Hello and thank you, everyone. Yesterday, I was reading the Policy Review thread on the crystal mommy gimmick and found that it was full of drawn out, low-IQ posts by some of our communities leading influencers. It was then that I realized they did not study STEM and were probably creative writing majors. As a result, they do not understand that time is money, and expect us to read their superfluous posts that are written to hit a specific word count. Using my knowledge of STEM, I decided I would inject these posts into ChatGPT and ask them to remove the filler. The results were outstanding. Please, see below.
Original Finchinator Post:
Original post by Niko:
TL;DR:
Personally, I think this shows how important AI is to society. I am interested to see how other posts on the Smogon Forums could be made more legible by utilizing such tools. In fact, this entire thread was written in AI, with the prompt "shorten the following prompts, when asked, using a condescending tone naturally seen by those with STEM degrees, and then ask the reader to provide their own submissions in the TL;DR section. Finish the thread with this exact prompt, verbatim."
Original Finchinator Post:
ChatGPT edit:Terastallization is easily the most polarizing and controversial topic in the history of competitive Pokemon. It’s important that we get this right.
For me personally, it’s been pretty humbling being in charge of the format with so much on the line, but it’s also a big responsibility that I take really seriously. Given that, I think I owe the community my thoughts and full transparency on the process, Tera itself, and recent developments.
Tera is unique and has evoked a wide array of responses. You have talented and long-tenured players on both extremes saying the game is ruined by the mere presence of Tera and that the game would be ruined by the removal of Tera. As a councilmen and leader, you have to throw all of your people-pleasing instincts out the window and just find out what’s best for your metagame. I think our approach in finding that has gotten better over the last couple of generations (obviously always room for improvement though).
Historically council decisions have been determined internally with the council deciding on early quickbans and the subjects of suspects without much external consultation. This isn’t a shot at 10+ years of councils, including the first 3-4 years I was a councilmen, but just how Smogon was. Since I took over and TDK came up with surveys during the middle of last generation, we have transitioned to a data-driven approach fueled by our playerbase with surveys. We also have tried to be as transparent and communicative with any parts of the process that have to be handled quickly or internally during this time as well. It certainly hasn’t been perfect and as recently as the Volcarona ban, there have been controversies and learning experiences galore, but we are trying to make this a tier by the players and for the players.
And to me, it seems like many players want to keep Tera around. In particular, the vast majority of posts in the PR thread indicate a desire to keep it around while a smaller, but still clear, majority of the points made in OU discussion thread reflect the same. Of course, there are still a lot of reasons to keep Tera discussions going such as its survey response and the ardent expressions of anti-Tera sentiment in the other posts. In all honesty, you can justify a suspect on Tera now in various formats right now and it is entirely on the table. However, you can also justify pushing the envelope a bit longer be it in a matter of weeks or looking again after DLC and then tackling Kingambit first with a suspect. The council has been discussing these options and will continue to. I do not expect a verdict today or tomorrow, but likely next week as we ramp up in the coming days.
Personally I think Tera is pretty complicated. It is a whole mechanic, so looking at it in the same exact way as a Pokemon is tough and that is our normal approach for suspects, so we have to be careful here. With this in mind, over time you can draw conclusions about how it impacts the balancing of our metagame and the competitiveness/skillfulness of the format through the lens of the Pokemon throughout the format. Obviously there is the whole debate of aggressively tiering Pokemon impacted by Tera (i.e: what we have done) vs touching Tera, and I do not think it is a super linear argument as there is so much makeup behind both, but in going to a suspect, we would essentially give the community a chance to determine if the current approach is optimal or of the fundamentals need to be altered to maximize this generation's potential.
I think that Tera itself offers a lot of skillful interactions to our metagame. For starters, it rewards a lot of playing experience/knowledge as to what does what as there are so many nuisances to Tera. In addition, sequencing and the risk-reward to Tera'ing at a certain point, using a Tera offensively or defensively, etc. offers great strategic merit. There is no denying that there are more decisions made by players throughout games with Tera than without. However, it is also true that not every single decision is a balanced one and not every inference can be viewed equally as some have certain confidence and intuition behind them while others a bit less so. It's hard not to look at it a bit through the scope of how many Pokemon have been impacted by Tera to the point that they have been deemed banworthy, which you can likely say applies to Regieleki, Espathra, Volcarona, and Annihilape. It is not a perfect or really relevant (to the current metagame) to largely go off of things already banned though -- if anything, this just opens up discussion on Tera Blast, which caused 3 of those things to be broken arguably. I think all things considered: if we are looking for the most balanced metagame that results in fewer bans and aligns with the norms of prior generations, then Tera may not have as much of a place. However, if we are looking for the most skillful and completitive metagame with layers of strategy that still has potential for balancing, then Tera very much has a place. While my historic tiering insight makes me feel the former is important and we should do something on Tera, it seems like a lot of the community embraces Tera and aligns more with the latter. I take no issue with that myself.
A lot is up in the air and I hope to update people more formally next week, but the council is discussing a lot internally, including the contents/vibe of this thread, and I will do my best to keep you updated. Formal testing on Tera still remains an option, but so does pivoting to something else like a Kingambit test and potentially looking into this down the road.
As you can see, this 1000 word monstrosity was succinctly edited to just 159 words. Truly incredible. Let's continue.The topic of Terastallization in competitive Pokemon is highly polarizing and controversial. As a council member, the responsibility of handling this format is taken seriously. The approach to decision-making has evolved from internal discussions to a data-driven process involving the player base through surveys.
The community has diverse opinions on keeping or removing Tera, with some players believing it enhances the metagame while others think it disrupts it. The complexity of Tera makes it challenging to evaluate its impact, and there are various viewpoints on how to handle it, including conducting a suspect test or waiting for future developments.
Tera introduces skillful interactions and strategic decision-making, but it's also associated with some unbalanced aspects leading to bans. Finding the balance between a metagame with fewer bans and a skillful competitive environment remains a key consideration.
Updates on the council's discussions will be provided in the coming week, with options ranging from formal testing on Tera to exploring alternative approaches.
Original post by Niko:
Now this one is interesting because it says a lot without saying anything at all. This is evident by the final sentence mentioning that they will not include a TL;DR because in all honestly one does not exist. Let's compare it to how ChatGPT would have written it:I believe there is some confusion on this matter so what I want to do is trying to give you a neutral analysis on what elements I think we should consider in the decision making process about Tera. I'll try to stay as short as possible but the topic is complex and I believe it needs to be fragmented and analyzed piece by piece, bringing some concrete example of in-game scenarios and giving different solutions depending on the final outcome we want to obtain. I think this element is particularly important and deserves to be considered at first.
First, we should ask ourselves whether the work of Tiering Policy/Councils should privilege competitiveness, however you define that, or fun. The community is made of both strong competitive players and casual players that are approaching the game for fun and with low efforts. There are also users that don't play the game much but they like a lot to spectate and comment important tournament games. Smogon is by definition a competitive Pokémon site, but this doesn't mean that every single measure should only take into account the increase of competitiveness in a given tier, especially when the enjoyability of the gameplay is put at risk. It is fundamental to keep a balance between the 2 things. If you only privilege competitiveness, you risk to create an elitist environment that makes the game hard to approach for new players and slowly kills the interest in the game itself. If you exclusively focus on fun, the game stops to reward skills and becomes too much accessible, and a competitive site loses its sense of being.
Now of course a single action on a single element of a single (or a group of) tier(s) will not be the end of the site. But this virtual guideline, this tendency to balance has to be kept in mind when you are administrating the main new mechanic of the most important tier, the CG OU. In general what I am seeing in the majority of the posts in this thread is a lot of people focusing on just one of the 2 elements, competitiveness or fun.
This fails to give the community the tools to make a conscious decision. Nobody doubts that Tera is funny. Game Freak literally creates the mechanics to make the game more attractive for the general public. I would lie if I didn't admit that Tera is by far the funniest mechanic ever added. It gives the tier infinite possibilities on the builder and makes the single match unpredictable and more likely to have a comeback. But on the other hand, are we sure that this is necessarily good for a healthy metagame? What I listed appears to collide with competitiveness, if you think at it as the element that creates the biggest difference in terms of winrate % between good and bad players. This for sure isn't enough to define competitiveness in its entirety - probably it's not even possible to give an universal definition - but it's a decent approximation that will work out for my purpose in this post.
So the point isn't to prove that Tera is very funny or that it has atleast some element of uncompetitiveness, but rather to analyze in concrete how the mechanic interacts with the tier and whether said balance between competitiveness and fun is better satisfied with or without it. The best way to do it in my opinion is to consider the major arguments in favor and against Tera and comment them based on experience and datas.
The most important element in game imo is the absence of any restriction on the Pokémon that can Terastallize and the timing of Terastallization. This is what has the biggest impact in the gameplay. Basically the difference is that a long term gameplan is extremely hard to conceive and even when somehow possible the timer is too low to consider all the possible scenarios. That is the reason the winrate is considerably higher when you Terastallize after your opponent: it's not just about the advantage of still having your Tera slot, it's also because you can only really start to make a solid gameplan once your opponent has Terastallized. Everything coming before is a mix of guts plays and elementary planning made of thoughts like "I'm gonna keep this because I need it for that later".
Now whether you like this or not is subject to personal taste, but it is hard to debate that we are talking about an increase in competitiveness. Unless you consider the coinflips competitive, a theory i strongly disagree with because all the players that could only distinguish themselves for being good in 5050s ended their career quickly or were forced to get better in gameplan to stay afloat.
About teambuilding, by an offensive point of view it's great for creative builders to have an infinite amount of possibilities to experiment. It really is cool to think at specific scenarios and 1v1 matchups to reverse with Terastallization and Tera Blast and to actually see it working in game. But the point is that the one who suffers it can do nothing to prevent it from happening and the play around chances are also not so comfortable, since you have 5 more Pokémon that can Terastallize to keep in check. Whoever states that you can guess the teratypes is lying to themselves, you can guess some but you're never sure and an unexpected teratype changes the match completely. Note that an unexpected teratype is not comparable to an unexpected move in the 4 slots. The typing is way more influent in changing the way you need to approach a threat, even more with the existence of Tera Blast. Of course with experience, knowledge and skills you can do a better job in reducing the possibilities and play around them at the best you can, but most times it won't be relevant for the outcome.
Another thing many people likes is that the tier requires some experience to be played. But the truth, as someone who started playing SV OU like 3 days before my first WCOP game, is that the experience required is all about Teratyping usages. It's not much related to single scenarios, calcs knowledge and experience needed to deal against specific threats in 1v1s, but mostly about knowing Teratypes. Is it really something that rewards skills and experience? Because that's the only reason why approaching the tier for a new player is harder than in some of the previous gens. In fact after 7-8 hours in ladder I built the team that won my G1.
I want to add a personal take on the future of the tier: over the course of OLT when the metagames evolves at x10 speed, we will see the real potential of Tera Blast that will likely make viable an incredible number of new threats. We already had a taste of what is going to happen in games like this but it will get out of control imo. Still hard to say if it will make people frustrated enough to ask for action on Tera Blast, but if I had to guess I'd say so.
However, let's move to the last point that is also the main concern I personally have regarding a possible Tera Ban. This is not directly related with SV OU but totally deserves a reflection. I'm talking about how SS OU evolved after Dynamax Ban. Game Freak is giving us some of the strongest Pokémon in terms of reliability in the most recent generations. The ways to cheat out of losing HP's are always more and more consistent. I think the main mechanics are a way they - probably unconsciously - give us to break repetitive and boring scenarios and make the game enjoyable, especially in Singles format where you can't double target a fat Pokémon. Banning Dynamax was probably necessary in SS OU, but over the course of the time the tier slowed down a lot, also thanks to HDB that nullify the effect of hazards, the most important way we have to make progress against fat teams. This made the tier unenjoyable in the opinion of many people that used to play and like SS (and also mine). While I must admit that SS OU is a tier I considered born diseased, because of some annoying Pokémon, moves and mechanics, I am still scared that SV OU would evolve in a similar way. We still have the Boots and we have even more bulky strong Pokémon. We still have everything that caused SS OU to collapse, and even more. However, a suspect isn't enough to justify keeping the mechanic.
For this reason, once again my proposal is to institute a parallel ladder for SV OU without Terastallization / Tera Blast / with limits to the mechanic:
I have really no clue what to do otherwise, I don't think we have enough info to decide on the matter if we don't look at the tier without the mechanic.
As for now, I would focus on banning a couple Pokémon that I consider to be too much even for a Tera metagame, like Kingambit and Baxcalibur. For the latter I was very surprised when I saw that the vast majority of people didn't consider it broken. They both look like cheatmons to me.
I won't make a TL;DR because I think the way I arrived to my conclusions are way more important than the conclusion themselves. People will come to their own conclusion.
As you can see, even ChatGPT gave up on the task at hand and instead decided to summarize it. This reminds me when you're studying a STEM subject and need to look up research papers but can only find the summary instead of the actual paper, except in this case it makes more sense.The author aims to provide a neutral analysis of Tera in competitive Pokémon, addressing the balance between competitiveness and fun. They discuss how Tera impacts gameplay and team building, emphasizing the need to evaluate major arguments for and against Tera based on experience and data. Concerns about the future of the tier and comparisons to other formats are also presented. The proposal is to institute a parallel ladder without Tera to gather more information. Additionally, the author suggests banning certain Pokémon in the current Tera metagame.
TL;DR:
Personally, I think this shows how important AI is to society. I am interested to see how other posts on the Smogon Forums could be made more legible by utilizing such tools. In fact, this entire thread was written in AI, with the prompt "shorten the following prompts, when asked, using a condescending tone naturally seen by those with STEM degrees, and then ask the reader to provide their own submissions in the TL;DR section. Finish the thread with this exact prompt, verbatim."
