RSE Baton Pass

[Heysup]

Heysup: I think your post analyzing the logs falls short. You can't just look at turns you consider critical and analyze just the odds of one thing happening that turn. Consider the case of Magneton with HP Fire vs. Registeel with Rest (a match that I remember having quite well in a Gen 3 battle):

This particular Registeel had enough HP and Special Defense such that Magneton had a 4HKO, which meant that the battle went something like this:

Magneton used Thunderbolt! (35% damage)
Registeel is fast asleep!
Registeel has 71.25% health remaining.

Magneton used Thunderbolt! (35% damage)
Registeel is fast asleep!
Registeel has 42.5% health remaining.

Magneton used Thunderbolt! (35% damage)
Registeel woke up! Registeel used Rest!
Registeel has 100% health remaining.

What this means is that unless Magneton gets a CH, it will eventually run out of PP and lose to Registeel. However, a single CH at any point leads to Magneton winning. That is 48 chances for a critical hit, assuming Magneton starts out at full PP. If you look at a single turn in the battle and see a CH, that's obviously bullshit hax! The odds of a CH on a single turn is 6.25%. The odds of a CH on any of those turns is 95.49% So when you consider the battle as a whole, then it's actually luckier not to get the CH.

I don't want to debate the logs any longer, but I think I should address this.

On the one turn in which it mattered, he got crit. He had the game won barring that one crit on that one turn. The fact that there were no crits up to that point does not have any affect on this one attack (as I'm sure you didn't mean to imply, but just to clarify my point).

If you take a group of those attacks doing 35%, of course it's likely that there will be a crit in 48 attacks. However, this example isn't analogous to Earthworm's battle (or any battle with a BP team). This is because if you group the attacks up, Piro could have critted almost any other time and it wouldn't have mattered because of Substitutes. Earthworm didn't get the substitute up because of a couple misplays, and he still had it statistically won.

Nothing's stopping people from playing ADV to see what BP is like. We shouldn't use a suspect test just to bring people to the metagame. That would be morally questionable even if our suspect tests haven't shown a bias towards banning.

Nothing besides the barely used ladder stopping people....

I'm not a big fan of the suspect test idea, but I do think it's far better than the alternative, if it's the only alternative, of waiting until the first round of the tour. I'd rather deal with it now.

You're the only one dismissing logs...I see a handful of posts doing a good and fair job of analyzing those logs.

I'm not dismissing the logs, actually. They prove BP is actually more broken than Pirotechnix originally thought even with an anti-BP team he still (EDIT: forgot to / instead of -)lost 1/3 and haxed at least one of the other two (crit on MM in ew's).

I mostly agree with Synre's post, which, just because you didn't respond to doesn't mean it's not there. Instead of responding to this, respond to him.

EDIT: @ Pirotechnix, I guess I misunderstood your other post, it seemed as if you changed your opinion. With Baton Pass you know the right move, you don't have to predict the right move.

 

[Pirotechnix]

The difference, in my opinion, between the stall strategy and BP strategy is that the stall strategy still needs you to predict. The BP strategy needs you to pick the right move, and there is almost always a right move (even sacrificing). If there isn't a right move, in BP's case, you usually lose. It's much more formulaic in that regard.

If you don't pick the right move in stall, you lose; there is always a "right" move. You don't pick the right move on a CB team, you lose; there is always a "right" move. You don't pick the right move in <insert team strategy here>, you lose; there is always a "right" move. That's what prediction/guessing, and Pokemon in general, is. You're romanticizing the difficulty and planning it takes for other RSE playstyles to be successful (EndRev, Magtrio, CB+Magneton are relatively simple in execution and concept, but are seen on many respectable teams), while conveniently ignoring that my logs clearly show that the BP player on the other end had to capitalize on my mistakes and playstyle to be successful.

EDIT: @Heysup's edit - So because a style has a higher confidence in its next play than another, it's anti-competitive or broken? As logs/people have been trying to explain, just because a BP team has a more linear and consistent path to victory as compared to some other styles doesn't mean someone can close their eyes and yawn against a reputable opponent, or that it's "broken". BP has always had the distinct advantage of keeping you one step ahead of the opponent; a full BP abuses this advantage to its fullest capacity, at the expense of having to use fragile Pokemon and a long, breakable chain (via misplays or RNG) to do so. It's a cost/benefit analysis that in good hands pays off more consistently than it doesn't, like any other calculated risk in a player's particular team or playstyle.

I'm not dismissing the logs, actually. They prove BP is actually more broken than Pirotechnix originally thought even with an anti-BP team he still went 1-3 and haxed at least one of the other two (crit on MM in ew's).

Those three logs I went 2-1 (I'm not sure where the ghost 4th battle came into play), and if you really want logs of me using this team against non-BP teams, I can probably give you at least 15, if not more, dating back at least 1-2 weeks before this all started. As I said before, the team in those logs was NOT structured with anti-BP in mind, it just so happened to match up well. This only goes further to prove you're reading the logs through very narrow lenses, and ARE dismissing them based on your narrow view of individual turns where hax, inconsequential or not, occurred. "More broken" implies you believed it broken to begin with, which is a premise you have not so far supported with any of your own data beyond reactionary theorymon - though people have asked.

I underestimated the strength of a BP team in the hands of a good player, which is understandable considering I pretty much never played a good player with a full BP in my years of RSE play (a lot of that having to do with the "reputation" thing Synre mentioned, I'll admit, but alas). WW Skarmory against the BP teams I normally played against would often be enough to ruin most players, and I tunnel-visioned in those matches because of that and paid for it, as obi and Hip have pointed out. I have more respect for the strategy than I did at the beginning of this conversation, but as I said, my overall opinion remains unchanged.

 

[Aeroblacktyl]

This is absolutely besides the point and avoids this whole conflict completely but if our main issue is how BP teams will show up on Smogon Tour and whether or not it'll be 'fun' why didn't we just slap RBY over ADV -_-

It'll make all of you shut up for one and let's face it, any thread without CIM posts is a good thing

 

[MapleSandwich]

My experience with the ADV gen generally occurred outside of the Smogon community, so I don't honestly know how valid that would make it inside the scope of this argument, considering it only affects the Smogon community and the Smogon Tour's ADV section. However, I played ADV extensively in-cart up to and including the years between RS' release and DP' release. It was my intro to competitive battling, if you will.

My experience with Baton Pass teams is as follows: It's the kind of thing where either your opponent is aware of the possibility, and has a counter to it, or isn't aware, has no counter, and struggles to counter your team with the few checks that the "standard" metagame has in common with a Baton Pass heavy metagame.

It's very similar to a Generation 4 Baton Pass team scenario: If your opponent leads with Smeargle, Spores, and passes off to a defensive BP Pokemon to start racking up boosts, and you forgot to slot in Taunt or a Phazing move on your team: then you are in big trouble. You have basically the turns in which the opponent hasn't built up enough defenses to wall you, to stop the Baton Pass threat. Once they get +6 defenses and subs up, its good game. On the other hand, if you do have Taunt, simply Taunt their Vaporeon (or etc.) and watch it struggle itself to death. Hardly an invincible strategy, but it is one that requires preparation beforehand.

What this brings to the third generation table, is that not many Pokemon in Generation 3 had the capacity to come in and threaten to sweep your whole team off of one turn of setup. The closest thing to this was CM Raikou and CM Jirachi--and those Pokemon's counters were extremely prevalent throughout the Smogon metagame during my experience with it, because everyone knew that they were effective, and everyone knows that if you don't counter a powerful, hard to stop sweeper, you have a good chance of being swept. So you bring your counters, you keep them in reserve, you make sure they are otherwise viable (no thanks, Onix, I'll look elsewhere for my CM Raikou counters), and you play the game.

Baton Pass is little different in terms of the setup space, but it's an entire team archetype that comes together against your options to play around it, and it can make your situation unwinnable in very short order if you don't have that counter by virtue of this. You can still stop CM Raikou, say, by having a faster Pokemon come in and hit it when it is at low health, and barely squeak in the KO. You can get to this point by playing it down to low HP using your team's checks effectively, and with some prediction and possibly luck. Baton Pass methodically takes your options to shut it down through methods that are not Taunt, Whirlwind, and Perish Song, and removes them. Once a good Baton Pass team sets up, it is designed so you cannot win without that defined check. That is what differentiates Baton Pass from any other widely-used ADV threat: without a defined counter or blatant luck hax, you are very unlikely to win against it.

That is what Synre and other posters are saying in this thread, and that is what I feel is the legitimate argument against Baton Pass. It does not break the game by any means: it has its otherwise viable counters, it is vulnerable to luck just like any other archetype (albeit MUCH less late game), but it forces you to check it explicitly, or else you lose. This is akin to other threats such as Deoxys and Lati@s which were also banned. It's not that they couldn't be countered and beaten, it's that the whole game was KO this Pokemon before they kill your counter, or else you lose.

I feel that, in a period of time where ADV is at a low popularity phase, we should probably reduce variables which will destroy the enjoyment of many who otherwise would like to play it. By forcing players to think about the game, as well, we are encouraging them to get more involved with the metagame than "Baton Pass beats Smogon PR players cause they don't expect it hurrr". It just all-around promotes a healthier metagame.

To reiterate: Baton Pass is not broken. It is simply an unhealthy, overweight, and attention-grabbing factor in the metagame that this tour could probably do without for now.

 

[Kevin Garrett]

It's very similar to a Generation 4 Baton Pass team scenario: If your opponent leads with Smeargle, Spores, and passes off to a defensive BP Pokemon to start racking up boosts, and you forgot to slot in Taunt or a Phazing move on your team: then you are in big trouble. You have basically the turns in which the opponent hasn't built up enough defenses to wall you, to stop the Baton Pass threat. Once they get +6 defenses and subs up, its good game. On the other hand, if you do have Taunt, simply Taunt their Vaporeon (or etc.) and watch it struggle itself to death. Hardly an invincible strategy, but it is one that requires preparation beforehand.

This is the only part of your post I completely disagree with. Taunt only lasts 2 turns in RSE, one of which is the turn it is used. The opponent only has to Struggle for one turn and it doesn't do any kind of damage. The only thing Taunt does is buy you a free turn to get a better matchup.

 

[MapleSandwich]

This is the only part of your post I completely disagree with. Taunt only lasts 2 turns in RSE, one of which is the turn it is used. The opponent only has to Struggle for one turn and it doesn't do any kind of damage. The only thing Taunt does is buy you a free turn to get a better matchup.

This is true, my mistake. It's been so long since I had a Struggle situation in ADV that I forgot Struggle still did negligible damage then. Assuming your Taunter has any attack capacity (and is faster), you can simply Taunt, attack, Taunt, attack, etc. until your opponent is in a situation where they must switch or be knocked out. The situational usefulness of Taunt as a counter only underlines the problem that Baton Pass brings to ADV, though.

 

[Philip7086]

Thanks for all the posts everybody, your thoughts have helped sort mine.

I've decided to go through with opening the ladder up for testing in ADV. This course of action just makes the most sense. Hear me out:

1. I will be accepting special permission applications, which means that any old schooler who is well-versed in ADV but doesn't have the time to "test" in these upcoming weeks can just submit an app listing their ADV accomplishments and be permitted to vote, so nobody will be alienated here.
2. Since this is a brand new metagame for a lot of newer users, this would hopefully promote a more active ladder for testing and ultimately increase the skill level of the Tour players in ADV.
3. If BP is indeed a shaky-at-best strategy, having newer players use and fail with BP on the ladder before the Tour is one of the best ways of discouraging it.
   1. On the other hand, if BP is indeed broken, we will know and be able to ban it outright or limit it before the Tour even begins.

Let's be honest here, this is the Smogon Tour where a trophy's on the line and a lot of newer users are unfamiliar with ADV. If it was the case that good players did not spam full BP out of some sort of honor code in the past, that will surely be thrown out the window if full BP is broken. The reason it's not seen in SPL is because the ADV players of SPL are, for the most part, the same as the top players from that era who still adhere to said honor code. This is the primary reason I feel like this test would be important for the Tour. Like I said, if it proves to not actually be broken at all, then no harm no foul. If it proves to actually be broken, then we won't be throwing 1/3 of the ADV weeks out the window.

Here are the qualification specs for this testing round:

• I will be using the top 15 players + 15 points method outlined in the OU Suspect Testing Round 3 thread.
• Current ladder ratings will not be reset for two reasons:
  • This is not a new metagame, so everybody who has been playing on the ladder has been technically testing this
  • Having higher rated players at the start of this will inflate point increases, so we won't have to wait so long to see higher ratings appear
• The testing round will end on Friday, March 18 at 11:59 PM, and then voting will take place the following week right before the Tour starts

I will be posting a discussion sticky for this test in Ruins of Alph, so go there if you'd like to discuss the metagame. Remember, this test counts towards Tiering Contributor, so if you're seeking that badge out this is a great opportunity for you! Best of luck to everybody :)

 

[cim]

So, which of these is up for vote?

• Ban the move Baton Pass
• Ban specific Pokemon using the move Baton Pass
• Ban specific Pokemon altogether
• Ban having >X Pokemon on a team with Baton Pass

 

[Philip7086]

The proposal in the OP is only 2 mons may know Baton Pass. If people want to suggest other solutions, feel free.

Edit: Let me specify. If people want to make an argument for more/less allowed BP mons per team, feel free. For example, I personally think allowing up to 3 Pokemon who know BP per team is okay. If nobody makes an argument for different numbers of BPers per team, then we'll default to the 2 max per team though.

 

[Mekkah]

Someone on IRC brought up banning Ingrain Smeargle instead. While I'd rather see the whole thing being left alone, I would prefer this over banning an arbitrary number of Baton Passers.

 

[BAIKA]

Someone on IRC brought up banning Ingrain Smeargle instead. While I'd rather see the whole thing being left alone, I would prefer this over banning an arbitrary number of Baton Passers.

That someone was me!

Yeah baton pass teams become severely crippled with Ingrain Smeargle gone. This would be a wise solution as it only requires one move to be gone instead of anything more.

 

[gene]

seems like a more subtle way to handle the problem. bp teams without ingrain are terrible anyway.

 

[Giga Punch]

I support the banning of Ingrain Smeargle on bp teams above all else. In the most general sense of things ingrain (besides the obvious speed boost) is what makes bp teams so hard to beat as the match progresses. Once ingrain is set in one of the main general counters to bp teams: phazing is now completely useless.

While I think the proposal for only two pokemon is an alright one, I'd say banning the "core" reason bp teams are just harder to take down (which I believe is ingrain) would make things much simpler.

 

[Heysup]

I have been testing non ingrain Smeargle teams and they auto-lose versus any team with Roar / Whirlwind, but I still don't like the idea that you almost have to have Roar on your team to beat BP teams.

 

[coyotte508]

I have been testing non ingrain Smeargle teams and they auto-lose versus any team with Roar / Whirlwind, but I still don't like the idea that you almost have to have Roar on your team to beat BP teams.

Phazing was a given in gen 3 though, or you had some other strategy to replace Roar.

 

[Synre]

I would see very little reason to clause BP past Ingrain, that'd be the best ban we could make if we have a problem with full BP.

I suspect because of this thread I have seen a couple people using really, really bad non-Ingrain BP teams on the ladder. It is not the lack of Ingrain's fault when you have no counter for the most common phazers and get destroyed by them, you just made a shitty team. I think a better solution to not having Ingrain is shorter chains - especially those from Celebi - but those were never being attacked here anyway, obviously. Regardless... if you're testing anything BP-related for the sake of this discussion, for fucks sake counter Skarmory.

 

[MapleSandwich]

(Example: Mr. Mime at 280 SpAtk OHKOs Skarmory after one Calm Mind with Thunderbolt. That's what I've been running, and no one sees it coming. To say nothing of just including Zapdos as a recipient that can also continue passing on the chain, that beats basically every phazer right there, which is also what makes Zapdos such a deadly Baton Passer in the first place.)

Ingrain Smeargle has basically no legitimate use outside of Baton Pass chains, and I agree that Baton Pass in itself (such as passing speed from Zapdos or Calm Mind from Celebi) is a decent enough strategy that we shouldn't restrict the number of Baton Passers you should have. Simply eliminating end-all chains should do the trick, although from what I am seeing on ladder, if you try hard enough, you can surefire counter Baton Pass while still having a somewhat viable team.

The problem with that is while you counter Baton Pass, you have several moves with limited use against other teams, which makes it harder for you to beat them in turn, which produces basically a Rock-Paper-Scissors effect. As stated in my last post, it's not broken at all, just unhealthy for the metagame, and it should not be allowed for this tour.

 

[Mekkah]

As Hipmonlee once said on IRC, giving Baton Pass trouble usually only takes half a Pokémon of dedication. For example, Quick Claw on your lead can basically destroy Baton Pass as early as turn 1 or turn 2, and all you did was sacrifice one of your six held items. I believe I've already named plenty of other decent Pokémon that both beat Baton Pass and help vs regular teams as well, one of the more effective ones being Raikou.

 

[Umby]

I have been testing non ingrain Smeargle teams and they auto-lose versus any team with Roar / Whirlwind, but I still don't like the idea that you almost have to have Roar on your team to beat BP teams.

Not as if that's uncommon or unreasonable. In general, a team may want a phazer to get rid of stat boosts/substitutes for vs "normal" teams. It also has the general utility of creating pressure over Spikes. Quite honestly, it's no different than 80+% of teams carrying a Swampert to counter Tyranitar. You're taking up one Pokemon/move slot on your team to deal with (a) common threat(s). Plus, as stated before, there are numerous ways to bear down on BP teams without phazing.

 

[Destiny Warrior]

I dislike the idea of complex bans in general, especially in older generations because the playerbase is already limited, and we aren't doing players trying to join them any favours by banning "Ingrain Smeargle", but that's just me.

Roar/Whrlwind is pretty easy to fit onto a team. When you can fit in checks to so-and-so, is it really that hard to fit in a Whrlwind user onto your team?

 

[Kevin Garrett]

When you can fit in checks to so-and-so, is it really that hard to fit in a Whrlwind user onto your team?

Whirlwind user will shuffle Smeargle in eventually. The only Whirlwind user in OU that is faster than Smeargle is Aerodactyl and its best function certainly isn't phazing.

 

[Hipmonlee]

you only need two other pokemon faster than smeargle then (and capable of ohkoing it, which is basically everything). Which, most teams have. Or just one with a lum berry.

Have a nice day.

 

[Ancien Régime]

Kinda skimmed the thread, but I disagree wholeheartedly with banning Baton Pass from OU play, I've dealt with literally hundreds of players running full BP teams for easy wins, and while they ARE hard to deal with when played by a good player, they are also much more difficult to execute in practice than it seems on paper, they are vulnerable to random criticals, and once one link in the chain goes, the BP team is effectively dead.

And I'm not even sure BP even requires an explicit check as Maple Sandwich believed. Yes, Ingrain Smeargle is annoying, but because Focus Sash does not exist, anything that beats 273 can OHKO it. Granted, the Smeargle user can predict and use Substitute, but that means it doesn't get Ingrain off.

At most, BP + Ingrain could make sense as a ban.

 

[Carl]

ironically this wouldn't have even been an issue if the thread was never made.

Agreed. No wonder there's all these BP teams on the PO Adv ladder.. I didn't realize this thread was happening or I would have posted sooner.

As Hipmonlee once said on IRC, giving Baton Pass trouble usually only takes half a Pokémon of dedication. For example, Quick Claw on your lead can basically destroy Baton Pass as early as turn 1 or turn 2, and all you did was sacrifice one of your six held items. I believe I've already named plenty of other decent Pokémon that both beat Baton Pass and help vs regular teams as well, one of the more effective ones being Raikou.

Quick Claw is not a reliable counter to anything.

I'll say this now: You can counter BP teams in Advance. This is a given. Be it by luck (CH, Freeze), quick power (think CB Salamance/Aerodactyl), or a combination of defensive measures (Taunt, Whirlwind, Perish Song). BP teams are good but not unbeatable. That said, this isn't really an issue of "counterable or uncounterable" but more of "sporting or unsporting."

Synre's long post does a good job of summing up the Advance culture in the earlier NetBattle/Smogon inception days and I agree with pretty much everything he said (hmm, shocking considering we're bff's). But specifically this:

A lot of what deterred BP before, which I guess people nowdays can't seem to imagine(jrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...), really was the culture thing -- obviously it didn't stop everyone, but I think it was a pretty significant deterrent to using BP because we had a smaller, tighter community back then and people cared about being respected. When BP was used, the user were often people who were sleazeballs anyway or who were in matches against what otherwise would have been a superior opponent and whipped their BP team out in order to try to eek out a win they didn't really have to earn... I guess trying to explain the psyche of players is useless, but needless to say from the posts in this thread peer pressure isn't going to deter any of the new guys, which is a problem for the tour, if not for SPL, where a smaller community of players is competing.

Back then, we all wanted to win.. but the difference was that we also wanted to win by simply outplaying the best, toe to toe, switching at the right times and using Earthquake against Salamence just knowing Metagross was coming in. We still played the game like RBY and GSC where team building mattered but so did your playing ability (This isn't a shot at later gens, skill still matters there but I just mean to say that you can't straight overpower teams in Advance or earlier quite as easily...). BP was seen as a crutch to most of us because it removed some of the thought required.

Now don't get me wrong, you have to be intelligent to use a BP team, craftily BP'ing and Sub'ing to avoid counters, but you also have very few "real" decisions to make; normally just a choice between 2 moves. This is where the "no thought" argument comes from. Normally, you have 5 options for your pokemon in play: the 4 slot moves and switch. On BP teams, five of your pokemon should have Substitute, Baton Pass, true stat up move, synergy move. Switching, by default, is removed (or combines with a moveslot, however you want to look at it) via the use of Baton Pass. Either way, one less "choice" to make. Next, Substitute should be used as much as possible to avoid critical hits/luck. For most of the game when Sub isn't up you only have 2 options, use Substitute or Baton Pass to get a better match up. Again, it's a 50/50 on the right move, and this one is pretty obvious as to which is correct. When you have the better pokemon match up, your options again 50/50. Sub, if you don't have one up, or use the stat boosting move. What about the synergy move? It's dependant on the pokemon and situation. With Mr Mime, for example, it could be Trick or Encore. Vapreon, it could be Surf or Roar. It could be a second stat up move. In the end, it doesn't matter what that move is, because you use whatever helps your specific version of the "BP team." That's why I'm calling it the synergy move. This move is removed from the "choice" equation because there are only certain, self evident, situations in which you would use it. A "BP Team" checklist, if you will. Encore with Mr Mime if the opponent is using a move you can tank, for example. In the end, you mostly focus on setting up a Sub and boosting the proper stats for your recipient. 2 move choices. The synergy move is just a suplement to those first two moves. Baton Pass is the vector move that ties it all together.

This is the fundamental problem I have with true, well constructed Baton Pass teams: On paper, when Swampert is against Salamence, the best move looks like Ice Beam. However, based on any number of events during a match, it might not be the correct move on that turn. The issue with BP teams is that the best move is always, always, synonymous with the correct move. So much so that I think you could literally write an algorithm for a computer to battle with a BP team. And I think it could win with it fairly often.

Again, BP teams are counterable. But are they really sporting? I say no. This post isn't a plea to ban BP teams, or even Ingrain (though that would help), but a plea to the people who still play this game to disregard the option of using these teams.. in tournaments or casual play. Advance is a dead game, 2 generations now removed from the present. What's there to prove in using a Baton Pass team?


hopefully my half drunken ramble made sense..

 

[Hipmonlee]

Quick claw is a fantastic counter to ninjask.

Unless your point is that fireblast isnt a counter to Scizor.

Have a nice day.