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Banning philosophy revisited a.k.a. return of the revenge
- Thread starter capefeather
- Start date
- Status
Teams exist to support eachother. A Pokemon cannot sweep successfully in any metagame without the support of it's teammates.
I don't understand your point.
Ubers isn't supposed to be a metagame. Ubers is a banlist that can be played as a metagame. But it is still a banlist.
No, I haven´t read all the walls of text before this, so forgive me if someone has already pointed out what I'm about to say.
I'm all against complex bans. In my opinion they create a dangerous slippery slope in the banning processe, that can (has?) lead to a more subjective aproach to our banning system. Not to mention that they make the Smogon metagame less friendly and harder to get into for outsiders, which goes against Smogon's spirit of making a fair, enjoyable metagame for all the fans of the pokémon series. Needless to say I'm against Aldaron's Proposal. I'm sure that a lot of you agree that some pokémon would get a much, much higher usage than they do now if Drizzle+Swift Swim was still allowed. Take Armaldo, for example? Does anyone think it is overpowered? I doubt so. It would maybe be usable in OU using its Dream World ability whitout being overpowered, but it will never have the chance to shine now. The main culprit for the whole "rain is OP" was probably Kingdra: great typing, stats, movepool and access to Swift Swim. So, why not simply ban Kingdra? Excadrill was also banned mainly (and I say mainly because I do realize that it was still pretty damn threatning with Sand Force) because of it's access to Sand Rush and it's great movepool, typing and stats. It was just like Kingdra in the sand. However, Excadrill was simply banned right away, instead of Sanstorm+Excadrill. Talk about inconsistency.
I'm all against complex bans. In my opinion they create a dangerous slippery slope in the banning processe, that can (has?) lead to a more subjective aproach to our banning system. Not to mention that they make the Smogon metagame less friendly and harder to get into for outsiders, which goes against Smogon's spirit of making a fair, enjoyable metagame for all the fans of the pokémon series. Needless to say I'm against Aldaron's Proposal. I'm sure that a lot of you agree that some pokémon would get a much, much higher usage than they do now if Drizzle+Swift Swim was still allowed. Take Armaldo, for example? Does anyone think it is overpowered? I doubt so. It would maybe be usable in OU using its Dream World ability whitout being overpowered, but it will never have the chance to shine now. The main culprit for the whole "rain is OP" was probably Kingdra: great typing, stats, movepool and access to Swift Swim. So, why not simply ban Kingdra? Excadrill was also banned mainly (and I say mainly because I do realize that it was still pretty damn threatning with Sand Force) because of it's access to Sand Rush and it's great movepool, typing and stats. It was just like Kingdra in the sand. However, Excadrill was simply banned right away, instead of Sanstorm+Excadrill. Talk about inconsistency.
Sleep Clause
1. I hate it when I've Spored or Sleep powdered one opponent, then Effect Spore puts another pokemon to sleep. Only for Sleep Clause to kick in preventing the opposing pokemon from being slept.
Basically, Abilities shouldn't impact on "Sleep inducing moves Clause"
2. Yawn. I don't believe Yawn should be included in the Sleep Clause ban. I see it as a solid way to Pseudo-Haze. Obviously unlike normal sleeping moves the opponent can simple switch out to prevent it.
1. I hate it when I've Spored or Sleep powdered one opponent, then Effect Spore puts another pokemon to sleep. Only for Sleep Clause to kick in preventing the opposing pokemon from being slept.
Basically, Abilities shouldn't impact on "Sleep inducing moves Clause"
2. Yawn. I don't believe Yawn should be included in the Sleep Clause ban. I see it as a solid way to Pseudo-Haze. Obviously unlike normal sleeping moves the opponent can simple switch out to prevent it.
Ubers is an officially supported metagame, BL is a better example of a banlist as that cannot be played.
@! i think kingdra was nowhere near as OP as ecxadrill was as kingdra was miles weaker and walled by ferrothorn who was no.1 at that time, i think. There is really nothing more i can say about this and i feel this thread is descending to arguments.
Baton Pass is ILLEGAL with Speed Boost. What made Blaziken broken was that it was hard enough to defend the standard set (from what I remember, it had exactly three counters: Slowbro, Flash Fire Chandelure, and Giratina), and only got harder when you started mixing in all the non-standard sets. It's nigh-impossible to prepare for every set Blaziken could be bringing to the table, and even then, if you guess the wrong set you're going to instantly lose at the very least a Pokemon and at worst your entire team. This completely ignores the issue of the 5 Pokemon that are joining Blaziken in this fight.
tl;dr: It's really strong and versatile.
Armaldo is not a fair example of a Swift Swimmer. The draw of Swift Swimmers over Chlorophyl and Sand Rush is the water typing. All around, water is a pretty great type. Only two weaknesses, only three types resist, and many secondary STABs get great coverage beside it (water/dragon, water/normal, water/grass, water/rock). Now take this great type, and give it not only double speed, but a fantastic double STAB. Armaldo doesn't have that, of course it isn't broken (besides, it's slow). And Kingdra might have been the worst, but it wasn't the only. Kabutops and Ludicolo were equally rampant. Ludicolo's STABs have perfect coverage outside of dragon typing, and thanks to Ice Beam, you were either getting hit with a Duel STAB Surf/Hydro Pump, a SE STAB Giga Drain, a SE (sometimes 4x) Ice Beam, or at the very worst, a non SE Ice Beam (though only a few Pokemon can claim that). Kabutops was equally fearsome with its killer SD Aqua Jet. And while you might say just ban those three, three different Swift Swimmers also had access to Shell Smash. Quadrupled speed, doubled attacking stats with double STAB water moves in one turn is really scary. You may not agree with Aldaron's proposal, but the solution would not be banning one Pokemon. I'm not saying all six would be banned, I'm just saying that Kingdra was not the entire problem.
if memory serves, Aldaron's Proposal was only ever a temporary measure with the intention that at a future date, once the metagame had settled, we would begin to reassess individual Swift-Swimmers. I guess this hit the backbench since Drizzle was repeatedly nominated for Suspect status and it seemed foolish to start attempting to buff it. dunno what the status of this is though (or even if my memory does serve correctly?).
What I'm going to defend might sound weird, but I hope everyone gives me a fair and considerate reading. I am going to defend even more complex bans than Aldaraon's proposal.
But why not have a more complex ban? Why not individually ban every swsw that we found to actually be detrimental to the OU metagame, rather than the combination of abilities? I'll be up front with where I'm coming from because our personal biases/opinions are ultimately going to shape what we will accept as reasonable limitations to the game. I take OU to be the main/central tier for competitive battling. I know some people might disagree on this point, but you can't deny it's the tier most play by.
I play pokemon because it's fun and intellectually stimulating/challenging. A think a lot of people would agree with that, but this is also where the real difficulty comes in. What I find fun is not necessarily what you find fun. I hate paraflinching, and I would never do it, but maybe that's something some people are into. Because of this, we need to primarily concern ourselves with macroscopic means of ensuring pokemon is a good game to play. This is pretty obvious, and it's why we don't accept "but I want to be able to use swift swim Kingdra in OU" as a good argument against the ban. So what macroscopic traits of our tiering can we look at?
Diversity. That's the first thing that comes to my mind, though maybe I'm being tunnel-visioned and am missing important alternatives. Diversity is particularly good because if we enhance diversity, we can probably increase the amount of people that are satisfied with their options for play in pokemon (OU in particular). There are two ways we can understand diversity, and both are fundamental to my argument, and what I think a good banning philosophy looks like. There's a rather simple diversity of options when it comes to being able to use different pokemon/abilities/moves/etc. It's good to have simple diversity, which means we want to ban as few things as possible. But there's a much more important diversity, which I refer to as practical diversity. Practical diversity is actually being able to harness simple diversity in a way that is successful in competitions.
The desire for practical diversity is what motivates most of our bans. We had to ban some swswers with drizzle because the strategy was so overpowering that it required devoting a good chunk of your team to counter it, or risk being annihilated every time you saw another offensive rain team. This lies at the heart of the sleep clause, and to some extent, the evasion clause (although banning evasion and instant KO moves is more readily justifiable on the basis that it promotes a more "intellectual" metagame).
As such, I think with bans we need to ensure practical diversity, and in doing so, respect simple diversity as much as possible. That's why I'm in favor of more complex bans. When we sent every swift swimmer + drizzle to ubers, we relegated most of them (who are not broken in OU) to less usage. This was unnecessary, because we could have ensured practical diversity/a healthy metagame by just banning the 1-6 (or more if it were determined necessary) swift swimmers + drizzle combinations that were broken. In other words, we sacrificed more simple diversity than we had to in order to maintain the same amount of practical diversity.
I'm not sure what all the objections to my view will be, but I know that one of them is that the rules of the game should be simple. I don't understand the point of that. Being good at the game is already very, very complicated, and requires knowing a lot (as well as some good instincts). If we have the intellectual capacity to engage in complex poke-battles where we're counter-counter-bluffing each other (if not worse), which we do, I don't see why it would be so difficult to enact even more complex bans. I mean it definitely sucks having to look at the rules so much, but if people in the community honestly felt the rules were getting to dense, that's a discussion we could have, and we could eliminate some rules if necessary. That's why I don't think there's a slippery slope.
I think you have done a very good job of showing that there were at least 6 swswers that ought to have been considered for banning. I don't play a whole lot of ubers, but my gut feeling is that most of them find a more suitable home in the lower tiers (although Kingdra definitely seems quite viable at the highest level). Simple bans to ubers in this case are kind of like sending pokemon to the Gulags, at least for the generation.
But why not have a more complex ban? Why not individually ban every swsw that we found to actually be detrimental to the OU metagame, rather than the combination of abilities? I'll be up front with where I'm coming from because our personal biases/opinions are ultimately going to shape what we will accept as reasonable limitations to the game. I take OU to be the main/central tier for competitive battling. I know some people might disagree on this point, but you can't deny it's the tier most play by.
I play pokemon because it's fun and intellectually stimulating/challenging. A think a lot of people would agree with that, but this is also where the real difficulty comes in. What I find fun is not necessarily what you find fun. I hate paraflinching, and I would never do it, but maybe that's something some people are into. Because of this, we need to primarily concern ourselves with macroscopic means of ensuring pokemon is a good game to play. This is pretty obvious, and it's why we don't accept "but I want to be able to use swift swim Kingdra in OU" as a good argument against the ban. So what macroscopic traits of our tiering can we look at?
Diversity. That's the first thing that comes to my mind, though maybe I'm being tunnel-visioned and am missing important alternatives. Diversity is particularly good because if we enhance diversity, we can probably increase the amount of people that are satisfied with their options for play in pokemon (OU in particular). There are two ways we can understand diversity, and both are fundamental to my argument, and what I think a good banning philosophy looks like. There's a rather simple diversity of options when it comes to being able to use different pokemon/abilities/moves/etc. It's good to have simple diversity, which means we want to ban as few things as possible. But there's a much more important diversity, which I refer to as practical diversity. Practical diversity is actually being able to harness simple diversity in a way that is successful in competitions.
The desire for practical diversity is what motivates most of our bans. We had to ban some swswers with drizzle because the strategy was so overpowering that it required devoting a good chunk of your team to counter it, or risk being annihilated every time you saw another offensive rain team. This lies at the heart of the sleep clause, and to some extent, the evasion clause (although banning evasion and instant KO moves is more readily justifiable on the basis that it promotes a more "intellectual" metagame).
As such, I think with bans we need to ensure practical diversity, and in doing so, respect simple diversity as much as possible. That's why I'm in favor of more complex bans. When we sent every swift swimmer + drizzle to ubers, we relegated most of them (who are not broken in OU) to less usage. This was unnecessary, because we could have ensured practical diversity/a healthy metagame by just banning the 1-6 (or more if it were determined necessary) swift swimmers + drizzle combinations that were broken. In other words, we sacrificed more simple diversity than we had to in order to maintain the same amount of practical diversity.
I'm not sure what all the objections to my view will be, but I know that one of them is that the rules of the game should be simple. I don't understand the point of that. Being good at the game is already very, very complicated, and requires knowing a lot (as well as some good instincts). If we have the intellectual capacity to engage in complex poke-battles where we're counter-counter-bluffing each other (if not worse), which we do, I don't see why it would be so difficult to enact even more complex bans. I mean it definitely sucks having to look at the rules so much, but if people in the community honestly felt the rules were getting to dense, that's a discussion we could have, and we could eliminate some rules if necessary. That's why I don't think there's a slippery slope.
@GKhan: Your proposal consists of more complex banning, which begs a question that has been brought up everytime this is suggested. If banning SwSw Kingdra but leaving Sniper Kingdra is fine (assuming because SwSw is the only thing that makes it 'broken'), why not ban Sand Rush Excadrill and leave Sand Force? By extension, why not ban Dark Void Darkrai and allow every other variant? Why not allow lv67 Mewtwo because it is 'only' Mewtwo's ridiculous power and speed that was breaking it? In theory that would be the perfect metagame, because all threats could be hypothetically perfectly balanced against each other and we would see every single battle style and every single Pokemon flourish equally well. (The natural, logical conclusion to your proposal? A utopian metagame with maximum 'practical diversity' as you call it?)
By banning SwSw Kingdra but allowing Sniper variants is giving the Pokemon Kingdra special treatment compared to others like Blaziken that also have less powerful abilities. This addresses fundamental questions of what game are we even playing, is it even Pokemon anymore? These fundamental questions were answered particularly clearly and eloquently in jas's post at the end of the first page so I have no more to say on the matter because everything I could want to say was spelled out by jas.
Also I'm enjoying the discussion on Drizzle + SwSw, I guess the willingness of people to speak on the matter just shows how controversial the issue is still. And I guess when the thread was started it was always going to gravitate towards discussion of the big bans eventually.
@Lee: I was also under the impression that Drizzle + SwSw was a temporary measure and it was a promise that this admittedly tricky question will be sorted out in a more proper and meticulous way in future. That's why I was willing to accept it. I really don't think it is a sufficient long term solution for the metagame and I'm surprised it has not been looked at since. I guess this may be where it enters the spotlight again.
By banning SwSw Kingdra but allowing Sniper variants is giving the Pokemon Kingdra special treatment compared to others like Blaziken that also have less powerful abilities. This addresses fundamental questions of what game are we even playing, is it even Pokemon anymore? These fundamental questions were answered particularly clearly and eloquently in jas's post at the end of the first page so I have no more to say on the matter because everything I could want to say was spelled out by jas.
Also I'm enjoying the discussion on Drizzle + SwSw, I guess the willingness of people to speak on the matter just shows how controversial the issue is still. And I guess when the thread was started it was always going to gravitate towards discussion of the big bans eventually.
@Lee: I was also under the impression that Drizzle + SwSw was a temporary measure and it was a promise that this admittedly tricky question will be sorted out in a more proper and meticulous way in future. That's why I was willing to accept it. I really don't think it is a sufficient long term solution for the metagame and I'm surprised it has not been looked at since. I guess this may be where it enters the spotlight again.
I don't agree with everything said, but I think the difference between a sniper Kingdra and a Blaze Blaziken is this: Swift Swim broke many otherwise mediocre pokemon, while you can find Speed Boost on Yanmega and Sharpedo, which aren't overwhelming at all. Speed Boost is not at all broken, so it must be Blaziken. Swift Swim made almost every user a threat. I'm willing to bet CB floatzel would have been a force if kabutops was removed. Maybe not broken, but a force. I don't think anyone is suggesting to dock levels, most everyone realizes that is excessive, and at least how I see it, dealing with an ability that is destructive on most users is different than modifying every pokemon for OU.
Thank you for engaging the topic. I was going to post a long response detailing why I would distinguish between the complex ban relating to swsw + drizzle I suggested and your proposals, but I figure everyone will be happier if I go straight to the point.
Most rules draw non-objective lines between what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. There might be very good reasons behind a rule, but there is typically some arbitrary discrimination involved. So when we think about what the OU metagame should look like, I think we have to ask: "Is that what people want to play by?" That's why my proposal's logical conclusion isn't an all-pokemon brawl. I don't think a substantial amount of our community would want to play in that kind of a metagame, but if it actually were the case that people did, then maybe we ought to think about shifting in that direction (and at the very minimum, discussing it).
I don't think rules should be a matter of simple democracy (I don't think 50% of the community needs to be in favor of something for it not to be banned). Where we draw this particular line is also perhaps somewhat arbitrary, but there are actually arguments in various fields about particular cutoff percentages. We probably would also want to limit such votes to more active members (so I would probably be excluded for a low post count haha). These are sorts of considerations that I think need to be reasoned out.
As for particular arguments against down-leveling or move bans from a particular pokemon, I can give you my reasoning, if you wish. But Ithat's a rather specific debate, and I think your concerns can be addressed more generally.
Please excuse me if I misread a post in here, but the only arguments I see against complex bans is the very illogical "slippery slope" one, and "subjective" banning.
I'm going to paste a post I made earlier, which got lost in the influx of much higher quality posts.
The slippery slope is not required to exist. I don't see any difference in saying "Level 38 Groudon should be ok then, right!?" and "Can I use Meta Knight in this Brawl Tourney if I use one less stock?" or "Men can play in the WNBA if they only use one arm." None of these have any rationale behind them, from my point of view.
Now, with abilities being the only allowed complex ban, what is subjective about seeing that Blaziken is broken with Speed Boost, and not with Blaze even when using the same set, and then banning Speed Boost on Blaziken?
I'm going to paste a post I made earlier, which got lost in the influx of much higher quality posts.
Now, with abilities being the only allowed complex ban, what is subjective about seeing that Blaziken is broken with Speed Boost, and not with Blaze even when using the same set, and then banning Speed Boost on Blaziken?
tehy
Banned deucer.
Well firstly, that's what a slippery slope is. Someone states:Well, we can ban abilities, why not moves? I'd like to see some lower tier players talking about blaziken's use to them, to see if blaze blaziken is even worth using in today's metagame, firstly. After that, we can argue about it, but i still personally believe that you should just ban the damn pokemon if it's broken.
Sure it can happen, but to elaborate on tehy's post, why? Why do we need to bring Blaziken back? And before anyone equates it to Drizzle and Swift Swim (any side of that argument), I'm going to say like I have before: the problem applied to many Pokemon, Speed Boost applies to one. If an ability brakes almost all its users, then thats enough 'why?' for us to consider a different approach to straight up banning. An ability that affects only one or very few users means the specific user(s) make it too good, and they should be banned.
It does just fine in UBERS - statistics show its within the top 20 and garners at least 10% usage. However, its far more hampered with the existence of a very hard counter in the form of Giratina (who also happens to be within the top 20 both formes) which Blaziken really doesn't have a way to mow over.
In terms of support I wouldn't say it has that much difficulty with the existence of Groudon. Though its pretty much like CShadow said - and certainly there are other UBERs which would need support. Still the performance of a Pokemon in UBERs does not necessarily entail that it should be OU it was the performance in the OU tier that mattered. So if its not doing good at UBERs doesn't make it an argument to bring said mon back down.
You completely misunderstand what the slippery slope fallacy even is. There IS something called a slippery slope, and it's when there's no clean divide between actions that are desirable and undesirable. For example, saying that it's okay to kill people for certain crimes below murder is a slippery slope, because it is unclear which crimes are heinous enough to warrant death. An arbitrary line has to be drawn. The slippery slope fallacy is when someone is claiming there is a slippery slope when there is in fact a clean divide. An example of this is the argument that allowing homosexual marriage will lead to human-animal marriage, when in fact there is a clear dividing line (one is human, the other is not; one has the legal right to sign contracts, the other does not).
In this case, there IS a slippery slope. There is no clean divide between the various kinds of complex ban. If it's fine to unban Pokemon based on their abilities, can we also unban them based on their moves? If not, why not? Aren't movepools "easily one of the most influential aspects of a Pokemon's potential"? If we say we can edit the ability pool, then why can't we edit the movepool?
So I typed up a pretty big post for this and then the forum died and I lost it, so I'll try to write-up what I had before (hopefully more concisely).
What I'd really like to see at some point in the near future is a re-assessment of the current bans. About 2/3 years into DPP, the suspect ladder was set-up on Shoddy to re-test stuff like Latias, Garchomp, Latios, Shaymin-S and Manaphy, with the idea that they may not be as tough to handle in the current-day metagame with newer sets and playstyles around, as well as the players' greater experience. We're now quickly approaching 2 years since BW's release, and I personally feel that although we're currently in a pretty stable metagame, we certainly haven't got there by banning the fewest Pokemon possible, which I feel should be a priority. Garchomp, Excadrill, Thundurus, Manaphy, Swift Swimmers (and to an extent, Blaziken) have all taken the fall in place of their respective weather inducers, with stuff like Volcarona having been on the chopping block multiple times, and will likely be considered again sometime in the future. I'm not completely one of those "anti-weather" scrubs, but I feel that the direction the metagame is going in is just "systematically banning weather abusers instead of banning the problem".
I think I read something in the OP about 'crit clause' or 'parahax clause' or something similar, which again I really disagree with. A lot of people here do seem to forget that a lot of people do still play Smogon's rules on WiFi, and implementing a 'hax clause' or 'chance clause' just segregates Smogon even further from Competitive Pokemon's roots. With that said, however, I do think that luck-based elements of the game that can be banned without altering game mechanics should definitely be considered for banning. I think everyone knows which specific ability I am referring to:
Sand Veil is one of those abilities that you are either 100% for banning or 100% against; from what I've seen there are very few people in the middle ground. I'm personally on the pro-ban side of this argument, purely because it can swing the direction of a battle from the favour of the better player to a worse player in a heartbeat at no fault of the better player, and because its one of the few hax elements that we can remove from the game without altering game mechanics. Jimera0 posts about Sand Veil a lot from what I've seen, and his main argument seems to be "if you don't want to lose to Sand Veil Gliscor then keep your Skarmory healthier" but this is obviously incredibly unrealistic to expect someone to do. For example, say my team has Starmie / Skarmory / 4 other pokes and my opponent has Tyranitar / Haxorus / Gliscor / 3 other pokes. Should I avoid sending Skarmory in on my opponents SD Haxorus because I want to keep it healthy enough to deal with Gliscor later in the game, even though I have Starmie (and possibly something else) to deal with it? Note that the alternative to sending in Skarmory is probably to sacrifice or cripple 1 or 2 of my other Pokemon so that I can revenge-kill it. I don't think that this is a worthy sacrifice purely for insurance in case Starmie misses his Gliscor later in the game, and this is hardly an exaggerated situation either. I, and I expect many other players, won't want to make flat-out bad plays earlier in the game purely to compensate for a possible hax event later in the battle. In my opinion, as long as Sand Steam is around, Sand Veil shouldn't be. It almost comes down to "20% of the time, I lose every time".
Regarding Sleep clause, I think we are better-off keeping what we have for the timebeing until we see the effect that Meloetta and Relic Song have on the metagame. Relic Song will be the first sleep-inducing move in the game whose primary use is not to put something to sleep. I think the current mechanics make a sleep-inducing move fail if you've already put one of your opponents pokemon to sleep, which would mean that Meloetta would be unable to change form if the 10% chance from Relic Song already kicked-in earlier in the game, but again I think we should hold-off on making any changes until we see if Relic Song Meloetta even gets much usage at all when it comes out. I actually wouldn't be completely against a complete Sleep-move ban, with BW Sleep being comparable to RBY Freeze in that once something gets Spored theres a very good chance its never going to wake-up. Luckily there aren't many good Pokemon that get Sleep-inducing moves bar Breloom, and most of the moves are kept in check pretty well by their average accuracy.
OHKO and evasion clause are things that I definitely want to keep around. Anyone who has played VGC12 or GBU at all has probably run into stuff like Minimize Blissey / Chansey and Sheer Cold Suicune etc which become nigh-impossible to stop if your opponent has decent luck. OHKO moves and Evasion again reward worse players and worse teambuilders for getting lucky dice rolls and coin flips.
What I'd really like to see at some point in the near future is a re-assessment of the current bans. About 2/3 years into DPP, the suspect ladder was set-up on Shoddy to re-test stuff like Latias, Garchomp, Latios, Shaymin-S and Manaphy, with the idea that they may not be as tough to handle in the current-day metagame with newer sets and playstyles around, as well as the players' greater experience. We're now quickly approaching 2 years since BW's release, and I personally feel that although we're currently in a pretty stable metagame, we certainly haven't got there by banning the fewest Pokemon possible, which I feel should be a priority. Garchomp, Excadrill, Thundurus, Manaphy, Swift Swimmers (and to an extent, Blaziken) have all taken the fall in place of their respective weather inducers, with stuff like Volcarona having been on the chopping block multiple times, and will likely be considered again sometime in the future. I'm not completely one of those "anti-weather" scrubs, but I feel that the direction the metagame is going in is just "systematically banning weather abusers instead of banning the problem".
I think I read something in the OP about 'crit clause' or 'parahax clause' or something similar, which again I really disagree with. A lot of people here do seem to forget that a lot of people do still play Smogon's rules on WiFi, and implementing a 'hax clause' or 'chance clause' just segregates Smogon even further from Competitive Pokemon's roots. With that said, however, I do think that luck-based elements of the game that can be banned without altering game mechanics should definitely be considered for banning. I think everyone knows which specific ability I am referring to:
Sand Veil is one of those abilities that you are either 100% for banning or 100% against; from what I've seen there are very few people in the middle ground. I'm personally on the pro-ban side of this argument, purely because it can swing the direction of a battle from the favour of the better player to a worse player in a heartbeat at no fault of the better player, and because its one of the few hax elements that we can remove from the game without altering game mechanics. Jimera0 posts about Sand Veil a lot from what I've seen, and his main argument seems to be "if you don't want to lose to Sand Veil Gliscor then keep your Skarmory healthier" but this is obviously incredibly unrealistic to expect someone to do. For example, say my team has Starmie / Skarmory / 4 other pokes and my opponent has Tyranitar / Haxorus / Gliscor / 3 other pokes. Should I avoid sending Skarmory in on my opponents SD Haxorus because I want to keep it healthy enough to deal with Gliscor later in the game, even though I have Starmie (and possibly something else) to deal with it? Note that the alternative to sending in Skarmory is probably to sacrifice or cripple 1 or 2 of my other Pokemon so that I can revenge-kill it. I don't think that this is a worthy sacrifice purely for insurance in case Starmie misses his Gliscor later in the game, and this is hardly an exaggerated situation either. I, and I expect many other players, won't want to make flat-out bad plays earlier in the game purely to compensate for a possible hax event later in the battle. In my opinion, as long as Sand Steam is around, Sand Veil shouldn't be. It almost comes down to "20% of the time, I lose every time".
Regarding Sleep clause, I think we are better-off keeping what we have for the timebeing until we see the effect that Meloetta and Relic Song have on the metagame. Relic Song will be the first sleep-inducing move in the game whose primary use is not to put something to sleep. I think the current mechanics make a sleep-inducing move fail if you've already put one of your opponents pokemon to sleep, which would mean that Meloetta would be unable to change form if the 10% chance from Relic Song already kicked-in earlier in the game, but again I think we should hold-off on making any changes until we see if Relic Song Meloetta even gets much usage at all when it comes out. I actually wouldn't be completely against a complete Sleep-move ban, with BW Sleep being comparable to RBY Freeze in that once something gets Spored theres a very good chance its never going to wake-up. Luckily there aren't many good Pokemon that get Sleep-inducing moves bar Breloom, and most of the moves are kept in check pretty well by their average accuracy.
OHKO and evasion clause are things that I definitely want to keep around. Anyone who has played VGC12 or GBU at all has probably run into stuff like Minimize Blissey / Chansey and Sheer Cold Suicune etc which become nigh-impossible to stop if your opponent has decent luck. OHKO moves and Evasion again reward worse players and worse teambuilders for getting lucky dice rolls and coin flips.
What do you consider a non-complex ban? Just banning individual pokemon? The clauses?
This is 100% correct and, while I didn't address it directly in my first post, it is pretty much one of the main ideas behind a lot of my views. A lot of people like to claim that it is just an ability that makes a Pokemon "broken." My point is that an ability is no different than any other part of a Pokemon. A Pokemon is just the sum of its parts. As such, there are really only two possibilities. Either the Pokemon is broken because of the summation of everything that makes it up, or it is broken because a single element of it is so overwhelming that it would break anything regardless of the rest of its parts. In the former case we should ban the Pokemon. In the latter we should ban the element. There is no in between. Claiming that something could be OK without an element when the element itself is not broken is very much a slippery slope.
Drizzle + Swift Swim, however, is a very interesting case, as it is not a Pokemon + Ability ban, but effectively a playstyle ban. While I have already presented arguments as to why this kind of ban should never come about to begin with, I would like to once more address one of the arguments in favor of it. Probably the most common one is that it preserves diversity by preventing bans. I think GKhan had the right idea in his definitions of Simple and Practical Diversity. While simple diversity is great, we should always treat practical diversity as the more important of the two. Having lots of things to choose from is awesome, but it means nothing if only a few options are actually viable. However, I do not agree with GKhan as far as implementation. While practical diversity is indeed what we should strive for, we should not compromise principals and objectivity in order to do so. In the case of Drizzle + Swift Swim, this would mean banning the top abusers. Sure, the elimination of 3-6 Pokemon would decrease simple diversity more than any other option, however by allowing other, non broken Swift Swimmers to shine, we are actually greatly increasing practical diversity, as with the current ban, almost none of the Swift Swimmers are actually viable in OU. And we can do this all without needing any complex bans. Now, we could also do what GKhan proposed and only complex ban the combo on those who would otherwise be banned, but all that does is add more subjectivity into the mix. It is not increasing practical diversity, and the loss of objectivity and the potential slippery slope it causes is not worth the increase in simple diversity.
Now, all the logic I have presented in this post is about the specifics as related to this one ban. In general though, I feel the slippery slope is important to take into account. As I pointed out in my first post, many people argue for complex bans using the fallacious reasoning that for some reason certain Pokemon deserve certain tiers. It is this kind of reasoning that will often lead to the proposal of complex bans, despite the lack of any logical reasoning for it in that case over any other similar case. And, of course, if we can do it in one case, arbitrarily, because X pokemon doesn't "deserve to be banned," then why can't we do that in every other case. Any kind of complex ban can have a slippery slope attached to it. The more complex you get, then slipperier the slope is. If we simply restrict our bans to a single element at a time, then we can avoid these slopes, and all the subjectivity that comes with it.
All this being said, I feel like many of the responses in this thread are starting to get a bit off topic. This is not about whether or not you like a specific ban, but about your opinions on the philosophy behind the bans. While I would love to argue all day with PenguinX on whether or not evasion and OHKO moves should be banned, I feel that this is not the place for that. Additionally, there was a lot more to capefeather's original post that has yet to be discussed ins depth, especially when it comes to the question of skill and fun, and about glitches. I believe that these to are especially important, as the former is really the reasoning behind everything we do, and is vital to determining the best philosophy to use, and the latter being one of the most crucial tests for any such philosophy. I would love to hear some other views on these two questions, in addition to anything else people want to say about bans themselves.
A simple ban is "X is broken, and now limited to [ban tier]". X can be literally anything, as long as it is any one thing. Standard example is a Pokemon. Less standard is an ability (Moody) or item (Soul Dew, for a while in 4th gen). We haven't seen a move be banned yet, but it may happen at some point in the future. A complex ban is "X is broken, but only under THESE circumstances, so we're banning it under these specific circumstances".
Clauses are something completely separate. Clauses are instituted not because they balance the game, but because they make the game playable in the first place. Pokemon would not be anywhere near as engaging without Sleep Clause in place, for example, and who the hell would want to play Pokemon without Species Clause?
@above
I would like to pose the opinion that the very nature of Drizzle+Swift Swim made it impossible to execute an effective standard ban, because there were no individual broken elements within the combination. The only solution would be to either ban a component and make some things Uber that really shouldn't be, or ban the combination. We ended up going for a compromise, where we banned every possible instance of the combination and ended up making a couple silly things Uber (Luvdisc+Politoed on the same team) but left the vast majority of the components untouched. We have never had a situation like that before, and it is unlikely that we will face one ever again (unless the power of OU gets low enough that we hit the same problem with Sun teams). With that said, we don't need to prepare for it. The Drizzle+Swift Swim ban was a ban necessitated by VERY unusual circumstances, and that situation does not need to be accounted for in standard ban policy. It doesn't need to be justified in banning philosophies, because it is something that acts entirely outside standard banning scenarios.
That's my take on it, at least.
I perfectly see your point, but then there's something that's always bugged me and still hasn't been satisfactorily answered. Why? Why is nerfing a whole group of pokémon acceptable because most of them can still be used in lower tiers (and OU, and also the odd Gorebyss/Kingdra in Ubers) while, in every other situation, we have banned the pokémon?
Do you see what I'm getting at? Drizzle+SwSw is quite the unique scenario, but imagine we had even more Dragon pokémon and we had come to the conclusion that "STAB Outrage/DM + [>110] offensive stat" made a trio of Dragons ridiculously broken and made many others really, really strong. In such a scenario, we could have complex banned "Outrage/DM+[>110] Offense". The Japanese had such a ban in DPPt (anyone who still remember that thread, please correct me if I'm wrong), where Swords Dance/Nasty Plot were banned on pokémon with >120 Atk/SAtk AND you could use only one 600+ BST pokémon. Do we think such complex bans would be acceptable in Smogon? If not, why do we have Drizzle+SwSw? If we do, then why haven't we done so yet, and why don't we do many more others (Blaziken+Speed Boost...)?
Otherwise, I agree with jas61292 (and a bit with Acritter) on this matter. And that we should get back at discussing the glitches >:
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