BurntZebra
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Posts posted by BurntZebra
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playing in 10 vs fab
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5 hours ago, LifeStyleNORE said:
Honestly I don't get it. I bet if this was a OU discussion, everything would be done to keep Misdreavus out of Ubers. But since it's LC then it doesn't impact devs' perspective of "we don't want ubers yadda yadda bad game design". Wouldn't banning Nasty Plot for Misdreavus in LC fix this whole thing? Who cares if complex bans look bad. It's literally one move that might push it over the edge and yet, a discussion is being held to ban Misdreavus as a whole, which has proven to be such an important mon to this meta. Imho Misdreavus without Nasty Plot is NOT banworthy.
The problem with this argument is that we have already been banning other LC mons too. Should we artificially change scyther/sneasel etc to be balanced in LC too?
I already don't really like the whole thing that is going on in OU to avoid any bans from occurring but that's an argument for another day. Balancing LC is even more difficult because gamefreak doesn't really consider LC very much when adding new mons/adding new evolutions to existing mons. Pretty much all of the LC ubers pool are mons that originally did not evolve, but gamefreak added an evolution later on, so they became legal in LC as a result, even though they were originally added in the game as a non evolving entity and the base stats typically show that (yanma, tangela, sneasel, scyther, misdreavus). Base stats and individual stats matter a lot more in LC than other tiers, as the low level and eviolite bonus, and how the damage calculation works can change damages drastically. 1 extra point in defense can result in damage rolls changing by 4 points of damage, which can be a 20% hp difference.
Some mons are sort of exceptions when it comes to base stat totals/balancing, like ponyta and onix. Ponyta typically has one of the highest BSTs in LC metas, but it's rarely seen as a super dominant force, as it is pure fire type, which leaves it weak to stealth rock/other hazards, leaves it prone to being trapped by trapinch/diglett, and generally doesn't resist enough common attacks in LC to be a good defensive switchin to things. Onix, while initially being a mon that doesn't evolve, has maintained balance as 42% of its BST is from defense alone, and has pretty terrible hp/sp def/attack, which limits how useful it actually is at checking defensive threats outside of physical flying/normal moves.
As for misdreavus, I think the best option is to just ban it. Prior to nasty plot access, misdreavus was already too good not to use, and the usage showed that. A BST of 435, supported by 3 immunities, 19 speed to outspeed everything besides scarfers and diglett, and a decent amount of support moves in its movepool. The only answers were porygon and munchlax (both of which, could be handled various different misdreavus sets, but these sets were less good vs other threats in the meta, so it was sort of fine from a balance standpoint). Now with nasty plot, misdreavus doesn't have to run sub optimal sets to deal with porygon and munchlax, as it can break past both of them, being able to go +2 sp atk in one turn and threaten them much more quickly than before.
I understand the desire to keep misdreavus around to be a fast utility mon that can help deal with fighting types, but from a tiering perspective, misdreavus is not too different from tangela or sneasel. So in my mind, it doesn't make sense to complex ban an element of misdreavus to keep it free in LC, but keep tangela/sneasel in LC ubers. Based off my understanding, the devs want to avoid stuff ending up in level 50 ubers, as those mons are then only usable in doubles and PvE, but with LC ubers, those mons are still usable in level 50s formats. Sneasel, tangela, and scyther have all seen usage in NU. Misdreavus has a smaller niche in NU, as mismagius still exists there, but it can still be used if you are looking for a bulkier version of mismagius while foregoing some speed/leftovers recovery.
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i won both very skillfully
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Wobbuffet is something that cannot be easily predicted in terms of what impact it will have on the NU meta. If you asked me when it dropped to UU, what it would be like in UU, I would have guessed it would have 25% usage and find itself on all archetypes of teams, for its ability to trap offensive pokemon and defensive pokemon, but the UU players don't run wobbuffet for whatever reason they have, so now NU is left to deal with it. Toxic users in NU might become more common so that wobb can't trap them very easily, while scarf pokemon that wobbuffet can easily switch into will probably decrease in usage. If wobbuffet has a significantly negative impact on the NU meta with a large enough usage, then I would consider banning it, but as of now, it is impossible to tell what the true impact it will have on the meta.
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Just for the sake of having my votes be public, I'll post my votes/thoughts here.
OU -> UU drops are fine. Porygon2 is a good tool for balance teams as it is an effective mixed wall and is also able to trap/revenge kill dugtrio so that dugtrio is limited to one kill per game, which is useful if you're running a team that has multiple pokemon that can be trapped by dugtrio (sd heracross/specs typhlosion/magneton etc). Umbreon probably helps out stall teams more than it does offense, but I feel it's largely outclassed by mandibuzz outside of its cleric abilities. Zoroark is a meme, probably not worth running in the current meta.
As for the BL -> UU drop discussion goes, there is a general consensus for porygon-z that it is too strong, being able to spam tri attack pretty freely, while also being able to boost its speed or special attack easily, makes it much too powerful for UU.
Mamoswine and Haxorus are a little different. I wanted an all or nothing vote for them, meaning I would either want both to drop, or for neither to drop. I think with mamoswine in the tier, we have enough answers to deal with haxorus then. In terms of defensive play, mandibuzz is a near perfect answer to haxorus, being able to live a +2 LO dragon claw from haxorus and ohko back with foul play. Forretress has an acceptable matchup vs haxorus as well, being able to live any +2 attack from haxorus and being able to either do some damage with gyro ball or ohko with counter. Vaporeon works too to an extent, as it lives +2 attacks from haxorus and can do 70-85% with ice beam, which is enough to ko provided that haxorus did not come in for absolutely free+set up for free. Haxorus must also choose between dragon dance or swords dance (or run both with limited attacking options). Running swords dance may be more appealing for breaking stall teams, but it also means that haxorus loses to crobat in a 1v1. Dragon dance is better vs some stuff, but leaves it lacking the power of SD, meaning it will always lose to forretress/some other defensive threats.
Now as for offensive counterplay vs haxorus, it is a different situation. An offensive team probably won't be running a max defense impish mandibuzz, so that is off the table as a potential counter, but things don't look too bad for offensive teams either. Offensive teams have more offense and thus haxorus has less potential to set up at all. Offensive teams will also have more priority available to them, including mamoswine ice shard, weavile ice shard, bisharp sucker punch, etc, so even if haxorus is able to set up a DD, there is still easy counterplay to haxorus that doesn't require ridiculous considerations in teambuilding.
I think if mamoswine wasn't in the tier, then haxorus requires a bit too specific of pokemon to be reliably answered on offensive teams, as there would only be one ice shard user available for super effective priority. Obviously as I'm writing this post, mamoswine has already been dropped to UU, so I would like to see Haxorus drop as well, but it seems others have a different mindset than myself.
Honch still has no place in NU, with an immensely strong stab priority and strong coverage moves.
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1 minute ago, RLotus said:
If you want more even teams then the managers shouldn't get to play. A team with a top tier player as their manager is at a huge advantage to a team with someone who isn't as strong.
If you want to do a snake tournament then call it a snake tournament, this isn't really what psl is. How the team is chosen is the whole gimmick of these kinds of tournaments.
I'm not really sure if I agree with your arguments here.
I agree that if the managers are selected, and 7 of the 8 are top tier players and 1 is terrible, then yeah, that one manager is probably at a disadvantage, but at the same time, not allowing managers to play either decreases the pool of good managers to choose from, or it decreases from the quality of the player pool, both of which we have seen in the past seasons. One potential option if this were an auction format is to have managers price each other and decide if they want to purchase themselves to play, the caveat being that they can play in any tier, not just a manager vs manager tier. This option is typically seen in the lower level smogon leagues that have a smaller playerbase, where if the managers didn't play, there would be a severe skill gap in the player pool. I'm not sure if this is really feasible in a snake format since each manager pick is essentially the same value, unlike the auction where one manager could be valued 5k more than another manager. Ultimately, allowing managers to play allows for the greatest selection of managers to choose from, since you no longer need to decide between getting to play or just managing, especially considering having 8 top players not being able to play can dramatically affect the overall skill level of a certain tier or just general skill level overall.
As for the Snake vs auction discussion, I think it's sort of silly to pretend that the unique thing about PSL is the auction. At the end of the day, SPL and Snake Draft are not terribly different outside of having different tiers to play. PSL in PokeMMO is unique because it is one of the only long-term team-based tournaments and is probably the only truly competitive one, seeing as World Cup had a myriad of problems that made it not competitive. The difference between auction and snake is usually the auction allows for a larger variation in the skill levels of players, e.g. buying 2 players for 30k each and then buying 8 players for 2-4k each, while snake *should* have a steady decline in the skill levels of players as rounds progress of the draft. Snake is also typically a tad bit more exclusive, but that really depends on what the rules are that Coolio comes up with. We have also had a snake draft in the past (season 7/8 I believe) for the first 2 rounds, and then had auction for the rest, so there is some precedent for a draft already.
I haven't read the OP since reading rules is for chumps.
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me vs zenor in 10-15 minutes
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me vs oscar in 10 minutes I suppose
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lyle reserve
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2 hours ago, crbox said:
Hi,
I'd like to build a sand team. Also, here is my CURRENT team (first attempt) Hydreigon, Ferrothorn, Jellicent, Conkeldurr, Volcarona and Salamence.
I would like to keep Ferrothorn, Hydreigon, and POSSIBLY Conkeldurr in my sand team, although really the ONLY one I would absolutely keep is Hydreigon.
I was thinking Tyranitar, Excadrill (use of sandstorm), Hydreigon, Conkeldur, Ferrothorn + 1, but I feel like using Ttar and Excadrill is awkward as they share weaknesses.
What do you guys think? As much feedback as possible would be appreciated as I really would like to learn as much as possible :)
Thanks,
crbox ~
I figured I'd take a shot at building a sand team in the current meta. I tried to make it have some unique features to make it stand out from other sand teams that have been made before.
https://pokepast.es/1d433f1789fb2e9d -> the team
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So you wanted to keep hydreigon, so that was my starting point for the team. I'm no expert on hydreigon sets, so this set can probably be changed if you would like. Focus blast allows you to 2hko blissey with rocks up and kill stuff like porygon2/tyranitar that are able to survive specs dragon pulse easily. U-turn is for momentum vs chansey, since odds are, you won't be able to kill it normally.
Next up is the sand component of the team. I wanted tyranitar as the sand setter because it has more offensive potential and has some unique switch in opportunities as well, compared to hippowdon. Fire blast can be used to nail steel types and breloom on the switch. Stealth rock because every good team has rocks. I debated if I wanted crunch or not on the tyranitar, since I wasn't running dark pulse on hydreigon. Without dark pulse on hydreigon, I figured reuniclus might get too annoying, so I stuck with crunch, and added stone edge to round out the coverage and the ability to ko togekiss. The ev spread is slightly random, but it does give you speed to outspeed blissey, bulk to live a +2 aura sphere from togekiss, and enough attack to deal out some damage.
I saw another team posted here with chople berry excadrill and I liked that idea, so I went with it here. Chople berry serves one primary purpose, which is to let excadrill survive a mach punch from conkeldurr and then ko with a +2 earthquake. Chople also helps with the special lucario matchup, as excadrill can live a +2 life orb vacuum wave with chople.
After adding the first 3 pokemon and seeing they are all weak to fighting, and knowing that sand teams are often weak to rain, I decided to go with a slightly unorthodox choice of slowbro. Slowbro is one of the bulkiest physical walls available still and gives you answers to physical lucario, mamoswine, conkeldurr, and kabutops. Scald and thunder wave try to limit what is willing to come in vs slowbro, and psyshock is just to have some offensive capabilities vs blissey, conkeldurr, breloom, and tentacruel.
At this point, I felt the team was quite weak to scizor and excadrill was being completely walled by skarmory, so magnezone seemed like the next logical choice. Scarf magnezone gives the team some speed and will hopefully remove scizor and/or skarmory. Magnezone is also the primary switch in to bulky waters and togekiss.
I was looking over the team and realized it was still fairly weak to fighting and had some potential flaws vs scizor still, so I went with salamence. Originally, I was going to do a special attacking defog roost salamence, but I think the physical dragon dance set takes advantage of the team more. Magnezone is able to trap skarmory and allow salamence to do severe damage. Roost seemed like an interesting option, as it let salamence switch into attacks a little more carefree and not have to worry about stealth rock damage as much. If skarmory is trapped, then dragon claw and earthquake have perfect coverage for everything else.
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As for flaws of the team, there are a few that came to mind that I haven't tried to adapt to yet.
First is shed shell skarmory. It will evade magnezone trapping and thus will stick around all game to wall both excadrill and salamence. There are a few ways to remedy this. One way would be to drop roost on salamence for a fire move to threaten skarmory more. Another option would be to run a knock off user on the team that can bait skarmory to come in and remove its shed shell so that magnezone can trap it. This is more difficult because nothing on the team learns knock off, so a pokemon change would be needed.
The second flaw would be bulky waters. Milotic is very annoying for the team as it is not prone to being trapped and has recovery, which makes it difficult to wear down. Milotic is able to switch in on salamence, slowbro, excadrill, and tyranitar. Remedies for this would be to add toxic on slowbro over thunder wave, so that if milotic comes in vs slowbro, it will be put on a timer and be easier to wear down. This is a double-edged sword since it will make salamence/excadrill do less damage to milotic as well. Another option is to make either salamence or excadrill life orb sets. +2 earthquake from life orb excadrill will ohko milotic, but will make you worse vs conkeldurr. +1 life orb dragon claw from salamence will put milotic in range of being killed off by an excadrill earthquake.
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16 hours ago, FNTCZ said:
Make me a sweet sweet bird spam team ft. tailow (and ofc with shit to break steels and rocks)
Edit: Bird spam has been one of my favourites team archetypes since banded talonflame was the pinacle of skill in pokemon. I love how you are almost playing a hyper-offense monotype team that's actually legit, fun and strong. with one of the best offensive typings featuring a 120 bp, perfectly accurate stab move and the surprisingly good coverage that some flying mons have (fighting - fire for instance) you can actually replicate this archetype in different tiers to a decent share of success, specially if you consider how fast your games can get, I've done so myself in ou and uu so why the heck not lc? Go birds!
Tailow set:
Guts @Flame orb
-Brave Bird
-Facade
-U-Turn
-Protect/QA
Doduo Set: (Scarf probably altought Band or even berry juice sd can work too)
-Brave Bird
-Return/SD
-Jump Kick
-KnockOff if Scarf, QA if Banded, Return if SD
The idea is to have two very strong offensive pokemon that share the same set of counters so one can leave holes open for the other to sweep, other important factors that this team might need is hazzard control and checks for steel/rock type pokemon in the tier, mienshao comes to mind for the later and it doubles as u-turn and regenerator user to provide momentum
I went ahead and made this team, even though I'm not technically a builder, I think butler said something about TC people getting a free pass.
https://pokepast.es/2994c60ce9db5be1
I'll go through my build process.
First I went with your taillow set as the starting point of the team. Guts taillow is fairly strong, but it has more trouble getting past normal/flying resists than other flying types, so the team needed some ways to deal with steel types and rock types.
Trapinch was the obvious next pick, as it is able to switch in vs onix and magnemite safely vs any attack and ko with giga drain or earthquake respectively. Trapinch also traps tirtouga and pawniard, but it seems that shell smash tirtouga is the more common tirtouga set so trapinch isn't the first switch to tirtouga in a normal game.
The next pick for the team is mienfoo, which has been the most consistent LC mon in the past 3 gens of LC, so there's not much surprise here. Mienfoo can tank almost any hit in LC and deal damage between fake out, uturn, and high jump kick. Knock off also makes it easier to break misdreavus / frillish / porygon / vullaby for the rest of the team. U-turn and trapinch can potentially eliminate certain threats that switch into mienfoo.
Before I added any more defensive backbone to the team, I figured I should figure out the other part of the bird spam for the team. There are a few choices. Doduo, rufflet, archen, drifloon, etc. I went with drifloon because it has some unique options that no other flying type provides. First, it has unburden, which allows it to outspeed all of the boosted and unboosted meta, after it uses its item. Second, it has many movepool options to break whatever you need. Acrobatics is a given if you're running flying gem. Knock off helps vs porygon/vullaby/flying resists. Thunderbolt hits vullaby / tirtouga / other water or flying types. Shadow ball also gives another stab move. The moveset can probably be changed around. Hidden power fighting can be used to hit pawniard / onix / porygon. Destiny bond can be used to remove any pokemon.
Next pick for the team had to be a stealth rocker, since every LC team needs a rocker. The top two choices were tirtouga and pawniard, as they resist ice/normal/flying, and have good overall bulk. I just went with tirtouga because I think it's quite good at what it does and is somewhat underutilized in this pokemmo LC meta.
The last pick felt like it needed to be some kind of hazard removal, since there was taillow and drifloon that are weak to rocks. I went with vullaby since it gives an answer to misdreavus and is just bulky overall, while also giving defog to the team.
I did make a different version of the team, but I didn't like the feel as much for some reason, maybe because it didn't have a fighting type on it. https://pokepast.es/bd84dc7920ff7287
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10 hours ago, OrangeManiac said:
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.
I didn't go through and sub quote anything so it's not terribly clear right away as to what I'm replying to exactly, but shouldn't be too difficult to decipher.
I didn't go through and see how many players each team had, I just noticed that some teams had 10+ players, and the fact that OU is the most popular tier in terms of number of players, so slapping on an extra OU slot is definitely the easiest way to reach the 6 games. I guess looking at some of the teams more closely makes me more worried about the competitiveness of the event. IMO some countries that did get a slot probably shouldn't have gotten one. Even if you have 7+ players in your country shouldn't automatically make you eligible to play in this, since I think there might be some "large" skill differentials between some of the teams (I can be very easily be proven wrong since I don't know some of the newer player base now). I guess this is more of a fundamental problem with a world cup with a relatively small sample pool. Even Smogon faces the same issue, where US East has won for the past like 3 years. No real way to solve this problem without artificially manipulating teams or to have more players play this game that are closer to reaching the asymptotic skill ceiling of Pokemon.
People could risk and try to no contest to get a tie instead of a loss, but this comes down to sportsmanship of the players to get their games done, and to the hosts for them to be careful with activity win/no contest decisions. This hasn't been *too* much of an issue in PSL for the most part and even when it does occur, there is usually some solution to avoid no contest calls.
On the topic of the 3-1-0 scale, obviously teams should go for a win if they want to be the best, but it gets complicated when a team wins 5-3 one week, loses 0-8 the next week, and is then ahead of a team that ties two weeks in a row. Do you value a win with an overall -6 point differential more than two ties with a 0 point differential? If your answer is yes, then the situation is even more extreme in a 3-1 scale, since 3 ties = 1 win, so wins are worth an astronomical amount more than a tie, considering there are only 3 weeks played.
If you do end up keeping just 5 tiers, then the 3-1-0 scale is less important since ties will only occur when a no contest occurs, which shouldn't happen too frequently hopefully.
I'm still not sure if I agree with the logic involving the world cup aspect and coaching. If anything, the fact that it is a team event should emphasize each individual on the team. If a world cup team is entirely coached by one player, the team essentially becomes that one player, which is the opposite of what we want with a team event. Ideally the team helps before the match and potentially after the match, while letting the individual player still be a valuable part of the team.
I think for a while, there was a negative connotation associated with coaching in team tournaments. Best example is Frags+Aw in team tournaments in 2014/2015, where the outside view was that frags was winning the tournaments on his own basically and made the wins less impressive because of that. There is also a division between players on their stance on coaching. Some players don't want to get coached because they feel adequate on their own or feel like it would discount their victories, knowing that someone else is partially responsible for your win, so I wouldn't go out to say that most teams get coached now adays.
Also I will disagree with your point about Smogon. Team based events are actually the most popular and hyped events on Smogon. This is true for the large scale tournament scene with the Smogon Premiere League, but it is also true in the microcosm that I am most involved with, which is the LC community. Sure there are individual tournaments that get a lot of players, but the main attraction is the team based formats, because of the exclusivity/higher average skill level of players participating. In an individual tournament, the performance in a lot of the early rounds are diluted out by the masses of players that sign up that don't play at the same level as the top level players, so it's essentially like watching a high school sports game for most of it, while the team tournaments are like the NFL (or insert national sporting association here).
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I guess since I'm involved in this tournament now due to my patriotic duty to make America great again, I'll give my input on certain aspects of this event to hopefully give some useful suggestions and give some wisdom to a rookie host (Roxxass).
The first thing I noticed about the event is that the matches are 5v5, which means there will be no ties (unless there is a no contest), so there is a huge point differential between wins and losses, even though there is only 1 game differential between a win and a loss (rather than a 2 game differential with an even number of games, e.g. 5-3 or 4-2 in an 8 game series or 6 game series respectively). Challonge's default setting is 3 points for a win, 1 point for a tie, and 0 points for a loss, so there are big opportunities for some big point differences. Personally, I like a system where win=2 points, tie=1 point, and loss=0 points. This system also assumes that there are even numbers of players on a team, so that ties aren't a rare occurrence (hopefully anyways). In my years of playing and observing pokemon tournaments, I've never seen an odd number of tiers used before, and for good reason, as it leads to imbalance in a round robin environment.
The second thing I noticed about this event is that there isn't much on any thread about how playoffs work. I imagine the highest point team of each division gets to playoffs (so that 4 teams total are in the playoffs). If this isn't the case, then I have some problems with two teams having already dropped out and 6 teams getting a free 5-0 victory, since that will artificially inflate the score of those teams in comparison to other teams that didn't get a free win (e.g. if you look at the points of all the participating teams as a whole, instead of a group-by-group basis). The fact that two teams have already dropped out within the first 2 days of the event starting is slightly worrying and makes me think more thought should have gone into what teams were chosen for this event. I do understand that a round number like 16 is optimal for this event and the goal of this event seems to be geared toward being inclusive rather than exclusivity. Other numbers of teams such as 12 could also work, such as splitting teams into 4 groups of 3 teams, but I suppose it is too late now for that. Just food for thought for future tournaments.
The last thing I noticed (actually probably the first thing I noticed when I read the threads) is that coaching is allowed for the entirety of the tournament. This was already discussed somewhat extensively during the last season or two of PSL, so I'll be brief with my thoughts. I think allowing coaching is a tempting option because people are likely doing it even when they aren't supposed to be doing it, but coaching hurts a lot of the competitive integrity of the game as well. One of the main components of any strategy based game is anticipating what your opponent is planning, and a key aspect of that is to know the skill level of your opponent. If you get matched up vs randoboy42069 who has been first rounded in every tournament he's ever entered, your expectations are going to be different than if you're playing someone who has 20 tournament wins. But with coaching, you don't know what is going on behind the scenes. You have no way of knowing if you're playing randoboy42069, or if you're playing the best player on the opposing team, or if you're playing the best player in the game, since anyone can be making the plays. This makes the players on a team as good as the best player on their team (if they choose to coach). Ultimately, this is me just waxing poetic about my stance on coaching, since there aren't enough systems in place to discourage coaching if it was against the rules for tournaments, compared to Smogon, where ghosting (same thing as what we call coaching here) leads to year long tournament bans for nearly all tournaments on Smogon, as opposed to here, where if you are caught in PSL, you are placed on the very spooky black list, where there's an 85% of you not being on the black list next season.
tl;dr:
suggestions:
1. Make the matchups 6v6 instead of 5v5 for balancing purposes. Adding a second OU match is the easiest solution most likely.
2. Make wins worth 2 points, ties 1 point, and losses 0 points.
3. Be more verbose in the process of the event, e.g. how playoff teams are decided, tentative schedule, etc.
4. I won't ask that the coaching being allowed thing to be removed, since I think ultimately it is a host preference thing, but my stance is that the aspect of your team helping should be limited to teambuilding, testing, and discussing before the match. Once a match starts, a single player is responsible for their own actions.
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15 hours ago, Vorred said:
Amanu getting fucking dunked on was a blast #ripqwilfish
playing for qwilfish was my probably my favourite though because it was the last time I ever actually played the game
managing was great too though, loved the people i met through my team and im glad i took chances on people like @Imabetheverybest1
Can't believe staff allowed shit name to exist but not cuboned ur mum
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got the win still, actually a good game, unfortunately results of it didn't matter
- AurumPegasus, DoubleJ and DrButler
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4 hours ago, Zymogen said:
I’m not overly familiar with LC so this is just speculation, but would Mienfoo not become an issue were it not for Misdreavus? It’s probably the wrong way to be looking at it but I seem to remember a similar “necessary evil” argument being used when Poliwrath was rife in old meta NU, as it kept stuff like Aggron and Sharpedo locked down
Mienfoo has many other checks/counters that banning misdreavus would not have an impact on it. Also a piece of tiering advice is that you shouldn't worry about what the future meta will look like, as you can always fix the future meta by banning something else.
Overall, I'm a bit split on misdreavus currently. I'm inclined to say it's not banworthy currently, but if it gains access to nasty plot via spiritomb, that would definitely push it over the edge as it means porygon/munchlax can no longer avoid being 2hko'ed by misdreavus.
As it stands currently, misdreavus seems to be running shadow ball+hp fighting almost always, with either sub+calm mind, pain split+will o wisp, or sub+thunderbolt as the last 2 moves. Eviolite roost vullaby is able to stop all of these sets and the only one it would struggle against would be a misdreavus that has calm mind and thunderbolt, which means that misdreavus will no longer have a protection against status and won't be able to scout enemy switches with substitute.
Another important thing to note is that misdreavus is mostly bulky from its eviolite, so if you knock it off with mienfoo, ferroseed, timburr, etc, then it becomes much easier to stop. I think in the current LC meta, there is enough offensive pressure for misdreavus to rarely get a good chance to set up, and the viability of scarf users is high enough that a set up misdreavus can still be revenge killed fairly easily. It also helps that vullaby+porygon, two of the better answers to misdreavus, are also very viable A/S rank mons in the LC meta, so you're not really being forced to run weird gimmicks to deal with misdreavus, unlike what gbwead is trying to claim.
January-Movement Discussion Thread
in Competition Archive
Posted
Speaking as the resident LC expert on the council, I second the opinion to UNBAN mienfoo as it was unjustly banned before, as there was no majority consensus to ban it. Mienfoo is important glue for LC and has caused people to shift away from playing LC. Usage is an extremely weak argument to ban anything in LC (and tbh is a generally weak argument in other tiers too), as it does not prove something is overcentralizing or unhealthy to the tier. #makeLCgreatagain
As for the announced drops, dugtrio and machamp are the more concerning ones, but they are both pokemon that could have a large impact on the meta or seemingly no impact at all. If they are decidedly banworthy down the line, it is more likely they are banworthy due to unhealthiness based on trapping (dugtrio) or overcentralization around either of them, rather than being objectively offensive uber or support uber. Since both of these ubers characteristics require examining the pokemon in the meta for an extended period of time, it does not make sense to preemptively ban them at this time.