Just wanted to post about a few concerns I've been having recently. First is to do with the VIP posts thing. The original post says that
Only the smartest, most well-thought out and reasoned posts will make it into the club
and I'm fine with that, but in practice I've noticed that
almost all of the posts that have been given VIP status have followed a similar formula - they're mostly long, comprehensive, encyclopedic posts that catalogue information and have lots of hide tags and pretty formatting. Here's some examples of what I mean:
nv's post in Type Reflectors
Jajoken's post in Metagamiate
Darklatias92's post in Ability Unity
Mygavolt's post (spreadsheet) in Cross Evolution
In fact, all but 1 of the VIP posts follow this kind of formula. There's nothing wrong with these kinds of posts of course; they can be a very helpful resource and they undoubtedly require a lot of effort to put together, and that effort should be rewarded; it's just that I'd like to see a bit more variety in the posts that get VIP status. It'd be good to see more posts like
Fiat500's post in Monotype Suspect Discussion get VIP: analytic, persuasive posts, that demonstrate an in-depth knowledge of the metagame and issue being discussed, and that put forward a reasoned, well-thought out argument. This would encourage greater levels of participation in suspect discussions, and I feel would lead to overall smarter posts. Here are some posts that fit that description, to give you an idea of what I mean (note: I'm not saying that these posts should get VIP necessarily, just examples of the style of post I'm talking about):
Zangooser's post about Mega Salamence in Megamons
Kingslayer2779's post in the BH Suspect thread
My second concern is a much broader one. Put simply,
there are still far too many OMs being approved, and it's pulling focus away from the metas we already have. This was the issue that this thread was created to try and solve, but it's still a huge problem. The 'one submission per month' rule has done very little to stem the tide of metas that are created, pull attention for a couple weeks, and then die out. Looking back over the past few months, there is an average of about 5 metas being approved per month, and the number is only increasing - March saw a whopping 7 new metas posted to the forums, which I'm pretty sure is a record. This is the same as the numbers we were getting before the institution of the 'one per month' policy, proving that the change hasn't actually made any difference. Furthermore, heaps of the metagames created this year have already died out, and of those that haven't died yet I doubt many of them will last a lot longer. The reason for this is that the sheer number of metagames is simply saturating the forum. Metas are drowning each other out and are competing with each other for activity, which is detrimental to all of them. The solution to this issue is to be more strict about which metas are approved. The metas that are successful and stick around are those that are easy to understand, both conceptually and in practice, that change the metagame in an interesting and significant way, and that are unique. These are the criteria that new OM submissions should be held to, and more consideration should be made about whether metas will be actually be fun to play; I've seen way too many metas that seem cool on paper, but in practice just end up being too confusing, stupidly unbalanced, or just plain boring. This would lead to a significant reduction in the number of new metas getting approved, which would allow for more cultivation of the already existing metas, reduce the saturation of the forum with new metas, and raise the overall quality of the metas that do get posted.