Metagame - SV OU Metagame Discussion v4 [NEW TIERING RESULTS POST 11597] (2024)

i'm not really "riled up", i just think laugh-react doesn't work because you were trying to be funny and failed spectacularly. i don't want you to get it in your head that "strawman argument in impact font over spongebob image" is what makes a meme

not ad hominems, constructive criticism. i'm giving you pointers on how to make higher-quality memes. "don't make spelling mistakes" is a fairly important part of quality memery because then you can use intentional misspellings to convey certain emotions or tones more clearly. also, it's a matter of convenience—text posts you can edit, but if you mess up while making an image, you have to go back and remake the whole thing. it's inconvenient, so it's best to take the time to proofread before you post a meme

there's a difference between mechanical cart accuracy and non-mechanical cart accuracy. smogon tiering philosophy only concerns itself with the former. half the things you listed don't have any effect on the actual mechanics of the game whatsoever, so they're not relevant to this discussion. freeze clause is only in old gens and is therefore also not relevant to this discussion; even if it were, it's more justifiable than sleep clause because the alternative in early gens (the only ones where freeze is a problem) is banning almost every ice-type move that exists and that would destabilize things so horrifically that the modding is better in that case. battle timer is impossible to code in a way that will perfectly reflect what happens in the game, because the amount of time that passes per turn is way longer on cartridge than on showdown thanks to the animations, and any way of rectifying that is too convoluted to be worth doing

when sleep clause was invented, there wasn't really any formalized tiering policy at all. when the initial descriptions were written of what official tiering policy and philosophy are, which is what i mean by "modern policy", they had to put a footnote in saying "oh yeah, except for sleep clause". so the actual policy itself, as written, hasn't actually changed, nor has the philosophy behind how smogon tiering works, but sleep clause has never been in line with tiering policy/philosophy for as long as it's been codified and it's high time to get around to fixing that

there hasn't, but modeling species clause on the in-game species clause is better for consistency. if we have something called "species clause" and they have a different thing also called "species clause" that works almost the same way but not quite, it'll cause no end of confusion

ok you can't just go "yaddah yaddah yah" to the burden of proof. and although i do agree that exclusive moves are becoming a lot more common, the only case of a mon being "banned over a move" that actually stuck (last respects and shed tail were eventually kicked) was annihilape, and that was banned because rage fist is not inherently broken—you can prove this yourself by using rage fist primeape and observing that it sucks. and as common as signature moves are, game freak's new fascination seems to be these weird "not-quite-signature" moves like last respects and revival blessing and shed tail and tidy up, where the distribution isn't quite a single mon/line, so it's actually becoming easier to ban broken moves instead of the mons that own them

actually, the programming part is true, to my understanding at least. from what i know about it. the way our usage stats are calculated is very f*cky when it comes to in-game form changes like megas. the algorithm they use can't really measure those at all. the way it gets the usage stats for stuff like megas and zygarde-complete is by measuring the presence of whatever the thing is that they have to run to turn into their forms. so when you see "charizard-mega-x" on the usage stats, what the algorithm is actually measuring is "charizard holding charizardite x", whether it actually mega evolves in a given match or not. same deal with zygarde-complete, mega rayquaza, ultra necrozma, etc. but there's no way it can tell whether a terapagos is going to click tera. so it would have to either assume that every single terapagos is terapagos-stellar, or that none of them are. the way it gets around this is by just ignoring the existence of the form altogether. if we tried tiering them separately, we'd have to either rework the usage statistics algorithm or risk creating a whole new branch of usage-statistic f*ckery every month when regular terapagos shifts tiers but stellar form doesn't, or terapagos-stellar shows up in usage statistics in tiers it's banned from, or some other such nonsense. at least, this is what i remember reading from the guy who's in charge of usage statistics in some policy-review thread on it or other. i could be misremembering, but i'm not gonna go hunting down the post to confirm/deny it because i'm about to go to sleep. (see, this is why it should be banned, then i can stay up 24 hours a day)

which policies? there's never been ou precedent for or against tiering an in-battle form separately from its base form. the closest thing was the ubers decision on mega rayquaza, which actually supported keeping terapagos-terastal, but gen 9 ou doesn't formulate policy based on gen 6 ubers. so the banning of terapagos was really not the result of archaic policy but the creation of new policy in a place where none really existed

man do i love bad-faith arguments that come right out and say they're bad-faith arguments. i didn't maliciously frame your argument to appear wrong, you did that all on your own

tl;dr l + ratio + lurk more + read policy + be better