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PandaJJ

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Posts posted by PandaJJ

  1. Updated thread. Some changes:

    -Pending challengers are now listed, so it is easier for the trainers to see who has challenged the gym.

    -Due to my departure, Kanzo and imabetheverybest will now be up for grabs (they never contacted me about a match anyways, so I'm not sure if they are still interested)

    -The thread will soon be taken over by a shared account, so trainers can update their result by themselves.

     

    @Artemiseta: You have to beat Rendiz to proceed.

     

    I apologize for any inconveniences this may have caused.

  2. Hey guys. I don't know how to better put this than to quote my good friend:
     

    ...but truth be told, I cannot play any longer without falling back with university...

    I knew that this was true all along, but shit just got serious. I'm going to hold back on my long-ass goodbye post, because I'm not about that life. In short, I'm thankful that I met and spent time with so many nice people here. I was planning on spending a lot of time on our gym, but life just got in the way. Luckily I designed a system that does not depend on me playing this game for the gym to exist, assuming this team is not dead. This thread and the gym thread should be taken over by a shared account anytime now, so my presence will no longer be needed. Feel free to send me a PM if you want to talk with me about anything.

  3. Keith brought up a valid point that there is roughly 40s per turn for VGC, which is just 4v4. Maybe we could adopt a similar platform, or even increase to at least 20s returned per move. 

     

    Only problem with VGC is that there's a time cap at 15mins, and the player with the most pokemon (or health, if tied) wins. This is necessary to prevent matches from going on for too long, something which is possible due to moves such as minimize being legal. However, it is really bad competitively because it invalidates certain strategies. It's particularly nasty when you are one turn away from winning, but your opponent stalls out the timer and wins due to having more health. Our current timer is perfect, except from the amount of time. 3m+20s as we have suggested give you 38s per move in a 10-turn game, or 29s per move in a 20-turn game (doubles games tend to be in that range.) It's also worth noting that weather effects eat your timer, which I can only assume to be a bug. Weather is common enough in doubles to effectively reduce your increment to 7s in a lot of games, which is plain stupid.

  4. @Keith

     

    Thank you for an amazing time. You are probably best person to discuss comp with, since you always have a very deep understanding and don't bring up things that are completely irrelevant to the meta. I will certainly miss those conversations. Good luck with university, I know this game doesn't clash well with that. After having recently started playing another strategy game where developers update the game bi-weekly and really care about the features that players are requesting, as well as the game being a lot more focused on battling than grind, I feel very sad about the current state of this game. Despite being bad, there are no other alternatives in this genre (or they are on a whole different level of suck,) but I also feel like the current flaws are too big to bear. I respect your decision, and hopefully they have fixed some stuff before we see you again. I also noticed you changed your vote from "doubles sucks" to "PandaJJ," which I find very touching (because I know you actually think it sucks :P)

  5. Standings updated.

     

    I'm sorry for not taking many challenges, I was hoping our original open date would have stood instead of rushing it. Anyways, I'm currently not a lot online, so I encourage my opponents to PM on forums. On that note I will be imabetheverybest's second opponent.

     

    On the timer: If the timer was designed properly, a time win would be a legit win. Although the current timer makes the current doubles a blitz game, it is still well-known by all players involved, and you know what to expect. For this reason, I will count time wins as wins.

     

    A more serious concern is disconnections. I understand that official tournaments with decent prices can't allow rematches, as it is very exploitable. In this context though, it wouldn't feel right if a challenger got a win from a disconnection, especially since you have unlimited rematches anyways. Here is my suggestion for handling disconnections:

    -If either player disconnects, the challenger earns an immediate rematch. The exception is when the gym trainer in question is busy or is suspecting that the challenger disconnected to earn an immediate rematch or to scout. In this case, the gym trainer is allowed to put a cooldown on the game as usual.

    -In the case when the match was in a winning position for either a player (i.e. a position which was unlosable by predictions or RNG,) the gym trainer is allowed to declare a win to that player.

    Since I trust my team mates, I will guarantee that they are not going to disconnect in order to scout your team or avoid a loss. As for challengers, since disconnection on purpose is very rude, I will let the individual gym trainer decide whether such a disconnection is intenional and whether a penalty cooldown will be given.

  6. Hey guys. I'm done shit talking, I just wanted to explain what caused my initial reaction, as you gave me the impression that you did not think it was justified. When I first saw that you had made a ruleset that could cause a deadlock if copied by other gyms, this is what went through my head:

     

    1. Maybe you didn't think a deadlock was unfair. I ruled this one out immediately, since it is obvious that a deadlock would be the most discouraging aspect thinkable for a player wanting to take on the 8 gym challenge. It simply opposes the nature of the event.

     

    2. Maybe you didn't think there was any other way of accomplishing what you wanted, namely having control over how many matches you would recieve while also letting everybody get a shot, without creating a deadlock. I also ruled this one out, seeing as there are two rather obvious ways of accomplishing the same while avoiding the potential deadlock:

    -You could have a cooldown similar to other gyms. This would of course not give you full control over the number of challengers. For example, if you have a week cooldown, then 100 challengers would still mean potentially 100 matches every weak. But the other gyms have policies that allow them to reject challenges when they feel like there are too many, as well as having fees to discourage repeated challenges. Still, I can see why you would not go for this approach.

    -You could have a "looping list." Basically, every new challenger is put at the bottom of the list. The only players that are eligible to battle you are either the top one (or the top 5, for instance,) and whenever they battle you, they are moved to the bottom of the list. This allows you to have exactly as many battles as you want each week, it allows everybody to get a shot, and it avoids the potential deadlock.

     

    3. Seeing as 1 and 2 are very unlikely, I would have to conclude that you knew that the deadlock was wrong and you knew that there were natural ways to avoid the deadlock. What am I to make of this? I could only see this as a way to force yourself to become "the last gym" at expense of the legitimacy of the entire event. For me, that is a way to say fuck you to everybody (which you also did, btw) and totally justifies my first post in the thread. 

     

    Based on your comments, I'm not sure what to believe anymore. Your initial response to the people who pointed out the deadlock made it very easy for me to believe that neither 1 or 2 were very likely. But based on some later comments, it might seem like you really didn't think this through and didn't know how to avoid the deadlock. Yet other comments make me think that you really don't care about the deadlock at all and think it's fair that players are made unable to complete the challenge. No matter the reason, I hope that you will be able to work this out. In particular, the "loop list" seem to be a nice solution.

     

    Let me also assure you that I was never negative towards any aspects of your gym besides the deadlock. I wish you good luck with the gym, and I'm looking forward to coming here some time in the future when my comp collection allows me to compete.

  7. The rules we implemented were approved by our host, eggplant, who for the second time acknowledged our decision and did not object to it in this thread. If you are unable to beat our players you have a fail safe by beating the other 7 gyms. End of discussion.

     

    Unfortunately CloudXI's gym can't be challenged without beating your gym, since they accepted your challenge to create retared rules, hence resulting in a deadlock. I'm not criticising the time and effort you have put into this, nor the difficulty of your gym, but your rules essentially says "Either we are the last gym, or we are creating a deadlock." I'm sorry, but that is just a stupid way of doing it, regardless of who approves of it.

  8. Are you kidding me right now? We've put a lot of fucking work into this and if you want to criticize us for making a format where players have the opportunity to duel several of LYLE's top competitors and truly prove themselves then so be it. We made this format with the community in mind so that they truly have a challenge rather than a cakewalk through gimmicks. If we continue to see this kind of bullshit I'll be deleting this thread. We could have just left it at playing 5 members and that's that, but we wanted to give more incentive for players to battle other gyms and to tie this event together.

    For fucking shame.

     

    Then don't propose a deadlock

  9. My one gripe with your argument, Panda (forgive me for not quoting, I'm on my phone), is that i really can't see kanga fitting into one of the main three uber criteria. It's not sweeping a majority of the Meta, it's not walling a majority of the meta (mostly just sp attackers), and it's certainly not a support uber. What we have is a Pokemon with a frightening combination of strength, bulk, and speed that borrows attributes from all the uber criteria. It is certainly centralizing, that much cannot be debated (by far the easiest Pokemon to slot into any team/play style right now) but the question becomes whether that centralization is unhealthy for the meta game.

    Unfortunately due to the subjective nature of unhealthiness bans, we have no real option but to look at the meta game after a theoretical ban. This is why most unhealthiness bans are preceded by a test-ban to determine the ban's effect on the meta. If, for example, we test banned kanga for 4 tournaments, and the resulting metagame was unbalanced and dominated by pokes like manectric or rain omastar (just an example, not saying it would be), we'd have to determine whether the kanga ban actually improved the health of the meta or not. It's super subjective and generally a last resort, but I have a hunch that's where this discussion is headed

     

    You are right, it's a bit annoying that it doesn't fit into one of the uber criteria. I'm also just 95% sure it's banworty, I will let it be up to others to make that decision, I just felt the duscussion was really lacking in finding good arguments against kangaskhan (and I still believe clefable has nothing to do with this discussion.) I do however see a startling resemblance to snorlax in OU, I was however unable to dig up the thread for banning that. 

     

    Well if we were to look at those tiering policies, they're probably the vaguest thing on the planet. I could name plenty of Pokemon from any tier ever and reason why they are unhealthy to some degree and by the tiering policy definition it theoretically could even make sense. "Forretress (or any other spiker) is an unhealthy Pokemon because it makes you run either a Rapid Spinner or Magneton, both of which are low in numbers so it centralizes the meta a lot. Pls beuhn." By approaching only one aspect of "unhealthiness" theoratically you could make stupid arguments like I just made about Forretress but even Forretress to a degree is a meta centralizing. I'm fairly dissapointed we don't use the Smogon's "what a good metagame should look like" long ass post used as a "guideline" which ThinkNice used to link back and forth when he was in the council but it was never implemented as a thing to "Senile's Tiering Etiquette Guide" which is kind of the thing we use as "tiering policies" now. I'm just saying we kinda have to look at the metagame when defining what is an unhealthy Pokemon for a metagame, otherwise I just see it impossible.

     

    Also if there was to objectively determine a banworthy Pokemon, there would be need only for a one guy. No council, no discussion threats, nothing.

     

    I was refering to Senile's thread, not the first one (that one is indeed vague.) The line between centralizing and overcentralizing is indeed subjective, your forretress is of course not even close to being overcentralizing (most notable because spikes does not even force you to run rapid spin, it can still be beaten.)

     

    I will stop talking about tiering policies as per request by council members. Somebody should have a look at that snorlax thread, though.

  10. The problem is we cannot know. It could very well be that after banning multiple things and meta getting worse and worse suddenly with enough bans we would reach an enjoyable, balanced metagame. But we cannot know. 

     

    We ban things according to tiering policies. Tiering policies say nothing about what the metagame looks like after the ban has been put into effect. Why? Because as I illustrated, if a metagame contains two banworthy pokemon that checks each other and we ban one of them, the metagame will now be overcentralized around the other. This shows that determining whether a ban was correct or not by looking at the resulting metagame is not a good way to approach the problem. If the metagame is still containing banworthy pokemon, they will be banned next. While we "can't know" that the metagame won't get worse with every single ban, if that were the case, our tiering policy is not working. However, these tiering policies are taken from and used by smogon, and they seem to work. There is also great evidence to suggest that this never will happen. If you order pokemon by base stats, they will form a pyramid. The pokemon that are banworthy are typically at the top of this pyramid, and as more bans go through, the pyramid is flattened out. Since typing is fairly evenly distributed, we would expect to reach a metagame with a lot of variety and viable pokemon.

     

     

    I don't think that banning kanga will solve anything, in fact it will only result in more bans wich is bad for the smallest tier in pokemmo right now.

     

    That comment does not belong in a tiering discussion. We very well do know that a single ban might not solve any problems by itself, but if it doesn't the following bans will. Techically UU is not the smallest tier in the game, NU is. What typically happens is that when a banworthy pokemon is banned, several underused pokemon become viable in it's place, or because of its absence. Bans more often than not makes for more viable pokemon, not less. If kangaskhan is deemed banworthy but does not make more pokemon viable, it's because there are other things that prevent that.

     

    Scizor

     

    Scizor was mistakenly unbanned several months ago due to a formal inaccuracy in the comment explaining its ban. We alll knew it was banworthy all along, it's sad that it took them so long to ban it again.

     

    Usage

     

    There is little difference between the way we ban things now as opposed to what we used to do. We do have more precise banning criteria now, however. The diffrence between before and now is this:

    -Before we started with a list of pokemon that people thought were not used a lot in the above tier and were not broken in the tier they were placed in. Then we proceeded to ban pokemon that seemed banworthy, and bring back pokemon that did not seem broken.

    -Now we started with a list of pokemon that did not have a certain usage in the above tier. We then proceeded to ban things according to ban criteria, occasionally bringing down stuff that is seeing too little usage in the above tier.

    Now, the list we started with is bound to be a lot further away from our ideal metagame than the one we started with before. This is why I think it was a mistake to be reluctant to make a lot of quick bans. The way I see it, usage is simply a way to remove pokemon from the metagame that is already seen in a higher tier, in a way to make the pokemon in the tier be less arbitrary. I remember we had forretress in UU before, despite it being used quite a lot in OU. This won't happen anymore, and it's not a problem as long as we adjust the metagame according to tiering principles. I think we are getting a lot closer to a varied metagame now than we ever were, as long as we stop doubting tiering policies.

     

    And seeing is this has now turned into a clefable discussion against my original intention, let me clear that up. Somebody here was concerned that by banning kangaskhan, UU is suddenly stripped of all it's viable special walls. I was merely pointing out that this can't possibly be true, seeing as clefable has the same defensive stats and typing as kangaskhan. I just wanted to say that the metagame is not gonna be thrown into turmoil, although even if it that happens, it is not relevant to this discussion. The pokemon respinsible for such a turmoil would then be banned. 

     

    So far none of the arguments against a kangakshan ban are valid by tiering policies, making me wonder if people are doubting them to begin with.

  11. You are right about the fact that don't keep OP stuff in the tier to check other OP stuff (...) We must be at least somewhat certain the metagame will be better than the one we have here after the ban or at least going in the right direction(...)

    Also I wanna address something here: If we were in a metagame with Clefable as the specwall instead of Kangaskhan, would the metagame be better?

     

    Well, this is a lot of what makes people reluctant to ban certain pokemon. They think that a metagame must necessarily improve with each ban. The problem is that if we have "OP stuff" to check "OP stuff," then banning one of them will make the other worse, hence possibly making the metagame worse. Was it the wrong thing to do? No. It just means that we need more bans. In a metagame which is almost good, each ban might improve the metagame, but in a metagame that is born from usage stats, there might be a lot of things that are banworthy, but somewhat balance each other out. In that case, we might not see a better metagame untill all of them are banned. What I am saying is that UU still suffers from being very careful with banning right after the creation, and that Kangaskhan is one of the pokemon in the pool that should have gone rather early.

     

    Does a metagame with clefable as the main special wall look better? One of the best ways of beating special walls, by using choice banders, is at least effective against clefable, while it almost fails against kangaskhan due to it's raw power. But based on my comment above, none of this matters when we are considering whether kangaskhan is banworthy.

  12. Interesting to see how the tier discussion has evolved over time. Back in the day people didn't want to ban TTar when everyone swept with it or got swept by it and tried to argue about the little you could argue in order to keep the Pokemon available. It seems now that Pokemon are getting mostly ban verdicts on the first page of each discussion and you rather have to have arguments for why something shouldn't get banned.

     

    It is also important to remember that "back in the day" UU was not determined by usage, but was an already preset list of "underused" pokemon that did not seem overpowered. Today's UU was created by usage, and we had very few quick bans, despite these being sorely needed. The process of going through all the obvious ubers was very slow, and was set back a lot by several unbannings that were completely uncalled for (probably the biggest tiering mistakes in the history of this game.) The fact that there are still pokemon in UU that are clearly banworthy is not a big surprise considering all of that. We are just interested in a healthy metagame after all, not "I want to use my kangaskhan otherwise I'll cry," which was seemingly the mentality way back.

  13. Can I point out that clefable is just as bulky and has the same typing as kangaskhan? The only difference between the two is the offensive pressure. As has been shown with the provided calcs, kangaskhan is the equivalent of non-curse snorlax in OU - it walls everything, and it hits hard without any consequences. And, should you be extra unlucky, it has cb to make your life hard too (except this time, we have a snorlax that outspeeds a huge portion of the metagame.) None of you are making valid ponts against a kangaskhan ban. Talking about how some pokemon might become a problem after the ban is not relevant, and you should know that.

  14. I recall staff saying that gift shinies were supposed to be trophies but there's no point in having a trophy you won't use / show off if you're not interested in it.

     

    Isn't that exactly what a trophy is supposed to be like? In all my life, all the trophies I have acquired are now in a box in the attic, and nobody, including myself, gives a fuck about them. Before they ended up in a box, I could occasionally show them off to a friend who dropped by. The amusent lasted for about a fraction of a second. I feel like pokemmo gift shinies very much resembles real life trophies. Occasionally I will show them off to people, and they will be mildy amused for about a fraction of a second. But usually, they are stuck in a box in my pc, where nobody gives a fuck. And some people even throw their trophies away, knowing how absolutely useless they are.

     

    On a serious note, this doesn't sound like the worst idea ever. Just make sure trades are 1-to-1, otherwise it completely destroys the purpose of having gift shinies.

  15. If you were to EV 6 pokemon at once and have your pokemon in the front of the party hold a macho brace then you would be gaining 7 EV stats per battle.  Thats just with 1 EV pokes and it could be much easier with pokes that produce more.  Out of all the grindiness I find EVing to be much less cumbersome then say, i dont know, farming silk scarfs. 

    This requires you to EV 6 pokemon at once, which is a huge issue. If I come up with an idea for a pokemon, and then proceed to breed the pokemon, I now have to make 5 more pokemon to even start EV training? Those 5 pokemon of course need the exact same spread as the pokemon I came up with (which is not a vanilla 252/252 spread, in most cases.) The fact that you can EV train 6 pokemon at once can really only be taken advantage of by EV-training services, which are not reliable in terms of trust and speed.

     

    If we had easy ways to EV train then it wouldnt be as special.  We wouldnt have people alt running for exp shares and people having EV training services.  I understand with braces, pokerus, and hordes in gen 6 it makes eving like a 20 minute endeavor but this isnt gen 6.  It's grindmmo.  Lets keep it special and hardcore to breed similar to the olden times. :D

    First of all, alt running is terrible gameplay and the developers should do everything in their power to remove it. And guess what, they have already started - by adding renewable tms etc to the game. If you think EV training encourages alt running, it should by all means be changed. Also, while this is an MMO, that does not mean every little insignificant piece of action in this game has to be a grind. In fact, it just means they need to have enough content to keep players playing the game. And do you know what this game doesn't have? Multiplayer features. If they added more multiplayer features, we wouldn't need all this excessive amount of grinding for no benefit. EV training is in particular the most meaningless grind in this game, it needs to change.

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