Rejected SV OU Terastallization Tiering Discussion, Part II

[Srn]

You can make a super long post all you want but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take a snippet from one of my posts and twist it into something it’s not - makes it seem like you did that for a lot of things and so most of your post is hard to find credible.

I didn’t say a full ban should be off the table because I “disagree” with it. I said it was pretty clear it wouldn’t win so it was a useless option to have since it will just be a dead option that less than 35% support, when a 60% majority is needed. But hey go off - posts like this are why it’s more likely no action wins out and nothing is done about tera instead of trying to adjust or restrict it in a way that most people can get on board with.

Pre-emptively removing "useless options" to vote for isn't great either, as we don't know how people will vote until it actually happens (see natdex tera suspect). Thank you for taking the time to read my entire post within 4 minutes and giving a Haha react. I love it when my reaction score goes up.

 

[BigFatMantis]

Pre-emptively removing "useless options" to vote for isn't great either, as we don't know how people will vote until it actually happens (see natdex tera suspect). Thank you for taking the time to read my entire post within 4 minutes and giving a Haha react. I love it when my reaction score goes up.

I'm a fast reader what can I say. Thank you for taking the time to correct the error - the opinion that removing "useless options" isn't great is a valid opinion/counterpoint to what I actually said, and I think if you just did that instead of trying to manipulate the actual snippet I would have taken your initial post more seriously. But I do disagree that "ban" is going to have any traction, and I really do think we should be discussing Tera Blast ban more, as that feels like the only thing that has a chance to happen as a restriction if more people can voice their support for it. Otherwise we're just getting a Gambit suspect w/ no tiering at all on tera until after DLC (this is probably happening anyways based on what Finch was saying but maybe not).

 

[ABR]

The main issue with the prior vote was that it forced people to abide by “action vs inaction” despite the very real occurrence of people prioritizing various options differently. Someone can prefer a full ban over no action, but prefer no action over preview. The existing voting structure doesn’t responsibly account for such scenarios, and a simple 1:1 would be the only way to get a fair vote. Niche options are excluded out of necessity and logistics, not because they’re stupid.

And no, Tera is not quite like Dmax.

 

[Finchinator]

For what it’s worth, we intend to move into a Kingambit suspect tonight or tomorrow.

These threads will remain open* and closely watched in the meantime as Tera is still an important topic.

*to Tera discussion, not Kingambit discussion

 

[Irpachuza]

Hi hi, Randbats main here, not gonna comment on Smogon official formats policy, and much less will attempt to discuss competitiveness arguments on a format I don't play.
What I do want to address is one of the multiple arguments Srn brought up, mainly because it's mathematically wrong, and I would hate for anyone else to use them on a PR ever again. Not out of spite to Srn, but oh boy people love their precedents on PRs.

A) Compare GXE between SV OU and SS OU
As Nat stated, there have only been two alts to attain a 90 gxe on the current SV OU ladder. On the current gen SS OU ladder, gxe was much higher overall. Take a look at OLT qualifiers here: Cycle 1 Cycle 2 Cycle 3 Cycle 4. Across all cycles, across 24 great players, ONLY THREE PLAYERS HAD LOWER than 85 gxe. In comparison, take a look at top ladder right now:

7/17/23 OU ladder

Out of the top 25 accounts, ONLY THREE ARE GREATER than 85 gxe... (Relic stone and shikuleo are both storm zone, so we are also comparing 24 players)
OLT ladder vs non-OLT ladder is not a perfect comparison, but the difference is like night and day. I will not be proven wrong when OLT comes around this generation. The gxe of OLT qualifiers will be markedly lower than they were last gen, I am calling it now. Not because the players have become worse, but because the meta has become more volatile and MU fishy.

Basically, comparing GXE between different samples of players and calling it evidence of variance in a format is absolutely wrong, for the following reasons:
1. Comparing different ladder sizes
2. Comparing different number of games played

Let's check them out, shall we:

1. Comparing different ladder sizes. Top ladderers' GXE varies with ladder size, similarly to what happens with ELO, the more people play games on a ladder, the top GXE inflates. You can think of it this way: GXE is designed to reflect the probability of winning against a random (1500 RD 350 Glicko) player of that ladder, therefore, the higher the ELO/Glicko ceiling becomes, there are more chances for a top player to beat a random player and therefore high ladder GXE increases.
How is this related to your example? Well, that's quite simple: OLT IX happened at the end of SS, with a ladder that has had time to grow from over 3 years, which can't really be compared with the generally new-ish SV ladder size. This "GXE inflation effect" can even be seen between the SS OLTs! You picked the last OLT of Gen 8 and compared it to the new Gen 9 ladder that didn't even had its first OLT, but what happened on the first OLT held during SS?

Mean GXE per OLTxCycle	OLT VII (2020)	OLT IX (2022)
Cycle 1	85.25%	88.6%
Cycle 2	84.53%	87.61%
Cycle 3	84.39%	87.1%
Cycle 4	84.99%	86.79%

But hey Irpa, if mean top GXE reflects balance of a format, wouldn't it be expected for it to be higher the older a Gen is, since Gens get hypothetically more balanced across time? Well, my answer to that is: maybe! But what I am arguing here is that you can't compare early and late Gen GXEs and accuse Tera for making the early gen one lower; because it seems to be common to other gens, and could simply come from purely mathematical effects.
You can't point to this difference as a proof of heavy unbalancing, much less at the start of a Generation and by no means by comparing ladders of different sizes*.

2. Comparing alts with different number of games played.

OLT ladder vs non-OLT ladder is not a perfect comparison, but the difference is like night and day.

Let me correct you and say that "but" should be "and".
This one is quite more straightforward but less mathematical, Srn kinda addressed it, and I'm sure that anyone that attempted to get suspect reqs will catch on it swiftly enough. Comparing OLT GXEs against raw ladder GXEs is a very poor practice because of the nature of how both types of accounts are used.
Basically, we have never considered GXE to be apt to measure quality by its own without adding number of games as context (source). GXE is more volatile on players with fewer games. OLT is played on alts, so you will have ABR (or any player with quality for being on top) sweeping through 80% of the ladder and likely getting a overinflated GXE as they beat most players for around ~150 games but Glicko deviation is still high. Regular laddering users will in general be more sloppy with forfeits and bad plays, as they usually will not be competing from the start of the account for getting the highest ELO possible, and they will have a lower deviation that will more accurately adjust to a realistic (and lower) GXE.
While the OLT IX Top players had around 150 games played, a quick overview of the alts you posted on ladder show a good bunch having well over 300, 500, and even 900 battles in Gen 9 OU. Sadly, W/L resetting is quite detrimental to try a mathematical counterexample, but I believe this one is intuitive enough to repeat: don't compare mean GXE with very different games played (unless the number of games is big enough that deviation is trivial).

As a corollary, please be aware that GXE can potentially reflect if a ladder prompts their players to lose more battles than other ones (see for example the very balanced Gen 9 Rands having top GXEs around 89, while Hackmons Cup's are roughly at 78%), but variance within a format is only one of multiple variables affecting mean top GXE, namely having number of games played, number of players in the ladder, raw interest and seriousness on which most players use the ladder, etc.
So while arguments about GXE reflecting variance could (and should) still be held, they should be taken as very raw and incomplete indicators, so pointing at Tera as the main culprit of the current GXE of the top SV ladderers on the basis that it's very different from last year's Top 24 OLT players is like comparing apples with transistors, as they played on another Generation, on another stage of said Generation, on a bigger ladder, in less matches, and with different backgrounds, intentions, and care for their alt.

I will not be proven wrong when OLT comes around this generation. The gxe of OLT qualifiers will be markedly lower than they were last gen, I am calling it now. Not because the players have become worse, but because the meta has become more volatile and MU fishy.

A well put comparison between these numbers and OLT VII ones could reflect better the difficulty of winning consistently between the start of both gens. It will say nothing more, and nothing else, and further interpretations should be relative to the general context and state of each generation at the time.
I understand that this could be just a misunderstanding of what GXE represents with some excessive cherrypicking, and I do suppose the rest of the arguments on the post are, while subjective as that's the nature of the definition of "competitiveness", done with more thoroughness. Please avoid making stats say things that they are not really saying just for the sake of your argument, and if you want to bring them out, be sure of doing so with better practices.

* Interestingly enough, a brief overlook of Gen 7 first and last OLTs shows a similar effect. Maybe with OLT VIII's info is completed (it currently only gets to cycle 2), if Top OLT players GXE changes across OLTs show statistical correlation to ladder size at the month of each OLT, it'd be possible to test the "ladder size" hypothesis more cleanly.

 

[gengod]

I really do think we should be discussing Tera Blast ban more, as that feels like the only thing that has a chance to happen as a restriction if more people can voice their support for it.

Not sure why Terablast support gets any traction at all. It doesn't directly solve the combination of problems presented by the mechanic. It's like putting a bandaid on a broken arm...

We should really be framing this discussion on what the frustrations of the mechanic are and if those frustrations themselves are worth taking action on based on tiering policy definition.

The objective frustrations with Tera boil down to the combination of the buffs the mechanic gives to the Pokemon that uses it and the timing around it’s activation which allows for a very low cost/high reward interaction that favors the user. That interaction, while able to be anticipated based on information gathered during play and assumptions made on metagame standards cannot ever truly be fully prepared for either in the team builder or during play due to the number of types a Pokemon can turn into and all of the possible interactions that can cause.

Overall the mechanic has a large amount of variability (that is impossible to be fully prepared for) Can swing games on activation either due to an offensive power boost that stacks with all other boosting methods, or though defensive usage which can result in creating obscure walls that teams might have no preparation for.


To reference the tiering policy’s definitions.

Uncompetitive - elements that reduce the effect of player choice / interaction on the end result to an extreme degree, such that "more skillful play" is almost always rendered irrelevant.

Broken - elements that are too good relative to the rest of the metagame such that "more skillful play" is almost always rendered irrelevant.

Unhealthy - elements that are neither uncompetitive nor broken yet are deemed undesirable for the metagame such that they inhibit "skillful play" to a large extent.

Elements of uncompetitive, broken and unhealthy are certainly within the scope of Tera. It can be argued that Tera itself doesn’t inhibit skillful play or enhances it but I’d it should be kept in mind adding any new element to a game will always inherently add some new level of skill required for it’s interaction. However, a low risk action with high reward will always create inconsistencies across skill tiers.

 

[Srn]

Hi hi, Randbats main here, not gonna comment on Smogon official formats policy, and much less will attempt to discuss competitiveness arguments on a format I don't play.
What I do want to address is one of the multiple arguments Srn brought up, mainly because it's mathematically wrong, and I would hate for anyone else to use them on a PR ever again. Not out of spite to Srn, but oh boy people love their precedents on PRs.



Basically, comparing GXE between different samples of players and calling it evidence of variance in a format is absolutely wrong, for the following reasons:
1. Comparing different ladder sizes
2. Comparing different number of games played

Let's check them out, shall we:

1. Comparing different ladder sizes. Top ladderers' GXE varies with ladder size, similarly to what happens with ELO, the more people play games on a ladder, the top GXE inflates. You can think of it this way: GXE is designed to reflect the probability of winning against a random (1500 RD 350 Glicko) player of that ladder, therefore, the higher the ELO/Glicko ceiling becomes, there are more chances for a top player to beat a random player and therefore high ladder GXE increases.
How is this related to your example? Well, that's quite simple: OLT IX happened at the end of SS, with a ladder that has had time to grow from over 3 years, which can't really be compared with the generally new-ish SV ladder size. This "GXE inflation effect" can even be seen between the SS OLTs! You picked the last OLT of Gen 8 and compared it to the new Gen 9 ladder that didn't even had its first OLT, but what happened on the first OLT held during SS?

Mean GXE per OLTxCycle	OLT VII (2020)	OLT IX (2022)
Cycle 1	85.25%	88.6%
Cycle 2	84.53%	87.61%
Cycle 3	84.39%	87.1%
Cycle 4	84.99%	86.79%

But hey Irpa, if mean top GXE reflects balance of a format, wouldn't it be expected for it to be higher the older a Gen is, since Gens get hypothetically more balanced across time? Well, my answer to that is: maybe! But what I am arguing here is that you can't compare early and late Gen GXEs and accuse Tera for making the early gen one lower; because it seems to be common to other gens, and could simply come from purely mathematical effects.
You can't point to this difference as a proof of heavy unbalancing, much less at the start of a Generation and by no means by comparing ladders of different sizes*.

Thanks for responding!
I'd like to ask though, how are you measuring ladder size? Are you just looking at how high the top elo is? If so, yes, OLT will inflate ladder size and unfortunately I don't have access (that I know of?) to any old SS ladder data besides old OLT stuff. If you could point me in the direction of resources to help me make a better comparison, that'd be great. Otherwise, I intend to update my post with OLT stats when it happens.

As far as "different number of games played" is considered, I'm using the ladder stats here for SS ladder during OLT, which shows 1693902 games and here the most current SV ladder stats we have, 1999363. Immediately you can tell that the SV ladder has more games now than an OLT inflated SS ladder did. I disagree with the idea that it's unfair to compare "A ladder that has had 3 years to grow" to the current one, because the ladder at the time in question was actually smaller than ours is now. So if anything, SV OU gxe should be higher if all things are even. But despite having a significantly bigger number of games played, and following your logic that leads to a more inflated top gxe, the gxe's are still much lower.

To address the "GXEs are increasing as the gen develops" idea, a lot of balancing to the tier happened between 2020 and 2022. You can't establish a causative relationship between GXE going up and meta developing, because bans and DLCs change the meta. Is gxe increasing because the meta is improving, or is it because people have had time to adjust to the meta? Probably both, but how much of which? I think that gxe will not catch up to SS levels if the meta remains as is, but I can't provide concrete evidence to support that unfortunately.

2. Comparing alts with different number of games played.

Let me correct you and say that "but" should be "and".
This one is quite more straightforward but less mathematical, Srn kinda addressed it, and I'm sure that anyone that attempted to get suspect reqs will catch on it swiftly enough. Comparing OLT GXEs against raw ladder GXEs is a very poor practice because of the nature of how both types of accounts are used.
Basically, we have never considered GXE to be apt to measure quality by its own without adding number of games as context (source). GXE is more volatile on players with fewer games. OLT is played on alts, so you will have ABR (or any player with quality for being on top) sweeping through 80% of the ladder and likely getting a overinflated GXE as they beat most players for around ~150 games but Glicko deviation is still high. Regular laddering users will in general be more sloppy with forfeits and bad plays, as they usually will not be competing from the start of the account for getting the highest ELO possible, and they will have a lower deviation that will more accurately adjust to a realistic (and lower) GXE.
While the OLT IX Top players had around 150 games played, a quick overview of the alts you posted on ladder show a good bunch having well over 300, 500, and even 900 battles in Gen 9 OU. Sadly, W/L resetting is quite detrimental to try a mathematical counterexample, but I believe this one is intuitive enough to repeat: don't compare mean GXE with very different games played (unless the number of games is big enough that deviation is trivial).

This is all correct and I'd love to update the post with OLT stats, I just wanted to get my post out with the best data available and as you say, I addressed the faults in the comparison up front.

As a corollary, please be aware that GXE can potentially reflect if a ladder prompts their players to lose more battles than other ones (see for example the very balanced Gen 9 Rands having top GXEs around 89, while Hackmons Cup's are roughly at 78%), but variance within a format is only one of multiple variables affecting mean top GXE, namely having number of games played, number of players in the ladder, raw interest and seriousness on which most players use the ladder, etc.
So while arguments about GXE reflecting variance could (and should) still be held, they should be taken as very raw and incomplete indicators, so pointing at Tera as the main culprit of the current GXE of the top SV ladderers on the basis that it's very different from last year's Top 24 OLT players is like comparing apples with transistors, as they played on another Generation, on another stage of said Generation, on a bigger ladder, in less matches, and with different backgrounds, intentions, and care for their alt.

This is all fair, which is why I did not leave this argument as the only one in Part 2. While the comparison is not perfect, I still believe some data is better than none to build your arguments off of.

A well put comparison between these numbers and OLT VII ones could reflect better the difficulty of winning consistently between the start of both gens. It will say nothing more, and nothing else, and further interpretations should be relative to the general context and state of each generation at the time.
I understand that this could be just a misunderstanding of what GXE represents with some excessive cherrypicking, and I do suppose the rest of the arguments on the post are, while subjective as that's the nature of the definition of "competitiveness", done with more thoroughness. Please avoid making stats say things that they are not really saying just for the sake of your argument, and if you want to bring them out, be sure of doing so with better practices.

* Interestingly enough, a brief overlook of Gen 7 first and last OLTs shows a similar effect. Maybe with OLT VIII's info is completed (it currently only gets to cycle 2), if Top OLT players GXE changes across OLTs show statistical correlation to ladder size at the month of each OLT, it'd be possible to test the "ladder size" hypothesis more cleanly.

Yup I hear ya loud and clear, and I can compare OLT VII stats to OLT X stats when they are available. I get that comparing the most up to date data of both ladders isn't necessarily giving the best comparison, and that the comparison isn't going to be perfect either way. I mostly wanted to get that post out before a tera suspect because a lot of weird opinions like "let's exclude options I don't like from the suspect" are being thrown around and needed to be addressed.

 

[Irpachuza]

As far as "different number of games played" is considered, I'm using the ladder stats here for SS ladder during OLT, which shows 1693902 games and here the most current SV ladder stats we have, 1999363. Immediately you can tell that the SV ladder has more games now than an OLT inflated SS ladder did. I disagree with the idea that it's unfair to compare "A ladder that has had 3 years to grow" to the current one, because the ladder at the time in question was actually smaller than ours is now. So if anything, SV OU gxe should be higher if all things are even. But despite having a significantly bigger number of games played, and following your logic that leads to a more inflated top gxe, the gxe's are still much lower

Those numbers are monthly games. Ladders grow continuously across the months. When I say number of games played I mean historically, not monthly, and clearly the three years old SS OU ladder has significantly more matches played than the 8 months SV one.

Probably further discussion on nuances of my brief correction shouldn't take more space of this discussion, as even you reckon that this wasn't the main argument of your posts, so feel free to reach me on Smogon DMs if you are interested on expanding on them further. That way we can let the very important flow of the thread to move on answering your other arguments, or bringing any other more relevant topics regarding Tera and the present and future of SV.

 

[TPP]

Personally I am in favor of seeing how a Tera Blast Ban plays out and believe it to be a favorable option at this point in time. The way I see it is that:

1. A strong majority of the player base wants to maintain the Tera mechanic.
2. A solid amount of the player base wants some type of change for the tier and currently do not find it enjoyable.
3. After seeing Tera not only in OU but every tier, it is accurate to say that games can be won/lost by the player depending on how players utilize the Tera mechanic. By this I mean, the player that executes their Tera better than the opposing player is more likely to have a higher chance at winning, and I count this as skill or in-game performance.
4. There is a high amount of variance and creativity with Tera types both offensively and defensively, and this easily leads to frustration and several offensive threats becoming extremely difficult to consistently handle.
5. Tera Blast can allow some Pokemon to easily overcome opposing Pokemon that would normally counter them (Tera Ground Iron Moth / Volcarona 1HKO'ing Heatran is an example).

I think in terms of balance, straight up banning Tera is technically the best option (banning anything that causes high variance would lead to a more balanced state), but I believe that it's also possible to accept it as an added layer to the game and play a competitive generation with it. It's like having to deal with Hidden Power + Z moves + Protean/Ash Greninja + Zard-X/Y in SM to me, where you have to find ways to manage them, or be prepared to outplay/scout something if the situation calls for it. Sometimes the opponent gets you and sometimes you outplay and end up avoiding a loss. Either way, they're all accepted parts of that generation and higher level play is actively used to overcome them, and the same has been done several times this generation as well. There's plenty of games between SPL and WCOP where people have won games off of scouting for Tera, or revealing a good defensive Tera-type to handle a threat, like Fire-type Kingambit being a Volcarona answer in SPL. I think the practices of deciding how to use your Tera, picking your Tera-types ahead of time in the builder, and executing an optimal terastilization will reward the better player more times than it won't, and that sounds competitive to me.

As for why I would vote for a Tera Blast restriction over the other options:

1. You remove a decent amount of offensive variance, which currently allows any pokemon to beat any counters
2. You retain defensive Tera in the tier, which I think is important in being able allow your team flexibility to handle any threats
3. You restrict the mechanic in a minimal way that does not negatively impact it as a whole (team preview does this a little bit which I'll get into later).

For the first point, it's as simple as me wanting to not have to think twice about going Heatran on a Volcarona. I think just being able to do that alone would be a huge beneficial change. Defensive mons benefit a lot from this because there is a much higher chance of them being able to handle mons that they're supposed to handle. There will still be situations like Fairy/Flying Kingambit vs Great Tusk, but at least there's no way you immediately lose your Great Tusk in 1 hit, and you have room to come up with a strategy to handle that Kingambit as best you can.

The second point, I think it's beneficial in the teambuilder to be able to decide how you want to make your team flexible in order handle as many threats as you can. No team is perfect and there will always be something that might just 6-0 you, but defensive Tera lets you cut down that number significantly. I think it's extra important at this point in time because of the low number of available pokemon. As we get more pokemon from DLC, things will change, but just as an example, OU barely has any Steel-types and barely any Ground immunities. The new additions from Pokemon Home have been helpful with this, but I think it's still not enough personally, and that Tera is something that helps us with this problem.

Last point would be related to team preview as a restriction, which I did vote for in the previous test. I think I'd have to see this one in practice to properly evaluate it, so I'm not really against it, but I do think that it cuts into the creativity aspect of building a good amount. The other thing would be that this is the more drastic of the 2 restrictions and would actively have a strong impact on every game, which if that's the goal, then I think a full ban would be more correct, but that's just me.

A Tera Blast ban is a slight band-aid to the big situation that is the Tera mechanic, but I think it might be good enough while having the least minimal negative impact. It helps strengthen the fundamental of Pokemon being able to counter Pokemon they're supposed to counter, and I think that alone is a significant benefit to balancing the tier. It won't be perfect, but it doesn't have to be, because this game rewards creativity and execution, and a tier with Tera without Tera Blast can still accomplish those things. People want change but not necessarily a drastic change, and I think this is the best option that satisfies both parties at this point in time.

My preferred voting order would be:

1. Tera Blast
2. Full Ban
3. Team Preview
4. No Change

 

[Pinkacross]

I'm not going to try and get into all of the talk about whether GXE data and ladder analysis is an effective measure of metagame health. However, I would like to talk a about one argument regarding how Tera affects teambuilding. I'm not making any statements as to whether Tera is better or worse for the tier, although at the moment I'm certainly leaning toward a Tera ban.

"Tera restrictions / ban would make teambuilding boring."

In the sense of having fewer options with the current pokemon in the tier, this is absolutely true. However, a tera ban would also free up lower tier pokemon to use. Lower tier pokemon typically perform best in stable, developed generations where significant unpredictability is low. For example, many teams in generation 8 could afford to run lower tier pokemon without giving up consistency. Unpredictability in teams, which tera undeniably increases, is an enemy to nearly all lower tier pokemon. This is mostly for one reason: having lower stats (which many lower tier pokemon do) makes using a pokemon significantly less forgiving when faced with unexpected situations such as odd sets, critical hits, hax, and most of all, Tera. It is true that Tera leaving would ruin a lot of sets currently run in OU, but the metagame would be more diverse in pokemon. I'm not sure if this data exists, but I believe the percentage of teams in high ladder comprised of OU pokemon would be quite alarming. If anyone claims that this is a bad argument because lower tier pokemon shouldn't be considered in OU, I would like to remind them that Smogon tiers are based on usage, not viability. The presence of lower tier pokemon in OU has been a major and wonderful part of previous generations, and I would like to see it again.

 

[Ctann]

TL;DR: with each Pokémon banned, Tera is becoming less polarising and more popular. This is likely to continue, at the cost of banning some Pokémon.

-


I genuinely feel if/when kingambit is banned, people’s main gripes with Tera should shift substantially.

it seems to be the overbearing receiver of the mechanic. So far the other main threats are bottlenecking into limited “viable” Tera types that make them more easily dealt with.

sure, there is unpredictability with the remaining Tera (ab)users, but you’re trading consistent results for the unpredictability. This is relevant if you want to stay highly ranked.

I am curious to see a post-gambit meta. And whether attitudes to Tera will shift substantially.

as said much earlier in the meta, you’re choosing to keep Tera, but ban about 5+ threats that would otherwise be unbanned, or ban Tera.

currently we are at 3 Pokémon that are very likely over the edge due to Tera, and kingambit is likely the next on the list. After that we might see more of the domino’s falling

with each domino falling, Tera will become less and less of a concern for players. Kingambit is potentially the last of the excessively “obnoxious” Tera abusers. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Tera is inherently popular, much more popular than the contentious pokemon at the fringe of the Ubers/OU border. Tera is more popular than the collective Volcarona/eleki/gambit/espathra that were arguably broken in unrestricted Tera meta.

the more I think of it, the more I’m okay with keeping Tera and just banning more Pokémon to Ubers.

 

[Vert]

Hello OU,

My stances on tera have not changed over these months, but I'd still like to contribute to the discourse. Strap in because I like to be thorough.

Part 1: Why exactly did we hate Shed Tail?

I first want to recognize the main argument on the opposition (That tera is skillful) and demonstrate why this is not good enough. In order to do this, let me first define what a skillful meta looks like, and then talk about the shed tail meta.

What does a skillful meta look like? A meta where player's decisions matter, where good plays are rewarded, and where bad plays are punished.

That's a pretty broad definition, so let's acknowledge that metas can be not too skillful but technically be "skillful." Prime examples are the ORAS Swagger+t-wave+foul play strats, if OHKO moves/evasion strats were legal, etc. These strats leave the outcomes purely to chance and player's decisions do matter, but much less than they do in the current meta. It's not technically "skill less," but let's call it that anyway as a point of reference.

People often have a kneejerk reaction to calling playstyles they don't like "skill less." Stall haters will call stall skill less, HO haters will call HO skill less, and shed tail haters will call shed tail skill less. Of course, we know none of that's true. Stall players know stall requires skill, HO players know HO requires skill, and even shed tail players knew that shed tail required skill. Much more skill than swagplay, evasion, etc. Readers may not be convinced, so let's take a look at OST finals.

Shed tail makes an appearance in every game, but it loses 2/3 games. Let's look at the one game that the shed tail user wins, and see if there's anything stellar flares could've done differently: game 3. If the great tusk was taunt or hydreigon was flamethrower, SF could've used it to kill glimmora rather than using pex, and thus not give orthworm an opportunity to shed tail. Seeing as tusk didn't taunt on turn 15 however, it wasn't taunt. Therefore on turn 14, rather than rapid spinning SF could've predicted the orthworm and gone into cinderace to prevent shed tail again. If neither tusk was taunt nor hydreigon was flame, this simply seems like a poorly built team for a shed tail meta! Regardless, the player's decisions mattered at every point in this game. This was a skillful meta.

So even in the only game where the shed tail user wins, there were perfectly reasonable and skillful avenues to prevent shed tail from happening. You could also argue that this meta had a high skill ceiling. SF did after all get very punished for their misplays in a shed tail meta, which seems to be a good thing? It's not like shed tail is an autowin button or anything, Vert adapted to the meta in game 2 by bringing red card corv and taunt tusk and won vs shed tail as a result! He was rewarded for having metagame knowledge and creative teambuilding, and shouldn't those kinds of things be rewarded? Vert also won 2-0 in semifinals, 2-1 in quarters, 2-0 in round 8, 2-1 in round 7, 2-0 in round 6, 2-0 in round 5, 2-1 in round 4, 2-0 in round 3...you get the idea. No doubt vert had like ~3 ladder alts in top 100 at the time as well. Clearly, consistent success was possible in a shed tail meta.

Old gen gods like M dragon and ojama couldn't just be passed teams and succeed either! They made it to round 6 but were knocked out by round 8. Perhaps shed tail was rewarding the metagame knowledge of current and active players?

I'll go one step further: let's quote Nat's first paragraph of their post and just replace "tera" with "shed tail" and see how it sounds:

(I won't tag them or directly quote anybody because they've stated they'd just like to state their piece and move on, not go back and forth) This reads perfectly well and makes complete sense, every argument defending shed tail just made is something I've backed up with evidence.

The main statement of the next paragraph is this:

Was success possible with any team style in a shed tail meta? In the finals alone we saw balance, sun, non shed tail HO and shed tail HO brought to one of the most important tournament matches on the website. Stall was also very viable at this time, so I think we can safely say a variety of team styles were viable during the shed tail meta too.

Let's quote ABR now from here

Yup, still true in a shed tail meta

NJNP? here

Yup, checks out

The tera skill gap? More like the shed tail skill gap. Players who were unprepared for and inexperienced with shed tail did much worse than those who were prepared+experienced, much like players who are unprepared+inexperienced with tera do much worse than those who are prepared+experienced.

I'll dig up an old vert post too:

Shed tail sure did punish misplays and force a perfect game! Great, right?!

You think the player using shed tail had an advantage over the player that wasn't? Shed tail lost more often than it won in OST finals! Clearly Cope+Skill issue+try adapting+try teambuilding+skill gap issue+did you try adapting?

But let's come back to reality: Shed tail was quickbanned with overwhelming popular support. But why didn't people like the shed tail meta, even though it was promoting a skillful tier, had consistent top players, rewarded creative teambuilding and metagame knowledge, and had a variety of viable teamstyles? The Shed tail meta was perfectly competitive and skill expressive!

This might be a bitter pill to swallow but...None of that guarantees a healthy, stable, fun meta. None of that is good enough.

What about the parts I'm skipping over? The depth of tera, the uniqueness, the timing etc are things I've already addressed but will be addressed now and again later as they don't translate in the shed tail comparison. Idt tera is that deep or fun, I don't care that its unique (shed tail is also unique and exclusive to gen9 :O), and the timing of tera is annoying but w/e.

So why was shed tail banned? Perhaps the announcement can clue us in:
"This move is providing not only a free entry to a Pokemon but potentially multiple free turns and so a 'wrong' turn can set you back heavily."
The thing is...tera also can give potentially multiple free turns, and a wrong turn can also set back your opponent heavily.

"In current SV play we see Shed Tail paired with abusers such as Iron Valiant (Calm Mind & SD), Roaring Moon (DD Taunt, DD Roost, DD 3 Atk), Iron Moth (Spa Booster & Speed Booster), Kingambit, Volcarona (Quiver Dance 3 Atk & Bulky Quiver Dance) & many more. Giving such potent sweepers a free turn it is not a surprise how Shed Tail has become such a centralizing move."
Tera is also giving these potent sweepers a free turn, and also new coverage or strengthening existing coverage.

"Some view phasing options such as Red Card & Whirlwind/Roar as a fair countermeasure to Shed Tail. The main issue with those options are they can’t be consistent and they aren’t a sure thing."
Some view a defensive tera in response as a fair countermeasure to your opponent's tera...But that's not consistent either, is it? Don't people still view defensive tera's as a valid adaptation?

"a proper Shed Tail mitigates many risks for your preferred win condition. There is limited counterplay and constrained methods to outplay a free Substitute for the player using Shed Tail."
A proper tera also mitigates many risks for your preferred win con. There is limited counterplay and constrained methods to outplay a wide set of dangerous tera sweepers, as listed above.

"The metagame has started to revolve around this singularity, and that has been reflective on the metagame from ladder to tour play that either you use Shed Tail based teams or teams built to outlast Shed Tail and the abusers it compliments."
The metagame also revolves around tera, and you can certainly see that everywhere. Even pro-tera players must acknowledge that the games are majorly decided by who uses their tera better.

Funny enough, the announcement also misses the key issue as to what made Shed tail so unhealthy: HIGH VARIANCE
If they missed this, it's no wonder they took so long to address shed tail.

If orthworm was forced to always shed tail only to kingambit, would it have been a problem? Not anymore problematic than kingambit already is. You can simply switch in your gambit check on orthworm (tusk, encore, dozo, id corv, whatever) and handle the gambit behind a sub the same way you always handle gambit. The sub adds an extra layer of difficulty yes, but the opponent is using an entire pokemon and a free turn and half its HP to allow this. Seems like a fair tradeoff.

The problem is that when you play incorrectly and give orthworm a single free turn, it can pass a free sub to 4 different pokemon, each of which can terastallize into at least 3 viable tera types and easily snowball out of control. There were too many possibilities to account for, too many ways you could get punished for a single misplay. All of this forces you to push long term planning to the side and hyperfocus on preventing any single threat from snowballing: don't let that orthworm get a free turn. If you do, you lose on the spot.

All of the following is also true in a tera meta, but to a lesser extent. There are too many possibilities to account for on key turns, too many threats to handle in the teambuilder, and wrong turns are too punishing. Ultimately, all the biggest arguments defending tera can also be used to defend shed tail, and the all the reasons why shed tail was unhealthy also describe why tera is unhealthy. Everything that was wrong with the shed tail meta is still wrong with the current meta, although to a lesser extent. You must lower variance for a healthy, stable meta

terrible analogy. this is the sun i used in finals and i barely got away with my life despite the techs and dogshit roaring moon set. my opponent stellar flares brought skeledirge / ting-lu / infiltrator dragapult in game 1 and he still would've lost if my iron moth got the special attack boost turn 26. also claiming stellar flares brought a "poorly built team for a shed tail meta" game 3 is very disrespectful. that was one of the best pre-home teams built by Giannis, crying, & Raptor and it was both perfectly equipped and specifically made for shed tail with encore scream tail, cinderace, and unaware protect dondozo, but according to you the great tusk and hydreigon needed to be taunt and flamethrower too. talk about overkill. you must be the greatest teambuilder alive if 3 top players combined can't stick a solid 6 that consistently wins vs shed tail, even when they actively try to counter-team it. i've yet to see any tera user demand this level of precision, including kingambit. at least great tusk + will-o-wisp / encore 'mon will suffice vs that shit. shed tail however you need to stack multiple answers & techs and you would still lose or barely win games.

there's a reason baton pass is banned. shed tail might take some skill, but it's still blatantly overpowered and uncompetitive, hence the 4+ survey rating. i can't use these words to describe tera though. this wasn't even given a scaled survey vote by the way. it was an option between "action" and "no action," the latter which can be divided into subcategories such as full ban, team preview, tera blast ban,... not sure why you claim we're a vocal minority when full ban barely got support last test and how ambiguous aforementioned survey data is. maybe if it was so overpowered and uncompetitive it would've been banned last suspect test? food for thought.

also when players in this thread bring up "skill issue" they are not saying you're dogshit because you want tera banned. it once again comes down to those two words; we believe it's a neither overpowered nor uncompetitive element worth banning because it's skill-expressive in its current state. the screenshots you posted trying to expose CTC are especially egregious. BigFatMantis already explained why

context you conveniently left out

tl;dr
CTC is saying tera is fine to keep in the game since both players have access to the same tool and is skill-expressive as the player who uses it better wins. the same cannot be said for shed tail as that would mean loading orthworm every game. CTC also believes tera rewards teambuilding. finally he argued that the metagame is not as volatile as the pro-ban side has been making it out to be.

But I've already shown this argument is meaningless. The best, consistent players are always the best and consistent. They were during the shed tail meta, and they were even during dynamax meta. This does not prove that meta variance is low, and does not prove the meta is healthy. All it proves is that people adapt to the meta, no matter how good or bad it is.
So what kind of evidence can show that meta variance is high?

apparently everything we say is a rhetorical fallacy to you. by your logic i'd assume you wouldn't bring up records again but clearly that's not the case when you get to the end. love how you responded to only 1 out of the 8 paragraphs Nat wrote by the way. ironic considering how long your post is.

A) Compare GXE between SV OU and SS OU addressed by Irpachuza
B) Look at one-sided due to MU tournament replays

replays

[EUR] Eeveeto vs. El Quixana [USW] - I'm not sure if specs gholdengo had psyshock or trick for cresselia. If not, El quixana's whole team is blown away by cress. Also a rare case of early tera working out very well.
[CAN] Fc vs. INSULT [USN] - Agility flamethrower booster spa WW just rolls insult's entire HO. FC didn't even need to tera and insult had to risk tera steel on WW to rk. Idk if agility was the right play from insult as once again, everybody has incomplete information on the team, but still very one-sided.
[BEL] Eoward vs. M Dragon [SPA] - A tragic stall goobing, but it's hard to say if M dragon choked vs hatt. On turn 15, maybe 1 cm sufficed to reduce draining kiss healing and stoss shoulda just been spammed at that point? Maybe ting lu should not have been let go? Without amnesia clodsire this kind of thing is kinda hard to stop anyway, so I chalk it up to MU.
[SPA] M Dragon vs. oldspicemike [USM] - This one is not too one-sided in terms of results, but I look at M Dragon's team and think to myself "what is the real gameplan vs garg here?" You have a ting-lu which can whirlwind and set hazards, but if it's not rest it's getting chipped down. You can knock it off, and that's nice. Cress can break through eventually I guess? The tools are arguably technically there but it felt like garg put in 10x more work than it does vs any team prepared for it.
[BEL] B1Kharma vs. DonSalvatore [FRA]- It looks over for DonSalvatore on turn 14 but they manage to clutch with red card glowking. Is this deja vu? I feel like I've seen this tech before...from a "competitive and skillful" meta..
[BEL] B1Kharma vs. xavgb [UK] - Wanna know why xavgb felt so confident in tera ghost gholdengo so early? Bc there was no gambit on the other side aka gholdengo goob city. Super tough MU for b1kharma based on that alone. Garg could be tera water, but what do they do if gholdengo is NP recover with cloak and it tera's ghost/water to tank eq?
[FRA] DonSalvatore vs. xavgb [UK] - This isn't super one-sided but I want you to take note of how much DonSalvatore's team just...gives up vs hazards? Like there's not a shadow of hazard control, no boots spam, it just..gives up lol..
[OCE] Aberforth vs. Ahsan-219 [UK] - Even though the pyro ball miss hurts vs azu, it could have still set up vs corv and 6-0d all the same. Another lopsided MU.
[OCE] Aberforth vs. QWILY [GER] - I love how nothing QWILY did mattered until turn 20 where they got 1 play wrong and proceeded to lose the whole game because of it. That game deciding 50/50 on whether to sucker punch or kowtow is just what a skillful meta looks like man! You may ask "how is tera to blame here?" Aqua jet doesnt kill cress without tera water boost, assuming cress is max defense and azu is adamant.
[UK] Ahsan-219 vs. MANNAT [USM] - Again, what's the plan for garg here? Sack somebody to salt cure so your tera fairy specs (I hope) enamorus or maybe tera dragon pult cb darts can get scouted by protect?
[UK] Ahsan-219 vs. QWILY [GER] - Once again what is the plan for garg here?? From turn 18 to turn 32 QWILY's garg literally is not needing to switch and it's just getting off salt cure chip the whole time. Did I mention garg wasn't even forced to tera? You know this was one-sided when the winner didn't even burn their tera and the loser did.
[USM] Luthier vs. QWILY [GER] - The garg plan was to tera water the glowking..and QWILY may have only avoided a full sweep because kingambit got a crit.
[USM] Kyo vs. RaJ.Shoot [IND] - Sneezed. I know dire claw sleep cheesed tusk, but ask yourself what happens if sneasler was tera flying acro. Only way to avoid a 6-0 may be tera steel zapdos and outplay but damn are the margins tight for that.
[USM] Kyo vs. Attribute [USW] - Tera cheese'd. Please lmk in the replies how Kyo was supposed to use their skill, metagame knowledge, and experience to preserve heatran in case of a dd tera blast steel dragapult and instead sack their garg+save their tera. Do you think attribute's team will work a second time or ever see major tour use again? This is what I call an inconsistent MU fish, one which Kyo could not have seen coming, which makes the meta feel very volatile and unhealthy.
[USS] Ox the Fox vs. Ruft [EUR] - It's not everyday a team looks weak to BU Ice spinner tusk, but here it is. I felt like the game sort of ended on turn 29 when ox's pult died. After that it was just making sure the dnite wasn't hurricane and saving tusk for the last 2.
[USS] crying vs. Vert [USW] - It's not everyday u see TR vs delphox and tinkaton lmao. Both of these teams seem quite fringe & inconsistent to me but it's also cool so I just wanted to highlight it here. Ursaluna mopped up tho sheesh.
[BAN] SKC44 vs. Vert [USW] - Scizor just rekt Vert's HO after Walking Wake took any damage.
[LAT] Fakee vs. March Fires [OCE] - Gargled
[LAT] Fakee vs. So Noisy [IND] - It was looking like a hydreigon 6-0 but fakee choked on turn 14 and it got knocked off. Still, game never felt too out of fakee's control.
[USN] Star vs. Yelodash [UK] - subcm enamorus put tons of pressure on glowking and moltres, and once moltres died, sub id zama just cleaned up. Not sure how else yelodash was supposed to respond.
[USN] Star vs. Mashing [LAT] - this didn't look like it would be one-sided on preview but keeping up rocks vs tusk/ace for the enamorus/cb dnite meant that moltres posed such a threat, molt+ghold just kept Mashing stunlocked from turns 14-25 until glowking/ace were too weakened to stop ival's rampage lategame.
[GER] xdRudi.exe vs. Yelodash [UK] - Gholdengo connected one focus blast on gambit and then hatt just did the rest.
[SPA] Javi vs. Leftiez [FRA] - Leftiez seems overwhelmed by hazards but tera blast fairy gambit just won on preview, Javi never had anything for it.
[SPA] Ado vs. Vaboh [USW] - Ado actually prepares for garg and is able to easily handle it, who knew? Cloak ghold just outlasts its answers and wins.
[GER] Ewin vs. Vaboh [USW] - Ewin's blissey gets overwhelmed by a Walking Wake and its joever.
[EUR] Kushalos vs. myjava [IND] - Gargled again. Didn't even need to tera water as alo caught the volcanion with mirror coat, but assuming it was tera water, garg just does its thing.
[USM] avarice vs. watashi [CAN] - The tera water garg is stopped by none other than the hero brute bonnet and its supporting cast (sun mu W)
[USW] velvet vs. sunsets [CAN] - balance sucks lol
[BEL] AtraX Madara vs. RggV [LAT] - No SD Kingambit/NP gholdengo or other very specific cress counterplay? Cress 6-0.
[USN] blunder vs. Rubyblood [BEL] - Teams with flimsy water resists like pult/hsamu are inherently at a disadvantage vs Specs WW. As a result, WW makes too many holes and speed booster tusk cleans up.
[OCE] DugZa vs. Rubyblood [BEL] - Ival was barely a zamazenta check as is without moonblast. Zama didn't even need to tera and it cleaned up shop quite early.
[BEL] Rubyblood vs. Scarlet Stars [CAN] - Hard to contain the cm ival if it decides to tera, and Scarlet Stars unfortunately tera steels the hsamu expecting moonblast but gets popped by aura sphere.
[GER] mind gaming vs. Punny [ITA] - SD LO Tera Dragon Bax just showing us all why its busted. Balance sucks :/
[LAT] dahli vs. Fairy Peak [FRA] - Fairy Peak's offense just seemed to lack the tools to really challenge heavy slam tinglu+zapdos, and the stone edge miss from lando-t certainly didn't help.
[FRA] Fairy Peak vs. MichaelderBeste2 [GER] - Sneezed...
[FRA] Fairy Peak vs. Skypenguin [CAN] - Gren pushes through amoongus, and from there the lack of water resists becomes apparent.
[BAN] Feen vs. MSnt [BEL] - Garg plan was to bd in front of it with azu? Gargled bro.
[OCE] etern vs. McMeghan [EUR] - Nobody expects the stall...but the stall prep was lacking.
[USW] Fusien vs. njnp [USS] - Fusien runs a fairly oppressive hstack and njnp's BO just can't keep up.
[ITA] Niko vs. Piyush25 [IND] - Piyush25 plays the heatran a tad impatiently (rocks on turn 12 into taunt? no scouting pjab/sludge bomb on turn 16?) but ultimately it claims 2 kills and that is enough to open the stall up to some volturn action and pult.
[ITA] Niko vs. Tace [USM] - Insane mew set goes on a rampage and sneasler cleans up
[USM] FatFighter2 vs. Trogba Trogba [UK] - HO team just cannot get past 1 wisp moltres, rip.
[BAN] Kaif vs. mimilimi [FRA] - one dbond to surprise a skeledirge and then tera water hatt just 6-0s
[FRA] mimilimi vs. Trogba Trogba [UK] - ursaluna tore open a balance team
[CAN] 3d vs. ayevon [USM] -3d had nothing for the Lando-T and team kinda just died.
[FRA] Carkoala vs. kythr [USM] - Once dd wisp pult forced the gambit to get burned, the cm tera water hatt just swept.
[USM] kythr vs. PikachuZappyZap [USW] - The sub 3 attacks lando harasses BO again, and only a clunky scarf enamorus can really force it out, which is easily taken advantage of by glowking.
[IND] Floss vs. Joeshh [UK] - 3 attacks SD ival just 6-0s lol
[IND] Floss vs. Samqian [USS] - Zapdos volt switch on glowking into CB pult just wore down the gambit and the opposition crumbled. Turn 1 tera to goob enamorus worked out really strongly.
[UK] Joeshh vs. aesf [USS] - The sub cm ep tera blast fairy lando-t...6-0'd
[OCE] false vs. Igniizard [BAN] - The dkiss/cm/taunt/ep enam-t sauced up the whole team, sick set but got lucky with no sludge bomb poison

Round 1 Tiebreakers

freezai vs Yelodash - Gmolt just 6-0s, disgusting mon with tera
Nat vs SKC44 - This is the difference between a team that is ready to win a hazard war and one that just hopes it wins. With max layers on both sides, the team that is built better ends up much farther on top.

Round 2

Lily vs Yelodash - This one might seem close, but lily is in control bc yelodash has no real garg plan
Vaboh vs ninjadog - This wonky ass pult set put in way more work than it had any right to, but why didn't ninjadog just go into ival after pult picked up surprise kills vs tusk and garg? The rotom-w died for no reason, but this was one wack MU regardless
El Quixana vs Drifting - hazards went up vs rain with no removal and all its progress just got boxed out, gren+bascu didn't get the ball rolling and the supporting cast fell apart.
mushamu vs Chloe - SD tera dragon bax just 6-0s. Silly mon.
Dasmer vs dice - Interesting battle where dice's gambit made little progress but Dasmer's did.
Reze vs MANNAT - Roaring moon put in stupid work and enamorus just cleaned up from there
Shafofficiel vs MichaelderBeste2 - So it turns out tera+qd is pretty goofy stuff

Once again, you can disagree with my subjective analysis of these replays and what I conclude as "one-sided due to MU." But doing some quick maths, 51/234 matches felt one-sided due to MU, 21.7%. Does that seem like a healthy number to you? 1/5 of the time you're just fucked? I think we need to take this number seriously and try to get it lower.

C) Try building balance

replays

-Eeveeto tries here but the team falls apart because NP gholdengo is incredibly toxic to any slower team. It's telling that stall has to resort to horseshit like calm mind blissey and amnesia unaware clodsire because it can't rely on passive damage vs good as gold and it can't even rely on attacks due to defensive tera.
-Eeveeto tries again here but it crumbles to sd stone edge landot+band tera fight zama.
-Aurella here uses haze pex+id corv (with torn-t, ting lu, tusk, bax) to try and hold off the opposition but it does not work. Team simply crumbles to basic pressure from set up mons, not even wallbreakers.
-Ahsan-219 here brings pex+bu corv (with pult, tusk, iron hands, cinderace) but the team struggles a ton with garg and cb iron hands just never makes enough progress.
-Lax here uses the power of tera ghost rest ting-lu to get and keep up max layers, finally a balance W which meaningfully deviates from the balance template I outlined earlier.
-Attribute here manages to win with rotom-w/ting lu/dozo/amuk/moltres/tusk, an ever so slight deviation from my balance template with amuk>glowking. It was looking a kinda dicey around turn 25, if bax was the LO Glaive rush SD set then dondozo was getting melted and the game might've swung the other way.
-Blimax here brings pex+corv+blissey+hippo+torn-t+skeledirge, I'm on the fence to consider this semistall but I'll be lenient and call it balance. The opponent's offensive pressure is sort of all over the place, with acid spray glowking struggling to accomplish much, specs WW left to wallbreak on its own, and SD gambit on its own as well. Still, a balance W that deviates from my template is what it is.
-pj here brings dozo+pex but then standard tusk/gambit/pult with an enamorus-t mixed in. This looks more like an HO cteam than a real team tbh, momentum sinks like dozo/pex make no sense with no pivots to bring in teammates like pult (unless you're certain your opponent is bringing HO) I'm not certain why this team was brought but hey not counting this one.
-TPP here brings ting lu/pex/corv/torn-t/bax/tusk which does lose but an unfortunate focus blast miss means that I'm not sure if this was a balance L or hax L. Both sides probably had a shot but results are results.
-SKC44 here wins with balance and deviates from my template but tbh I am not too impressed by the team choices or plays of the opponent (keeping kingambit in on turn 35? Gengar in general???) it's a balance W but reluctant to give it.
-Vert here brings scream tail/zapdos/garg/tusk/ace/hoopa which i'd call balance and breaks my mold, but wins primarily due to hax. Who knows if the team could've weathered specs enamorus tera fairy moonblasts, idk either way not counting this as a balance W.
-Fakee here brings the same 6 as above and wins, but I hesitate to say balance W bc it was more of a solo garg W.
-So Noisy here brings zapdos/dondozo/tusk/glowking/heatran/bax and loses. Notably they deviated from my balance template by lacking ting-lu, and as a result they were super weak to hydreigon which probably 6-0d had fakee not choked on turn 14.
-Leftiez here brings corv pex gren gambit zapdos ting lu but tera blast fairy gambit won on preview, this is a gambit W hardly a balance W imo.
-Ewin here brings Blissey/alo/av torn-t/corv/dondozo/sd protect ursaluna??? and gets throttled by WW under sun
-1 True Lycan here brings corv/pex/torn-t/bax/ting-lu/tusk and after a close shave with hatt, barely is able to win.
-myjava here brings dondozo/roaring moon/enamorus/glowking/heatran/tusk which could arguably be called balance? it loses to future sight pressure after the jaw lock roaring moon doesn't work.
-Kushalos here brings alo/garg/gholdengo/lando-t/cinderace/meowscarada and garg does most of the heavy lifting here. Alo is the only really passive mon but I'll give it to em and call it balance, but Tera water garg got the W the team was just chilling.
-Lily here brings the same scream tail/zapdos/garg/tusk/ace/hoopa balance vert and fakee brought, but unlike them narrowly loses.
-Lily here brings slither wing/toxapex/lando-t/hoopa/hsamu/kingambit and wins by the skin of her teeth. Balance W just barely.
-Shiloh here brings the scream tail+hoopa balance I've mentioned 3 times, solid W. Turning point was catching the tera fairy enamorus though, until that point shiloh seemed to be on the back foot.
-Velvet here brings pex/corv/ting lu/torn-t/tusk/bax balance and gets 6-0d, plain and simple. No overwhelming breaker or super dedicated anti-fat plan just one smack down lando-t and an ival with some coverage+tera is enough.
-rggv here gzap/ival/clod/corv/ace/bax and gets 6-0d by cresselia.
-rggv here brings the same (?) team and loses again :[
-ninjadog here brings the scream tail+hoopa balance, 5th time showing up, narrow W.
-Finchinator here brings corv/pex/zama/tusk/garg/tinglu and gets a narrow W.
-Punny here brings that corv/pex/torn-t/bax/tinglu/tusk team we've seen many times and claims a solid W
-Punny here brings donzo/corv/pex/garg/tusk/cinderace and tera dragon SD LO bax tears a gaping hole, and there's no coming back
-Skypenguin here brings amuk/garg/scream tail/lando-t/pult/ace but the bax answer gets crit by bax and its joever
-DJ Breloominati here brings dozo/ting lu/tusk/rotom-wash/amuk/moltres (slight deviation from my template with amuk>glowking) and weathers a tera dragon CB bax assault to clutch the W. Key was turn 27 when they made the hard read to stay in with tusk and knock off Bax's CB.
-Ciro Napoli here brought pult/zapdos/tinglu/toxapex/bax/kingambit and lost.
-Xrn here brings scream tail/dondozo/cinderace/great tusk/kingambit/dragonite and loses barely
-Nat here brings dondozo/amuk/rotom/tusk/moltres/tinglu and wins, muk especially puts in a ton of work.
-Nat here brings dondozo/tinglu/moltres/tusk/cress/slowking and loses to specs tera fairy enamorus
-Stareal here brings dondozo/pex/corv/garg/lando-t/cinderace and beats Fusien's balance as it melts to garg. Bc this is the first balance vs balance match I've seen (24/32 groups deep...), one must necessarily win and one must lose, which doesn't prove much about the playstyle, so we'll ignore this one. Both teams deviate from my template though.
-Trogba Trogba here brought the scream tail+hoopa u balance and lost to ursaluna breaking open too much
-ayevon here brought my balance template with lando-T as the filler and zapdos as the bird and won. Balance W
-Highvoltag3 here brought enamorus/meow/dondozo/clodsire/corv/glowking and managed to dance around a tera ghost block garg to a W.
-ABR here brought scream tail/moltres/garg/hoopa/glowking/tusk and lost to opposing bu tusk once ival chipped moltres+dbond'd scream tail.
-ABR here brought toxapex/zamazenta/great tusk/garg/tinglu/corv and lost. Volcanion pressured the ting-lu to tera water, and as a result the team became very weak to zapdos.
-false here brought dondozo/amuk/moltres/tinglu/tusk/rotomwash and was going to lose (I'm fairly sure) but won by timeout. Counting this as a balance L, also it only slightly deviates from my template with amuk>glowking.
-Blimax here brings dondozo/tusk/iron moth/bax/hatt/corv, a very strange 6 (balance with no ghost resist?) and loses. Tera dark gambit is real.
-Blunder here brings dondozo/moltres/meow/tinglu/ghold/dnite and u-turns his way to a W
-fade here brings dondozo/moltres/chomp/ghold/tinglu/ival and wins, but gets lucky fighting a hydreigon that definitely could've won instead.
-Highvoltag3 here brings garg/tusk/gambit/dondozo/gren/amoong and wins, but opponent used ursaluna a little weirdly (why no eq on turn 21?) Opponent's team was ultimately quite gambit weak and it lost to it lategame.
-McMeghan here brings the dondozo/moltres/chomp/ghold/tinglu/ival balance we saw fade bring and wins, but who tf signed off on the opponent's team I just wanna talk.
-shiloh here brings tinglu/ghold/torn-t/tusk/dondozo/amuk and loses, I thought waterfall>liquidation but was I mistaken???
-Achimoo here brings scream tail/tusk/sneasler/volcanion/gholdengo/ting lu and loses, specs pelipper+tera blast fairy gambit broke it down.

In a healthy meta, we should see a variety of teamstyles be viable, but also see a variety of successful builds within those specific teamstyles. If you are seeing 100 successful offense builds across hundreds of wcop games and high ladder and only 2 successful balance builds and then try to tell me "look bro balance is doing fine" I'm not biting.

tera blast flipped a lot of these games in extreme, unpredictable ways-- grassy terrain dragapult, tera blast-fire baxcalibur, moltres-g, frosmoth, etc. as i said multiple times i am open to banning that move! not sure how i feel about the 21.7% though. very subjective and tera without tera blast was not a factor in a lot of these other beatdowns.

point (c) is complete bogus. i literally built that scream tail + hoopa-u team w/ shiloh. balance is extremely viable and consistent with options like dondozo, garganacl, ting-lu, gholdengo, zapdos, moltres, etc. along with more creative picks such as cresselia and muk-alola. you claim balance teams here don't often deviate from the norm but this archetype was just as, if not more linear in SS & SM (8 is self-explanatory, m-latias fat in 7).

according to you i only won my game due to hax despite not knowing my team and ignoring the insane value i got those first 10 turns. "it doesn't count" my ass. truly pathetic statement and you dropped similar condescending lines towards other players such as pj claiming his squad was illegitimate. finally saying "this was a garganacl / kingambit W not a balance W" is hilarious. next time a clefable or gliscor carries a game in SS / SM i'ma just say balance is dogshit and that was a clefable or gliscor W instead. other lines like "narrow W" and "would've lost if opponent was X" are funny too. you were just complaining about 1-sided mu's but now you have a problem with close games? make up your mind.

"A full ban would be the most overtly disastrous decision that would kill SV immediately."

Source: my ass.
This is just blatant fearmongering backed with nothing. If you aren't interested in SV without tera, cool. But saying a tera ban would "Kill SV immediately!" lol.

"obviously everyone is entitled to their opinion but personally i believe pro-restriction players are unviable"
or if we want to get more transparent
...
(vert, who called them unviable, is 2-2)

funny how you are pressed i called some people "unviable" despite saying "everyone is entitled to their opinion," but dropped a "source: my ass" on ABR which is 10x more toxic. also ABR is literally right. there are statistics (tour included) that show how dead SS is compared to SM, the latter which kept its core mechanic. in terms of more recent data, SM registered 161905 games last month vs the 79731 SS did. you are right that we shouldn't sacrifice competitiveness for popularity, but no one pro-tera argued tera was uncompetitive to begin with it.

I hear "skill issue" all the time. I put this in the "weak argument" section but it's really just ad-hominem, and not even "the truth hurts" kind! I don't want to speak too much for others, but I know xavgb isn't happy with a tera meta, and they are at least top 3 SV players rn. At the time I am typing this xavgb has the best record in wcop, 5-0 (vert, who called them unviable, is 2-2) (CTC, who called them microbrained, is 0-0). Remember that ladder screenshot I posted up in Part 2A? My man Pinkacross just got back from like a month long vacation and hit #22 on ladder within days of getting back what a goat. He also isn't a fan of the current meta. I can say similar things about Pinecoishot, high ladder hero who doesn't enjoy the tera meta (Nat shouted out my man pineco too). I've heard tons of players from teams uk and canada share the sentiment as well shoutouts BALOOR.

Post elo?

Sure

yes, i went 2-2. i still think the tier is great, tera is dope, and i have a lot of room for improvement! i will reflect on my losses and come back strong :] and bro really said "ad hominem." no one used skill issue as an insult except CTC who still provided actual arguments which you conveniently deleted from your screenshots LMAO

and seriously, where is your spreadsheet record? individuals record? a charity bowl semi-finals appearance? you're claiming that this is a weak argument yet you are the one using it against us. bring up Pinecoishot disliking tera but i owned his ass in OST while you're out here flexing 79% GXE on the ladder. i have an alt that's 91.2% GXE bro. do /rank 82JungKookBTS. i'm also in OU SSNL Finals. why even bring up CTC going 0-0 by the way? despite not playing this year, he's still an amazing builder that cooked numerous influential teams this tournament. more than i can say about you, someone who thinks that iconic scream tail + dondozo team is "poorly built [for shed tail]." i'll happily talk my shit since you have no problem bringing up our sheet records to make your argument look better.

outside of Nat's 12-3 year, let's also ignore the fact blunder, another pro-tera player, went 3-1 (arguably 4-0) but once again expecting you to give unbiased information here is a lost cause. xavgb is the only good sheet player that matters since he aligns with your belief tera should be outright banned. pretty awful post imo, front to back.

 

[Magcargo]

TL;DR: with each Pokémon banned, Tera is becoming less polarising and more popular. This is likely to continue, at the cost of banning some Pokémon.

-


I genuinely feel if/when kingambit is banned, people’s main gripes with Tera should shift substantially.

it seems to be the overbearing receiver of the mechanic. So far the other main threats are bottlenecking into limited “viable” Tera types that make them more easily dealt with.

sure, there is unpredictability with the remaining Tera (ab)users, but you’re trading consistent results for the unpredictability. This is relevant if you want to stay highly ranked.

I am curious to see a post-gambit meta. And whether attitudes to Tera will shift substantially.

as said much earlier in the meta, you’re choosing to keep Tera, but ban about 5+ threats that would otherwise be unbanned, or ban Tera.

currently we are at 3 Pokémon that are very likely over the edge due to Tera, and kingambit is likely the next on the list. After that we might see more of the domino’s falling

with each domino falling, Tera will become less and less of a concern for players. Kingambit is potentially the last of the excessively “obnoxious” Tera abusers. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Tera is inherently popular, much more popular than the contentious pokemon at the fringe of the Ubers/OU border. Tera is more popular than the collective Volcarona/eleki/gambit/espathra that were arguably broken in unrestricted Tera meta.

the more I think of it, the more I’m okay with keeping Tera and just banning more Pokémon to Ubers.

Baxcalibur may be another controversial Pokemon suspected down the line, since its a similarly bulky strong sweeper that drastically benefits from free potential setup that Tera can provide. Might even be scarier than Kingambit in some positions since its Speed is higher + it has reliable priority.

I think a potential Kingambit ban would drastically shift the Tera conversation since it would be banned due to its strength being amplified by the raw mechanic, rather than being broken by recieving an additional coverage move (as was the case with Regieleki, Espathra, and maybe Volcarona). A case could be made that its the key poster children for wanting the Tera Preview restriction implemented too & the reason that Tera is seen as a "comeback mechanic", espicially since its amplifying the comeback factor with its ability.

 

[Srn]

Obligatory disclaimer: no disrespect to any player mentioned, teambuilding is hard af this gen.
Another obligatory disclaimer: I am attacking arguments here, not users. Don't take any of this personally please.

Welp looks like these didn't work. Guess I have respond then.

this analogy is terrible. this was the sun i used in finals and i barely got away with my life despite the techs and dogshit roaring moon set. my opponent stellar flares brought skeledirge / ting-lu / infiltrator dragapult in game 1 and he still would've lost if my iron moth got the special attack boost turn 26. also claiming stellar flares brought a "poorly built team for a shed tail meta" game 3 is very disrespectful. that was one of the best pre-home teams built by Giannis, crying, & Raptor and it was both perfectly equipped and specifically made for shed tail with encore scream tail, cinderace, and unaware protect dondozo, but according to you the great tusk and hydreigon needed to be taunt and flamethrower too. talk about overkill. you must be the greatest teambuilder alive if 3 top players combined can't stick a solid 6 that consistently win vs shed tail, even when they actively try to counter-team it. i've yet to see any tera user demand this level of precision, including kingambit. at least great tusk + will-o-wisp / encore 'mon will suffice vs that shit. shed tail however you need to stack multiple answers & techs and you would still barely win games.

Funnily enough, you complain that I quote others out of context (I'll tell you why) but then you go ahead and do the same thing. "Poorly built team for a shed tail meta" is not everything I said.

seems like a poorly built team for a shed tail meta

Wanna know why I did not say with certainty that it was poorly built? Because I didn't know the team and I gave the people who made it the benefit of doubt by saying "SEEMS LIKE." There is a big difference between what you quoted out of context and what I said.
And by the way, yeah, I personally would've used flamethrower>EP on hydreigon in that set. You and the builders are free to disagree, but the results speak for themselves. My small little gripe also does not mean I think the team is all of a sudden dogshit. Any team showing up in OST finals is fantastic, and I imply that when I say in my post:

Was success possible with any team style in a shed tail meta? In the finals alone we saw balance, sun, non shed tail HO and shed tail HO brought to one of the most important tournament matches on the website. Stall was also very viable at this time, so I think we can safely say a variety of team styles were viable during the shed tail meta too.

I am describing teams that lost in OST finals with this snippet. Does that mean I think those teams are poorly built? Obviously not. Once again, I hope none of the builders take it personally when I criticize their team and its results, they should all know that they are better players and builders than I am.

You mention great tusk+wisp will suffice vs kingambit and never go on to address the replay I showed where kingambit easily overpowers that precise counterplay. Not doing a great job showing that you've "yet to see any tera user demand this level of precision." If you actually read my post you would've seen it...

You can say you'll barely win games vs shed tail but a win is a win bro. If you adapted and won as a result, your adaptation is being rewarded.

there's a reason baton pass is banned. shed tail might take some skill, but it's still blatantly overpowered and uncompetitive, hence the 4+ survey rating. i can't use these words to describe tera though. this wasn't even given a scaled survey vote by the way. it was an option between "action" and "no action," the latter which can be divided into subcategories such as full ban, team preview, tera blast ban,...

Shed tail was not uncompetitive. You had every opportunity to outplay it and adapt to it, things that are fully in your control. Let me quote tiering policy framework again

II.) Uncompetitive - elements that reduce the effect of player choice / interaction on the end result to an extreme degree, such that "more skillful play" is almost always rendered irrelevant.

• This can be matchup related; think the determination that Baton Pass took the battling skill aspect out of the player's hands and made it overwhelmingly a team matchup issue, where even the best moves made each time by a standard team often were not enough.
• This can be external factors; think Endless Battle Clause, where the determining factor became internet connection over playing skill.
• This can be probability management issues; think OHKOs, evasion, or Moody, all of which turned the battle from emphasizing battling skill to emphasizing the result of the RNG more often than not.

The part I bolded does NOT describe the shed tail meta. It was possible to outplay shed tail if you had adapted to the meta and brought the right tools. You could argue that shed tail did make it overwhelmingly a team matchup issue, but when I say that also applies to the tera meta, yall claim I haven't adapted. So I'll say it right back. If you thought shed tail made it overwhelmingly a team matchup issue, it's because you didn't adapt to shed tail.
You think shed tail was overpowered? I think Tera is overpowered too. Moving on.

not sure why you claim we're a vocal minority when full ban barely got support last test and how ambiguous aforementioned survey data is. maybe if it was so overpowered and uncompetitive it would've been banned last suspect test? food for thought.

Last I checked, 35%<51%, meaning that the pro unrestricted tera camp is a minority. They're certainly vocal too, as you can see on this thread. The full ban camp might be about 20% of us, and the remaining 45% might be split in half between preview and tera blast ban. We're all vocal minorities here, if any one option had a clear supermajority this wouldn't be so controversial. I'm comfortable with being called a vocal minority, why aren't you?

If tera was so balanced and healthy, you might've won by a bigger margin than 6 votes! Gotta ask yourself why 59.25% of voters then and 65% of survey respondents now want action on tera! Food for thought indeed.

also when players in this thread bring up "skill issue" they are not saying you're dogshit because you want tera banned.

The players in this thread are more civil, and I certainly appreciate that. But let's not mince words here, that's literally what CTC said. "Ban tera players=unskilled" "Tera complainers are microbrained" "It is a skill issue" Do not try to worm your way out of this, these are ad-hominem attacks.

it once again comes down to those two words; we believe it's a neither overpowered nor uncompetitive element worth banning because it's skill-expressive in its current state. the screenshots you posted trying to expose CTC are especially egregious. BigFatMantis already explained whyView attachment 537658View attachment 537659View attachment 537660View attachment 537661View attachment 537662View attachment 537664

I think tera is overpowered, I agree tera is not uncompetitive, and it's not good enough that it's skill-expressive in its current state.

Thank you for graciously providing the full discussion. To be clear, I linked the FULL POST of everybody that I "took out of context" in my own post because everybody here has been very civil and I wanted to extend that courtesy in return. Even in BigFatMantis's post (which I link, you can check) the context does not change the point I am trying to make: It's simply not ok to take voting options off the table if significant parts of the community want it, no matter what option you don't like or why you think it shouldn't be there. I am not trying to willfully misrepresent anyone, if I was I wouldn't link their full post.

So now that our dear readers have the opportunity to see the full convo, let me ask them: does it make what CTC said any better? Is the argument he is making justifying the claims that "Ban tera players=unskilled" "Tera complainers are microbrained" "It is a skill issue"? Does the context really change what he said? No...that is why I did not extend that courtesy.
(By the way this doesn't mean I have beef with/hate CTC, all my favorite blunder/aim videos have CTC in them. I didn't take any of what he said to heart, I know CTC is a certified hater.)

tl;dr
CTC is saying tera is fine to keep in the game since both players have access to the same tool and is skill-expressive as the player who uses it better wins. the same cannot be said for shed tail as that would mean loading orthworm every game. CTC also believes tera rewards teambuilding. finally he argued against the idea that the metagame is not as volatile as the pro-ban side has been making it out to be.[/hide]

And here's another reason that I did not feel the need to respond to CTC's arguments: I've already addressed them.
"Both players have access to the same tool and is skill-expressive as the player who uses it better wins" also describes dynamax! This argument isn't great!
Oh and before you say it

"Stop comparing dmax to tera! This is in bad faith!"

If your argument defending tera can also be used to defend dmax, it's probably not a great one because dmax was indefensible.

I already addressed it here.

CTC believes tera rewards teambuilding? I mean you can see xavgb disagreeing in the screenshots you posted, but I'll just speak for myself. I already kind of address it in the same post linked above

"Tera increases diversity!"

If anything, the number of threats that you have to handle in your teambuilder drastically increases more than your defensive options do. It's simple-ish math: If every threat like Roaring Moon has 3-4 viable tera types (flying, dark, steel), and your defensive options can only choose to be one tera type (I make my skeledirge tera fairy), then inevitably you can't cover every option. We see this now with huge threats abusing tera like chien pao, chi-yu, annihilape, espathra, iron valiant, roaring moon, dnite, etc the list goes on. All of these pokemon have 3-4 viable tera types and it's RESTRICTIVE to try and cover all of them in the builder. It leads to the opposite of diversity.

But I can use some real examples too, to be more clear in the current meta. Kingambit without tera would simply be checked by any reasonably bulky fighting type that's faster than it. With tera, you need to run great tusk+wisp/encore and you can still lose (as shown in the replay you ignored). It's not enough to just have glowking and think you check cm enamorus/ival, you need another answer for then they tera steel/ground/ghost.

You can theoretically answer tera for tera, but in practice that's not really the case. There's no gaurantee you can fit a tera into your team that can respond to Tera blast fairy/flying kingambit, tera ghost cm ival, tera steel/ground cm enamorus, tera fairy/dragon/ice SD bax, the list goes on and on. Not only that, you sometimes need to burn your tera just to check a threat that doesn't need to use theirs! Things like WW in the sun, bb gren under rain, unburden SD sneasler under terrain, Roaring moon, dd/sd bax etc are often threats which necessitate a tera to contain.

Putting yourself on the backfoot like that is hugely disadvantageous. This is why I don't understand when people say "you can cover weak matchups with your own tera" bro spending your tera to "fix" a weak matchup isn't real, you're still crazy far behind. This is what I mean when I say there's too much to cover in the meta.

apparently everything we say is a rhetorical fallacy to you. by your logic i'd assume you wouldn't bring up records again but clearly that's not the case when you get to the end. love how you responded to only 1 out of the 8 paragraphs Nat wrote by the way. ironic considering how long your post is.

I bring up records again later not to make arguments but to defend the pro-restriction camp from ad-hominem attacks. I wouldn't need to, if you didn't make them. I will happily disavow any anti-tera players who openly insult others, but you seem unwilling to do the same.

I don't even respond to 7 out of 8 paragraphs Nat wrote because I already did everywhere else in my post.
When she and every other pro-tera poster argues tera is a valid form of skill expression? All of part 1 was a response to that. You don't have to agree, but did you even read and understand that I made that comparison to respond to this argument?
The "generational gimmick" argument is addressed in my response to Pearl.
I don't have strong feelings on tera blast, and I chose not to majorly address it in my post
And in the end she doesn't want tera preview to be an option available for voting despite a major chunk of the community being interested in it...super cool and already addressed in my post! Honestly I'm surprised I missed this lol my b.

Similarly, I do not respond to the rest of the very valid points MANNAT made in their post because I don't have strong feelings to defend preview more than I already did. The idea that you don't need to scout for low kick if you see tera fighting kingambit is all very valid and true, and that is something preview takes away! I don't have anything more substantial to say than agree with it, so I didn't respond. I just replied to the part that I disagreed with (taking preview off the table), and like with every other post I respond to, the context I left out doesn't change what I replied to. I also link MANNAT's full post, you can check.

The post was super long in order to respond to every argument I wanted to respond to. Whether or not you realized I did that, I don't really care.

tera blast flipped a lot of these games in extreme, unpredictable ways-- grassy terrain dragapult, tera blast-fire baxcalibur, moltres-g, frosmoth, etc. as i said multiple times i am open to banning that move! not sure how i feel about the 21.7% though. very subjective and tera without tera blast was not a factor in a lot of these other beatdowns.

I openly admit my analysis is very subjective, you don't have to agree with that number and in fact I welcome you to generate your own. Tera blast is nothing without tera though, and a completely balanced move without the context of tera. It just feels pretty weird to ban a completely balanced move that causes no issues on its own while ignoring action on the real cause of all issues in question. Be that as it may, I do think a tera blast ban would make tera a lot less volatile and that is why it is my next favorite option, as I stated in my post.

point (c) is complete bogus. i literally built that scream tail + hoopa-u team w/ shiloh. balance is extremely viable and consistent with options like dondozo, garganacl, ting-lu, gholdengo, zapdos, moltres, etc. along with more creative picks such as cresselia and muk-alola. you claim balance teams here don't often deviate from the norm but this archetype was just as, if not more linear in SS & SM (8 is self-explanatory, m-latias fat in 7).

You've missed my point entirely yet again. I openly acknowledge both that successful balance builds exist and even that yours was successful and deviated from my template. The point is that there is an extreme imbalance between the number of successful offense builds and number of successful balance builds, evidence that balance is much tougher to build (due to the tera meta we are in). No where do you acknowledge and respond to this, so I'm guessing you just missed it? Cool.

Lily actually reached out to me yesterday and (very politely) pointed out to me that there may be different factors besides tera to blame for balance's lack of success recently. That's a great point, and is exactly the kind of thoughtful discussion that I was looking for. Hazards and specific pokemon like baxcalibur and zapdos are difficult to handle without very specific pokemon like dondozo and tinglu in response. Ultimately I think that banning tera and banning problematic mons afterwards (bax, WW) will improve the viability and health of balance the most in the long run, but that is just speculation.

I'm pretty out of touch with SS and SM rn, but I'm also not convinced that balance was more linear then. Look at this successful SS balance RMT which uses Umbreon, a passive RU pokemon. Do you think you could build a successful balance team around a passive RU pokemon in this meta? I welcome you to try.

according to you i only won my game due to hax despite not knowing my team and ignoring the insane value i got those first 10 turns."it doesn't count" my ass.

Dude the game ended on turn 11 at 4-6 of course I'm not counting it. Nobody is denying that you played well in the first 10 turns, but I wanted to only count complete games with balance. I consider this battle incomplete. I'm sorry if this criteria offended you, that wasn't my intention. I could've been more clear about that.

What I was clear about, however, was how I was classifying balance. I don't need to know your team to identify it as balance for my purposes. Me not knowing your team is irrelevant to the greater discussion, because guess what, I don't fully know any other balance team I talk about either lol. That's part of what makes this analysis subjective and flawed, which I openly admit.

truly pathetic statement and you dropped similar condescending lines towards other players such as pj claiming his squad was illegitimate.

I really hope nothing I said came off as condescending, I tried to cover myself with numerous disclaimers but hey. I explained why precisely that team structure did not make sense to me. Anybody is free to share the team, explain why it was built the way it was, why it was brought, prove me wrong and make me look like a fool. I welcome such constructive corrections with open arms, as I did when Irpachuza corrected me earlier.

finally saying "this was a garg / kingambit W not a balance W" is hilarious. next time a clefable or gliscor carries a game in SS / SM i'ma just say balance is dogshit and that was a clefable or gliscor W instead.

I mean..yea? When gliscor carries a game, it's a gliscor W? Is this really a controversial statement to make?
If 1 mon is solo carrying, it's not really good proof that balance is successful. You're free to disagree with that criteria, and I look forward to your own thorough analysis.

other statements like "narrow W" and "would've lost if opponent was X" are funny too. you were just complaining about 1-sided mu's but now you have a problem with close games? make up your mind.

Vert...
In part 2B, I looked for wcop matches that I thought were one-sided due to MU
In part 2C, I looked for wcop matches with balance teams.
I am making separate arguments in different parts, which don't contradict with each other. Are you sure you actually read and understood my post? I never said I have a problem with close games either bro, where are you getting this from?

funny how you are pressed i called some people "unviable" despite saying "everyone is entitled to their opinion," but dropped a "source: my ass" on ABR which is 10x more toxic.

mm so it's ok when you're toxic and insult other users but when I point out a ridiculous claim has no evidence supporting it I'm being 10x more toxic. Calling your insult an opinion also makes it ok. Sure thing bro.

also ABR is literally right. there are statistics (tour included) that show how dead SS is compared to SM, the latter which kept its core mechanic. in terms of more recent data, SM registered 161905 games last month vs the 79731 SS did.

This doesn't prove ABR is "literally right." There is no reason to believe that SV without its core mechanic will end up the same way that SS did without dynamax (a ban that was objectively and inarguably the correct choice for the singles meta by the way). The evidence you offer does not translate at all to what may happen with SV. We are once again ignoring several key differences between SV and SS, like less toxic, less defog, less scald, less knock off, more hazards, new threats etc which all forces teams to be more offensive and proactive.

Either way, we the community keep core mechanics if they're balanced, and we ban them if they're not. We should not keep core mechanics because of some unwarranted fear that banning it would "kill SV immediately."

you are right that we shouldn't sacrifice competitiveness for popularity, but no one pro-tera argued tera was uncompetitive to begin with it.yes, i went 2-2. i still think the tier is great, tera is dope, and i have a lot of room for improvement! i will reflect on my losses and come back strong :] and bro really said "ad hominem." no one used skill issue as an insult except CTC who still provided actual arguments which you conveniently deleted from your screenshots LMAO

Holy shit I used an adjective appropriately, I really said it bro!
And why are you defending this? It's ok to insult others as long as you make some real arguments too???
Obviously not. Leave out the insults and stick to the arguments.
As explained previously, I did not address some of his arguments because I did not care to repeat myself. When he claimed it wasn't volatile, I argued that it was and backed it up with evidence.

and seriously, where is your spreadsheet record? individuals record? a charity bowl semi-finals appearance? you're claiming that this is a weak argument yet you are the one using it against us. bring up Pinecoishot disliking tera but i owned his ass in OST while you're out here flexing 79% GXE on the ladder. i have an alt that's 91.2% GXE bro. do /rank 82JungKookBTS. i'm also in OU SSNL Finals. why even bring up CTC going 0-0 by the way? despite not playing this year, he's still an amazing builder that cooked numerous influential teams this tournament. more than i can say for you, someone who thinks that iconic scream tail + dondozo team is "poorly built [for shed tail]." i'll happily talk my shit since you have no problem bringing up our sheet records to make your argument look better.

outside of Nat's 12-3 year, let's also ignore the fact blunder, another pro-tera player, went 3-1 (arguably 4-0) but once again expecting you to give unbiased information here is a lost cause. xavgb is the only good sheet player that matters since he aligns with your belief tera should be outright banned. pretty awful post imo, front to back.

The reason I brought up your sheet records and repeated your own insults is to show everybody how foolish they sound when they're placed next to results. Not making an argument, just defending my crowd from personal attacks. If you didn't like that, then don't insult others. Simple as that. I'd love it if my arguments elicited arguments in response (like it did from Lily and Irpachuza) and not personal attacks.

By the way, I was not "flexing" 79% GXE on the ladder. I am pretty sure most people here are not impressed by that. My elo was not posted to impress or intimidate anybody. I don't even mention my charity bowl semi-finals appearance because how I did in the pre-home meta is irrelevant.

What I was afraid of was having my opinions and subjective analysis be minimized or attacked not on their own merits, but because I'm not the most prominent player. You showed me I was right to be afraid and did exactly that. Why else say all this?

I posted my elo for the sake of legitimacy. To prove that I played enough and knew enough about the meta to comment on it. I know that you're a better player, I know that CTC is a better builder, probably every single wcop player whose replay I commented on is a better player than me. All I wanted to show was that I was good enough to speak up about tera and have my opinions be taken seriously.

It's really not a good look when top players are flaming and belittling others, then hiding behind their spreadsheet records when called out. As if being a top player makes it ok to insult others. It's not.

 

[Tricking]

So here's what I'd like to ask the pro-tera crowd, if you want to try swaying me:
1) Watch this replay, put yourself in Luthier's shoes, pretend you only know about team preview and the information gathered from turns 1-3. Can you explain, using words and arguments NOT intuition, how Luthier could've pieced together that the baxcalibur was tera blast fire?
2) Can you explain why the competitiveness score is at an extremely low 5.43/10, despite the meta supposedly being fine as is and fun and rewarding?
3) Can you offer any evidence that SV OU will NOT be fundamentally competitive+skill expressive+healthy if tera is banned, and that tera must remain for the health of the meta? This is after any bans on mons we may have to do (Bax, WW, who knows). Do not respond if your answer is "OU will be dead/stale/boring!!" etc

Just a very quick answer to the points you have raised (I haven't read all the posts carefully, so my bad if I am repeating known things):

1) these scenarios are very common across different generations - no matter the mechanics involved - you will sometimes face an unexpected set or an attempt to "fish" with a certain move. Tera is no exception to this. I would be amazed if you could tell sets of mons like Volcarona, Jirachi, Z-Moves, Heatran, Kartana, Mew, Magearna etc. across different generations by looking at preview. So, the answer to your point is simply that Luthier doesn't know it and that's perfectly fine as it is.

However, if you want to refer to that particular game, the very first turns are mindgames that Luthier lost and that put him in a position of disadvantage where Baxcalibur (or another setup mon) could enter for free. Assume Luthier wins the mindgame and goes Hatterene T1 on Michael's Spikes and spams Nuzzle vs no resists. Baxcalibur will most likely have a harder time getting that free turn. So, this specific game isn't even an example of Tera turning a lost game into a win, or of anything you are trying to prove about the mechanic being unhealthy.

Spending a few more words about this particular set, we brought that exact Baxcalibur set 3-4 times in SPL, it was completely useless and we didn't even get to reveal it - people didn't even know about that until baloor posted his teams (actually, the set sometimes backfired when playing on the ladder). This is equivalent to picking a particular Pokemon / moveset / EV spread / move / Z-move / nature etc. to have an easier time against some particular threats you feel weak against. This usually goes at the expense of something else. Tera is not an exception to this well-known approach.

Players who are able to get advantage from team preview, making their opponents think twice about possible sets, using innovative teams, sets, combinations have historically been the most consistent performers in tournaments. This trend developed in recent years and made teambuilding more important, also impacting oldgens. Toying around with sets on known teams is another useful skill to get wins. Tera acts in continuity with these known principles and does not disrupt them.

As for points 2 and 3, I won't add much to the discussion.

However, if people are interested in the game and in tiering decisions, potentially looking for a change, it is a good sign that answers to subjective questions (enjoyable metagame, competitive metagame...) are not one-sided.

And, I'll leave this as a starting point for further thoughts: if you mention other bans and retests after a Tera suspect, maybe Tera isn't the priority at the moment, and that is probably why we are moving into different suspect tests first.

 

[Srn]

Just a very quick answer to the points you have raised (I haven't read all the posts carefully, so my bad if I am repeating known things):

1) these scenarios are very common across different generations - no matter the mechanics involved - you will sometimes face an unexpected set or an attempt to "fish" with a certain move. Tera is no exception to this. I would be amazed if you could tell sets of mons like Volcarona, Jirachi, Z-Moves, Heatran, Kartana, Mew, Magearna etc. across different generations by looking at preview. So, the answer to your point is simply that Luthier doesn't know it and that's perfectly fine as it is.

However, if you want to refer to that particular game, the very first turns are mindgames that Luthier lost and that put him in a position of disadvantage where Baxcalibur (or another setup mon) could enter for free. Assume Luthier wins the mindgame and goes Hatterene T1 on Michael's Spikes and spams Nuzzle vs no resists. Baxcalibur will most likely have a harder time getting that free turn. So, this specific game isn't even an example of Tera turning a lost game into a win, or of anything you are trying to prove about the mechanic being unhealthy.

Spending a few more words about this particular set, we brought that exact Baxcalibur set 3-4 times in SPL, it was completely useless and we didn't even get to reveal it - people didn't even know about that until baloor posted his teams (actually, the set sometimes backfired when playing on the ladder). This is equivalent to picking a particular Pokemon / moveset / EV spread / move / Z-move / nature etc. to have an easier time against some particular threats you feel weak against. This usually goes at the expense of something else. Tera is not an exception to this well-known approach.

Players who are able to get advantage from team preview, making their opponents think twice about possible sets, using innovative teams, sets, combinations have historically been the most consistent performers in tournaments. This trend developed in recent years and made teambuilding more important, also impacting oldgens. Toying around with sets on known teams is another useful skill to get wins. Tera acts in continuity with these known principles and does not disrupt them.

As for points 2 and 3, I won't add much to the discussion.

However, if people are interested in the game and in tiering decisions, potentially looking for a change, it is a good sign that answers to subjective questions (enjoyable metagame, competitive metagame...) are not one-sided.

And, I'll leave this as a starting point for further thoughts: if you mention other bans and retests after a Tera suspect, maybe Tera isn't the priority at the moment, and that is probably why we are moving into different suspect tests first.

So the point I was responding to when I asked that question was, to paraphrase, "You can deduce tera's by looking at team structure, this is a skill." If you cannot deduce that Bax was tera fire from this replay (just one of many potential examples), then it throws the aforementioned point into question.
That is the only thing I was asking that question to show. The rest of the post is for showing the mechanic is unhealthy, tera turning lost games into wins, etc.

To reply to what you said last, I disagree. Think back to early SS. If I mentioned that arena trap needs to go after a dynamax suspect, that doesn't change that dynamax is the priority at the moment, and should be handled first.
Tbh that might be a poor comparison because tera is so entangled with the viability of mons directly. Kingambit is borderline with tera, totally fine without. Walking Wake is fine in a tera meta, might be borderline in a meta without it. Bax is pretty busted either way lol. You get the idea.

Thanks for sharing your insights on tera fire bax overall and for the thoughtful response

 

[Pais]

Even if nobody asked for my opinion I want to give my two cents about all this terastallization drama based on my personal experience from playing in ladder in which I'm consistent and also from the last tour I played (wcop).
I'm not a Tera Enjoyer at all, I think it killed a bit the skill and the effort you needed to apply at least in the team building phase (look, I'm not saying you can use 6 random mons but at least building is easier... just read Will Of Fire's post he made a good point).
I don't think anyway the games are this uncompetitive, obviously as long as you are able to play at an above average/decent level in any other fairy gen if you put enough effort you'll be able to perform decently also in SV, there is zero doubt about that. Obviously there is more variance but as well there has always been variance in Pokemon.
There are positive things about terastallization too like the fact that it rewards more the grinding since you need to be updated a lot of with current tera-trends and you can use the tera to work on new tech and to always have an advantage on other players. Obviously players that have explored all the possibilities of the Tera have also been better performers.

Anyway not gonna lie, don't get me wrong but I'm not sure at all about the point of this thread since most of people probably expressed their opinions on the survey. As long as people managed to play a bit SV then they'll have their opinions on Terastallization but I think we should use a more concrete approach or we then are talking about the absolute nothing...

As you can see I'm not a Tera fan at all but at the same time I don't cry about the presence of the tera in the game (as I said in this post there are things I find unique and I like about tera), it's not the end of the world, you can still be a good competitor with or without tera, but even if I want maybe tera gone why I should be this sure about my choice to vote ban on a possible suspect? About that let's move on the main point of this post:

1) LET'S MAKE A 2ND SV OU LADDER (WITHOUT TERA, NOT OFFICIAL/OM)
2) LET'S MAKE NO-TERA SIDE-TOURNAMENTS IN THE COMMUNITY/OU FORUM

I think it's unacceptable to vote on something that can change the metagame forever without knowing the consequences of our actions. Nobody will change mind about Tera reading some random post on this thread but having more concrete ways to see how a meta would be without tera will help both Tera Enjoyers and Tera Haters.
And no, sorry, I won't use past gens to have a better idea on how a metagame without Tera is because SV has a lot of new mons and different dynamics in-game. Also even if I'd like to vote ban on Tera then I'm not sure on how the council (disclaimer: not a personal attack) would manage the tier after a potential ban considering I've not been a great fan on recent decisions, so probably at the end of the day voting no-ban would be a good solution to not destroy the meta more (we all agree that the meta is not in its best spot rn sadly...), but I won't go further in that since it's more a personal opinion.
Anyway I'm not a close-minded person that does not change idea so I'd like to have tools to decide if banning Tera and a 2nd SV OU non-official ladder without tera would help a lot.
Don't try to say that a 2nd SV OU Ladder would split the playerbase because people actively decide with their minds what to play and they would not quit SV OU since it's still an official CG: we have literally a lot of formats on Showdown, we have literally modded versions of this game (OMs) like Balanced Hackmons or idk Mix and Mega (?) and we can't have a 2nd unofficial sv ou teraless ladder? Also I want to remind you that in the past there has been implemented a ladder in gen6 without scald and megas lol.

Also I'm really surprised that nobody in charge of managing the tier or the OU community never had the idea to host some tera-less tournament. Obviously people are not this encouraged to play these side tournaments but if you are really interested in SV OU this would be a good way too to see a "what if scenario" of a SV without tera that would help players to decide in a concrete way without further bullshit about keeping tera or not. I think in SS there has been a side-tournament without Heavy Duty Boots, right?

tl,dr: we need to see both the two sides of the coin before deciding to take action or not, because nobody has seen yet a SV OU without tera and unless we see it we can not have at 100% the tools to decide about what to do. If the goal is to decide forever the destiny of the Tera we need to see with our eyes SV without tera or it's just theorymon stuff...

 

[Theia]

1) LET'S MAKE A 2ND SV OU LADDER (WITHOUT TERA, NOT OFFICIAL/OM)

Hi, it's me, a PS Admin who doesn't have a horse in this race but who did spend the better part of six hours this morning writing about ladder policy since ladder additions and deletions generally fall to our team. Finch put the reasons why this won't be happening pretty succinctly in his post, but just to reiterate since it keeps coming up: a separate ladder will not be happening.

Finch (the OU Tier Leader) has told you so. shiloh (the Tiering Admin) has said so. And I (PS' Senior Policy Admin speaking on behalf of our team) am now telling you.

Continuing to suggest it is a nonstarter.

Carry on.

 

[Ctann]

the Tera fire baxcalibur anecdote is a great example of “trading unpredictability for consistency”.

• It might surprise win one game where the opponent didn’t have the resources to scout the set (outside of blowing a potentially wasted Tera).

• it also loses a lot of games and gives up your Tera earlier than needed, as fire decreases it’s matchup against everything from azumaril to all the grounds that pack tera water + EQ.

with each ban, we should really see more of these strong trades away from consistency and into unpredictability in an attempt to surprise an opponent who doesn’t have scouting resources.

the lack of scouting resources is a bottleneck problem based on the Pokémon tho.. look at valiant, who loves running 2 attacks, boosting move and a status move. The closest thing we have to a reliable counteris healthy SpDef landorus, or trying to force it out early in the match with impact plays.

Tera just makes these Pokémon that are difficult to scout , more difficult to scout. Tera doesn’t [arguably] break these Pokémon, these Pokémon are [arguably] broken in an unrestricted Tera meta. There’s a difference!

looks like the main contentious things left after kingambit will be valiant and bax, and it seems like there might be issues taken up with the ghosts as well.

i've yet to see any tera user demand this level of precision, including kingambit. at least great tusk + will-o-wisp / encore 'mon will suffice vs that shit. shed tail however you need to stack multiple answers & techs and you would still barely win games.

[in the current unrestricted Tera meta] Kingambit requires more game flow planning than any other Pokémon, ever. It’s not right to say that you can just deal with it with tusk/wisp.

That might be true if urshifu, magearna, and zam-h were still collectively on 65% of teams. But that’s not the case.

Also, using tusk + status pokemon is grossly oversimplifying the solution (with a 45%+ usage pokemon, no less..)

shed tail was ass, but it was predictable and usually came out early, so you have the healthy team to deconstruct their game flow.

kingambit can even be used to force 2 for 1 trades against the most prepared teams, it’s not like it needs to be in the end game when it can pull weight really well before.

in short you need:

1. something to encourage it to switch in earlier in the match, and force at least 20% damage after hazards and lefties.

2. can’t have too many Pokémon’s that hit it softly, like most toxapex, HDB meowscarada, glowking, etc.

3. need a minimum of 2 Pokémon on your team that resist sucker punch. And maybe a third that can Tera into a resist

3a. One of the resists must be extremely bulky.

4. need some utility moves outside of taunt. You used encore/will o wisp as an example, there’s also trick, substitute, etc. each of these is a soft-solution to it..

5. despite using all of the above , you need to be prepared to throw up to 3 bodies at a kingambit to KO it in the end game, and that’s assuming you’re using some combination of status moves, super effective moves and moves that may be super effective against its most common Tera types, whilst also keeping at least 1-2 of your sucker punch resists healthy and maybe even keeping some priority of your own that 2HKOs it but blocks the first sucker punch, which requires prediction.

-

The above discussion mostly looked at baxcalibur, valiant and kingambit.

if Tera is untouched, they might all be contentious due to their high impact with “surprise” Tera being an option.

In short, there’s nothing wrong with each of them being assessed in the game for what they are, with Tera still left intact.

It’s just a choice at this point, do you want Tera or do you want more of these Pokémon at the borderline?

 

[Pais]

Cut

This does not mean that the policy is not wrong or is the absolute law.
Any attempt to promote bar conversations like this pointless thread without taking concrete actions to see if there is for real margin to improve the meta is a good way to kill the competitive approach of which a tiering should have been made of.
The Finchinator's post has a good point, but it's also true that if you make potentially an OM teraless OU on a long period of time like 1 month, 2 months or 3 months and also a LARGE sample of games then you'll have enough datas to see how a SV without tera can evolve. I repeat, we are not talking about a 1 or 2 week meta/ladder but about a 2-3 months ladder. And since Council/Tiering community loves a lot datas since they make every month surveys it should not be a big deal!

People have always compared a meta to another to have a better opinion on the quality of the meta (like a lot of tera enjoyers were for sure annoyed from SS OU) but at least you won't have random comparisons to SS or other fairy gens but you'll have CONCRETE ways to compare a teraless OU to a tera OU. Simple as that. And also I'm 100% sure I'm not the only one who would support something like that and I've seen some other people pushing for some real way to compare the two metas on a long period of time (and so not only a day 1 meta as someone said). So a compromise unless there is some lazyness can be done for sure.

I'd just prefer real facts to support pro-tera or not-pro-tera opinions instead of promoting pointless discussion around tera, because technically surveys can be already good enough for that and as I repeat we have not seen yet a SV OU without tera yet so we are still talking about no-sense... and if we really want to discuss about something maybe we can discuss about a possible way on how to conduct the voting since last time it was not managed in the best ways but other people in this thread like abr, amaranth etc have made a good point on that.

But ok let's assume a ladder is this undoable because of some ideology behind that and this can be legit because as an ideology it is not necessary right or wrong, I still find crazy that zero side teraless tours have been made. I want to remember that with SS someone (I don't remember who) made an invitational without Dynamax maybe a community tour can be made this time too.

If I'm pushing for these ideas is because I want real facts to support both pro-tera and anti-tera argouments and at the same time I don't find useful at all watching the community divided on this Tera drama, because as you can all see everyone has their opinions but at least we should provide ourself enough tools to consider every possible aspect of our decisions, like the consequences of a possible ban/not ban. We need to be methodic.

 

[Pearl]

Wasn't planning on making a follow-up post, but I believe there's enough to unpack in people's replies to the arguments I highlighted, which makes me want to clear a bunch of things up (especially because my opinion on a very specific point has shifted slightly after rereading some of the posts, but I'll get to that in a bit). Do note that some parts of this post might not be directly related to the discussion at hand, and I apologize for that.

It's an odd distraction to keep returning to these ideological debates, given there appear to be so many pro-tera arguments that the meta w tera may be more competitive.

The reason why I focused on the ideological debate regarding whether Tera should (or shouldn't) receive special treatment when tiered is tied to the following points:

1. A hefty chunk of the posts before mine have already focused extensively on most other pro-tera arguments that I would personally highlight, so my goal was moreso to bring something "new" to the table rather than having that be my primary line of defense "against" the people who view things differently than me. I do think it's an important element to discuss, as are most other tiering guidelines, but it's probably not a discussion point that belongs in this thread.

2. My own experience leading a tier on Smogon in the past. Despite the fact that people have a hefty chunk of pet peeves with SM UU, it's still a tier that is widely considered to be great from a gameplay standpoint (I think this Pak log describes it better than I possibly could in a formal Smogon post). The way this (IMO) ties to the whole Tera debate comes from the fact that during the time SM was the main generation, I pretty much pondered on a daily basis whether a blanket ban on Z-moves would improve the state of my tier and the conclusion I came to is that yes, it probably would, and maybe what's currently happening with Terastallization is similar, except that Dynamax's ban back in Gen 8 made people more open to the possibility of tackling issues like these. However, I don't regret never having pushed for a tiering decision as radical as that, and I honestly do believe that the criteria for taking action on a core generational mechanic should be different from tiering Pokemon, which is where my disagreement with your original post comes into play.

If what I said about Z-moves makes people want to take action on Tera even more I think that's fine too, I think I made it clear enough in my first post that my goal isn't really to try and shift opinions, there's way more competent and better informed people than me to do that, but rather to say my piece on a topic that I'm fairly passionate about despite my somewhat limited contact with Smogon tiers at the moment.

Pearl since I consider teambuilding an important skill, maybe the most important you can develop in the game, I believe it's very important preserving it. If you actually try reading my post you would eventually see what I mean with ruining it in the sense of restricting but if you want more details about why I see very badly the situation about the easy approach you can come in pm and I'll explain in details with no problem, post is long enough already. Pokemon is already inclusive enough as it is we don't need Tera to make teambuilding a lesser important skill. I'm not hungry for s/o, people should be already encouraged with the passion they have for the game, I respect whoever has enough passion to explore the metagame fully but that doesn't mean they need something like Tera to do so.

Hello, thanks a lot for the reply! I appreciate the fact that your tone this time around is a lot more humble than in your original post (although I could do without the bit that accuses me of not having read your post in its entirety, like if I got what you meant in its entirety just from that post I wouldn't have asked for you to elaborate further). You see, I'm a teambuilder at heart too. Even when I was at "my best", I usually got more satisfaction out of fine-tuning my craft and seeing other people thrive with it than I did out of playing the game itself, and I think that's a fine way of approaching things too. This means that it would be a big deal to me as well if my perception of Tera led me to believe that it has made teambuilding a less valuable skill.

I'm of the opinion that in spite of teambuilding's importance as a part of Pokemon, it's something that's inseparably linked together with actually playing the game. Yes, you can be a col49 and intuitively understand Pokemon with an average 10 games played per year, but situations like that are the exception, not the rule, and for the most part I would argue that in order to understand the game (and a given tier) well enough to consistently build good teams it takes a buttload of time invested playing and studying it, to the point where a lot of players, despite probably having the competences required to engage in that process, would rather take other people's teams and just stick to playing Pokemon. Either way, I'll keep that part of my train of thought there, as this post isn't meant to devolve into criticism of the way each person chooses to engage with the game we play.

The way I perceive this to actually be related to Tera comes down to the part of my original post where I talk about the "Tera metagame", and since playing and teambuilding are ultimately two faces of the same coin, I believe that everything I said applies here as well, with no real further need to expand further upon it. Personally, it doesn't come across to me like teambuilding's importance has been diminished as a consequence of Tera's impact on the game.

The OP Pearl already understands that we shouldn't make tiering decisions to appeal to the masses, which is nice. They also stated they understand this point is subjective and that they're not trying to change minds, so I wont go too hard.
Let me ask you instead: do you think that keeping dmax in gen8 would've been better for smogon's growth than banning it? Should we be compromising our competitive integrity to put a "core mechanic" on a pedestal, forever giving special treatment to whatever goofy shit GF balances around doubles next? The only special treatment I accept giving a core mechanic is taking quickban off the table. I do understand it's important to do outreach to newer players, so I understand how bad a quickban of dynamax would've looked from the outside, no matter how justified it would've been.

Hot take, but I think that keeping unhealthy core mechanics in the tier can do more damage to Smogon's rep than banning them might. I'm not going to put my foot down and say this is the case with Tera, because I try to tie down my opinions with a sliver of evidence. But put your ears to the ground and you will notice a lot of casuals are not having fun trying to adapt to tera, a lot who might be leaving for greener pastures. The flip side of the skill gap that is being lauded so much on this thread is that this tier is also very inaccessible to newer players, who will need to learn 2x more than they would in previous gens. Learning which mons tend to tera into which types, getting a feel for when they tera, and learning to teambuild with tera in mind are all skills which take a huge effort to get adjusted to. Because I'm a mod in the OU room, people have PM'd me on PS saying they're having trouble adjusting to tera and ask me for advice. Does it seem very welcoming if I tell them "skill issue bro, grind 4 hours a day if you want to keep up"? Because that is the response I get when I complain about tera. If outreach is what you care about, don't assume keeping generational mechanics is guaranteed to help you.

Hey there! I really appreciate the passion that went into this post, and I would love to tackle all of it in a deeper manner, but due to time constraints I'll keep it mostly to the parts that touch upon my words and things that relate to them in some manner.

The parallel between Dynamax and Terastallization is hard for me to comment on due to my overall lack of engagement with Gen 8. However, it's an aspect that's been tackled by other users, and in my case I've made a direct comparison between Tera and Z-moves if it helps contextualizing my opinion on tiering "core mechanics". If you'd like to hear my completely uneducated opinion you can also have that though!

The second paragraph that I quoted is the part I actually want to reply to though. I don't fully agree to it, but I don't find it to be a stance that's incompatible with my own. The reason why I hid that part of my post in a spoiler tag in the first place is because I genuinely didn't want it to be the focus of my post, not because I think it's silly (or else I wouldn't bother writing about it in the first place) or entirely unrelated, but because I genuinely find it to be "too much" to tackle in a thread about a tiering decision, and there's enough good arguments to defend Tera's presence in Smogon tiering (even if you don't agree to a lot of them, as you've let us know in your post) without going down that rabbit hole in the first place, but we can give it a try since you decided to entertain the thought, even though a lot of it is primarily subjective and I could just be talking out of my ass anyway.

The best way I found to explain this is through the use of a picture:

What I'm trying to get to here (excuse the extremely poor visual presentation, but I'm not willing to put more effort than that into a Smogon post) is that a Ban on Tera would make it harder for people to move from "Outside" into "Smogon's Sphere of Influence", as Smogon is now adhering to a set of rules that is different enough from what people "know" about the Pokemon games in question that it could become a genuine discouraging factor. When I think about "not making tiering decisions based on appealing to the masses", I associate it moreso to the people within the sphere, as those are the ones that will be vocal about what "Smogon" chooses to do without necessarily being the most educated about competitive Pokemon.

You could argue that it's a distinction that doesn't really matter and that I'm getting granular over something that doesn't deserve this much ponderation, but the reason why I've structured it like this is because I personally believe that movement from the sphere to the Smogon community is a natural process that is fairly independent from tiering decisions, especially when taking into account the fact that Smogon has so many different tiers and formats that even if OU ends up in a bad state it's not the end of the world. For example, I've had some OU success during past iterations of WCoP, but I've pretty much always been a lower tier player primarily due to the fact that those almost always turn out to have a better "feel" to them than CG OU, whereas moving from "Outside" to the sphere is something that should be incentivized and even taken into account for a tiering decision this big, as it makes it more likely for Smogon to remain sustainable from a community standpoint for a longer period of time.

To explain my train of thought on this one, I'll resort to another part of your post:

All it proves is that people adapt to the meta, no matter how good or bad it is.

News flash! Adaptation is a key part of being a Pokemon player. Do you know why I managed to easily get voting requirements for the first Tera suspect (and will do it again if a 2nd one happens) despite my limited interactions with the SV OU metagame? Because getting enough wins to qualify for REQs in low ladder is piss easy I've been playing this game for long enough that despite the metagame being different from past ones I've played, most if not all of competitive Pokemon's core aspects come to me intuitively, and I'm then able to use my past experiences as need be in order to win enough SV OU games to qualify for the vote. I don't think that makes me a good SV OU player, as that would require way more time than I'm willing to put right now, and if me saying this causes people to want to change the tiering methodology to make it harder for people like me to have a say on this matter that is fine too.

I'm touching upon this because my anecdotal experience interacting with many people within Smogon's Sphere of Influence that aren't quite full-fledged members of the community yet leads me to believe that a lot of them will pin their lack of results/progress on the first tiering decision that they can think of, as they don't have the flexibility to adapt to the environment yet. And honestly that's fine, like sometimes we forget about it but it's kind of insane how high the entry barrier to competitive Pokemon is with all the stuff you have to know from memory, and even that alone isn't enough to shape a competent player.

Basically, the way I see movement between the sphere and the Smogon community is kinda like recess in the 2000s: little Jamie rolls up with his Game Boy Advance and Link Cable and starts slapping his Pokemon-playing classmates around with his level 100 Mewtwo, while his "competitors" only have a level 50 starter with 4 STAB moves, which will then lead to 2 possible outcomes:

- Jamie's classmates get tired of losing and stop wanting to play Pokemon PVP battles (the Showdown equivalent would be people who end up hardstuck on the ladder;
- Jamie's classmates will use their crushing defeat as fuel to improve at the game until they can kick his rear (in my argument, this would be where "movement" would happen).

Now, I'm aware that this is a very reductive way of describing how people interact with the game, and that's part of the reason why I didn't want to tackle this in such an in-depth way, as I feel like it's bordering on arrogant to assume how people are going to deal with such complexities. However, it's the best way I could find to put my thoughts on the matter together. A tl;dr would look something like this:

- The Smogon community should be more conscious of the impact a decision like this would have on its ability to attract new people to its sphere of influence;
- People that play Smogon formats but "aren't good" will very often complain about tiering decisions regardless of their quality when seen through the eyes of well-informed people;
- People that truly want to become good at competitive Pokemon (Smogon formats to be more precise) will put in the time to do so regardless of what the decision on Tera is.

I don't want to fully deny that keeping Terastallization around might have a negative impact on player retention to some extent, like I could be wrong about that for all I know, but I still think that it's nowhere near the level of potentially discouraging people from even trying Smogon formats in the first place. Something that I really love about this game (and that I think Smogon does an excellent job expanding upon through its tiering system) is that there are a multitude of ways to engage with it and enjoying it, and if you don't like OU you can play UU or LC or DOU or Monotype and so on.

Sorry pearl the gloves are off for this one.

T'was a joke, doofus.

(confession: I'm a lot more open to the option of looking into Tera Blast as an isolated element after reading people's posts on it, lots of good stuff there, but still personally think that Action vs. No Action and type of action to be taken if that faction wins should be 2 seperate votes)

Either way, this will probably be my last post on the matter unless I can think of anything new to add, but I'd like to encourage people to contact me directly if there's any questions on anything I've written here.

 

[blarajan]

I have only loosely followed this and have not read the entire thread, but the genie is out of the bottle. If the suspect occurred but you’re still talking about rerunning it, and then discussing which circumstances would justify running it or rerunning it, you will run it enough times such that a ban is inevitable. This is not a tiering decision which can ever occur objectively and I think operating as if there’s an argument which will successfully determine whether tera is broken or not broken is unrealistic. This is far more subjective than removing a single Pokémon — everyone here knows far better than I do that OU with tera or OU without tera are different tiers. I know that it’s challenging because the OU tera decision affects every other tier, but it really seems to me that waffling between the choice and never being sure is worse. Just pick one.

fwiw banning terablast as a compromise and then just saying “we can’t satisfy everyone fuck you deal with it” sounds pretty good to me.

I don’t fully understand how the 50-50 on any given turn affects things, but OTS in vgc has allowed for much more informed gameplay than you would anticipate. Open tera is less precise than OTS, but still gives you more information about the entire team’s range which allows for more informed micro decision making. Ban tera blast & make it open tera, and then say fuck it we have a tier. Fundamentally questioning the identity of the tier every three months does more harm than good imo

 

[1LDK]

Its been almost a month since the last comment in this thread, and a lot of things have happened, mainly, the World Cup Finals, The Kingambit suspect test, and OLT being in his fourth cycle, so I wanna see if I can potentially revive this thread by asking some questions

Has there been anything that has changed your opinion on what's the best course of action?

Have you been in matches where there's no tera, or maybe tera preview or no tera blast? If so, how do you feel about these potential changes?

How do you feel about DLC 1 and 2? Especially with the new "type" shown (keep in mind that, outside the leaks, we only have the trailers for info, so keep that in mind when answering)

 

[Tio Chico]

Its been almost a month since the last comment in this thread, and a lot of things have happened, mainly, the World Cup Finals, The Kingambit suspect test, and OLT being in his fourth cycle, so I wanna see if I can potentially revive this thread by asking some questions

Has there been anything that has changed your opinion on what's the best course of action?

Have you been in matches where there's no tera, or maybe tera preview or no tera blast? If so, how do you feel about these potential changes?

How do you feel about DLC 1 and 2? Especially with the new "type" shown (keep in mind that, outside the leaks, we only have the trailers for info, so keep that in mind when answering)

I still remain anti-tera, I think the cost-benefit risk is too low and can generate not-so-competitive turnarounds.
I understand that more dedicated players can better assess the situation and minimize the drawbacks. I understand the feeling of reward that more dedicated players found in Tera. Although I'm against it, I totally understand and respect it.

What has changed is my perception of Tera Preview and how dangerous it can be for singles. This can reveal much more than just the Tera type, the way in which the possible, even if not used Tera could cover some deficit of defensive or offensive synergy allows a good analyst to see the opponent's archetype and guide a good counterplay already in team preview, removing the essence and mischaracterizing the mechanics. And turning No or Yes x18 to just No or Yes each turn does not remove the coin-flip effect.

Things are still tense then and Kimgambit staying in the tier even with 55% community support to ban him is just another example.

I believe that doing nothing until the DLC on September 13th and gathering some feedback with a survey is the best way to go.

About the new type, I don't want to get into theories but it should probably be something like Multitype Arceus in LoA.