Smogon Staff vs The RBY Community

[Dre89]

I did some pondering on the concept of patching Counter, but I think there is something that may solve the divide.

Many players say "Go to Stadium" and RBY players respond with "I dislike how much Substitute warps the game".

I think there may be a solution. How about Pokemon Stadium "Zero"? This is the Japanese Stadium game that is kind of a bridge between RBY and Stadium 1, AKA the one we got first. This game has some mechanical differences (stat re-application no longer exists, Explosion kills you on Substitute), but it lacks some changes Stadium made that are seen as bad (Hyper Beam doesn't recharge on KO, Substitute doesn't block status, Crits are the same as RBY). The mechanics were made by Satoru Iwata when he imported the entire RBY battle logic in a week. I believe Counter was fixed. All these "RBY-Stadium love child" traits while fixing desyncs, as they literally cannot happen here.

It should be noted that this does have some Japanese mechanics (Swift accuracy glitch), but it does have the Blizzard nerf and a lot of stuff us international players are used to. There are some of the "bad" changes though; the 1-3 (move last) turn Sleep nerf is there, the Wrap change is also there, etc. There's also the Japanese legality factor, as Blue JP does have a few changes there. They're mostly minor, though. There is one elephant in the room in the fact some Pokemon are missing, but for OU purposes, basically all the staples are there. I do think this would be the big deal-breaker as well as the Sleep if a specific missing Pokemon causes a big issue (personally I think it's fine).

I think this may be an avenue for you all to try out. Pokemon Battle Historia has a (Japanese) table showing the mechanical differences here. Give it a look if you understand Japanese, I think you'll find it interesting! Enigami has pondered working on a sim for it since a few of us players want to add Nintendo Cup 98 to a project that's being worked on. I seriously think this may be the way to go if it means solving all the issues and roadblocks the community keeps running into. There's some stuff that'll take some getting used to, but I just thought I'd put the idea forward.

I may look into doing some mechanics research for this should it gain traction. It seems super interesting.

The reason why people decided to make this cartridge mod the “official” meta in the first place is not because it’s the better meta, but simply because it’s cartridge. It’s a similar thing for the tradebacks ban. They didn’t do extensive testing and see whether the meta was better or not with them, they just banned them because you couldn’t get those moves in 1999.

If the priority was having the most competitive meta whilst being faithful to the games Stadium would have been the main meta this entire time.

 

[Plague von Karma]

The reason why people decided to make this cartridge mod the “official” meta in the first place is not because it’s the better meta, but simply because it’s cartridge. It’s a similar thing for the tradebacks ban. They didn’t do extensive testing and see whether the meta was better or not with them, they just banned them because you couldn’t get those moves in 1999.

If the priority was having the most competitive meta whilst being faithful to the games Stadium would have been the main meta this entire time.

And I agree! The current philosophy of the community is to stick to mainline, which makes sense for consistency. Otherwise, it could get confusing from a tiering point of view. You could argue that other gens could jump to Stadium 2, XD - Gale of Darkness and Battle Revolution as mainstays for Gens 2-4, before we suddenly jump to BW2 for Gen 5 due to no alternate game choice. It would be a string of very weird jumps between consoles and spinoff vs mainline. On top of this, presenting an entire shift in video game choice could even be seen as disrespectful to the history we have so far.

My point of view (as I've said to Lutra) is that this hypothetical jump would be an absolute last resort against the issues with remaining consistent to RBY Cartridge.