Gym Badge Awarding Policy

Texas Cloverleaf

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Per request, copying my post from Birkal's gym match vs me to policy


So obviously the circumstances surrounding the end of this match are super unfortunate, both to witness and experience.

In the process of being salty af it got me to thinking about what the gym system is supposed to represent in ASB on a philosophical level, whether it's supposed to be a "pure competition" arrangement vs. an "achievement" challenge. Essentially, is the gym league and the gym leaders supposed to represent a no holds barred everything to win competition against the challengers or is the system one where the end goal is expectation of completion where the gym leaders are facilitators of the challenges the competitors face. Considering situations seen similarly from the actual anime's gym league, this brought me to consider the idea of whether there should be a system in place for challengers to appeal for a badge in a losing scenario and how that would look, which brings me to my proposal.

The idea, fleshed out in conversations with the gym committee (who I'll note have in no way signed off on this as of yet) is essentially as follows:

- Provide a system where a challenger who believes that they genuinely deserved the badge but were denied it* can appeal to be granted the badge
- Have such a system be heavily protected against abuse and usable only in rare and clear cut circumstances
- Remove the time penalty for challengers where the above circumstances apply who would otherwise have to rechallenge
*ex: circumstances impossible to control, absurd hax, impossible matchup

The specifics:

1. When a challenger truly believes they "really ought to have won this one", they may make an appeal to a panel consisting of the standing gym committee and the gym leader who was challenged to be granted the badge
2. The aforementioned group of four meet (in PM or on discord) and have a brief discussion about the circumstances of the match and overall merit of the appeal based on the qualities they deem important, i.e. quality of play, cause of loss, etc
3. The group of four vote on whether or not the challenger should be awarded the badge. In the event of a tie, the gym leader's vote will carry the tie break.
In concept the assumption is that every member involved in the situation would be heavily disinclined to award a badge except in exceptional circumstances. The gym leader's vote carrying tiebreak weight ensures borderline cases do not pass where the committee is split, while a four member committee ensures that a salty gym leader cannot deny a challenger a badge if the entire committee disagrees.


In consideration of the above, I therefore formally make this proposal to the gym committee of smashlloyd20, deadfox081, and Elevator Music for implementation and open the floor to discussion of this idea to the general ASB public.
 
I don't see why the entire Gym Committee has to be involved in this process, except to make this process take several months longer. We could just make badge awarding and time penalty waiving completely at a gym leader's discretion. I don't think any of our gym leaders are big enough assholes to deny challengers a badge that they truly deserved. Which salty gym leaders are you talking about? And nobody knows how well the challenger played quite like the one who actually faced them.

As for the reasons for awarding one, you'd have to specify what exactly "absurd hax" is. What percent probability are we talking about? Is a 30% Rock Slide flinch absurd hax? Is an untimely 10% Blizzard freeze or 20% Stone Edge miss absurd? Is a crit absurd hax? (Note, that in Texas's case, that unlucky crit had a 17.6% chance of occurring over the course of the round, meaning it's more likely to happen than a Fire Blast miss.) Does this only apply to bad hax at the very end of the battle? What about a good battler who gets screwed by terrible early game hax that sets him back in an unrecoverable position? The battle might not have been close, but he'd be screwed just as much as someone who got haxed in the last round of battle.

I don't think that an impossible match-up is a circumstance outside of the challenger's control. That's a team-building mistake, in my opinion.

Also, if this proposal takes place, it should only be applicable to challenges started after this rule is passed. I agree with Birkal that it's quite shady for a moderator to make up new rules for their own benefit.
 
I'm sorry, but philosophically speaking, I see a lot of issue with your proposal.

First of all, let us talk about hax. I will not attempt to quantify what "absurd hax" would count as, because as Ooraloo said above, it's pretty difficult to do. My question, rather, is: why should we overturn the outcome of a gym match because of "absurd hax"? If your reply is because "you genuinely deserved the badge" but didn't get it because of hax, well... why should this be a case only with gyms? I mean, I've seen TLRs, Battle Halls, raids etc. going completely wrong because of absurd amounts of hax. That the latter should count as "pure competition" rather than "achievement" is highly subjective. Literally anything but actual Tournaments can be likewise questioned. Of course, you could bite the bullet and say that yes, we should do this with TLRs, raids etc. too. But... is this really something we want to do? What does it even mean to be "entitled" to win a certain challenge? The moment you play a game when stuff can happen 6.25% of the time, you basically accept that stupid hax can happen. Air Slash can miss 1 every 20 times. Most Ice-type moves have a 10% freeze chance. You can try to build your team in order to minimize hax, but hax exists and there's nothing we can do about it.

A different matter would be if you suspect that a certain challenge - in this case, a gym battle - is impossible to win unless you have a favourable RNG. Personally, I've always been of the idea that no matter how difficult a challenge is in ASB, it should still be winnable even through hax, except for the most extreme cases. If an ASB challenge (be it a gym or something else) requires you to go through a 25% chance to lose to RNG at your best, then it's prolly an unfairly hard challenge. Quantifying this on anything but a raid, sadly, is extremely difficult. Nevertheless, evidence may arise that a certain gym is simply too hard to be won if one insofar as angers the RNG gods a little bit. But, in that case, the sensible option would probably be not to overturn the match result, but to look into the gym in question and ask for an arena nerf of some kind. I do not know if this was the case with Birkal, of course.

As far as "impossible matchup" goes, it's quite the same case. If you feel you have a strong case for claiming that you brought the best possible team anyone could've field for that gym challenge (bar legendaries and such), and still lost, then it's a problem with the gym which needs to be nerfed, not unlike how we may decide to nerf a TLR or Raid for similar reasons. But, again, I don't see how "giving out" the gym badge would be justified anyway.

Finally... what are, exactly "circumstances impossible to control", besides the aforementioned ones?

Tl;dr: "absurd hax", no matter how defined, should never be grounds to overturn a gym match, anymore than it is when it comes to any other challenge in ASB. If a gym is so hard that a minor amount of hax is sufficient to swing the pendulum against the challenger, then the gym needs to be nerfed, and that's it. But you can't overturn a gym battle just because that 1% chance just happened.
 
Like almost every game, there is an inherent randomness in Pokemon, ASB included.

Unfortunately, sometimes shit happens.

I honestly see no reason for this proposal and do not support it in the least.
 

Texas Cloverleaf

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first of all: y'all can fuck right off with these accusations about "a moderator" making up rules for their own benefit, a) the entire point of putting shit through policy is to get community input/agreement and b) i dont give two shits about my gym match any more

this discussion is philisophical at this point

secondly: it literally doesn't matter what definition you assign to things. the examples i listed were just that: examples. the point is that the gym leader and the committee discuss the circumstances of a specific match under the conditions appropriate to that match, which may include any, all off, or more than the examples i provided, it's all contingent on the circumstances of that match

thirdly: i don't care about tlrs/raids/whatever. this discussion is about gyms.


honestly if y'all think so poorly of me to believe i'm doing this solely for my own self-service then there's no point in my being involved here anymore let alone having any kind of position

as a sidenote to ooraloo and as the only commentary i will make about my match at any point, those odds to crit may be accurate but they are not the relevant factor, critting any other mon or being crit by the ice thing wouldnt have impacted the match, that I crit the anger point mon is the issue and was something completely outside of my control despite the fact that i had otherwise put myself in a position to win the match for certain
 

Texas Cloverleaf

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Like almost every game, there is an inherent randomness in Pokemon, ASB included.

Unfortunately, sometimes shit happens.

I honestly see no reason for this proposal and do not support it in the least.
This is rather frustrating to read.

I asked you on discord to consider the gym league from a conceptual standpoint which is your duty as a member of that committee.

It would seem you have refused to do so if you do not understand why this proposal exists.

I ask you again to consider it from such.
 
I could really just requote my post myself here since it is all that needs to be said.

The gym league isn't a concept, its a Pokemon battle. Sometimes you lose Pokemon battles for shitty reasons. The world keeps spinning.
 

JJayyFeather

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Put quite simply, this is not a much necessary thing at all.

Having been a GL that has benefitted hugely from hax (see: my defense vs deadfox) and a challenger absolutely fucked over by hax (see: my first challenge to deadfox) -- it's really not that big of a problem such that a whole policy needs to be made of it. RNG happens, you just deal with whatever it tosses at you.

Besides, that's merely one aspect of an entire battle. You cannot argue that this one roll tossed the entire game out of your control. RNG sucks, sure, but there are definitely other misplays that probably led to a loss anyways that RNG just simply coaxed along.
 
Texas Cloverleaf I get it that you only care about gyms here. The reason why I brought up TLR/raids/etc. is that getting haxxed over a gym match is not really any different from getting haxxed anywhere else. And yet, if I lost to hax against, say, Hall Matron Argenta, I wouldn't say I am entitled to a win. If I lost to hax vs Eusine in Assault on Mt. Coronet, I wouldn't say I'm entitled to a win. If hax caused me to lose vs Heatran in BSC, I still don't think I should get the catch by default. So, if I lose because of hax to a gym leader, why should I still get the badge? You cannot just say "this is about gyms", without making a point about why we should treat gyms differently.

Moreover, in your haste to reply to accusations regarding mod role and so on (about which I honestly don't care, personally), I believe you overlooked the most important point me, Ooraloo and others brought up - namely, that you cannot overrule hax in a game which is literally built on possibly haxxy events to occur. Every time an opponent hits you with Ice Beam, there's a 10% chance you'll be utterly screwed (and we both know that, most times, a freeze is enough to decide a close match between equally good opponent). Does this mean that, everytime a freeze occurs, the gym committee should be called upon? How many Ice Beams suffice to say it wasn't exactly hax? I really don't see any committee being able to decide on this.

Finally, back to your philosophical point about gyms... I do agree that, to an extent, gym battles are different from, say, tournaments. In a tournament, it's perfectly acceptable that, due to previous choices at the beginning of the tourney that you can't overturn, you can walk into a match you just can't win. Conversely, I believe me and others agree that, assuming both players playing at their best with no mistakes and assuming that the challenger brought the best possible matchup he could (barring legs etc.), then the challenger should be able to beat the gym leader without needing to pray to the RNG. In a certain sense, the gym leaders are there to be defeated, if you try hard enough. That's the in-game spirit of it, and that's - I believe - the spirit of the gym league here, as well. The same, I'd say, holds of just about any RP as well - or really, any non-tournament challenge. Gym leaders are not much different from a TLR ref, in that they have a special arena and a limited set of mons to use in order to beat a challenger who tried his best to counterteam them.

However, this kind of spirit should inform the "building" stage. For example, we should make Gym arenas (as well as TLR arenas, Battle Hall rosters, etc.) in such a way that they provide a reasonable challenge - not easy, but not insane either. However, once it's all good and set, as others said... it's a Pokemon battle. Which means that shit like hax can happen. If you did things right, as a challenger, you should have a large enough advantage that one stray crit shouldn't suffice to bring you down. However, even the best team in the world cannot prolly save you against a sufficiently hard gym leader/raid boss/whatever, if you constantly get freezes and whatnot. But that's something which just happens - and if it happens, you just rechallenge. If it is eventually found out that even minor hax is sufficient to tilt odds against the challenger, a decision can be made to nerf the gym leader's arena. But such decision should occur before or after a battle. The battle itself is not something the gym committee, or anybody else, should have a word into. The only thing keeping battles fair is that both players know the odds as they enter it, and accept the outcome whatever it is.
 

ZhengTann

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I would like to explore a more, shall we say, "flavourful" side of the proposal - its precedence in-anime. After all, I'm the self-proclaimed flavour-freak.

Tex is right that GLs sometimes give out badges (to Ash because, I don't know, "he's the lead protagonist"?) in-anime. If his proposal in the OP is implemented, though, I think the "protection against abuse" doesn't exist, because just about every challenger would go for the appeal. Filtering the ones worthy of debate, whatever the point of debate may be, will definitely take up the Gym Committee's time that could be better spent elsewhere.

So I'm here to propose that a slight amendment:
a) Only Gym Leaders are allowed to make that appeal, not the challengers.
b) 3-man Gym Committee reviews the appeal and puts in their vote (yay, nay, don't care).
b.i) If "yay" gets 2/3, passes.
b.ii) If "nay", drops.
b.iii) If "don't care", GL decides.​
One more amendment suggestion - I think these "given" badges should not grant advancements in Leaderboard prizes (I refer to the TLR/Raid bonus items and whatnot). Meaning, if your 3rd badge is given by me as Rock GL, for example, you will not get those Heart Scales until you actually earn another badge by winning and opting to retro them at the price of not getting your Raid Heirloom. In this case, Gym badges become a status/cred/clout thingamajig, without any practical benefits - I guess?
 

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