OrangeManiac

Reuniclus' main set in Singles metas will forever be Calm Mind sweeper. It's one of the most devastating sets in BW era unless specifically countered for. Now, Pokemon that do well checking Reuniclus (Scizor, Haze Milotic, Tyranitar, Hydreigon) are all very viable and prevalent meta threats so playing Reuniclus is hard. The parallel to Togekiss isn't necessary though because they try to beat teams with completely different ways. Togekiss relies on somewhat okay speed (or high speed w/ Scarf) and the high flinch chance, Reuniclus relies on massive bulk after Calm Minds. Reuniclus sure has come down from its S rank days but A- is underselling its value a bit too much considering how hard it is to bring down a set upped Reuniclus. Edit: Just checked, Reuniclus under 9% usage in MMO now wtf has happened. Gotta admit it's pretty hard to justify A+ rank for sub 9% mon, although usage is never the be-all-end-all to viability rankings. Being weak to Fighting-priority, which is used only by Conkeldurr and by some occasional Vacuum Wave Lucarios and maybe some weird Brelooms, is very minor compared to the positives of Hydreigon. Hydreigon is a scary Pokemon to every team composition. Switching in against Hydreigon is super difficult no matter of the Pokemon. Even the Pokemon that have the bulk to switch in against Hydreigon can get easily 1v1d by a Taunt-Roost set. Sure, Hydreigon does have kind of a 4-moveslot-syndrome but the value one gets from Hydreigon is insane. It doesn't get fully shut down by anything in the metagame and it's one of the hardest Pokemon to teambuild against in paper. To me beating Hydreigon needs always some level of predictions or a team that abuses its 4-moveslot-syndrome problem. I think that because Hydreigon has so little drawbacks and so few reliable counters, it deserves S rank perhaps more than anything in the game. I agree a lot with what you said about Mence and Pelipper and those changes definitely would be reasonable to me. And Togekiss, well, things have changed a lot since it was an actual UU Pokemon in this game.

Really devastated from hearing these news today. If there was one person who truly wanted to give back to this community it was Rox, and this community will forever miss her. My heart is with her family, this tragedy is something that no person should ever experience. I know how close friends you were with her so I can't even imagine Cali how difficult loss and how difficult time this is for you, and I really appreciate for doing this in the memory of her. I hope she's in a better place.

about tree fiddy

Well, it is. Better option obviously could have been to temporarily ban Unburden + Baton Pass combination but it seems like nullifying Abilities is something the Devs seem to do when there is a bug regarding it, perhaps because it's the easiest way and doesn't require a server shutdown. Edit: Disabling an ability in general makes a lot of sense because a bug tells that something is wrong and there might be some other ways in which Unburden interacts with other mechanics is wrong. So disabling it until everything has been looked into makes sense.

Not in Little Cup.

Yeah, this exactly.

Fair enough to pretty much all of that. Personally, I hate coaching. If someone tries to coach me during games I probably either tell them to stop, go DND or block them depending how much I like them. To me it was just a personal preference but I never really judged anyone who either coaches or wants to get coached. The way I saw it is that often "coaching" is just a friendly discussion about the ongoing game. It's really vague when is it coaching and when is it just "stating the obvious" about the ongoing game play. But I digress. If we can all agree that coaching is indeed bad and against the integrity of the game, sure. I don't mind rewriting the rules that it should be "discouraged". But if it's straight up against the rules, that would mean that allegations would require investigations and what comes to me, I have no willingness for that. (Probably because I would probably rule in the favor of the accused one unless something really indisputable, and really hard evidence of serious coaching arises). If it's just one guy making a careless comment in team/normal chat like "Dang that Hydreigon did a lot of damage", which technically is coaching, I wouldn't deem that a massive rule break worthy of a serious punishment. I'm not speaking behalf of all of the hosts about this, though. I'm glad for the conversation starter, though. Happy to see the inputs, especially because I was under the impression that everyone coaches and no one really deems it unethical. What I'm mostly sad about is that all of this discussion started after the event started. But at the same time if the hosts wait for too long "they're killing the hype". But hey it is what it is. I think this topic is something the hosts should address as soon as possible. But changing rules afterwards would probably cause even more hassle.

When you log-in to play with Android, it's slightly awkward when people start to write to you expecting a conversation like you were playing normally on your computer. That's why I'm suggesting that like in Discord you could show in-game whether you're playing on Android device so people would know if you're exceptionally slow to answer or don't answer at all. This probably should be an optional thing because I imagine there's players who don't want others to even know what device they're playing on but what comes to me, I'd be happy if everyone knew this right from the log-in.

Really good points Zeb. Dw, I read your whole post but I'll just quote to the TL;DR version. 6v6 would indeed be better but I personally was afraid 5v5 would already test it a bit too much. I felt like 2 subs is a minimum that a team should have so that would make it 8 players signed up from each country. I'll be honest, I thought only about 6-10 countries could even do that but I'm pleasantly proven wrong in this regard for this event. While I agree that this makes the most intuitive sense (isn't tie half of a win anyways?) but I thought that this would discourage people avoiding "the 5th game" just to guarantee points from that round. If the reward for a tie isn't good, then it makes most sense to do everything you can to make the last game happen. Now, it's important to note that only 2 teams per group qualifies so to be perfectly fair, no one should ever go for a tie if they want to qualify. So I'd say fair enough in this regard; especially if we would do a 6v6 format I'd say 2-1-0 is probably the most fair. We just thought the people found the PSL's 3-1-0 already fair so what wasn't broken shouldn't be fixed. But I'm glad someone started this conversation. Okay, this is entirely on us. We definitely should have done this and it's our mistake if we didn't do it clearly enough. Or I'm not sure if any of us did post it anywhere in the forums? Anyways. The teams in each group play a round robin, the best 2 teams in each group qualify to the final stage which is a 8 team single elimination bracket. Then each week half of the teams move on and eventually we have the winner. Now, one thing we had not yet even discussed is that how will be the single elimination be formed? It was agreed that the 2nd seed will play 1st seed of another group - but we honestly haven't even decided "which group" yet. I think we need to make an official announcement of this soon. Edit: The best teams in each group are defined by 1. Points (from wins/ties) 2. Individual games 3. Match against the tied team Okay, this is a big one. I'll definitely take the blame for this one and we had a long conversation in this regard. There already was some discussion to allow coaching before PSL but eventually people realized it breaks the whole format because the credit management is so important in that event. Quite frankly it would make the strategy to buy the cheaper players completely obsolete since the select few would control everything. World Cup does not have this element so this is the first time it's really ever discussed whether it's straight up against the integrity of the game to have someone else to help you in a seemingly "single-player" game. The answer is, I don't know. And there's no general consensus about this regard. Take for example the World Cup of Poker, where one player is representing a country at the table but may call time-outs to discuss key decision with their team. In that regard the significance of the "team effort" is always there and it isn't just one player playing for the whole country. But at the same time I definitely understand your point that it isn't fair that you do not know who you are realistically playing. Problem I see is that whether it's allowed or not, people can still do it and proving anything definitely is impossible. Even when you could have the hosts to be in part of the official Discord group, anyone can just start a private call and do the same thing. And even when you see some seemingly new player do exceptionally well, how do you know they didn't just practice their ass off for last 3 weeks? At worst you would have accusations of rule breaking when that really wasn't even there. Double edit: I'd like to also analyze the PokeMMO Team Tournament in this game. Do people consider it unethical if a player gets helped in some regard in a Team Tournament game? I don't think I've ever heard or seen this, it's almost assumed that in MMO Team Tournaments some level of help is going on in the team chat. And people don't really mind that. Now, does that mean it's "right"? Not necessarily. But the way MMO and Smogon approaches this issue is different and will forever be different because Smogon's environment isn't as team-centralized as MMO's and we quite frankly see the whole game of Pokemon different due to the fact that something like "teams" even exist. Different environments create different cultures and morals I guess.

Really cool concept to have them all as one thread.

Based on that post it would only make sense if he signed up

I heard some defensive players use Aero as a special wall. It's a very niche pick and only fits the said specific team I guess but it is used indeed as a Special Wall. Salamence has Roost and that's the reason you can really call it a "wall". After Intimidate, some physical threats simply cannot 2HKO Salamence so Roost will essentially make them useless and force them to switch out. Gyarados has no reliable recovery move - only Rest, which makes its usefulness much more limited. I've actually used max defensive Gyarados as a niche Pokemon and it's actually quite alright - it just doesn't "wall" opponents and quite rather focuses only on Dragon Tailing for hazard chip damage. For the lack of recovery I think "tank" is a better word to describe that, rather than a "wall". But again it goes down to the definitions.

Skill based stallbreaking is the most accurate thing anywhere ever. Really like the idea of this thread though.

I do believe that offence is taken, not given. But. Why would you even use words that have no other purpose but to possibly offend, if anything? Also, no one can know what your ethnicity is online so you can't really make the argument online that "some people can use a word without problems" because no one actually knows who the fuck is behind that in-game name. And why would the staff need to allow words in their platform that are nothing but controversial in their nature? I know the staff can be a little trigger happy with the mute button but arguing that these kinds of words should be fine in a public discussion channel is just ridiculous, just stahp guys. Also top kek @ freedom speech means you can say whatever you want... literally nowhere is this the case.