Policy Review Policy Review - Revisions & The CAP Metagame

[Rising_Dusk]

If you are not an experienced member of the CAP community, it is strongly recommended that you do not post in this thread.

This thread is intended to contain intelligent discussion and commentary by experienced members of the CAP project regarding CAP policy, process, and rules. As such, the content of this thread will be moderated more strictly than other threads on the forum. The posting rules for Policy Review threads are contained here.

This Policy Review is presented to you by both DougJustDoug and Rising_Dusk.

Introduction
​

The CAP metagame has always been the ugly duckling of CAP, a thing that has always been put at the back of our minds when it comes to developing CAPs. It isn't our primary concern, after all, what or how our CAPs do in a metagame with them all mashed together.. Or is it?

There is a very troubling issue that has arisen lately in the CAP metagame, that of revisions at large. Awhile back, Syclant, Revenankh, and Pyroak underwent major revisions to be up to date and on par with the rest of the CAPs. Recently, however, it has come to the attention of the community at large that some of these revisions have actually broken these CAPs in accordance with the Uber characteristics of Smogon. That this has happened indicates that there is a very fundamental issue at play here in CAP, one that must be addressed.

Secondly, Doug and I want to address something else that has been brought up time and time again. Accessibility of the CAP metagame. We have just completed our milestone CAP and broken into the double digits. We have 10 CAPs, and let me tell you, there are basically no good teams on the ladder that don't use at least 3 of them. The CAP metagame is looking more and more distant from OU with every CAP, and this is an issue for new players, especially now that the server isn't necessarily booming with CAP activity in the first place. You have to prepare for monstrous threats and things that you just don't have to worry about in OU. It's gotten to a point where I fear that an OU team without ample preparation for the CAP metagame cannot and will not do well. A proposal that simultaneously addresses this while fixing the revision issue at large would be a great boon to the CAP community.

The Problem
​

Revisions have no regulations around which they function. In the past, revisions have been very haphazard and more of a "Hey, maybe these things need to be revised because they kind of suck." They also had virtually no proper leadership and weren't supervised or organized properly. It ended up, tragically, becoming more of a flavor poll than anything competitive. If revisions are to continue, then a definitive and absolute policy for how they are to be run as well as how we determine if they are even necessary needs to be crafted and agreed upon.

That leads into another point that needs to be addressed, though. Why do we need revisions at all? The idea of a revision is that we fix something that we "failed" to do correctly the first time. Why should we create such a safety net for our CAPs? If anything, it makes more sense to put more pressure on the community to get it right the first time. If we didn't allow revisions at all, Topic Leaders would have to be absolutely certain that what they were doing was to the best of their and the community's ability. These are the sorts of things that will be primarily discussed in this Policy Review thread.

Proposal
​

Doug had suggested a possible solution for this to me, one that might seem a bit harsh at first, but that I think would really steer CAP in the right direction. No revisions. Ever. This puts a lot of pressure on the CAP process and community to get the CAPs right the first time.

This proposal takes it one step further, though. All CAPs must be accepted into the CAP metagame after the standard playtesting period takes place. After the standard playtesting period, we would have an "unlimited CAP metagame" stage where all CAPs are allowed and lasts for a week. During this week, players are able to test how all of the CAPs mesh together and discover for themselves how they interact and which ones should stay. It's important that these acceptance criteria be spelled out perfectly, but a good start is listed below.

We have to determine in any given season...

• which CAPs are too weak
• which CAPs are too strong
• which CAPs are poorly conceived
• which CAPs do not benefit the metagame enough to be worth having around

Realize that each CAP that we decide to keep around comes at a cost to the metagame. Team builders will have to account for it as a threat and it limits the accessibility of the metagame by adding a new Pokemon to it. Only if the CAP is worth this cost should it be accepted into that round of the CAP metagame. Note that if a CAP isn't accepted for one round, it might be accepted the next round if a new CAP is introduced that balances it out or allows it to shine or fit. In essence, this acceptance process is us asking "Is this CAP worth the cost?"

In order to determine who gets to vote on the answer to that question, Doug and I feel that a checks and balances between the server crowd and the forum community is in order. The top players of the previous CAP season, as ranked on the ladder and as interviewed by the mods, would be the people that get to vote on what's on the competitive slate for the next season. In this way, you'll see that the suggestion looks a lot like the Smogon Council, and it could indeed be our very own "CAP Council," a constantly updated group of relevant and current players from the server that determine which CAPs are used and which aren't.

This proposal is very exciting for me, and solves many of the problems CAP has been plagued by:

1. "Get it right the first time" on the forum with new CAPs. As CAPs might not get accepted into the metagame, and no one wants that, there is a lot of pressure on the forum community to Create-A-Pokemon properly and not resort to fixing them after the fact.
2. "The CAP Metagame is unplayable" is an oft-heard complaint that would be fixed with this. Things that are broken in the metagame or that the server users don't think are healthy for the metagame can simply not be accepted into it at the council's discretion. Furthermore, by removing certain CAPs that don't fit in a metagame, the metagame becomes more accessible to newcomers.
3. Even if it bothers you, as the TL or a participant of CAP, that your CAP is not accepted into the CAP metagame, there is a chance that a future CAP can bring it back by making it interesting, useful, or more relevant. In this way, the disapproval of certain CAPs is not an irreversible or permanent tiering.
4. It gives the server regulars some legitimate and serious control over the metagame. This is something I favor a lot, especially because I feel that the server users really deserve a say in what goes on here.
5. The forum and server become "equal partners" in determining the future and success of the overall CAP project. This is perhaps the greatest achievement of this whole proposal, as it really meshes the server and the forum together into one meaningful conglomerate.

Discussion of this possible solution, as well as other possible solutions of your own design, is welcome and encouraged in this thread.

 

[Dominion]

I like this idea for the sole reason that it gives us, as CAP members a formal history. We will be able to look back and say 'hey, we did this before.. and it didn't work out so well' or whatever. While we all want the CAP process to be fun, we also want it to be scientifically sound (Or atleast to a degree.. considering we're studying a children's game).

As you've stated, if we can change anything about the CAP at any other time then what was the point in going through the process anyway? Why not just take any ole' idea from anybody, slap the 'im a CAP' sticker on it then fix it later? It's also insulting to the people who worked hard on any particular area of a CAP to be told that now it's obsolete. This makes these 'hard workers' try and beat the test of time by thinking up ideas or theories that will be unhindered by newer generations of both pokemon and people.

 

[Elevator Music]

So, if I'm getting this right, after our normal playtesting we'd playtest the new CAP in the full CAP metagame and see if it fits in well? For a week? And if it doesn't we just remove it from the CAP metagame? And furthermore this "fitting in" includes not only being too strong, but also being too weak/etc.? (Sorry, these aren't great questions and normally I'd ask you/someone on IRC but my other comp isn't working so I can't).

I like this idea, assuming I read it all correctly,... on paper. However, over time, it really doesn't solve very many problems. After another 10 CAPs I don't see this making too much of a difference, and we will still be at this situation where you need 3+ CAPs to make a good team.

However ignoring that because I'm assuming it may be addressed at some point, I'm also worried and confused about how we will decide when to add back in old CAPs. Would all CAPs be retested (with possible exceptions) after every new CAP, or would it be arbitrarily decided on by the 'council'? Both have their issues so I'm hoping I missed some good middle ground...


On a side note, what about the CAPs we already have? I don't like that we will probably be excluding a pokemon like Pyroak from basically every metagame from now on (I don't see it becoming less broken anytime soon without another revision), because the previous revision is what made it so damn broken, not the original.

Also, side note #2: How does this affect the analyses? No matter what we decide to do with our analyses (even just keeping them as they are), we will need to update them very frequently if we go this route. Just FFT.



I do really like this idea and how it would mostly fix the problems that we have, I'm just hoping that some bugs get ironed out so it doesn't create big new ones.

 

[Deck Knight]

There are a few concerns I have with this.

The first question is, of course, how important is accessibility?

Now I'm not the best team builder and not the best battler, but I like milling over all possible options before I decide to test something out. To me, treating the CAP Pokemon as a sort of UU tier where some of them get banned to "Limbo" (for lack of a better term) inbetween rounds sacrifices innovation at the cost of appeasing users who cannot even account for ten (or eleven) new threats. I'm not sure what Pokemon Black and White is going to bring, but I imagine we'll be getting at least 10-15 new threats there, all of which will then be entered into whatever we decide to do with CAP.

Now I understand that some of our CAPs are now a bit overpowered, but they should be revised and I think retroactively applying the result of our movepool thread to them would be the best way forward on that count.

But CAP is and will always be different than standard OU. In fact a change in standard OU (banning of Latias) basically catapulted Pyroak even further by removing one of its most solid checks. Changes in CAP will never affect OU but changes in OU apply to CAP.

Moreover even with the enlightened opinions of the best server battlers, how is that going to help us keep things accessible to new users? Why wouldn't the experts simply continue allowing the CAP Pokemon that have made them successful? Or ban the ones they find most frustrating? In either case, how can we expect them to speak for new users rather than themselves. Moreover, how can we even describe the "cost" of removing one CAP vs. two or five? If that's the CAP they don't prepare for, then we still aren't "accessible," whatever that means.

What some may see as a "cost" I see as an "enhancement." It makes innovation more important because you always have that one CAP that checks whichever one you have chosen. If I happen to think Syclant, Pyroak, and Arghonaut are too effective at addressing the Colossoil I like to use, I have reason to exclude them regardless of whether the CAP metagame is more accessible with those Pokemon removed (rather than Colossoil).

So is this proposal really about newcomers or veterans? I'm not saying the two are mutually exclusive, but how much is "accessibility" going to factor into the veteran decision makers views of the CAP Metagame? We can't even define accessibility now, how are we going to make it a metric like we do if we decide a CAP is "BL" like we do in UU revisions? It's not just going to be #cap contributors at the top, just like "The Smogon Council" isn't going to be made up entirely by mods and badged users. It won't be like selecting the PRC where you can be reasonably assured everyone has a vested interest in CAP.

Finally the matter of revisions. We don't even have a solid revisions process now, and we're going to speak of doing it multiple times a round? Will we just be revising the CAPs that don't make it under this proposal? Even assuming we apply revisions like in the movepool thread retroactively, how are we going to go about changing them if we believe they need to stay in the same general place? That's for another PR, but it is a legitimate concern so we don't wind up with the dead ends revisions brought us last time.

Incidentally I've never liked testing periods of less than 10-14 days. I don't think a week is good enough to decide.

So to summarize, I want these questions answered:

What is accessibility?

We claim this is the good we want, but we don't even have it defined. The "Most Accessible" metagame would be one with no CAPs or very few. But would that be the "best" metagame or simply the "most accessible" one, and which would we want?

Furthermore, when you want to jump from OU to UU you play an entirely different metagame. Why should CAP cater to what some might call the "lowest common denominator?" If the metagame is unplayable because of "broken Pokemon" than it would be better to fix the Pokemon than ban it or remove it for "being too weak" or whatever.

Is this for veterans or newcomers?

The two are not mutually exclusive, but counting on the former to act in the interests of the latter is suspect. My instinct is that veterans would want the maximum number of tools at their disposal while newcomers would want the easiest transition from standard OU.

 

[Rising_Dusk]

So, if I'm getting this right, after our normal playtesting we'd playtest the new CAP in the full CAP metagame and see if it fits in well? For a week? And if it doesn't we just remove it from the CAP metagame? And furthermore this "fitting in" includes not only being too strong, but also being too weak/etc.? (Sorry, these aren't great questions and normally I'd ask you/someone on IRC but my other comp isn't working so I can't).

Not quite. We would not test the new CAP with the old ones and only hold the new CAP accountable for its cost on the CAP metagame. Every CAP would need to be considered, since some old CAPs that were once problematic could become fair in the presence of the new CAP, or with the support of the new CAP may become broken. These things all would be considered, and then "round" tierings for all CAP Pokemon would be decided at the end of that one week period.

After another 10 CAPs I don't see this making too much of a difference, and we will still be at this situation where you need 3+ CAPs to make a good team.

This is in particular why I am in favor of one final revision based upon the conclusions of this PR thread. Because the truth of the matter is that the old CAPs will consistently dominate the ones made after that PR with their exorbitant movepools. If we do not act in retrospect with the results of that PR on the older CAPs, the CAP metagame will eventually be "Ban all CAPs prior to CAP11." That bothers me.

And it may always be that great CAP teams will need 3+ CAPs on a team to perform excellently. CAPs are expected to be excellent Pokemon, no doubt about it, but they should not be as powerful as they have been. There are very few non-CAPs in our current metagame that can seriously stand up to more than 1 of the CAPs at a time and fare well. If we can address this with a final revision, then excellent, but if not, c'est la vie. Perhaps the cost of the Pokemon that changes the metagame that much is simply not worth it, then.

Would all CAPs be retested (with possible exceptions) after every new CAP

Yes, all CAPs would be retested after every new CAP. No exceptions.

On a side note, what about the CAPs we already have?

Mostly explained this above. :)

Also, side note #2: How does this affect the analyses?

The analyses are written for the OU metagame, so most would not change. The CAP metagame section needs a rewrite after every new CAP is added anyway, so we would just take note in there of which ones are banned from that 'round'. Seems very workable and legit to me.

I do really like this idea and how it would mostly fix the problems that we have, I'm just hoping that some bugs get ironed out so it doesn't create big new ones.

As do I. I'd really like to see this go through.

Will respond to Deck's post when I get home from work...

 

[Rising_Dusk]

Okay, Deck's post. I am making a new post so my previous one isn't too titanic and tl;dr. Hopefully that's not an issue.

how important is accessibility?

Notice how the actual problem being addressed by this PR is not accessibility, it is revisions and the CAP metagame. Accessibility is a side-effect of this PR, but it would be preferable if in some way, the accessibility of the CAP metagame were improved with whatever solution comes to pass here. How important is it, you ask? It is incredibly important that CAP at large is accessible to the public, as their general understanding of the process helps them make educated opinions and votes on each stage of the process. If you are referring specifically to the CAP metagame (as I assume you are), then it is important insofar as we don't make the metagame so substantially different from OU that newer players cannot simply start up, read some analyses, and get going.

An extreme example of this would be if permanent Sun and permanent Rain ever made an appearance in CAP and were somehow allowed by Doug, the TL, and the PRC. As interesting as these things might be for the process, they completely ravage the typical weather metagame as people are used to seeing it in OU and make it harder to follow and become a part of. These effects, if they were fair, might be banned due to the cost associated with them where they too dynamically change the metagame and make it difficult for newcomers. However, they might not be. It really would depend upon the voters to make that decision.

This brings my to my next point in response to what you're worried about: you seem worried that our voters will be selfish and will vote selfishly and take advantage of their ladder position to make the next round "easier". This is in particular interesting because it is a general question of tiering anything as we've ever done on Smogon for OU, UU, and even LC. Do you trust the voters? This is why my proposal above intrinsically requires that the mods approve of whatever paragraphs we ask for. I do not want users to be required to submit N paragraphs in essay-form each time where N is the CAP number we're on. That gets absurd fast. They would instead only write a paragraph of 6-8 sentences for each CAP they think should be banned and why, based upon the characteristics we define here.

The reviewer of these things, someone who didn't play on the ladder during that round and is well-respected in the community (doesn't have to be constant between rounds), would review the quality of the paragraphs and decide which of the top 15 ladder users' votes get counted. If a majority (>50%) of the counted voters voted for the removal of a given CAP, regardless of the reason, it is removed for the next round.

How does accessibility play into this? For each less CAP, it consequentially and conveniently gets more accessible for the newer users. I definitely want "accessibility" to be a legitimate vote or "ban clause" for the tiering, though, as the most estranged CAPs turn the CAP metagame into a chaotic mess. Accessibility is not the primary reason for this PR, though, rather the stance on revisions and the proper placement and balancing of the CAP metagame is. Those are the true focus of this PR.

Is this for veterans or newcomers?

This is a very interesting question, because as I said before, it's largely focused in tiering as smogon does it, not just how we do it. The Uber characteristics of the Smogon suspect testing for UU and OU are largely arbitrary. What is "too much" of the metagame in terms of being swept? What is "not much" support in terms of what's required? We leave these things up to the voter to interpret and define in their votes. It is arbitrary, but at the same time, it's intentionally that way because it is totally impossible to decide on hard numbers for this sort of thing. It is entirely dependent upon the impartial member reviewing the votes to decide whether the person has made a legitimate case or not.

To have an issue with this manner of tiering is to have an issue with the tiering of all of Smogon, in which case I'm not sure what to suggest. It works and has been proven to work in the past numerous times. I think it will make a successful return here.

Finally the matter of revisions. We don't even have a solid revisions process now, and we're going to speak of doing it multiple times a round?

We wouldn't be revising them at all, we'd be leaving and tiering them entirely as-is. The only revision I am suggesting is a final one-time revision specifically for getting the older CAPs in-line with the new movepool restrictions. This is advantageous for two reasons:

1. It would likely balance out all of the major issues with the broken CAPs
2. It would prevent new CAPs post CAP10 from being utterly weak when compared to the older CAPs of Krilowatt and prior

Incidentally I've never liked testing periods of less than 10-14 days. I don't think a week is good enough to decide.

Perhaps 2 weeks is the way to go, then. I think this may actually be better, since it also allows the ladder to stabilize a bit more before the rankings are pulled.

 

[ssbbm]

The problem I see with the proposal of no revisions is the fact that the OU metagame is constantly changing, and thus, CAP pokemon that can be considered “balanced and fair” at one time can be considered either under, or over, powered at different points in the metagame. For example, let us say, hypothetically, that the Magnemite family was never created, and that a new CAP pokemon, with the same properties of the Magnemite family, was created because Scizor would be running rampant. (I understand that Scizor has better checks and counters than Magnezone/ton, but this is hypothetical.) The pokemon is then considered a success in both OU and CAP, as it can do what it was meant to do – counter Scizor. But then, what would happen if Scizor would be banned in OU play? This would obviously lower the abilities of the new CAP - it has lost its main purpose. However, it would not be able to be revised to change to the new metagame. At this time, nobody would be at fault – it was impossible to predict that Scizor would be banned. The reason that I believe revisions are important is because they can fix mistakes that occurred not through a lack of effort, but by an unpredictable change in the metagame. I agree that some of the CAPs are overpowered. However, I believe that banning revisions entirely will hurt the overall CAP process, not help it.

 

[Deck Knight]

The thrust of my post was that the proposal seemed to have a lot of erroneous or stretched justifications for it.

Our actual "Revision" policy as stated is going to be:

There will be a one-time final revision on CAPs 1-10 based on changes implemented in the previous Movepool Policy Review. No further revisions will ever be allowed.

I agree with this. What I was having trouble understanding was where the thrust of everything else was going, since it seemed to be an entirely different proposal.

For example, we are supposed to be determined if a CAP "as-is" after the revisions is "too weak" or "too strong," so "Getting it right the first time" would be more important than ever, not less. As vague as revisions were before people believed they would eventually come to pass by some arcane process or whatever. Now we will know each CAP moving forward is "one and done."

I don't really like the criterion for accessibility. One because it's hard enough to hold a test vote in UU when you're just voting on whether something is "too powerful" for UU utilizing one of three Uber characteristics applied to the UU metagame. Now voters can also argue a CAP should be disallowed because they'd like a "more accessible metagame." So Arghonaut could be neither too weak nor too strong, but since people want a metagame where stat-ups are viable again they can argue Arghonaut hurts too many strategies too severely. How do you have someone independent check that when we've made an allowance for accessibility concerns outside of power concerns? This leaves a scenario open where the only relevant graph someone could have for opposing a CAP Pokemon being allowed is "accessibility." This makes it entirely different than Smogon's tiering, because they are concerned solely with power [Does X Pokemon meet an Uber characteristic in this metagame]. I sincerely doubt after revisions any CAP will be suspected under an Uber characteristic, which basically means we should flip coins and decide which pokemon make the game "more accessible" in the face of a new CAP.

Learn the metagame. It's what you have to do if you jump from OU to UU or OU to LC or OU to Ubers. My fundamental belief, and it may be an erroneous one, is that the most likely new users are here for one of two reasons: either they want a quick break and think the CAP Pokemon look pretty cool and pretty fun, or they want to get involved in the academic nuances of CAP and trying to build something from scratch. The first class of newcomers are going to flit in and out while we retain most of the second class, who generally better the project going forward.

Interestingly, the original Pyroak we tested permanent and temporary auto-weather abilities and deemed them too powerful. We did it using Lv. 78 Kyorgre/Groudon on the ladder to approximate OU play, even though the flaw was that the CAP would operate differently. It was mostly looking at the support aspect of it.

 

[Umbreon Dan]

I agree with this proposal on the whole but I have issues with many parts of it.

We have to determine in any given season...

• which CAPs are too weak
• which CAPs are too strong
• which CAPs are poorly conceived
• which CAPs do not benefit the metagame enough to be worth having around

Actually, the only one of these I agree with is the first one. Overall, I'm quite interested in the idea of banning all revisions and simply taking what we get. However, I don't think there's any reason to ban CAP Pokemon because they "aren't good" (especially since our next CAP will have strict restrictions on movepools and as of yet we have almost no idea how this will turn out).

If a Pokemon isn't good, why can't we simply let it be unused on the ladder? It's said to be "for fairness," meaning that a Pokemon that is too weak is treated the same as a Pokemon that is too strong, forcing users to get it right. I believe that "making a CAP that nobody uses" is good enough as far as "punishing the TL/community" goes, to be honest.

On top of that, there's the issue of whether or not a Pokemon really is weak. Okay, so you may be able to realize within the timespan of one or two weeks that a new CAP Pokemon is broken. Fine, ban it. But how can you tell in two weeks whether a Pokemon sucks or whether we simply don't know how to use it? I point to Empoleon, who would no doubt be booted out of the CAP metagame based on what we saw in the first two weeks of playing DP. It took almost a year for Empoleon to be widely recognized as one of, if not the most feared sweeper in the standard metagame. I can also draw attention to our own Kitsunoh. Wispy Kit and Stallbreaking Kit were sets that were only discovered (relatively) recently, but have come to be the most respected ways to play Kitsunoh. If we had banned Kitsunoh after two weeks, we would never have known how good he actually is. Do you really believe that we can reliably establish in a short timespan whether a Pokemon's full potential has been realized, especially with such a small playerbase?

The other argument was that if Pokemon are too weak to make a big influence on the metagame, they should be removed because they make the metagame less accessible to Standard players. This doesn't make an awful lot of sense to me, to be honest, because if the Pokemon sucks, then it won't have much influence on the metagame, and therefore removing it will only change the metagame marginally. It's akin to banning something like Donphan from Standard. Sure, it sucks, but if you remove it, the metagame will stay virtually the same.

"CAPs [which] are poorly conceived" - what exactly does this mean? Did I just totally miss it, or was this actually defined anywhere? All the criteria for banning CAP Pokemon need to be clear and objective.

"CAPs [which] do not benefit the metagame enough to be worth having around" - actually, I don't really think we should ban any CAP Pokemon that aren't obviously broken.

I hinted at this earlier, but no matter what we do, not even two weeks is long enough for a "suspect" period. I would say this stage should be at least a month. (I also think ordinary CAP playtests should be longer. At the current rate, we only produce two or three Pokemon a year. The playtesting period for one CAP is always long over before the next CAP even begins.)

If there were to be a CAP council, there should be no limit on the number of members. It should be run like the suspect program, ie. everybody is given a (four-week!) period to achieve a certain rating, possibly with a deviation requirement as well, and I think the requirements should be fairly lenient. Basically, if you play the CAP metagame, I think you should be allowed to vote.

Somebody brought up the idea of simply reverting all of the CAP Pokemon back to their original forms. Believe it or not, I don't oppose this idea. Old Syclant and Revenankh were considered broken, but I think in the current metagame they would clearly not be. Old Pyroak may not be as impressive as current Pyroak, but I'm not exactly a fan of the modern Pyroak either. :|

edit: I'm just going to put this idea out there but I think if we start banning stuff then we really ought to have a playable CAP ubers ladder on the server.

 

[DougJustDoug]

The thrust of this PR is to address the CAP metagame as a whole. That is the main reason Dusk and I wrote this. There are numerous other secondary benefits of implementing the OP proposal, but the primary driver is to implement a workable system for managing the combined CAP metagame played on the CAP server.

"The CAP Metagame" is really just a big BY-PRODUCT. We make a continual stream of CAP pokemon, all of which are very powerful in general pokemon terms -- usually commensurate in power with the very best pokemon in OU, and possible ubers as well. We then combine all those pokemon together, with no structure or design, and we expect the server to play the metagame that comes as a result of mixing all our independent forum creations. After cranking out a bunch of these pokemon, it is quite reasonable that the combined CAP metagame has become a bit of a chaotic mess.

In general, my attitude about an unbalanced CAP metagame has been -- "So what? The CAP metagame is, and forever will be, a big mess. That's simply what you get when you make a bunch of high-powered custom pokemon and then throw them together in a metagame."

Unfortunately, the general CAP server population is not satisfied with such an answer. The denizens of the CAP server are not content to play a combined CAP metagame that is a jumbled, imbalanced mess. From time to time, when a pokemon is deemed "too good" or "not good enough" -- in keeping with the general theme of "creating pokemon" -- we alter the pokemon to fit the conventional server thinking at that time. And after a few years of making and revising pokemon, we have seen many of our CAP's ping-pong back and forth amongst power levels. And the CAP metagame as a whole, is not much more balanced or playable as a result. Some people argue that the CAP metagame is actually worse off, despite our attempts to fix or improve it.

This PR is intended to take a different approach to designing a combined CAP metagame. The approach is very similar to the approach we take in Smogon when it comes to designing the OU metagame. In OU -- we take all the creations that Nintendo gives us, and we ban the pokemon or mechanics that we feel make the metagame unplayable. We don't alter real pokemon or alter game mechanics (well, we do have Sleep Clause, but that's another story). We can argue over the purpose of the uber characteristics, or the implementation of the suspect testing process. But, in broad brush strokes, I think we can describe the entire OU tiering process as, "Getting rid of the stuff that we don't like."

That's what we are proposing for CAP. Instead of constantly revising CAPs, let's just get rid of the stuff we don't want. If we do it, then we get several project benefits:

• First and foremost, we have a very simple and clear policy for designing a combined CAP metagame. I don't really care what metrics or characteristics we develop to determine whether a pokemon is accepted into the metagame or not. Nor do I really care how long we spend testing pokemon in order to make our determination. But in the end, the mechanics for fixing the CAP metagame are very simple -- regarding each CAP pokemon, we have to make a choice -- keep it or reject it.
  
  
• The "get it right the first time" imperative that places on the forum community is a secondary benefit. But, I do think it is a benefit to give the forum community a clear motivation to make good decisions.
  
  
• I also like how it creates a certain checks and balances between the forum and server. Each side has a certain amount of responsibility and control. The forum controls the pokemon, but the server controls the metagame. Both sides need to function well in order for the Create-A-Pokemon project as a whole to succeed.
  
  
• The mandate placed on the server community is still pretty vague -- "Make a good metagame" is about all we can say at this point. I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I'm confident we can come up with criteria. I have opinions about the way we should structure the criteria, but I'm not too emphatic about them. My only desire is that, as a result of applying the criteria (whatever they are), not all CAP pokemon will make the cut. If we end up accepting all CAP pokemon into the metagame, then we are completely wasting our time with this process. But, assuming we do actually reject some CAP pokemon, then I think it will be worthwhile, for all the reasons stated.
  
  
• The accessibility aspects of this PR are a secondary benefit. But, issues about accessibility of the CAP metagame have been a longtime concern on the CAP project. We've had two PR threads dedicated to the topic, and we have had numerous other discussions about it here on the forum and on the server and IRC. I'm not too sure how far we need to go in defining the specifics of "accessibility". If we want to define the term and incorporate that into the voting criteria for CAP, I'm fine with that. If we want to leave accessibility as a vague, unspecified concept floating around this process -- I'm fine with that too.

We still have many more details to work out, if we want to seriously pursue this proposal. And even if we agree on some details and conclude this PR, there would be many more details to be worked out afterward. The most important thing is to get feedback on the general reshaping of the relationship between the forum and server, and determine if it is worthwhile to manage the combined CAP metagame in this general manner.

 

[Rising_Dusk]

For the record, I absolutely agree with Doug's post.

If we're willing to pursue the idea of banning CAPs for whatever reasons in an attempt to primarily address the issue of the CAP metagame in its entirety, which it seems there is ample support for thus far, then the characteristics upon which we can ban something definitely need to be meted out and concluded on in this thread.

The suggestions in the first post are even noted there to be just that - suggestions. I have not hammered out exactly what they mean insofar as we need to, only presented what I feel are the important characteristics that should be discussed here

I don't really like the criterion for accessibility. One because it's hard enough to hold a test vote in UU when you're just voting on whether something is "too powerful" for UU utilizing one of three Uber characteristics applied to the UU metagame. Now voters can also argue a CAP should be disallowed because they'd like a "more accessible metagame." So Arghonaut could be neither too weak nor too strong, but since people want a metagame where stat-ups are viable again they can argue Arghonaut hurts too many strategies too severely.

I am remiss to admit it, but I agree with this. I don't think it's wise to include accessibility directly in the ban characteristics because it is very difficult to argue one way or the other. A CAP that is too weak or too strong we can make a founded case for, even if it is still a bit subjective, but that cannot be said about accessibility. As much as I'd like accessibility to be a characteristic, I also feel that it shouldn't be.

If a Pokemon isn't good, why can't we simply let it be unused on the ladder? It's said to be "for fairness," meaning that a Pokemon that is too weak is treated the same as a Pokemon that is too strong, forcing users to get it right. I believe that "making a CAP that nobody uses" is good enough as far as "punishing the TL/community" goes, to be honest.

On top of that, there's the issue of whether or not a Pokemon really is weak. Okay, so you may be able to realize within the timespan of one or two weeks that a new CAP Pokemon is broken. Fine, ban it. But how can you tell in two weeks whether a Pokemon sucks or whether we simply don't know how to use it? I point to Empoleon, who would no doubt be booted out of the CAP metagame based on what we saw in the first two weeks of playing DP. It took almost a year for Empoleon to be widely recognized as one of, if not the most feared sweeper in the standard metagame. I can also draw attention to our own Kitsunoh. Wispy Kit and Stallbreaking Kit were sets that were only discovered (relatively) recently, but have come to be the most respected ways to play Kitsunoh. If we had banned Kitsunoh after two weeks, we would never have known how good he actually is. Do you really believe that we can reliably establish in a short timespan whether a Pokemon's full potential has been realized, especially with such a small playerbase?

I strongly support the banning of CAPs based on being too weak. If they are tragically weak and inferior to everything else, I want to see them removed from the metagame because the offer nothing to it but they still make it fundamentally different from OU because of their presence. Each CAP comes at a cost to newcomers simply by existing, the more powerful ones obviously have higher costs. However, I do agree with you that a CAP needs to be given a chance in the CAP metagame before being called weak. For this reason, I support that for the first "round" of the CAP metagame that a new CAP is released into, it cannot be banned for being too weak, but it can be banned in subsequent rounds for that. This gives us ample time to experiment substantially with that CAP during that round before we make the judgment on being too weak for the following round.

"CAPs [which] are poorly conceived" - what exactly does this mean? Did I just totally miss it, or was this actually defined anywhere?

It was not defined anywhere, it was just a suggested idea that would then be elaborated later as a possible ban characteristic. Since you have brought it up, I will explain more my thoughts on this one.

This is an idea Doug and I had for a possible characteristic where a CAP can be punished for blatantly not following the concept of the CAP process that created it. In one sense, I like the idea of punishing the community for clearly diverting from the concept, but on the other, it might not be sensible to ban a CAP from a metagame that it was not designed for. I am mixed about this ban characteristic and would appreciate more opinions on it.

"CAPs [which] do not benefit the metagame enough to be worth having around" - actually, I don't really think we should ban any CAP Pokemon that aren't obviously broken.

I hinted at this earlier, but no matter what we do, not even two weeks is long enough for a "suspect" period. I would say this stage should be at least a month. (I also think ordinary CAP playtests should be longer. At the current rate, we only produce two or three Pokemon a year. The playtesting period for one CAP is always long over before the next CAP even begins.)

A month is a long time, especially for the CAP process. It would basically give you a month of playtime in the "suspect" realm and maybe a month of playtime for the actual round. When you push the suspect duration to that long, it almost seems pointless to have tested at all when there will be a new CAP in no time at all.

I feel that we should aim to create 4 CAPs a year. The process is currently not really optimized enough for us to do this, though, but after these PRs and a few more CAPs, we may be there. For instance, we've spent nearly 4 weeks on this PR round and we're not done yet, meanwhile both Doug and I feel that the idea PR round should take ~2 weeks. If we could get it down to the level where we can achieve the timescale we want, I think 4 a year is very fair. Anyway, this is really not a significant topic for me to say more about, but I wanted to let you know my feelings on the matter.

Anyway, this ban characteristic was thought up on the principle that some CAPs may be fair but drive the metagame too far away from OU. This was basically the "accessibility" characteristic that I noted above that I really don't support that much, but wanted to propose to get some ideas for it.

For the moment, I think the general stance is for the following 3 characteristics:

Uber Characteristic
A Pokémon is banned from the CAP metagame if, in common battle conditions, it is capable of either sweeping through a significant portion of teams in the metagame with little effort, walling and stalling out a significant portion of the metagame, or consistently setting up a situation in which it makes it substantially easier for other Pokemon to sweep.

Underused Characteristic
A Pokémon is banned from the CAP metagame if, in common battle conditions, it is unable to sweep much of the metagame, wall or stall out much of the metagame, or set up a situation with any regularity where other Pokemon can more easily sweep. A CAP cannot be banned by this characteristic on the first round of the metagame after its creation.

No-Concept Characteristic
A Pokémon is banned from the CAP metagame if, in common battle and metagame conditions, it functions in a vastly different manner from the concept given to it by the CAP project that created it.

The biggest characteristic I want to discuss next is the No-Concept Characteristic. Should that be enforced, especially for the past CAPs? For instance, majorly Kitsunoh is nothing of a scout in the CAP metagame. Does this mean we should ban it even though it is actually a contributing member of the metagame that may be both fun and balanced to use? What about Krilowatt, who cannot function as a utility counter in the CAP metagame because of its typing and the new threats it is supposed to utility counter (that it can't)? Should it then be banned because it must function as a sweeper? These are things I want to address.

I feel that perhaps the No-Concept characteristic will leave the CAP metagame barren of many of our past CAPs, but pressure us to focus very closely in future CAPs to ensure that they closely meet their concept. This has its ups and downs. I can list a few CAPs offhand that I feel don't fit their concept at all. Furthermore, Syclant, Revenankh, and Pyroak don't even have proper concepts. How can we analyze them for this characteristic? Should they be exempt, even though they really don't follow any proper concept? Despite us potentially gutting older CAPs with this characteristic, the pressure it puts on future CAPs to "get it right" is something I support tremendously and really want to see. Perhaps, though, if we just keep the CAPs balanced and within fair-play ranges, they will naturally fall more or less into the concept given unto them. What do you all think of this?

 

[Raj]

Eh, you can use this, but I really doubt anyone's going to just throw it out. Each CaP takes ~2 months for completion, right? So if we trashed our latest creation, there's that right out of the window. 2 months of work gone. I suggest that if we do this, we should forego the artistic portions of the CaP until after it's accepted, because that's mainly what takes the longest. In the meantime, we can use a generic sprite to represent the "demo" on Shoddy.

 

[Yllnath]

I really don't like the underused characteristic for a simple reason. What if the concept itself is a niche concept? Or a concept that is "weak" on purpose, causing it to see less use, but somehow that concept does make us learn a lot of the metagame?

This could lead to two situations.

1. Concepts that will likely lead to a niche pokemon or an underused pokemon for whatever reason, will never get chosen, even though its concept could be really good, with ample oppertunity to learn from the metagame, etc. This will lead to concepts getting more standard with every passing CAP and will only lead to overpowering concepts. (Because who wants to select a concept that will get banned anyway after a few weeks of play under this characteristic).
2 The niche concept is chosen anyway, but, in order for it to actually see much use, it just receives additional gadgets in every single stage (higher BST than necessary, better typing or ability, etc.), just out of fear that 12 weeks of work aren't in vain and that CAP gets shafted later.


I'm perfectly fine with the breaking of concept, and uber should be clear. But I think something else should be found for UU CAPs.
Perhaps something along the line of the relation between OU and BL. Pokemon that just don't see enough use to be defined OU, but are too strong for UU and thus are placed in BL. They can be used in OU, but you rarely see them.
If we could make a more "official" CAP OU, defined by the actual CAP server usage statistics, the CAPs that would fall under the usage drop-off line, should just be called BL. The, on the CAP homepage, a tiers page for OU would only show the CAPs we feel are the most viable. This makes the CAP OU less cluttered for newcomers, but those who want to use certain CAPs (favourites, or specific teamplay, or whatever reason), even though they are classified BL, those people can still use the shafted caps in OU matches.

I'm not sure if that makes sense, but if shafting CAPs on basis of too low usage is being considered to clean up the metagame, I'd rather "hide" the shafted CAPs, instead of outright banning them, so newcomers only see the good CAPs at first, but all CAPs can still be available for veterans or fanboys.
And since they were underused and fell through the bottom of OU, it's not like not banning them will mean that newcomers will still see them pop up regularly on opposing teams, because if that were the case, they would have never fallen to BL anyway.

 

[Rising_Dusk]

I really don't like the underused characteristic for a simple reason. What if the concept itself is a niche concept? Or a concept that is "weak" on purpose, causing it to see less use, but somehow that concept does make us learn a lot of the metagame?

It being banned from the CAP metagame does not inherently mean that that we did not learn anything from it. However, there is a direct correlation between a weak concept and a CAP performing poorly in the CAP metagame. For instance, Cyclohm had a very weak concept and is largely regarded as the 'worst' CAP in the CAP metagame.

1. Concepts that will likely lead to a niche pokemon or an underused pokemon for whatever reason, will never get chosen, even though its concept could be really good, with ample oppertunity to learn from the metagame, etc. This will lead to concepts getting more standard with every passing CAP and will only lead to overpowering concepts. (Because who wants to select a concept that will get banned anyway after a few weeks of play under this characteristic).

But you see, we want strong concepts. We want concepts that actually impact the metagame significantly, and we want concepts that in impacting the metagame do not do so in a way we already understand very well, such as what Salamence does. I have no doubt that concepts will not become as you suggest for future CAPs.

2 The niche concept is chosen anyway, but, in order for it to actually see much use, it just receives additional gadgets in every single stage (higher BST than necessary, better typing or ability, etc.), just out of fear that 12 weeks of work aren't in vain and that CAP gets shafted later.

It cannot get that, actually, because the end goal is failed even more-so if the CAP is broken in the playtest metagame than if the CAP gets banned in the relatively after-the-fact CAP metagame. I am sure that the TLs would know better than to assume that a unique and niche concept implies that it will suck. (As it does not - look at Krilowatt)

And since they were underused and fell through the bottom of OU, it's not like not banning them will mean that newcomers will still see them pop up regularly on opposing teams, because if that were the case, they would have never fallen to BL anyway.

That's the thing, though. All CAPs, regardless of whether they are underused or not, have unimaginable bulk or offensive power or both - despite how they fare in the metagame. There are many times where a player is prepared for every common threat, then the relatively "underused" Cyclohm comes in and eats their entire team because they weren't ready for it. That added layer of preparation for a relatively uncommon threat makes the metagame less accessible and less ideal.

Eh, you can use this, but I really doubt anyone's going to just throw it out. Each CaP takes ~2 months for completion, right? So if we trashed our latest creation, there's that right out of the window. 2 months of work gone. I suggest that if we do this, we should forego the artistic portions of the CaP until after it's accepted, because that's mainly what takes the longest. In the meantime, we can use a generic sprite to represent the "demo" on Shoddy.

I do not agree with this. We should absolutely finish a CAP before we even consider what the metagame implications of it might be. If it gets banned after being created, then that means that the TL and the community should have tried harder to do things right.

 

[DougJustDoug]

I like the idea of a No-Concept Characteristic, although we might want to come up with a better name. "No Concept" implies that it never had a concept in the first place. When, in reality, all CAP's have a concept (even the CAPs we made before we formally had a concept, there was a general "theme" that developed during the course of those projects). The issue is whether the CAP sufficiently fulfills it's concept. Perhaps we could call it a "Deviation Characteristic" or something like that.

I think some people may not like having a characteristic based on the Concept, because it is not similar to the way we ban pokemon from OU. People can easily understand the idea of banning something too powerful. That's exactly what we do in OU. I think the other characteristics are going to be hard for people to swallow, so I'd like to explain the motivation for removing CAP pokemon in more detail.

Banning a pokemon from CAP is not the same as banning a pokemon from OU. That's why I don't want to refer to it as "banning". Because everyone here assumes that "Ban" is just a short way of saying "Banned for being too powerful". So when we talk about "banning something for being too weak", people just don't get it. They think it is an oxymoron. So, rather than trying to get people to step outside of their narrow pre-existing definitions -- let's just use new words to describe this stuff, and avoid all the bullshit clarifications and disagreements that come with all the baggage associated with a commonly used metagame word like "ban". I suggest we use the term "Reject" instead of "Ban", but I'm open to other suggestions.

This proposal is not that we reject CAP pokemon simply because they are too powerful. We should reject CAP pokemon because they are not "good CAP pokemon". Now we need to define "What are the criteria for identifying 'good' CAP pokemon?" or the inverse "What are the criteria for a 'bad' CAP pokemon?" I think the definitions should encompass a variety of criteria that are not normally evaluated when tiering in normal OU. We are not simply tiering CAP pokemon, we are evaluating the pokemon in relation to the competitive metagame AND the goals of the CAP project as well.

Some people may question this proposal.

"Why do we care if a CAP pokemon is not very good? What harm does it do? If people don't think a CAP pokemon can help them win, then they don't have to use it."

"Why do we care if a CAP pokemon fits it's concept or not? Competitively it doesn't hurt anything. Who cares about what we were TRYING to build? On the server, what matters is how the pokemon ENDED UP. Arguing about how it fits the concept is just a bunch of irrelevant flavor bitching. If it works in battle, it's fine with me."​

These aren't literal objections, but I wouldn't be surprised if people think this way.

I'm not going to recite the whole CAP Mission Statement -- but that's the reason we should evaluate our CAP pokemon. Right now, the CAP forum has no real motivation to make "good" CAP pokemon. I think the general attitude is "Hey let's experiment with a bunch of stuff and see how it turns out." I don't think that is a good way to approach a project. I think our project should feel like we need to make a "good pokemon", and that there are consequences if we fail to do so. In a previous PR, I mentioned having "skin in the game". Well right now, the forum community has very little skin in the game with regards to the pokemon that we are sending over to the server. This PR can help change that.

This means that the forum community will be held accountable for their creations, and they will be judged by the community that actually has to use the forum creations. So, instead of just banning stuff that is too good, or trying to revise the CAP that are not-quite-right -- we need to adopt a comprehensive standard for what makes a "Good CAP Pokemon" and judge the creations based on that standard. In the end we'll make a very straightforward judgement on each pokemon -- Accept or Reject.

Any criteria that is consistent with CAP goals that can be logically reasoned and discussed, should be fair game for evaluation. So what criteria are consistent with CAP goals? I think we can look to project history to help there.

Obviously, we are concerned making pokemon too powerful. It is a common theme of every discussion thread in CAP. The power level of the pokemon is also very easy to argue logically, since "Too powerful" has already been defined for us by the Smogon OU tiering process. So, one voting characteristic is assured: Uber Characteristic.

We also have significant project precedent for deeming certain CAP pokemon "not powerful enough". Just look at Pyroak, Syclant II, and even Revenankh II. All those pokemon were revised to be more powerful. The CAP project has long been concerned about underpowered CAPs. We don't just leave ineffective CAPs alone. We never have. So, if we are going to evaluate CAP pokemon, I think we should acknowledge that less-effective CAP pokemon are "bad pokemon", in CAP terms. We can just invert and modify the uber criteria, and come up with a pretty good definition for arguing whether a CAP pokemon is underpowered or not. Voila! -- Underused Characteristic.

We have a long track record of defining, managing, and evaluating a CAP pokemon in regards to Concept. It's nothing new around here. We talk about which concepts are achievable or not, whether a Concept will help or hurt the metagame, how well we are adhering to the Concept during every creation step, and we even have questions written before we start the project that should be answered after the pokemon is complete and playtested. In my opinion -- this is a perfectly reasonable criteria for determining if a CAP pokemon is "good" or "bad". Did we successfully implement the Concept or did we end up with something different than we planned? That is a fairly well-defined question already, and I think we can define it further if necessary. Three down.. Concept Characteristic.

I think we also should include a fourth characteristic:

Disruption Characteristic
A Pokémon is not accepted into the CAP metagame if it causes a set of common battle conditions and encourages a set of common battle strategies that are significantly different from the standard Pokemon metagame.

We all know that making new pokemon will inevitably shift the metagame away from standard OU. But, on the CAP project, we do have precedence for trying to avoid making pokemon that would cause the metagame to shift dramatically. The auto-weather test is a good example. I think the general consensus was that limited auto-rain and auto-sun abilities (Wet Spell and Dry Spell) were not "unplayable" per se. But they caused the metagame to shift to be completely about setting up rain or preventing rain from being set up. While that may be a feature of ubers play -- we felt like a CAP metagame centralized around rain and sun would be too different from standard OU and therefore harmful.

We also had similar resistance to giving Syclant an Auto-Rapid Spin ability. The conventional thinking was that such a pokemon would basically rid the entire metagame of Stealth Rocks. You can argue whether that would happen or not, but you can't disagree that a metagame where SR is not a common battle condition -- that would be almost completely different than the metagame we play in standard OU. While some people might LOVE a metagame without SR, we all agreed that it would be bad to shift the metagame that dramatically.

So, the characteristic I am proposing continues along the same lines of this existing unspoken rule. "Don't cause major disruptions to the standard metagame." We can argue over the specific interpretation of the characteristic, but that's the case with all characteristics. But I don't think the arguments will be purely subjective. I think there is a lot of room for solid logical discussion about how a given CAP pokemon affects the metagame itself in relation to standard OU.



And one last reminder -- all CAP pokemon are always going to be available in unrated play. So, we're not actually getting rid of anything. We are just proposing what pokemon are accepted on the CAP Ladder. Minor point perhaps -- but some people in this thread are talking about "throwing away" CAP pokemon, and that is not going to happen.

 

[Rising_Dusk]

I definitely agree with the thought of calling it something other than a ban. Rejection certainly seems more applicable to what we're doing here with the CAPs. I will use that word henceforth for discussions in this thread and the definitions of the characteristics.

Anyway, I agree with the presence of the fourth characteristic as you present it, Doug, although I would call it something else. It, to me, seems like it should be called the Metagame Characteristic, since it directly relates to whether or not the CAP drastically alters the OU metagame by existing. If you don't like that or would prefer the Disruption Characteristic, we can mull it over a bit more. Really, it doesn't matter that much either way, I just want to use wording that enables users to immediately understand what the characteristic is gauging. (ie. Concept Characteristic) This achieves two things:

1. It is a much more logical progression of how the CAP affects the metagame than any accessibility characteristic. The advantage of this is that it isn't arbitrary in that anyone can slap down the "accessibility" card to justify the rejection of a CAP from the metagame. Arghonaut, for instance, does not deform the metagame so far that I'd consider it for the Metagame Characteristic, but something like a Pokemon with Drought or Auto-Rapid Spin would. There will be a lot of logical consideration put into this, which is clutch.
2. It actually serves as a protector of accessibility of the metagame, while not directly addressing accessibility at all. Because this characteristic forces the the metagame to be relatively alike OU in battle conditions and general strategies, it guarantees that new players won't be totally shell-shocked by new-found changes in the CAP metagame.

This is where we now stand with our characteristics:

Uber Characteristic
A CAP Pokémon is rejected from the CAP metagame if, in common battle conditions, it is capable of either sweeping through a significant portion of teams in the metagame with little effort, walling and stalling out a significant portion of the metagame, or consistently setting up a situation in which it makes it substantially easier for other Pokemon to sweep.

Underused Characteristic
A CAP Pokémon is rejected from the CAP metagame if, in common battle conditions, it is unable to sweep much of the metagame, wall or stall out much of the metagame, or set up a situation with any regularity where other Pokemon can more easily sweep. A CAP cannot be banned by this characteristic on the first round of the metagame after its creation.

Concept Characteristic
A CAP Pokémon is rejected from the CAP metagame if, in common battle and metagame conditions, it functions in a vastly different manner from the concept given to it by the CAP project that created it.

Metagame Characteristic
A CAP Pokémon is rejected from the CAP metagame if its presence in the metagame causes a set of common battle conditions or encourages a set of common battle strategies that are significantly different from the standard Pokemon metagame.

 

[Yllnath]

"And one last reminder -- all CAP pokemon are always going to be available in unrated play. So, we're not actually getting rid of anything. We are just proposing what pokemon are accepted on the CAP Ladder. Minor point perhaps -- but some people in this thread are talking about "throwing away" CAP pokemon, and that is not going to happen."

This last part wasn't fully clear yet and for a moment, it seemed entire CAPs were going to be scrapped when deemed rejected in any way.

I have one more issue I want to raise. Theorymon will only get you so far. (No one could have fully 100% imagined what impact on the metagame a CAP would have with Magic Guard, for example.) It's impossible to fully think through all the possibilities on how something will actually play once on the server.
Now, the proposal is to have a testing period after a CAP is finished, after which will be decided whether a CAP will be accepted or rejected.
Revisions on the other hand will be banned.

However, because of the large part of theorymon, issues could come up in the testing period.

My question is pretty much, once a CAP is completed, are we unable to ever make changes as soon as the testing period starts? Or could the testing period be used to "iron out" inconsistencies. (There should be a limit in place, obviously, on how much can be reviewed)
Or will there be a very strict "You have one shot, get it right" rule in place, where the product already has to be fit within all the set characteristics in the testing period?

 

[Elevator Music]

I don't get the point of the "Underused Characteristic". It doesn't help to solve any accessability problems, nor does it help "get it right the first time" (getting it PERFECT is a little too much to ask...).

We don't manually remove pokemon (I'm avoiding ban here because apparently this word is touchy) for not being good enough. We soft ban them lol because they aren't worth using. The 'cost' of having a shitty CAP pokemon around does not override nor outweigh its potential to be good in the testing of one "gimmick" set.

 

[Plus]

I generally like the idea here, in the sense that we put more pressure in making it a good CAP rather than giving people the mindset "Oh who cares if we mess up, we can revise it later", which is a pretty bad mindset to have. It detracts from the overall quality of each CAP, and there's much more potential to make a CAP "broken" in any way possible offensively, defensively, or support-wise. We discussed potential ideas concerning voting in #cap, and I'm posting here because I want to touch upon this subject a bit more, should we go about your suggestion (which I think we most likely will the way this thread is going).

In order to determine who gets to vote on the answer to that question, Doug and I feel that a checks and balances between the server crowd and the forum community is in order. The top players of the previous CAP season, as ranked on the ladder and as interviewed by the mods, would be the people that get to vote on what's on the competitive slate for the next season. In this way, you'll see that the suggestion looks a lot like the Smogon Council, and it could indeed be our very own "CAP Council," a constantly updated group of relevant and current players from the server that determine which CAPs are used and which aren't.

I like this idea specifically for voting, but I was wondering whether you could give an exact or at least non-arbitrary criteria for voters in order to avoid bias? Something like a rating / deviation requirement to vote wouldn't be hard to set up, and would avoid people lying about playtesting extensively. Furthermore, I find it a better measurement of skill than ladder ranking alone, as you can have excellent players on CAP who don't have the time to ladder spam as much as other users. Decent but definitely not the best of users can potentially reach the top. And I don't think this is entirely a matter of laziness -- You still have good CAP players devoting some of their time to battling, it's just that others are much more devoted. If you were to give a set rating / deviation that addresses both dedicated players and good but "lazy" players, I think we'd have the best voting pool possible.

I'm also not sure whether this voting pool wants to be inclusive or exclusive, from my point of view it seems that you want a rather exclusive type of voting pool. Is there any number you could throw at me, or at least a rough estimate of how many voters you expect to have? Personally, I think anybody who wants to vote can vote as long as they put their minds to it, though if you are set on making this exclusive I wouldn't mind either. So long as there is some sort of set criteria to qualify to apply for a spot in CAP council I don't have a problem.

EDIT: I agree with EM concerning UU characteristic, similar to OU there is nothing stopping you from using UUs in OU if you feel the need to. I think Doug and RD mean something else to what I am getting from you guys, so could you please elaborate more on that? You shouldn't be banning CAPs from a metagame just because they suck, you should only be banning them if they are broken. Move them to CAP UU if you feel obligated to, but I don't see any reason to ban them from CAP OU because of that.

 

[Dominion]

the concept characteristic is possibly my favorite. As I can see many CAPs that have already swayed form their original intent..Krilowatt.

When it comes to the underused characteristic, I'm a bit worried. So far all of our CAPs are top tier. They are pushing the boundries of 'Uber' in some cases. What happens when a CAP is just average? Where do we draw the line at average? Would we use percentiles? it's effectiveness against top tier pokemon of the time? etc. On top of that, why would you ban a CAP because it's subpar? We don't do that in Vanilla, so why here? (As Plus and others have said).

Personally, I can see CAPs being removed due to them being too weak. and I don't mean subpar. I mean brokenly weak. Such as NU quality, not UU quality. I like the characteristic for what it's implying but I cannot see it being implemented correctly.

The Metagame characteristic is.. hypocritical. The whole point of the CAP process is to see what would happen if pokemon X was unleashed into the metagame. the 'Metagame characteristic' should -never- happen if the TL does his job properly. The only way for this rule to be broken is for the concept to be essentially broken from the start.

If the concept wasn't the one that caused the 'metagame characteristic' to be broken, then it wouldn't be breaking that rule, it would be breaking the ubers characteristic. due to the CAP's stats, typing, ability or movepool (or a combination of 2 or more).

Thus, I can conclude that the metagame characteristic is unnecessary as long as the TL doesn't pick a concept thats obviously broken from the start.

 

[Deck Knight]

Just so I can get more (satanic) clarity:

We are going to do final revisions based on the movepool PR.

This I get. What comes afterward appears to me to turn the by-product of creating CAPs that is the CAP metagame into a server managed product, much like UU, LC, and even OU to an extent are managed by the relevant suspect tests in those metagames.

In order to do this we will develop characteristics to facilitate this in a manner the server players with the most experience and prowess decide, e.g. more fully integrate the server into the project when we aren't playtesting a recently created CAP. Much like the UU suspect tests, anything that has been previously disallowed from Ladder play is not permanently banned, merely put in a sort of Limbo until after the next playesting period.

Incidentally I really wish everyone would stop putting the characteristics in Quote boxes. "Quote" does not pull the text in internal quotes.

Underused Characteristic
A CAP Pokémon is rejected from the CAP metagame if, in common battle conditions, it is unable to sweep much of the metagame, wall or stall out much of the metagame, or set up a situation with any regularity where other Pokemon can more easily sweep. A CAP cannot be banned by this characteristic on the first round of the metagame after its creation.

This is a very poorly defined characteristic. Almost by definition anything we give Stealth Rock will never fail under this characteristic (unless it has Klutz which prevents the use of Focus Sash). CAP Pokemon in general will not fall under this unless another CAP makes them almost entirely obsolete (like Arghonaut to offensive Syclant), in which case one is only "underused" because the other is arguably damaging to the metagame.

Concept Characteristic
A CAP Pokémon is rejected from the CAP metagame if, in common battle and metagame conditions, it functions in a vastly different manner from the concept given to it by the CAP project that created it.

Since this is the revision PR I think we should try and set a concept for each of the CAPs without one when we do the final revisions, in addition to the movepool conformity changes. Now, as for living up to this, Cyclohm's concept is "Neglected Ability" and it has two of them, at least one of which functions extremely well. Kitsunoh was supposed to fill a "Scouting" niche and while we had difficulty defining it, it has the general requirements for it. WispyKit definitely forces switches while I've always liked the information control of Kitsunoh with Frisk. Regardless, "deviations" from the concept come in different flavors. This one seems quite hard to enforce because, quite bluntly, some of the CAPs have incredibly vacuous concepts.

Metagame Characteristic
A CAP Pokémon is rejected from the CAP metagame if its presence in the metagame causes a set of common battle conditions or encourages a set of common battle strategies that are significantly different from the standard Pokemon metagame.

My biggest problem with this is that we create concepts because we want to significantly alter the metagame with each CAP. Arghonaut is almost an auto-ban on this characteristic because it obliterates a huge amount of stat-up sweeper viability. Colossoil so effectively defeats Rotom-A (and almost removes entirely the Rotom-H that give Scizor a lot of trouble) that the core of many stall teams is compromised, etc. I imagine there will be some other downgrades in revisions but the purpose of CAP is to test the standard metagame's limits, and I don't see how this characteristic limits are already exhausted creative pool on good concepts.

 

[DougJustDoug]

These characteristics are nothing new really. They are an attempt to codify something that is currently bandied about on the CAP forum and on the server, and occasionally we even take action on them.

I think the Uber and Underused Characteristics should probably be renamed the Overpowered Characteristic and the Underpowered Characteristic. That's what they are. And we have revised CAP pokemon because they are overpowered or underpowered many times in the past. So let's actually make some decent argumentation criteria for the two, and use it to formally evaluate CAP pokemon. And let's be clear -- Whether we implement this proposal or not, the CAP project will continue to bitch about CAP pokemon, typing, abilities, and moves being overpowered or underpowered, and the project will occasionally take action based on the vocal majority opinion about overpoweredness or underpoweredness.

I think revising CAP pokemon is not good for the long-term health of the project. And I think imposing real stakes in making CAP pokemon can set up a great motivational incentive for the forum process. By creating dual criteria related to power, we squarely push the CAP forum to bring their A-game in the creation process. If the project gets too aggressive, wild, or fanboyish -- they run the risk of seeing the creation rejected for being overpowered. But, if we get a Topic Leader or vocal majority that gets enamored with "playing it safe" to avoid overpoweredness -- they can't be too reserved and make an ineffective CAP pokemon. If they do so, the pokemon will be rejected for being underpowered. So the mandate is tough, but fair -- "Make a good OU pokemon, but not too good."

I think with ten custom pokemon under our belt, that we should know what we are doing by now. Yes, it may seem harsh for us to overtly Accept or Reject a pokemon for the metagame. But, if you think about it, the CAP project is all about making clear evaluations of winners and losers. We don't give effort points to submitters in the CAP process. For every step of the process, we declare a single winning submission. As harsh as it may sound, that makes every other submission a loser. So, why do people think it is so cold and callous for us to pass a final vote on the creation as a whole? I think it fits nicely into the general mentality of the CAP project, and it will push the forum to create pokemon as perfectly as possible. I think it will raise the quality of analysis and discussion during the creation process, which is the primary goal of the CAP project, and always has been.

The other two criteria (Concept and Metagame) are simply two other very common complaints about CAP pokemon -- either the pokemon has some problem related to the original Concept, or that the CAP metagame is unplayable. Formalizing these issues seems to make sense as well, if we are going to be voting on CAPs overall.

So, in terms of the characteristics proposed, I don't think this PR is very surprising or different from the status quo. We informally apply these criteria all the time currently. I admit that by formalizing rules that were previously unwritten, we run the risk of perverting the intent and possibly the results. This is not an exact science, so we might get it wrong. But I think the project has progressed sufficiently that we can't keep revising pokemon and shaping the CAP metagame based on whims and unwritten rules. We need to make an attempt at imposing some more structure in this regard.

I also agree that interpretation of the criteria as written is somewhat vague. I think characteristics like this should intentionally be written in broad language. Hopefully, they sufficiently communicate the general intent, so as to give a voter room to justify their argument how they see fit, and to give the argument evaluator room to interpret the argument appropriately. In this case, I do not think it would help to structure the criteria in exacting detail, and encourage pedantic arguments based on precise definitions of words and interpretations of the metagame. How vague is too vague, and how specific is too specific? I really don't know. I think the current wording looks pretty good, but I'm open to suggestions if someone would like to improve it.

 

[Rising_Dusk]

When it comes to the underused characteristic, I'm a bit worried.

It is up to the voters to draw the line, not us right now. If a majority of the voters end up drawing the line, wherever it ends up being drawn, then that Pokemon is too underused for the metagame. I also discussed this a lot on IRC, but it seems that I need to address here as well why we should ban a Pokemon for being underused. First, let me say that this is not standard tiering. We are not only assessing whether a CAP is broken or not as in standard smogon tiering, we are deciding whether the CAP is bad or poorly conceived or not. Effectively, the underused characteristic is saying that yes, a CAP that is made that ends up not very effective in play should be punished and rejected from the CAP metagame. This is us saying "You didn't do a good job in creating a good Pokemon, so it won't be in our metagame." I very much support that sort of pressure. In this vein, making a broken or weak Pokemon are both issues that resort in rejection of the CAP.

The Metagame characteristic is.. hypocritical.

But it's not. There are a lot of things that could be done very legitimately in the CAP process because we don't know much about what we're doing and wind up completely morphing the CAP metagame into something unrecognizable. We can hope that someone will bring it up early on in the CAP process so that it doesn't happen, but in the possible event that it does, there needs to be a characteristic that addresses it.

Imagine, for instance, if we had added an auto-Rapid Spin Pokemon to the metagame without anyone calling it out in development. We might have realized too late that we created a monster and completely redefined the metagame. Such a CAP would be rejected from the CAP metagame on the Metagame Clause, regardless of if it were broken or not.

We are going to do final revisions based on the movepool PR.

Well, don't jump the gun. We didn't decide in the other thread that we would, and we haven't decided in this thread that we will either. I am simply seriously recommending that we do so, or eventually that will be an inordinate disparity in the power level between CAP11+ and CAP10-. Surprisingly, no one has even commented on whether they want to do such a revision or not yet outside of myself.

Underused Characteristic

It is the exact inverse of the Uber Characteristic. I certainly expect CAPs to be rejected on it, despite what you have suggested. It is very possible that we pick some concept in the future that simply doesn't do what we expect it to to the metagame. In lieu of that, the CAP falls into disuse and generally cannot do anything spectacular at all, and should be removed from the metagame for not doing basically anything in it or heaven forbid wind up actually outclassed by something else. Maybe this won't ever happen, but the characteristic itself needs to exist for completeness in the event that it does.

Concept Characteristic

I feel that this one will only be enforced for extreme cases. Krilowatt is perhaps the most-extreme case we have so far where Magic Guard completely shifts the Pokemon from being defensive and typically a utility counter to an offensive sweeper. He, of all of our Pokemon, might have the hardest time with this. For Pokemon like Cyclohm or Kitsunoh, I really don't think that they will have a difficult time passing this characteristic, but really it's hard to say at this point. Regardless of which CAPs will "pass" this or not, it's a very crucial characteristic to have.

Since this is the revision PR I think we should try and set a concept for each of the CAPs without one when we do the final revisions, in addition to the movepool conformity changes.

I absolutely agree with this statement and even suggested it in the op and in #cap the other day.

Metagame Characteristic
My biggest problem with this is that we create concepts because we want to significantly alter the metagame with each CAP.

No, we create concepts because we want them to impact the metagame, not significantly alter them. Even Arghonaut, which was intended to decentralize the metagame, didn't deform the metagame into something bizarre and vastly different from OU. As I said before, we make these concepts to try to impact the metagame in some meaningful way, but not to completely change it into something new. I think that's really the crux of the concept stage and a major contributor to what this characteristic tries to maintain.

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I want to also address something that Plus brought up but I haven't had a chance to respond to yet. He mentioned in his post the rating and deviation of a user as requirements for the CAP voting, and as I expressed during our IRC chat, I agree with him. I want to emphasize that we shouldn't have nearly as stringent requirements as the UU suspect testing process, since we have a much smaller user base and are also wanting to perform our test over 2 weeks instead of 4 weeks. I think a rating/deviation of 1600 RATING / 60 DEVIATION is a reasonable requirement for this sort of suspect test and is both achievable in 2 weeks and doesn't cut out an unfairly large portion of the player base that plays regularly. What are everyone else's thoughts on this?

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Ok, so after reading Doug's post, I agree with him on the names of the first two characteristics. Right now, they are a bit misleading in their naming. We will go with overpowered and underpowered. Right now, we stand at the following:

Overpowered Characteristic
A CAP Pokémon is rejected from the CAP metagame if, in common battle conditions, it is capable of either sweeping through a significant portion of teams in the metagame with little effort, walling and stalling out a significant portion of the metagame, or consistently setting up a situation in which it makes it substantially easier for other Pokemon to sweep.

Underpowered Characteristic
A CAP Pokémon is rejected from the CAP metagame if, in common battle conditions, it is unable to sweep much of the metagame, wall or stall out much of the metagame, or set up a situation with any regularity where other Pokemon can more easily sweep. A CAP cannot be rejected by this characteristic on the first round of the metagame after its creation.

Concept Characteristic
A CAP Pokémon is rejected from the CAP metagame if, in common battle and metagame conditions, it functions in a vastly different manner from the concept given to it by the CAP project that created it.

Metagame Characteristic
A CAP Pokémon is rejected from the CAP metagame if its presence in the metagame causes a set of common battle conditions or encourages a set of common battle strategies that are significantly different from the standard Pokemon metagame.

 

[petrie911]

I think the problem people are having with the Metagame characteristic is that "significantly different" is conveying the wrong meaning.

For example, suppose we went through with the "Kingdra of the Sun" concept, and successfully made sun sweeping a viable OU strategy. That would be a significant change to the metagame, as you would have to make sure your team can handle a sun sweeping team. However, dealing with such a team isn't that much different from dealing with a Hyperoffense team. Things like Scarf Flygon can revenge many sun sweepers, good prediction can stall out the sun, sun starters can be taunted, and, of course, Tyranitar can immediately end the sun just by switching in. So, while there would be a change to the metagame, there would not be a drastic change.

As such, I think the wording of the Metagame characteristic would work better if "significantly different" were changed to something more like "drasticly different" or "radically different". That way, we recognize that we want the CaPs to have an effect on the metagame, as any good Pokemon does, but we don't want a complete upheaval of the metagame.

 

[Dominion]

petrie911 brings up an interesting point. Drastically changing the metagame may not be for the worst. Using his example, If we did make Kingdra of the Sun. Would it necessarily be that ground breaking? Some concepts will obviously change the way we play the metagame.

If Kingdra of the sun is made, obviously for the first few weeks it'll be the most popular pokemon in CAP but thats not the point. What would happen if we made a CAP that changed the way teams are made. Naturally a Sun-Kingdra will create a new threat to counter, possibly changing the way teams are made. If Sunny Day becomes as popular as Sand Storm (with Tyranitar and Hippowdon), who's to say that's a bad thing?

It's very difficult to make an arguement for or against the Meta-game clause right now because it blends in with the Overpowered clause to a degree. If the metagame is shifting to counter a threat, then that threat is obviously sweeping teams/stalling whole teams/is overly supportive. If it wasn't, then it wouldn't be brought into question. The only other time it would be brought into question is if someone with a loud enough voice was butthurt because he was defeated in some way by it.

Ofcourse voting would commence if a CAP is found to be violation of the metagame clause but how will you base your arguement? Taking Sun-Kingdra again as an example. If someone says 'Sun Teams are more popular than Hyper Offensive!' then does that mean we hold a vote banning the CAP that made Sunny Day more dominate? How do you make an arguement that makes Hyper Offense seem less obsolete versus a Sun-Team? Or that it deserves the spot in the spotlight more than the sun-teams?

My point is (Because I know i'm rambling a bit), is that the Metagame is not constant and undergoes continous evolution in terms of play style. Even during a generation thats under full swing we see constant change. So, you can't make an arguement for the metagame clause without saying that you support a stable, constant metagame that has no change. For example we didn't ban Bullet Punch on Scizor because it completely changed what threats we look out for now did we? So, do we simply ban the CAP's inevitable metagame change simply because it's a CAP? Expecially if the populous doesn't catch on right away to what the counters to this new threat are.

So, I suggest that we make the metagame clause very precise. Because the metagame will -always- shift no matter what kind of CAP we introduce. A different Meta-game isn't bad, a metagame that is forced into a constant state is.

My rewording of the metagame characteristic:

Metagame Characteristic
A CAP Pokémon is rejected from the CAP metagame if its presence in the metagame causes a set of common battle conditions or encourages a set of common battle strategies that shift the metagame into a stagnant state where the majority of other common conditions and strategies have very little effect on the current metagame.

To put it simply. This states that (and please reword it if you feel necessary) the CAP is a danger to the metagame if and only if it forces the metagame into a state where new strategies and techniques cannot be conceived or grow due to the CAP's shear prescence. Such as Sandstorm right now is used on almost every team (indirectly some times) due to Tyranitar's and Hippowdon's prescence thus it's difficult to make an effective Sunny Day team without 2 or more Sunny Day users. If Sun Kingdra was made with Drought and, lets say Ground immunity, then Tyranitar and Hippowdon may become less useful. This would hurt Sandstorm teams but it wouldn't hurt Hyper Offense, Bulky Offense or Semistall thus Sun-Kingdra wouldn't break the Metagame clause.

But if we made a CAP immune to all direct damage moves, then we would possibly have a complete and total rework of the entire metagame that couldn't be salvaged without removing that kind of CAP, thus it would be in violation of the Metagame clause.