspecting afterwards. My only concern is I hope it doesn't become like LatiMence in gen 4 where it takes years for the mon that wasn't problematic by itself to be unbanned
I am definitely not someone who is against banning pokemon that are too powerful for a tier, but banning 10 at once because there are too many powerful mons is ridiculous. It’s been less than a month since the dlc, just see how it goes and see what stands out as it develops.
Except we're suspecting the mons one at a time, if they're broken they stay banned, and if they aren't broken then they don't stay banned. It's a method that allows us to see if these Pokemon are actually broken and not have them be overshadowed by other busted mons.
@@matthewadams1674I get that, but surely if something was too powerful we would already be able to see that because it would be massively dominant, at least in terms of usage? If there are 10+ threats that could be deemed as ban worthy at what point is it just power creep
@@AlexC-vd7vp Not necessarily, in fact I'd argue that's a pretty bad way to try and find broken pokemon considering the most used pokemon are generally the most versatile while broken pokemon generally are only good at one thing(Garm and Vish in SS OU being good examples) and may not be necessarily better in the metagame than their competition. A better way would be looking at how they centralize the metagame around them(which can lead to decreased usage as teams are forced to run specific, sometimes otherwise bad, mons specifically for them) And it becomes powercreep when you can have a balanced tier with the mons in it. 7 out of 10 are setup sweepers while deo-s is one of, if not the best, leads for HO and has a setup sweeper set from what I've heard, with the last two, gholdengo and kingambit being two of the most used and centralizing forces since SV began.
After reading the comments I’m glad NO one is for this terrible idea. Bros still trying to have gen 3 level balance in a world with mons like val and gambit. That will never happen lol.
"There's no way to prep for every threat at once." Isn't that... a sign of a healthy and diverse metagame? Like I play Yugioh, and the most beloved formats there are ones in which there is a wide variety of different decks that are at a similar power level, but each do different things. I feel like competitive pokemon should be looked at in the same way, and right now it has that, with so many great pokemon that, yes, you can't plan for every eventuality, but that's part of what makes pokemon so good in competitive, you get to analyze situations and try to figure out how you can progress your position, even if there's a disadvantage.
Ygo is absolutely not the standard to strive for 😭 to an extent, what smogon is trying to achieve is to mold a metagame that isn’t based entirely around having to match up fish. Most of the relevant mons in the tier are set up sweepers, which poses a problem in that you can just lose on preview if the sweeper they have isn’t one that you can check.
No… it’s not… it’s one thing to be weak to specific archetypes and such but when just covering the basics like the top threats isn’t possible that’s a problem. There needs to be stability in a tier, if you can’t handle the top threats no matter what then the game becomes nothing less than matchup fishing spamming top threats ngl, you want a tier with stable archetypes that while they have their weaknesses are still manageable there is a big difference between auto losing to that niche low tier mon thus giving it more use in the tier helping the overall metagame health, and having teams always lose to one of the top mons no matter what since there are just too many top threats. It just creates a situation where games are defined by if your opponent has the threats you’re weak too instead of a metagame where players can run stable teams leading to generally much more skill based battles.
This is most definitely a delicate matter. The idea itself is not intrinsically bad, however I think most of the issues lie in the way the council plans on testing these mons. Testing them individually means that some mons might remain banned because in a tier without the other 9, they are too overbearing. This however does not account for the fact that among the other 9 banned mons there could be 3 or 4 mons that are valid answers to the mon that is being tested. So the mon remains banned while it would definitely be a healthy presence. This also means that if they were to go test > unban > test > unban the last mons to be tested back would undergo a much more fair judgement. Another thing to consider is that simultaneously removing 10 mons or so doesn't necessarily mean the OU tier will be balanced. Many of those mons are the glue on loads of teams and if they were to be banned, team building would become more restricted, achieving the opposite of what the original objective was. I believe that the testing method they have in place now is much more suited to the game itself
Literally the only two mons in the whole list that could even be cogitated as the "glue" of any team are Kingambit and Ghold, with the former being a mon with an useful defensive profile and insane potential as an anchor in offense teams and the latter being the glue that makes hazard stacking a dominant playstyle. The rest are primarily extremely powerful setup sweepers, and generally insanely powerful threats with limited defensive utility but outstanding offensive prowess. And, honestly, I'd much rather ban a mon that hypothetically could work ok if only we had also these three other brokemons in the tier than keep the four brokemons. "Broken checks broken" is not a good balancing philosophy.
I believe you misunderstood my words. We both agree that broken checks broken is not a good balancing philosophy, as you said. I also think that some of those mons are definitely ban-worthy. What I want to argue in my original comment is not IF they should be banned or not, but rather HOW they should be tested before a potential ban. The so called Kokoloco method is interesting, but I don't think it offers a fair and thorough testing environment, as it leaves some things to be desired. I mentioned those in my original comment
I actually like this idea as a general way to suspect test, if you have 3 broken Pokémon that counter each other, removing one of them would just make the format worse unless you ban the other 2 as well.
