Even if someone can reference that list, tabbing back and forth between that list and a dex entry or something is really annoying, compared to a system that's more intuitive and easier to memorize.
The dex entries have the tier the pokemon is in, and if it is at all viable in higher tiers it has an analysis for that set on the dex page that can be easily seen. Not to mention, in the teambuilder the same tabs remain as exist in the 'look for battle button' and if you select something for a tier it is illegal in, it says that the pokemon is illegal. There should be very few times when someone is trying to reference the list without a lot of stages to help in that significantly.
The problem is, having an FAQ is symptomatic of failed design.
An FAQ should never be your first resort, it should always be your last resort. An FAQ means, "I don't know how to make this intuitive, so the only thing I can do is explain it." It means "I failed to make this obvious, so now I have to explain it."
I mean, we have one already. Lets see what other non-intuitive things are in there: how to find a battle, click the battle button. How to fight my friend, click on their name and click challenge. The 4th question on the FAQ as it is could easily be adapted to explain the tiering system. For reference, the current question and answer is:
question said:
What do AG, Ubers, OU, BL, UU, BL2, RU, BL3 and NU stand for?
answer said:
If you want to know more about a specific tier you can use the command /tier [tiername]; it will show you information about that format.
Now 2 problems with this, one being it doesn't explain the transitivity of the tiers at all, despite that apparently being a huge problem, and 2, for a grouped question, you have an answer for specific tiers rather than a general one. Adding in, 'if you want to know more about any specific tier, use the command /tiers and it will take you to a page that can explain everything about smogon tiering' would be minimal effort and would go a long way to making this even more of a non-issue. It would require work on the actual, hopelessly outdated page, but is a better solution than committing to a half-hearted change in nomenclature. I get that it says something that this has to be a question in the faq itself, but when you have such other questions as 'how to battle' 'click battle', it cant mean all that much.
FAQs take time to read. Let's say it takes five minutes to read an FAQ. PS has 10 million users. So you expect to waste 95 years of my users' time because you're too lazy to deal with a rename?
Tell me this is a poor joke, please. 1) Nowhere near 10 million users have asked for an in depth explanation of the tiering system, 2) We have an FAQ already, adding one extra line into it is not adding 95 years worth of time to it, it's adding about 2 seconds per person, 3) Even assuming a tiny fraction of what you're claiming there, 5000 (1/2000 of the number you claim) users asking for clarification since the start of the year, that would be about 21 people per day, or nearly one person confused about tiering nomenclature every hour. Now, if logs show I'm wrong and someone asks that every hour, I eat my words. But you're significantly exaggerating how widespread the 'problem' is.
Most people don't read FAQs. FAQs are a last resort, not a first resort, and they're not even a very good last resort at that.
Then why do we already have one? It's specifically designed for situations like this, where questions are frequently asked. Changing the way we name our tiers will potentially reduce one question we would have to have on there, but I and others like Magnemite dont feel like that very slight benefit is worth changing something synonymous with Smogon. Creating an identity is a valuable part of any venture, and removing something that has been central to Smogon since it's inception is not something that gives many benefits at all. I know you say you wouldn't change OU or anything, but then the question will be changed from "what's the order of the tiers" to "why do you change from a U to a T for no reason?"
Have you ever read instructions for how to use the teambuilder? Did you have to read "to open the teambuilder, click the Teambuilder button" before you understood how to open the teambuilder? Or was it obvious? Something as complicated as building a team can be done without reading any instructions at all, because it's designed to be obvious how to do it. And yet you can't do something as simple as naming a tier without needing to give people instructions for it?
Answering questions is a last resort. Designing things so people aren't confused should always be your first resort.
No, but I also never needed instructions to know the tiers further down the list were below the tiers higher up on the list. And I never needed instructions that the battle button found me a battle. But you answer that question in the FAQ that you so vehemently oppose adjusting one question very slightly to be better explained.
As for the second point there, if we were starting a new Pokemon Website I might agree with you. But we're not, we've already had this naming system for nearly a decade, and changing it now when it is such a fundamental part of the identity of the website is a bad idea, just from a marketing standpoint. The widespread confusion it creates, allegedly, is not more valuable to be rid of than removing the brand would be damaging, at least in my opinion.
It's symptomatic of bad design.
"Why are Subway Sandwiches called Subs? What bad design. They should just call them 'bread with condiments between the slices'."
Your argument is purely logically based on the idea that minimal confusion is the most optimal state, ignoring brand identity, brand history and the significance of the change. This is not a minor aspect of the website that we can do without, this isn't a wrongly spelt word that we all missed, its part and parcel of Smogon's identity and we should be hesitant at best before changing it drastically.
Once again, notice how I managed to build an entire teambuilder without having anything so badly designed as to need instructions in allcaps. There's no "TO MAKE ANOTHER TEAM, CLICK NEW TEAM". The stuff we do warn about, like clearing cookies, is stuff out of my control.
The problem with making the answer very clear and available is that it's not actually clear and available. People shouldn't have to join the PU room to have that question answered. That shouldn't even be a question in the first place.
PU is a bad name. FU is a bad name. NU is a bad name especially if it's not even the lowest tier.
I'm 99% sure I've seen people ask questions like "how do I make a team". I've certainly seen "how do I export/import the team". Some people will be dumb. You have people who dont know how to find a battle with the biggest button on the screen being the Find a Battle button. We can never account for all issues of people not understanding something, no matter how intuitive it is. Overreacting in an attempt to is an effort in futility that is at best misguided when there are other areas that could be focused on (ie, making the current system adapt to make it simpler, without outright abandoning it). I already pointed out how we could change the N from Never to Negligibly. P could even stand for Pathetically. F should be shown the back door and replaced, but there are pretty obvious reasons to not have a tier called FU.
We're talking about PU, not OU. I don't want to change OU at all.
In which case this isn't useful at all. You're keeping the fundamentals, and then abandoning them after an arbitrary cutoff date from when the new tiers that were added should not be recognised by their current names. Assuming you mean to keep NU as the lowest tier, you would have to rename PU to NU, something the PU Leader and Supermod has said he doesn't want, and then have a random T-tier sandwiched between NU and RU, or you want to abandon NU, something we've had for nearly a decade now as well, in which case the ones you're choosing to keep or replace are arbitrary. And if you want the current ones to stay aside from PU, you still dont solve the issue of why something that is NeverUsed cannot be used in every tier, because there will still be a tier below NU.
Turns out that that proposal wasn't Zarel's one, I explain why I dont like Zarel's post later on the page. This part can still be applied for the option that does suggest adding random T's into places.