boudouche settled the dugtrio issue; we will not be suspecting arena trap.
but it seems that there has been another disruption and area of grief: the belief that the council has not been doing enough.
on baton pass:
baton pass has been a recurring issue throughout this generation. all cheap strategies could technically be destroyed if we ultimately just banned the move. so why are we not doing this?
because as heist said, baton pass also represents viable strategies spanning across multiple pokemon. and the current use of baton pass is not nearly as problematic as past incarnations. while surely annoying, it is certainly not broken and there are extreme team limitations that come from employing that strategy. in short, baton pass teams as i see them now are unreliable, easy to predict, and for the most part have a surefire way to be stopped. there is no longer an epidemic of bpass in tournaments either, and if i know anything about the smogon community, it is that if something is becoming a problem outside of ladder, it will surely make multiple showings in tournaments (of course being in tours does not make something broken, but it is a good indicator of an apparent problem such as gothstall or early bpass). a strategy can be 'cheap' but not broken, similar to focus energy kingdra or trap teams.
additionally, unlike the gothstall teams of yesteryear, baton pass teams do not even require countermeasures specifically to beat.
which leads into the second point, why has the council not suspected sableye?
for starters we could very well do it. in fact this has renewed discussion about the mon itself and the past few days we have been talking about a possible suspect on sable exclusively.
why we have not made a formal post or insider discussion on sableye yet though is due to it not really being...that big of an issue. we all know stall is a pain to deal with, but abr stall and other iterations of chansey - sab stall really have just not been that overwhelming recently. i find that you don't even need to specifically build a team with heavy anti-stall measures to be successful in defeating it. take it from somebody who spammed stall on the ladder for basically 3 months and remained in the top 10: stall is not unbeatable. i have lost
many games that at the start i thought were surefire wins just because of 1 unorthodox set, 1 item knocked off, or 1 predicted u-turn screws up my whole plan. sab cannot hold off every sr user consistently, and while surely annoying, it is not unbreakable and can turn into a liability for many pokemon (especially if it is used on balance > hard stall). without sableye, hard stall would probably become obsolete simply due the lack of ability to consistently keep hazards off without extreme loss in momentum.
the differences with stall in oras and stall in other generations is that:
1.) stall in oras is VERY matchup reliant. the reason stall is so good on the ladder is that good players recognize that most people don't play aggressively and can get walked all over, even if they do have the tools to fight against stall. it is a very good tool against no win-con fat balance and frailer offenses which kill themselves off. however, just 1 pokemon can make a huge difference in how the game plays out. torn-t, u-turn lando-t, strong choiced users, bisharp + second physical attacker, etc.....
2.) you have no idea how much each pokemon relies on one another in stall. it usually only takes 1-2 to go down for the whole thing to fall apart. this is probably due to the massive amounts of threats in oras, and that losing one check leads to the sacrifice of another, and another until you lose a defensive base.
so stall itself is a flawed playstyle which relies heavily, if not supremely, on the ability of one pokemon to preform all game, which may not even be able to succeed in its task consistently. we have to consider if we want this variety in the metagame in the first place as well. sab opens up the doors to not just hard stall, but other gimmicky / hard balance teams as well. in a metagame where hazard removal & prevention is hard to come by (and one where many people have said spikes is broken), i think sableye plays an important role.
the council really just doesn't see sableye as that much of an issue. it may commandeer an entire playstyle, but it does not itself make it broken, just viable.
however it is worthy to note that the subject of this thread, dugtrio, is really more about sableye's ability to make these stall based teams viable in the first place. boudouche made a good post about how dugtrio itself was not broken, which i agree with myself.
and now onto reymedy's post.
Okay, so I'm sorry in advance if that sounds rude, but the council has been showing either a clear lack of interest or competence lately.
Take the end of BW, Tornadus-T was broken as heck, the metagame was dominated by Rain in a way I've yet to experience again.
Obviously, what happened, is that a suspect with Tornadus-T and Keldeo took place. It was probably questionable to throw Keldeo into the mix, but most people did not really mind, and jumped on the occasion to give Tornadus-T the boot.
Where am I getting at ?
Few months later, after this suspect, the council decided to run another suspect, about Keldeo only. Why ? Because obviously the results of the previous suspect, as far as Keldeo was concerned, got probably skewed by the presence of the main offender at the time (Tornadus-T).
Still, the council wanted to get the job done, and done well, that's why they resuspected Keldeo, to close the Gen and move on to the next one on solid bases.
They did what anybody with half a brain would do, by isolating the things they wanted to examine.
Now, what I am wondering is :
How in the blue hell, did Sableye-M get away so freaking easily when all it ever went through was a suspect test shared by the most cancerous Pokémon I've ever seen in ORAS (Gothitelle) ?
We're talking about a Pokémon that is not only most likely broken thanks to its combination of Magic Bounce, typing, and solid bulk, but also at the epicenter of most of the cheaper strategies out there. But nah, for god knows which reason, it seems like it got thrown under the carpet right before a new generation comes out. Do you realise how tedious this will be to ever make a call in the future, once this generation won't be the main anymore ? Do you realise how much we're already screwed given that the next Official Tournaments won't even be using ORAS anymore ? The next to come being OST and SPL, which will be most surely featuring the new games.
i feel like i shouldn't have to make the distinction that this isn't bw, but i guess i will have to anyway.
bw rain with tornadus-t was absolutely ridiculous and instantly sparked discussion about it being broken. there was hardly any wait time because it was just so ridiculous. to compare our rate of action on sab w/ torn-t, one of the most ridiculous offensive threats ever, is hardly credible. we don't feel the need to suspect sab, which is why we have not done it. don't mistake opinion for ignorance.
msab got away so easily because we (and the immediate response of the community afterward) did not feel it was broken. while it isn't ideal to suspect near the end of a generation due to limited time, keep in mind the keldeo suspect test began in august, while the games came out in october. we have time (sm comes out in late nov?). also, like i said above, cheap does not equate to broken.
Anyway, how comes we're 2 games into a generation, and Baton Pass is still being so damn lame after going through what ? 2 or 3 suspects ?
How comes everybody half knowledgeable about this generation would agree that the sheer abundance of very solid threats is pressuring way too much the limited amount of team slots one could have, but we've almost not been suspecting anything to balance the metagame so far ? Instead, we're stuck on getting rid of the uncompetitive elements like Baton Pass or Shadow Tag CS trick garbage like we're 2 weeks into a new generation.
I mean, I wish we could have suspected.. I don't know Manaphy (you know, that thing that you can't virtually cover, that'd have been a start) for instance. I don't even know if I would want to have it banned, but hell I want for sure to see how it goes, I want to discuss the possiblity, I want the community to work towards a better metagame for the tournaments I play.
This generation just felt like a wasted potential, and there was no reason for it to happen because XY wasn't even bad at the end (just Greninja was dumb as crap, unless you want to accept having Clefable in every single team basically).
baton pass tweaking has certainly been annoying to deal with, but we have as a community tailored it to a point where it is in my opinion (and many others, including bp god dennis) an annoying, but non-issue. i don't see the problem with taking time and perfecting an issue over impulsively banning it and getting rid of viable use of the strategy otherwise.
manaphy was never on the table for a serious ban. it was ridiculously strong for a few months due to it being anti-metagame at the time, but it is nowhere near the threat it once was. if you're going to bring up a pokemon that we "could have suspected", at least bring up something more controversial like torn-t (which itself has died down a bit in the past months). the thing with oras is there is really nothing that pops out to any of us as clearly broken as hoopa had, or as greninja had, or as aegislash had. i would be willing to argue that because oras is so matchup reliant it suffers from perpetual metagame shifts where pokemon appear to be far more problematic than they actually are in the long-run (which is another reason the council and i don't like to rush to decisions on a suspect).
So I don't know if you guys are half dead half inactive, or if you're thinking "yup, perfecto, this is the dream generation", but either way, I'm starting to become disillusioned instead of cynical. It feels like you're trying to make the choices in everybody's place. Don't get it twisted, it's your role to choose the topic of the discussion, but you shouldn't be deciding the outcome on your own. You don't decide if Sableye-M gets banned or not, you decide if it gets suspected or not, and that's not nearly the same.
now this is the part which bothers me. you're acting like the council has been completely obstinate and refuses to hear what the community believes is an issue. this is just not true. personally, i enjoy lots and frequent suspects which act as a quick 'check' to see how the community feels about a strong issue (similar, but more restricted than the uu program). but that doesn't mean back to back tests just for the hell of it.
it is our job to listen to you guys, but ultimately to choose the correct direction and road to pursue. never have we manipulated the suspect process to our own benefit, so i'm not really sure what you're trying to insinuate there. ask any member of the present or recently past council and they will give you a reason why these tests have not been realized, and i can tell you the answer is not to manipulate the metagame.
i do see however how your post has a decent community backing, which is something we will listen to. so on that note, i am on board with a
suspect test for sablenite. i am not however interested in this nonsense about a dugtrio suspect.
- kek council overlord pdc out