Evasion Clause - It's time to fully bake this half baked implementation.

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Elian

Aún creo en esa rumba....
To be honest, I really don't see the problem with keeping Sand Attack and other moves that lower accuracy. Do not misunderstand me, I see the point if a mechanic that is uncompetitive is exploited consider not allowing to maintain a healthy metagame. The fact is that I do not see an exploitation of the mechanics itself, yeah, you can use a baton pass team and play comfortably on ladder using Sand Attack Ninjask but if you face someone who knows how to play they will be able to play around that and if they is good enough (or you are just bad) you will lose. Of course if we talk about smogon tournaments it will happen the same or even worse, so I don't really think Sand Attack and etc are broken.

Pero pues cada quien, no?
 

R8

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To be honest, I really don't see the problem with keeping Sand Attack and other moves that lower accuracy. Do not misunderstand me, I see the point if a mechanic that is uncompetitive is exploited consider not allowing to maintain a healthy metagame. The fact is that I do not see an exploitation of the mechanics itself, yeah, you can use a baton pass team and play comfortably on ladder using Sand Attack Ninjask but if you face someone who knows how to play they will be able to play around that and if they is good enough (or you are just bad) you will lose. Of course if we talk about smogon tournaments it will happen the same or even worse, so I don't really think Sand Attack and etc are broken.

Pero pues cada quien, no?
What really is the point keeping those moves though?
 

R8

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It's not even about being a QoL upgrade, in my opinion : the purpose of smogon rulesets is to create a metagame as rewarding to the most skilled player as possible. Of course you can't ban everything that involves luck, but there is little to 0 cost to remove sand attack and stuff like that, so why not do it?
 

vapicuno

你的价值比自己想象中的所有还要低。我却早已解脱,享受幸福
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It's not even about being a QoL upgrade, in my opinion : the purpose of smogon rulesets is to create a metagame as rewarding to the most skilled player as possible. Of course you can't ban everything that involves luck, but there is little to 0 cost to remove sand attack and stuff like that, so why not do it?
Not saying that I support keeping accuracy lowering moves, but they can still potentially be explored as a strategy for lastmon restcune/curselax mitigation and also for para+subspam, both of which are generally considered healthy.
 
How thin are we going to keep deli-slicing these bans? Just get rid of Ninjask and be done with it. You ban sand-attack and they'll find some other cheesy bullshit to work around it. Or they'll keep playing Ninjask BP even if it has a 30% winrate. You give the mouse a pellet every time and it gets bored, but you give the pellet occasionally at random and they'll keep pressing that button all day long. That's all they know how to do. For the love of god, let the rest of us play ADV on the ladder without narrowly building our teams to counter one specific cheese.
 
How thin are we going to keep deli-slicing these bans? Just get rid of Ninjask and be done with it. You ban sand-attack and they'll find some other cheesy bullshit to work around it. Or they'll keep playing Ninjask BP even if it has a 30% winrate. You give the mouse a pellet every time and it gets bored, but you give the pellet occasionally at random and they'll keep pressing that button all day long. That's all they know how to do. For the love of god, let the rest of us play ADV on the ladder without narrowly building our teams to counter one specific cheese.
Ninjask has a legitimate niche as a dugtrio/choice user punish, and I don't think that you really need to "narrowly build" to beat jask pass. If your team loses that badly to ninjask, you're probably also boned vs more common setuppers like suicune.

On another note, while I understand the frustration of losing to uninteractive strategies on ladder, it's just an unfortunate fact of life that sometimes you're going to get bad games. Also, ninjask is significantly worse than zapdos on those teams, so if it gets banned the winrate of that strategy would probably increase anyway.
 
It doesn't have to be an "unfortunate fact of life" -- we can change it! Let's be real, no one uses Ninjask for anything other than cheesy bullshit. Dugtrio counter, that's a good one. You know how many times Ninjask was used across the six CI tournaments? 5 times. Out of 1,872 teams. Is it really worth screwing the ladder over a "legitimate niche" which is played 0.2% of the time?
 
It doesn't have to be an "unfortunate fact of life" -- we can change it! Let's be real, no one uses Ninjask for anything other than cheesy bullshit. Dugtrio counter, that's a good one. You know how many times Ninjask was used across the six CI tournaments? 5 times. Out of 1,872 teams. Is it really worth screwing the ladder over a "legitimate niche" which is played 0.2% of the time?
"Unfortunate" does not begin to describe the facts of life... Let's get specific here. I'm too lazy to track Hclat's games here, so maybe he pops up to embarrass me, but we'll say that no ADV main or tournament favorite has used Ninjask in CI. Ninjask has not been used in CI to any notable success or by a player who has gone on a deep run. It's only shown itself to be a problem in Hclat's SPL XII win against Marcop where he used a variant of Mead's Mime Pass. Ultimately, everyone is aware that Ninjask isn't a real Pokemon off of the ladder, and only the most creative cheesers dare to use it -- often to their own detriment.
The reason Ninjask hasn't thus far been banned is that some value the QoL of Ninjask Nathans. Or perhaps the it's the ad revenue. Couldn't tell you. As much fun as it would be to imagine a gen3ou -Jask ladder, I think the biggest problem here is that there are just such a high number of ladderers who get a kick out of using Jask, and maybe that's all the enjoyment they get out of mons. I can remember before I joined competitive, I was screwing around on cart with a friend, and one of the strategies he wanted to make work more than anything was a Ninjask team. I called him an ass, but I think the hurdle that these bans eventually approach has nothing to do with the competitive value of these mons. It's a philosophical discussion about what should be allowed in casual play. A fair solution might be to have a Gen 3(OU?) AG ladder where people are allowed to use whatever they would like. I'm agnostic, but I do think the discussion should be moving in this kind of direction if we're going to get something done that hasn't been ignored in the past.
 
It doesn't have to be an "unfortunate fact of life" -- we can change it! Let's be real, no one uses Ninjask for anything other than cheesy bullshit. Dugtrio counter, that's a good one. You know how many times Ninjask was used across the six CI tournaments? 5 times. Out of 1,872 teams. Is it really worth screwing the ladder over a "legitimate niche" which is played 0.2% of the time?
You make a good point, but what other cheese could Ninjask potentially use after banning accuracy lowering moves? Not much left besides swagger.
 
Should have just banned Baton Pass in the first place.

Did everyone collectively forget the shitshow that was Gen 6 BP Clause when deciding to do a complex ban lmao.
It's almost like Gen 3 and Gen 6 are different issues?

This discussion is RE accuracy moves, not BP as a whole.
 

Karxrida

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This discussion is RE accuracy moves, not BP as a whole.
You admitted in your OP that this was basically a Baton Pass issue since it's being abused by Ninjask to enable passing.

The discussion which surrounded stat passing last time revolved on it being uninteractive and leading to needing to use whirlwind as counterplay to the stat pass teams it enabled. The current issue is that the only completely reliable counterplay is to bring Skarmory as it is a phaser which cannot have its accuracy lowered. This is much the same issue but with even less flexibility.
People have also talked about how Ninjask will likely resort to Swagger if Sand Attack is banned to fish for cheese. Everything comes back to trying to abuse Baton Pass.

But go ahead and mald at Sand Attack if all things I guess. Watching people fuck up dealing with BP again is hilarious.
 
if you don't play the tier and aren't, to my knowledge, at all involved in the community, then please leave tiering decisions and discussion to the people who actually have a stake. While I do not always agree, the community has decided time and again that baton pass is worth preserving as an enabler of offensive strategies. In my opinion, the fullpass strategy is not good in its heavily nerfed form, and further action - be it a sand attack ban, speedpass ban, or swagger ban - is not necessary, and I think that most people agree that baton pass is not broken anymore.

I agree with the sentiment some have expressed here that we have to stop somewhere, and in my mind we are already there. While sand attack and flash don't commonly see competitive use, it is possible that they might in the future. Swagger sees more-than-0 usage as a last move on endeavor swampert, and that to me makes it wrong to ban. The community has decided against a speedpass ban many times before and likely will again.

Sand attack should be looked at outside of its usage on baton pass teams, because as a hit to baton pass it will likely be very ineffective. If the concept of lowering your opponent's accuracy is banworthy then we should ban it, and if baton pass is the problem we should be looking elsewhere. Notably, if we really want to split hairs, we can adjust baton pass clause to be "stat-altering moves" rather than "stat-boosting moves".

I don't think there would be significant opposition to banning brightpowder as an extension of evasion clause. While I do think, in some niche scenarios, it could be the best item to use (certain smeargle sets, probably) I doubt anyone cares enough about that to try and preserve the item. I think king's rock (not within the scope of the thread but related) has a niche on houndoom, charizard, and maybe dugtrio and should remain in the tier.

Anyway, for the third time, that's my two cents, so I suppose you've all got six of them now. Have a nice day everybody, and let's look forward to some quality games this spl.


EDIT: replying to the post below mine, I'd rather not flood the thread with a back-and-forth.

Karxrida said:
Yes, I understand each Generarion is different and has its own standards, but a lot of people don't know that and continue to propose bad complex bans in the OU discussions.
In what way is this different from what you are doing now? Because you think your ideas are good and these other peoples' are bad? Baton pass adds a certain dynamic to ADV OU that our community is loathe to part with. And to reiterate, banning ninjask isn't going to do anything, in my opinion, because zapdos is already better than ninjask at passing speed due to threatening almost all of the phazers in the tier. This is the kind of thing that we don't need to spend much time on if the people involved in the conversation already are familiar with the workings of the tier. But I digress and this is already far-enough removed from the purpose of the thread. I hope everyone reading this is having a nice day.
 
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Karxrida

Death to the Undying Savage
is a Community Contributor Alumnus
if you don't play the tier and aren't, to my knowledge, at all involved in the community, then please leave tiering decisions and discussion to the people who actually have a stake.
I do have a stake because Old Gen decisions still get cited for actions to be taken in Current Gen and stuff like this makes us look inconsistent with tiering policy. Yes, I understand each Generarion is different and has its own standards, but a lot of people don't know that and continue to propose bad complex bans in the OU discussions. As an aside, preservation of Dry Pass didn't mean shit to us when BP finally got banned during Gen 6.

Anyway, since people here clearly don't want to deal with BP directly, then maybe consider banning Ninjask if it's that much of an issue. Sand Attack is only seeing use because Ninjask has access to Speed Boost + Pass and I don't need to reiterate the Swagger point.
 
I do have a stake because Old Gen decisions still get cited for actions to be taken in Current Gen and stuff like this makes us look inconsistent with tiering policy. Yes, I understand each Generarion is different and has its own standards, but a lot of people don't know that and continue to propose bad complex bans in the OU discussions. As an aside, preservation of Dry Pass didn't mean shit to us when BP finally got banned during Gen 6.

Anyway, since people here clearly don't want to deal with BP directly, then maybe consider banning Ninjask if it's that much of an issue. Sand Attack is only seeing use because Ninjask has access to Speed Boost + Pass and I don't need to reiterate the Swagger point.
I am sorry that you feel that inconsistent policy causes tiering issues in the gens you play. I am not sure that trying to influence the gens you don't play is the correct form of remedial action.

BP has been discussed heavily and was the subject of the most recent suspect test, and much of the player base do not want to reopen this can of worms. BP being banned in gen 6 is irrelevant as you already had moves like u turn and volt switch by that point.
 
How BP is handled in other gens is 100% irrelevant to this discussion. They're different games, with different pokemon and moves and mechanics and metagames. Celebi is Ubers in Gen 2 and you don't see people crying over an "inconsistent tiering policy" cause it's allowed in Gen 3.

But anyway, "More than 0 usage" shouldn't be the standard. Of course you can come up with some hypothetical situation where a person might want to include Swagger on their Swampert or something. Fact of the matter is, no one's doing that. It's just not a thing. And you're doing a disservice to Gen 3 by making the ladder toxic to new players over something that's used legitimately 0.001% of the time.

It's funny that this thread is titled "It's time to fully bake this half baked implementation" and yet you're proposing another half-measure complex ban. Ban Ninjask. It's as simple as that. Siglut might not have his "Dugtrio counter" any more, oh well. Let's open up this metagame, bring some new talent in, make it so people actually want to play the ADV ladder and not private one-on-one practice games between the same 20 people.
 
no it’s a skill issue and u need to get good… maybe use some keeneye pokemon during building, eh?
I feel like this is the most bullheaded way to respond to the discussion- If everyone involved on the ban side is saying "this doesn't make sense given evasion clause and it's a qol issue", not that it's broken or warping, then answering "git gud and run keen eye" (skarm) doesn't add anything to the conversation
 
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