Policy Review An Adjustment in Direction

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Hello everyone!

I've already had the opportunity to chat with many of you on both PS! and IRC regarding Doug's proposal, and now I'd like to make an official post here with my opinions on the matter, as well as my thoughts on a few other related topics.

First off, I'd like to say that there are several aspects about Doug's proposal that I really enjoy, and I agree with a lot with the general sentiment of his post regarding the social aspect of CAP and "reestablishing a working middle class." So, rather than restate everything Doug said that I'm in agreement with, I'd like to elaborate further on the benefits of this proposal, as well as touch on some of the specifics that I foresee as potential issues and hopefully provide ideas as to how they may be fixed or avoided.

Scope of this proposal -- Is it too wide?

jas61292 touched on one of my biggest concerns with the proposal quite nicely, which is the scope of designing a CAP for potential use in multiple metagames. Don't get me wrong; I definitely feel that the increased potential for participation and contribution from competitive players of varying backgrounds would be simply amazing for CAP. We end up with a project that is easier to participate in, offers more opportunities for players to contribute their metagame knowledge, and in my opinion, we end up with a more fun project as a result! However, I do feel that the proposal in its current state risks being too broad in this sense for many of the reasons jas has already outlined. I'll attempt to elaborate on this issue further.

Competitive Pokemon Knowledge on Varying Scales

To start, I'll analyze myself as a competitive Pokemon player, purely for the sake of example. I've been on Smogon for almost three years now and have played on Pokemon Showdown for even longer than that, and I'd consider myself to have a adequate working knowledge of general competitive Pokemon. If we get more specific than general competitive Pokemon knowledge, I consider myself, first and foremost, a 6v6 singles player. As a result, I'm most comfortable playing and learning metagames that fall under this classification. As far as specific metagames I've battled in and learned, I'd consider myself most knowledgeable and experienced with Little Cup and the CAP metagame. I still ladder in several other formats to a good extent, including various doubles formats. In fact, I've obtained voting reqs in Doubles OU before, but despite this, I still wouldn't consider myself all that familiar or well-versed with the more intricate strategies unique to the various doubles formats, or any other category of formats outside of 6v6 singles for that matter. I'm usually at a loss when it comes to teambuilding for these formats due to the presence of various strategies that are unique to these formats, thus being absent from 6v6 singles. While it's true that "general competitive Pokemon knowledge" can only take you so far in a transition to just about any metagame, it's inherently easier to apply your existing knowledge of competitive Pokemon to forum discussion, teambuilding, or battling situations the more similar the metagame at hand is to the metagame(s) you are already knowledgeable about.

Transferring general competitive Pokemon knowledge across different formats -- How does it affect the current and future CAP process?

Let's say that I want to get back in touch with a format that I haven't played in a while, or perhaps start playing a completely new one. If I pick a format that falls under the category of 6v6 singles, let's say ORAS NU, I'm going to have a much easier time and learn more quickly than if I decided to try something like VGC 16 for the first time. I can grab a sample team or two from the NU forums, look over the viability rankings to figure out the top threats, and dive right in and (probably) do reasonably well. I'd be able to teach myself things along the way like how to patch up weak spots in my team and increase its overall effectiveness. Of course, I'm still not going to be some sort of NU genius or anything; if I really wanted to step up my NU game, I'd likely end up consulting more experienced NU players that have a much deeper knowledge of the metagame than I do so that I may further my own knowledge. But the way I see it, that's a good thing in the end, as it encourages interaction, and I feel like this is directly applicable to how CAP should work in terms of Doug's proposal.

If we're in the process of designing a CAP that the community feels is really shaping up to be a perfect fit for NU, that's where the expertise of experienced, high-level NU players will come into play. Not everyone in the CAP community is highly knowledgeable about NU (and we can certainly say the same about OU in past CAPs), but that's exactly the beauty of Doug's proposal-- we're not expecting everyone to be an expert in NU! Or whatever metagame(s) the CAP ends up being centered around for that matter. We'll expect our posters to have good "general competitive Pokemon knowledge," but nothing more. As a project progresses and the ideal metagame(s) for the CAP begin to come into focus, the people of those respective metagame(s) will inevitably hear that we're making a Pokemon that's likely going to see use in their metagame. "Hey, those guys at CAP are designing a Pokemon that we can use in NU! Let's go post in the thread!" I'm certain that there'll be people that are excited to come and contribute their knowledge to the discussion at hand, with hopes that they'll get to use to use the final creation in a metagame they already know and love. Even though there will be plenty of participants that aren't top-level players in the metagame(s) at hand, the broader CAP community will still be able to chip in and contribute to the discussion with their working general knowledge of competitive Pokemon, and will still be able to enjoy the process and the end result.

But what if we get sidetracked or "screw up" somewhere along the way? Let's take the NU example again. We're halfway through designing the CAP and the community seems to be mostly in agreement that it should be a potent and viable threat in NU. If we hit a bump along the way and give it an ability or stats (or something) that skews its power level in a way that renders it too powerful or too underpowered for the NU metagame, it's not a problem! In the past, if we're in the process of making a CAP and we ended up choosing something that made the CAP too powerful or underpowered for the OU metagame somewhere along the way, we were stuck with it. Some people would lose hope and stop posting. "Oh well, we screwed up again. Better luck next CAP." This attitude would reduce involvement and hype would die down, as well as decreasing the overall morale of the greater CAP community. Most notably, this increased toxicity as users started to point fingers at each other about who screwed up. Meanwhile, the remaining participants would struggle trying to salvage the CAP.

Doug's proposal addresses this issue quite elegantly, as we're no longer targeting a specific metagame. If we decided somewhere along the way that we want the CAP to be this awesome NU Pokemon, but then we screw it up somehow, that's fine! We simply regroup and press onward. The CAP community has already proven on several occasions that it's capable of adapting to change (reminder: we just made a Mega CAP), and we'd use this opportunity to draw in knowledge from knowledgeable PU or RU players, allowing them to step up to the plate and offer their wisdom, and we can continue where we left off without the hard feelings we've experienced in the past. And it could very well happen that the CAP community isn't in total agreement as to where a CAP fits best after the creation process is finished. Perhaps the community is split on whether it's more of a RU or a NU Pokemon. That's not a problem either! The CAP can be playtested in both metagames, or as many other metagames as we see fit.

TL;DR - It's inherently easier for an experienced 6v6 singles player to learn about, play, and apply competitive battling strategies and knowledge towards another metagame if said metagame is also in a 6v6 singles format. It's also easier for the CAP userbase, as well as the CAP itself, to adapt to change and unforeseen "mistakes" along the way if our concept and building focus fits within a certain general category of formats, as opposed to it being a complete free-for-all.

Depth of Competitive Pokemon Knowledge and CAP Leadership

So, where am I going with all this? Well, I can't stress this next part enough: Our leadership, especially the TL and TLT members, will be of the utmost importance in an upcoming CAP Project following Doug's proposal, or any new proposal we come up with for that matter. We'll be forging new and uncharted territory for CAP in many ways, and it is their job to keep discussion on track and focused. In my opinion, the TL and TLT members should absolutely have a good general knowledge of competitive Pokemon, as well as the ability to effectively lead discussion and pose thought-provoking questions for us to answer. However, it's not reasonable to require our leaders to have an in-depth working knowledge of all the numerous, intricate strategies and nuances across formats with little relation to each other, be it 6v6 Doubles, Triples, 1v1, or whatever other format category you could possibly come up with that's currently supported on Pokemon Showdown. Now don't get me wrong; I do realize that there are universal competitive strategies and bits of knowledge that can be applied to all formats regardless of what metagame we're looking at, but there are countless intricacies across each format that just can't be ignored, especially when we're considering being all-inclusive in building a generically good Pokemon.

If we have a CAP participant that is a relatively experienced competitive battler and is well-versed in the general strategies of 6v6 singles (let's say their main tier is ORAS OU), they'd still be able to apply and contribute a good deal of their knowledge towards building a generically good 6v6 singles Pokemon, regardless of which format was being focused on. If the CAP's attributes and discussion start pointing towards it being more of a UU sort of mon? It wouldn't be a problem, even if said OU player has never so much as touched UU before. Assuming they're competent enough at conveying their general knowledge in discussion, they'd still be able to offer valuable insight and feel like a useful contributor. If discussion was initially focused on OU, but suddenly became consumed by players talking about how said CAP will perform and function in, let's say Smogon Triples, it suddenly becomes harder for some participants to contribute to those aspects of the CAP, and more importantly, it will hamper the TL/TLT's effectiveness in leading and driving the discussion if they themselves are not well-versed in that sort of competitive environment. Even worse, it could lead to a bunch of separate discussions happening simultaneously that have little relevance to each other, leading to chaos in the discussion threads and a "tug-of-war" effect that was explained earlier.

Broadening our scope (but not excessively so)

I'll just go ahead and quote jas directly, since he made a really important point (and summed up what I'm trying to say quite nicely).
jas61292 said:
Anyways, I guess what I am trying to say is that I believe that we need to have uniformity in the types of strategies that people are discussing in order to have a coherent project, and as such, that we cannot simply have a free for all of any and all metagames and still expect good things to come. We certainly can, and probably should, move away from being extremely metagame specific, but I believe there is a limit to how far we can go, and I fear that if we cross that line, we will end up in an even worse place than we started.
I am in absolute agreement with this statement. As such, I'd think it'd be optimal for us to narrow the scope of the original proposal down to a more defined and closely-related group of formats, such as 6v6 singles. Even with this narrowing, CAP would still encompass a broad range of metagames, much broader than ever before, and I can still forsee this proposal doing some amazing things for CAP:
  • Promoting Inclusivity - We already have an incredibly diverse range of participants in the CAP community from many different backgrounds, not just OU. This is a fact. This proposal uses this to CAP's advantage, as we can draw from the deeper metagame knowledge of various participants to help us along the way without stifling participation and the overall enjoyment of the greater CAP community in the process as it has in the past.
  • Growing our Community - This plays off my first point, but naturally if we're building a mon that's shaping up to be a potent threat in X metagame, this will naturally spark an interest for people from that respective community. And once the Pokemon creation process and playtest(s) have been completed, who knows? The newer participants may decide "Wow, CAP is pretty fun!" and stick around for another project!
  • Decreasing Toxicity within the Community - This is HUGE. We all seem to be in agreement that something desperately needs to change-- that's why we're having this discussion! If we continue to focus on OU (or any specific metagame for that matter, even the CAP metagame), we're inevitably going to continue making the same mistakes, some of which are simply out of our control due to the nature of CAP itself. We'll run into the exact same issues with struggling to balance and tailor future CAPs for a specific metagame. And, we'll continue to receive the same old criticism we always get from outside the community, not to mention the general negativity from within the CAP community itself. By broadening our focus, we allow ourselves to draw from a much, much wider range of general competitive pokemon knowledge, allowing for more people to feel comfortable contributing to and participating in competitive discussions, and allowing for a wider range of potential leaders to step up and contribute their deeper metagame knowledge to our discussions. In other words, we're increasing both discussion quantity and quality-- and I'm pretty sure we'd all enjoy that!
Future of CAP Concepts

Considering that this has also been somewhat of a problem area in past CAPs, I'd also like to talk about Doug's proposal regarding future CAP concepts and how we can move forward. Deck Knight already addressed this topic quite thoroughly, and I'd like to take the opportunity to add onto that a bit. As far as CAP concepts go, if we do agree to narrow the scope of which types of formats we're building for only slightly, as outlined earlier, this actually gives us much greater freedom to create more developed, descriptive roles for future CAP concepts than if we try to develop a CAP concept that's general enough to work in virtually any format.

To take an extreme example, let's consider a concept entitled "Ultimate Pivot." This is certainly a workable concept in 6v6 singles (as well as some other formats outside this mold), but this role doesn't exist, for example, in the 1v1 metagame. Because you're using only one Pokemon per battle, there is no actual switching or pivoting to be done. Now, this isn't to say we couldn't still try to make it viable in 1v1, but the concept isn't "all-inclusive," so in a theoretical 1v1 discussion, we'd be just sort of giving it traits to succeed in the metagame without regards for the original concept. Therefore, it wouldn't quite be considered an ideal concept under the unmodified version of Doug's proposal.

Again, the 1v1 example may be a bit extreme, but my point is this: There are countless more nuanced strategies and roles in competitive Pokemon that are exceedingly prominent in one group of formats, but are completely unseen in another. Therefore, by narrowing the scope of the types of formats we're building for, we allow the CAP community the freedom to be more descriptive and creative when designing and submitting CAP concepts, as they can be assured that their concept will be relevant to a certain type of format. In my opinion, this is a good thing! Now, I do realize, that overly-specific concepts do tend to limit discussion, as the answers end up being "too obvious," which stifles creativity as a result. Despite this, I still have faith that our future TL will recognize this, and will be able to strike a balance, selecting concepts for the slate that aren't overly-specific, but aren't overly-vague either. This will allow us to hit a sweet spot with our discussion threads; discussions pertaining to the concept won't be too boring or obvious, but they won't be too unfocused or chaotic either.


Potential Revisions to Doug's Proposal

Anyway, I've done plenty of commenting on Doug's proposal at this point, so I'll go ahead and quote Doug's "TL;DR" proposal with a TL;DR version of my thoughts edited in for potential discussion. My suggestions are in bold.
TL;DR Proposal:
  • We build pokemon intended to be generally useful in competitive pokemon battles, according to a known set of good "competitive archetypes" that are applicable to multiple competitive metagames and rulesets. Instead of "generally useful in competitive Pokemon battles", we could narrow this down to a more specific type of format (perhaps 6v6 singles) for the various reasons outlined by myself and others.

  • The "Concept" for a given CAP project will be one of those general "competitive archetypes". With the alteration to the above bullet point, users have the freedom to be more descriptive and creative with CAP concept submissions. Intricate roles and team archetypes that are unique to a specific set of metagames (again, perhaps 6v6 singles) may be freely explored.

  • The specific direction of each competitive aspect of a CAP pokemon and which competitive games it is expected to play best in -- will unfold and potentially change over the course of CAP discussion threads, but will be guided to stay within the general archetype defined by the Concept.

  • Good general competitive knowledge will be valued in CAP discussions. Expert tournament battling skill is appreciated, but not expected. Disrespect or scorn for any metagame or battling format will not be tolerated.

  • One or more playtests will be held to determine which tiers, metagames, and rulesets are most appropriate for the CAP pokemon just created.

  • After the playtests, the pokemon will become part of the CAP metagame. But this policy proposal makes no provisions for how the CAP metagame is structured now or in the future.
All in all, I feel that Doug's proposal has the potential to be a very solid one for us and our future as a community. If we can get some of the more specific details ironed out and come to a general consensus among PRC, I think we'll be in an excellent spot!

---

There are just a couple more things I'd like to talk about in my post. Bear with me!


State of the CAP Metagame, the CAP Metagame community, and its future

As most of you already know, I'm a huge enthusiast of the CAP metagame and am a lover of the growing community. The CAP metagame community certainly isn't the largest one around, but it has come a long way in this past year or so. If you frequent the CAP metagame forum, or even just peek in every once in a while, you'll see that there have been numerous forum projects, competitions, and tournaments hosted there, proving that the community has willing and dedicated contributors, and a legitimate place in the greater CAP community. There have been many helpful and dedicated users within the forum, and the combined efforts of numerous users have led to the completion of well over 30 CAP metagame analyses to date. This includes CAP Pokemon and non-CAP Pokemon alike, which I think is awesome. The non-CAP Pokemon analyses are especially cool in my opinion, as many newer players assume Pokemon from OU tend to run the same sets in CAP. While this is certainly true to an extent, their CAP analyses outline their differences and their performance in the actual CAP metagame. One of the examples I always like to bring up is Hidden Power Ground Keldeo. OU Keldeo really has no business running Hidden Power Ground, but it's widely considered the standard in the CAP metagame, as it allows Keldeo to hit Mollux and Plasmanta for massive damage. Anyway, the creation of CAP metagame analyses hasn't been the easiest or quickest process ever due to the lower number of participants in the community, but it's definitely been a worthwhile endeavor.

Expanding on the evolution and progress of the CAP metagame forum in its entirety, the community has formed a solid base of extremely dedicated and hard-working participants that have pushed the forum forward in impressive ways ever since its inception. cbrevan is an example; he's been nothing short of a powerhouse in the CAP metagame forum, QCing basically every CAP analysis that gets put onsite nowadays, writing plenty of analyses himself, and hosting important threads such as the CAP Viability Rankings. Now, he and I are both acting as the coordinators for Crucibelle's Playtest Analysis. I could honestly go on and list several more valued contributors in the community if I wanted to, but that's not really my goal here. My point is that the CAP metagame community has advanced and grown significantly in the past year or so on both the Smogon Forums and PS!, and many of the people in this community happen to be frequent participants and even respected leaders in the main CAP Process. In other words, this community absolutely deserves a say in the future of the metagame they've grown to love and worked so hard to develop!

But how does this all relate to the proposal at hand? ...am I just rambling at this point? Well for starters, one of the aspects of Doug's Proposal that I very much enjoy is that it intentionally makes no assumptions regarding the future of the CAP metagame. In fact, if we were to move forward with Doug's proposal (or a similar variation thereof), it has no direct impact on the CAP metagame. The current iteration of the CAP metagame is structured using the simple philosophy "OU+CAP," meaning that its banlist is based directly off of OU. That's pretty much the way it's been since the start. If a Pokemon gets the boot from OU, boom, it's gone from CAP too. It's true that CAP players have always been able to adapt to these shifts, and it's never really caused any huge issues as far as I'm aware of. However, a shift in direction for CAP with the nature of Doug's proposal suddenly renders the CAP metagame's tie to OU completely obsolete. As a result, this tie to OU would become completed unneeded in my opinion, and I'm definitely not alone in this thinking.

As the Change in Direction thread has progressed, there has been nothing short of a ton of speculation, excitement, and even nervousness within the CAP metagame community regarding not only the possibility of breaking free from OU, but also the future of the CAP metagame thereafter. Many of you were likely aware of this already, but I still feel that it's important that this is perfectly clear to the entirety of PRC. Some users are more vocal with their opinions than others, but I know for a fact that there are several notable users that have very strong opinions regarding the future of the CAP metagame, including myself, and not all of us are in agreement (which is completely understandable). However, I won't elaborate on my specific opinions here to avoid going too far off-topic. After all, the primary focus still needs to be the future of CAP as a whole, and nothing is set in stone yet. Therefore, I'd prefer that we start a separate PRC topic to address these issues, but at a later date (specifically, after the greater CAP community is sold on a plan of how to best move forward with CAP). If the CAP metagame ends up being directly addressed again here in this thread, or within another proposal, I'll certainly elaborate and pitch in more of my thoughts on the topic. If it doesn't, I propose that we postpone the addressing of the CAP Metagame's future and save the specifics for another PRC thread, where it can be discussed in detail.


Crucibelle Playtest

One last thing. On an entirely separate note, I'm overjoyed that the CAP ladder was able to be kept up alongside the Crucibelle Playtest ladder. This was one of my gripes with CAP Playtests in the past. But as we can see, having both ladders active this time around led to more CAP battles overall as Deck Knight showed us earlier, which is awesome both in terms of publicity and expanding our playerbase. The only real downside that I can think of was that this caused some confusion to newcomers (as we anticipated) e.g. "Why is Crucibelle banned in CAP?" or "Why can't I use Cyclohm in the playtest?" However, this wasn't really much of an issue, as it's easy to explain, and I don't think any of the PS! room auth had any problems clarifying this for newcomers. Ultimately, the overall benefits of keeping both ladders up at the same time during a CAP playtest easily outweigh this minor drawback, and I think we should continue to do so in future CAP playtests.
 
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Birkal

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I want to address a bunch of jas61292's concerns, most notably the concern of lacking discussion and the concern of playtest feasibility. I'd like to start the conversation with a brainstorm I had with sparktrain on IRC. I tried to keep the log short, but it gives an example of how I envision CAP discussions would function under Doug's proposed model. It talks specifically to the concern of discussion quality.

[20:06] <&@Birkal> so I wanna take a step back from your proposal(s) and go back to Doug's original one
[20:07] <&@Birkal> given the "archetypes" that Deck described, let's pick a really simple one: Cleric. They heals teammates' HP / status
[20:08] <&@Birkal> so -- as I envision Doug's proposal -- we would somehow pick cleric as our current CAP project
[20:08] <&@Birkal> again, a really broad archetype that probably isn't inclusive to every metagame (e.g. 1v1)
[20:08] <&@Birkal> I think then our "concept assessment" stage would turn into "hey, what does your metagame know about clerics?"
[20:09] <&@Birkal> people reply with their posts, e.g. Gen 5 OU used Celebi as a cleric (not a ton, but it's something)
[20:10] <&@Birkal> describing some of the characteristics of Celebi's role as a cleric within that meta
[20:10] <&@Birkal> at the end, it's the TL's job (and the community's) to take all of that information and say "alright, here's what makes a good cleric"
[20:10] <&@Birkal> "they're usually bulky, sometimes have good typings, have good offensive options, etc."
[20:11] <&@Birkal> and then /that/ would be the framework for our project, and future conversations
[20:11] <sparktrain> okay, I like that, it somewhat simplifies the process
[20:11] <&@Birkal> does that make sense so far?
[20:11] <sparktrain> later stages like typing can be used to discuss which specific typings are most conducive to performing as a cleric, as well as which defensive typings are better than others across various metagames
[20:12] <sparktrain> and yup it makes sense so far
[20:11] <&@Birkal> so each process is guided by what we decide generally makes a good cleric
[20:12] <&@Birkal> so people can bring in their metagame-specific knowledge again
[20:12] <&@Birkal> this is how I envision Doug's proposal working
[20:13] <sparktrain> we analyze our chosen concept and which sorts of traits help fit that role, and the more specific metagame-related details fill themselves in as the discussions progress and we draw in minds from different metagames

[20:13] <&@Birkal> so I'll go back and talk about how your post fits (or doesn't fit, at parts) into that
[20:13] <&@Birkal> the first is the constriction of metagames to purely 6v6 metagames
[20:16] <&@Birkal> if we're just talking in general terms, it doesn't really matter where your experience comes from
[20:17] <&@Birkal> in fact, I'd argue the more metagames we hear from, the better the project will be
[20:17] <&@Birkal> because then you get more perspectives on what a cleric is, which will help in the molding of what one truly looks like
[20:17] <sparktrain> I still believe that it's possible for CAP to be very inclusive, even if we narrow the scope of metagames to a group like 6v6 singles.
[20:17] <&@Birkal> (or what one iteration of a cleric could possibly look like)
[20:17] <&@Birkal> no, it would be very inclusive, doing just 6v6, I agree
[20:17] <&@Birkal> but that brings me to my next point
[20:18] <sparktrain> Not as inclusive as if we opened the doors up to every metagame of course, but still much more inclusive than before.

[20:18] <&@Birkal> you addressed the roles of TL and TLT
[20:18] <sparktrain> I think a slightly narrowed scope is very important in that sense.
[20:18] <&@Birkal> and I hope that Doug's proposal doesn't lend itself to pressuring the TL and TLT into knowing every metagame that's being discussed
[20:18] <&@Birkal> because that's a ridiculous proposal, whether it's all metagames, or even 6v6 metagames
[20:19] <&@Birkal> because as soon as you put that [knowledge of all metagames] out there as a requirement for posting, toxicity will go way up
[20:19] <&@Birkal> because there is no way anyone will be able to participate in CAP ever again lol
[20:19] <sparktrain> yup :/
[20:19] <&@Birkal> because no one knows all those metas
[20:19] <&@Birkal> so, in my mind, the role of the TLT and TL becomes more to the mindset of GameFreak, but with a competitive edge
[20:20] <&@Birkal> they're the one who calls the shots on which communities are speaking the most intelligently / relevantly about the archetype in question
[20:20] <sparktrain> that's exactly how I envision it

[20:20] <&@Birkal> as an example, 6v6 metas probably know a lot more about clerics than 3v3s (just me guessing)
[20:20] <&@Birkal> so it's the topic leadership's job to discern who's "voice" is the most relevant
[20:21] <&@Birkal> so the slates become more of a "this is what a cleric looks like" rather than "this is what a cleric looks like in RU/OU/NU/UU/LC/Doubles/Gen5/Gen4/AAA/BH/etc"
[20:21] <sparktrain> they won't have to be top-level players in multiple metagames-- just experienced players capable of leading discussion effectively
[20:22] <sparktrain> they should also be able to point us in the right direction of "hey, listen to X user, they know what they're talking about when it comes to this meta"
[20:22] <&@Birkal> correct, they give validity to the the discussion
[20:22] <&@Birkal> so, consider the following example:
[20:23] <&@Birkal> Clerics, by definition (check the pokedictionary) have heal bell or aromatherapy to heal teammates
[20:23] <&@Birkal> so an OU player that's just talking about heal bell is not intelligent, because that's part of the definition
[20:24] <&@Birkal> but now the conversation turns to "hey, we have Blissey in OU, and an important part of its role is passing Wishes as well. does that contribute to a cleric?"
[20:24] <&@Birkal> which evolves the conversation into what secondary characteristics clerics have
[20:25] <&@Birkal> and it's the topic leaderships' job to discern which of those secondary characteristics (not primary) best bring us to our archetype
[20:25] <&@Birkal> and that's what gets slated
[20:25] <sparktrain> like we could end up with something completely different than what we had initially imagined, perhaps a fast, offensive cleric
[20:25] <&@Birkal> sure thing
[20:25] <&@Birkal> because maybe NU has a fast, offensive cleric
[20:25] <&@Birkal> and they contribute to the conversation some of those factors that gives its cleric success
[20:25] <&@Birkal> it's seen as valid by the TLT, and then put up for poll​

There's more to the log, but I gave you all the CliffNotes. As I mentioned, I believe that the broader the scope, the better. It brings more perspectives in to the conversations, as opposed to limiting them. Furthermore, it turns the conversation away from the current witch hunt of players' OU knowledge into one of learning from each others' perspectives. This part of the proposal has community written all over it, and lends itself to more community talk and dialogue than we've ever had before. Will there be times when, for example, metagames differ on what makes a good archetype in their tier? Of course, but that's what makes the conversations so alluring. We've shifted away from black and white discussions and towards conversations that could really take any direction. That's not only pure theorymon, but it's also an exhilarating framework for a conversation, in my opinion.

To briefly address jas' concern about what the playtest would look like, there's a lot of ways we can feasibly do it. We'll likely need to create an entire CAP Playtest sub-category, where any metagame what wants a ladder can find theirs posted. To determine which metagames get playtests, I envision we have a sign-up list, where X amount of users need to sign-on, committing to try out their metagame with our CAP. If a metagame doesn't want to try our CAP, they certainly don't have to. As I posted in the OP of this thread, CAP used to be a forum project, where all users from the OU metagame had their fingerprints on CAP. Opening up the playtests to multiple metagames gives CAP back to those people, as opposed to the CAP regulars that we have now. There is definitely interest out there in metagame communities for CAP, so why not give them the chance to shine?


I encourage people to really consider Doug's proposal with a stripped-down sense of what we know and understand of CAP. Do we need a single metagame to have a conversation about how to make a Pokemon? Do slates really need to only encompass one metagame? Tradition is great, but don't let it shackle down what could potentially be the greatest change we've ever had in CAP. Just because this is extremely unfamiliar doesn't mean it isn't good. So please, consider this proposal through the lens of what we really came here to do: to create Pokemon as a community. In my mind, this proposal expands the concept of community far greater than anything we've seen in the past.
 

Bughouse

Like ships in the night, you're passing me by
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I'm normally pretty good about reading, but I'm just not going to read even more walls of text in this thread. I previously read 5 or so already and there are not enough hours in my day to read any more millennia-old epics. I think I just skipped over the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Faerie Queene, and maybe the Tale of Genji too.

Anyway...... From what I can gather from Birkal's post, Doug has proposed making CAPs generally as Pokemon, not for OU or any other metagame, based on the idea of a role the Pokemon would play on a team.

Interesting idea. Sorta similar to concepts we've had submitted before about making a mon that fills the same role as other mons in different metas/generations, where the discussion would be focused on understanding what that role is.

I think that's a fine starting point to not focus on concepts like we have before and just set ourselves to think about roles every time. But I do think it absolutely has to get narrowed down to a metagame at some point pretty early on in the process. Building a mon generally and then seeing where it fits in will never work as a practical matter in terms of getting best educational results (and I thought learning about Pokemon was the point of CAP).

Suppose we tried to build a hazard remover. You'd have a strong contingent of PU players who will be very focused on making one that is suitable for PU, because they badly want a usable hazard remover (well, not so much anymore after recent tier shifts, but you get my drift). You'd have another contingent from, well most of the rest of the site, that is going to want to make something that looks like it'd be OU. Even though that concept is probably most interesting when looking at PU, they will likely be outvoted every step of the way, unless at some point it is made clear that hey the PU players really do have a point and we should do it for their meta. And why shouldn't we do that? Making another OU-viable hazard remover doesn't really teach us anything. There's like 10 or 11 already.
 

DougJustDoug

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We talked about this stuff a lot in the PS room yesterday, and I made the following clarification that several people have been misunderstanding. I'll repost the shortened, consolidated chatlog for everyone else:

-----------------

DougJustDoug: There has been a severe misinterpretation of what I suggested about making pokemon for "multiple metagames" and are equating that with "We will make pokemon for multiple Smogon tiers" -- and that is NOT what I intended.

Reapehify: You actually went into detail specifying lower tiers, though. That's hard to misinterpret.

DougJustDoug: No, I didn't. I said this:

"I think we should aim for a power level of "good pokemon" in terms of stats, ability, etc. But the idea that "OU" = "good" (as I detailed in my massive post earlier) is an ancient way of looking at the game of Pokemon. Nowadays, there are mons with awesome stats and abilities hanging down in NU. So I don't think we need to say, "This will be RU level in stats and ability", or anything that specific. We try to make a "good pokemon" and then see where it falls in the tiers."

So, yes, I mentioned RU and NU, but my point was this -- Make a GOOD pokemon, and if it doesn't end up in OU, that's fine. But I don't plan to make low-powered pokemon so they can be played in NU or anything else. Make a good pokemon. And if the subtle nuances of competitive pokemon lead to the pokemon being playable at best in a lower tier than OU -- that's OK.

Reapehify: That's an entirely different and more concise explanation. Well, concise nonetheless.

KhosroTheGreat: So we're still aiming for OU-level Pokemon

DougJustDoug: No, we are not aiming for "OU pokemon". We are aiming to make a "good pokemon" in terms of the entirety of competitive pokemon. Which does NOT mean that I just said our pokemon have to be good in EVERY metagame.

Reapehify: No, of course not.

DougJustDoug: It means let's stop accepting that the only yardstick for determining if a pokemon is "good" is if it is viable in OU -- that is simply NOT TRUE.

DarkSlay: Right, getting rid of the OU requirement is the difference. So making the already broad old construction of CAP Pokemon even broader.

Reapehify: But not so broad it loses focus, if the terminology basis is introduced to archetypically pick a pokemon skeleton and build on it.​
 

Ignus

Copying deli meat to hard drive
I feel like the biggest problem with Doug's proposal, at least, as it is right now, is that we don't have a way to place CAP in a tier properly. In fact, with the way CAP is built, it naturally doesn't mesh well with the idea of metagames in the first place. This is because every tier is based on usage statistics. The new Pokemon that we add to a metagame will naturally have a higher usage rate just because of their novelty, which skews the accuracy of how we properly place it in tiers. In fact, the only way OU can even place anything like this is because the game doesn't change more often than every few years. If it changed more often than this, tiers would most likely be separated entirely by win rate or some other more consistent statistic.

So with this proposal, let's say we make a new CAP. How do we decide which tier to put it in? Just keep playtesting until either we figure out which metagame it belongs in or people burn out? That doesn't seem like a solid idea for building CAP's community; Anytime a process stage moves at Cawmodore levels of slow we see a significant decrease in participation. If there's an obvious way to do decide where we place CAP tier wise, non-arbitrarily, we should take it. As of right now, though, I can't think of a solid way to do this.

That said, building for different metagames sounds like a great idea, but we have to define what we're building for early on. That way, it gives us a reason to advertise on their forums and recruit as quickly as possible, gives the project a better semblance of structure, and allows us to reach out to some of the metagame's best players on their opinion on what direction the project should go as early as possible. On top of that, it removes the drudgery of testing multiple metagames near the end of the CAP cycle.
 
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Birkal

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While I don't want to close this thread prematurely, it has gone on now for several months and CAP 22 will be ready to go sooner than we'd think. I encourage everyone on the PRC to really read through Doug's proposal starting here and the following posts. I feel that much of the disapproval have been simply a lack of understanding what is being proposed here in the first place. For example, to respond to Ignus, there is no need to place a CAP into a tier "properly" with this proposal. Once released, a CAP would be open up to any and all metagames. As long as there is an active enough playerbase that wants to try laddering, they qualify for using our CAP.

I will be honest in that I want Doug's proposal to go through more than any other proposal previously instated with the CAP PRC. It would absolutely revitalize CAP while taking away the toxicity of bashing users for making a Pokemon "the wrong way." There shouldn't be a wrong way in the first place -- that's a fundamental problem with our current CAP system that is not fixed with any other proposal in this thread, except Doug's. The whole point of CAP is to learn through engaging conversation, not judging our CAP's performance in a tier. We've gotten so wrapped up in regulation and rules that it's impossible to make everyone happy because we've layered on years of expectations. This proposal returns us to CAP's roots, where we have greater flexibility and there is free-flowing conversation by putting us in GameFreak's shoes.

If, after reading Doug's proposal through, you honestly cannot see any benefits from moving forward with his proposal, I ask that you at least let us try it out once. Let's see if this drastic change can really change things up for the better. If not, we can always revert once we're done. I'll be leading a Reflection PRC Thread on it afterwards (similar to when we implemented the TLT), so we can make an informed decision moving forward. I would hate to see CAP 22 start without there being any change. We've been ramming our heads into a wall long enough -- let's end the bickering and try something new that has a great chance to be beneficial and fun.
 

jas61292

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Ok... no. Just no. This is not how we do things Birkal. I hate to have to be making this post, but more than anything I have ever seen in PRC, this just absolutely rubs me the wrong way.

While I agree that this thread is dragging on, I have seen nothing to show "CAP 22 will be ready to go sooner than we'd think." Are you just making a general statement about your feel? Or are you referring to some private conversation? Either way, I have always, and will always feel that we should finish policy revier AND THEN start a project, not cut PRC discussions short just to get them finished. Regardless though, the issue here is that the proposal simply does not have support in this thread. Doug proposed it. You like it. That is pretty much ALL the support I see in this thread for the unedited proposal as a whole. There was a lot of support for the general idea and the reasoning behind it, but most posts say straight up that no, we cannot make a metagame neutral Pokemon. We can be more open than we have been, sure, but the support for the unedited proposal simply does not exist to an extent to a large enough degree to even halfheartedly claim that it would be the community consensus.

And I have to say that I absolutely resent the implication that the majority of people commenting on the proposal simply cannot understand it or something like that. No. We understand it perfectly well. We just reject it (or at least important parts of it). And please don't compare it to the TLT system. The TLT system had a huge amount to support, and even people who were somewhat hesitant about it thought it was worth a shot. That is absolutely not the case here. So, if we want to conclude this thread, lets have try and reform the proposal so that people actually gets support. Looking through the posts, I doubt it would require that much change. Most people do like the general ideas behind the proposal. But it absolutely would require some change.

I most certainly respect both you and Doug, and the ideas behind this proposal are certainly great. But don't act like the proposal has support where it doesn't. Now maybe I'm wrong, and maybe there is more support than I think. But if there is such support, those people NEED to post in the thread, cause, as is, I simply cannot look at this thread and believe there is even close to enough support for the proposal to make it even worth a shot.

With that all said, I do, as already stated, think we should try and wrap things up IF we can reach a consensus, and I will try and look at all the posts here and see if I can make an amended proposal here soon. And I absolutely encourage other people to do the same. Lets not settle for a proposal people do not like because we don't have an alternative. Lets amend it, talk about it, and get this thread finished. But lets do it once we have a proposal that we can actually call a community consensus, and no sooner.

EDIT: For what its worth, sparktrain did give a somewhat edited version of the proposal. While its changes were somewhat vague (too much so for a final proposal) I do think there is plenty of merit in it, and would love to see more discussion of what he said. I think the simple changes he made might not be enough to be ideal, but would be enough to make me think it might be worth a try.
 
I agree with jas. What we decide about this proposal is insanely important to the development of CAP in the future, and absolutely not something we should rush. Even sparktrain, whose edit on the proposal seems a little more fleshed out, still doesn't have a plan of implementation. We need more time to discuss how we actually want to excecute.
 

Birkal

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I apologize if my post rubbed you the wrong way. Do notice that I never posted a time limit on when this thread is closing. Of course we will discuss this to fruition. That is the point of the PRC. But the reality is that we could feasibly start CAP 22 in a few weeks, and it would be frustrating to delay making Pokemon due to a thread that has now been open for half a year. The point of my post was to reignite the conversation, and with many new people now on the PRC, I'm not ashamed in bumping it. You should know full well, jas, that this thread would have sat dormant for another month, where we'd grudgingly look for a middle ground to get CAP 22 on the road. This thread deserves to be played out in its fullest, so let's keep the conversations going.

Furthermore, your notion that "every post is a solid no" is painting the picture towards your viewpoint in an unfair way. Bughouse and Deck Knight, two CAP contributors, considered the proposal as interesting and worth discussing. sparktrain, an upcoming moderator, was also willing to consider the proposal, but within limited terms. The rest of the posts have been either a) tweaks to the proposal about the parts they didn't like, or b) solely you posting dissent. I have always valued your "devil's advocate" position, which is why I took the time to make a detailed reply to your post, which never received a response from you, here or on IRC. This proposal isn't unanimously approved, but it is by no means unanimously unapproved either.

There is much to discuss, which is why I posted. Again, apologies if that offended anyone. We will let this thead run its course -- I think it is the most important PRC thread we've ever had. So I'd be very interested in hearing more thoughts and having open dialogue.
 

Bughouse

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Sorry, but I'm not gonna be used as evidence that it's interesting. I did think it was, given my cursory reading.

But if the proposal insists that CAPs won't be built "for" a metagame, which seems to be the case, then no I don't find it interesting. I just find it stupid and unworkable. So if a "vote" of sorts has to come down and CAP has to get a move on, I would be a clear no. Even though I'm not exactly involved a ton anymore, I do think my opinion should carry some weight. And this would leave CAP very aimless. Aimless CAP has happened before, and it never turns out well.

Here's an analogy. Which is a good project idea? Make a Pokemon to be some defined Pokemon's perfect mate? Or make a Pokemon with no guide and then find out which Pokemon's perfect mate it is? We've been trying to do the first. Doug now wants to do the second.
 

jas61292

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For what its worth, I agree with you Birkal on a lot of what you said. Like you I do think this is the most important PR thread we have ever had. And yes, I know that if we don't do anything and leave it as is, this thread would likely be sitting here unchanged 6 months from now. That is very much why I said that I would try and make "try and look at all the posts here and see if I can make an amended proposal here soon," and why I encouraged others to do the same.

Furthermore, my intent was not to imply that "every post was a solid no". Hell, I'd even argue that my own post was not even close to pure dissent, like you implied. Rather what I was trying to say what that no post, other than perhaps yours, was a solid yes, and that, as such, we should not even be thinking of just going for it as it stands, which is what your post seemed to imply. And while that might not have been your intent, I am certainly not the only one to have interpreted that way. I mean (as much as it pains me to use this as a statistic) that last post of mine was literally the most "liked" thing in this thread since the actual proposal. People want to discuss this more. And we should. People want to edit the proposal. And we should. We don't need to throw it out and start anew, but we shouldn't go on with it as is either.

---

Anyways, you mentioned that you responded to my post and I didn't do likewise, so let me do that now. Honestly, I don't have that much to add from my initial points. I simply cannot agree in the slightest with your general statement that "the broader the scope, the better." More perspectives are only a good thing so long as they are perspectives on the same thing. In a debate about anything, having more opinions are great. But if your debating, say, economic stuff and people start shouting their opinions on foreign policy (yeah, I've been watching more political news than I really have a need to), those opinions are not enriching the debate in the slightest. They are taking away from it, because they are taking away focus from the actual issue at hand. With relation to this project, what this means is that people having opinions is only helpful so long as those opinions are all relevant to the same thing. The more I think about it, the more I am hesitant to even try anything that does not have a single metagame focus for this very reason.

I also think that your whole proposal for the playtest would just be kinda a mess. We already don't get many battles, and this would split that up even more so. I highly doubt it would serve any worthwhile purpose if layed out as you suggested. That said, I don't want to be all negative, and so I would like to actually make some sort of proposal with regard to this. I'm not the biggest fan of the whole sign up idea, but I can't think of anything better on that end. Rather, what I'd like to propose would be that, rather than having many playtest metagames going on simultaneously, we do them sequentially, one at a time, for a few days each. Each metagame will have its own time to be "the one" being tested, and so each one will be more likely to actually see play from a wider group of people.

Anyways though, ultimately, I do think we need to make things less of a free-for-all than what Doug proposed. My last paragraph from my first post on it still stands as probably the best summation of my position on it. I like a lot of what Doug laid out, but I fear that without more restraint on our end, we will only end up hurting ourselves.
 

Cretacerus

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Looking through the proposal, I have to agree with jas61292 that the open-ended approach might end up causing more trouble for the project than it solves. A large-scale community project such as CAP absolutely needs a clearly defined goal in order to uphold constructive discussion, prerequisite for a solid learning experience.

The concept of a “good Pokémon”, as presented in the proposal, is highly subjective and open to plenty of different interpretations, which in the end may leave us without any clear direction. Perhaps the most common way to define “good” is by the standards of competitive viability, though the proposal makes it clear that this is by far not the only valid route.
The fact that there would be no right or wrong in the process of creating a Pokémon, as mentioned by Birkal, would almost certainly take a toll on competitive discussion, causing it to become increasingly aimless and ultimately pointless. The existence of multiple equally valid approaches would instead require more emphasis to be placed on large polls, based solely on individual preference. It seems that we are in fact trying to lower the amount of toxicity and regulation in discussions by cutting down the need for discussion altogether.

In my opinion, we shouldn't risk obstructing something as important as focused discussion for the conceited goal of pleasing everybody. While strict regulations and overall toxicity might deter many users from participating, a lack of focus and direction throughout the project could certainly have the same effect, especially towards the competitively oriented people CAP could heavily benefit from.
 
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Hello all. This is my first time joining in on PRC discussion so I know I have no real presence or acumen with any of you; that being said I'd like to think here in the confines of the PRC that we're all on equal ground. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I'd like to address the committee if I may. And I apologize in advance if my first post is short in span compared to your massive treatise but hopefully that means everyone is capable of digesting it and all of its merits. Even you Bughouse. :^)

I've been following along in the shadows waiting for a chance to speak, and on the day I get granted permission by Birkal PRC has devolved into total indifference. I'd like to think that the newest batch of PRC committee members was a calculated tactic by Birkal's hand to inject some energy into this and push it towards completion, but whether or not that's true is pure speculation. Regardless, it did happen, and new angles are likely to be explored. Now I'm going to come out and say straight away that this isn't a new proposal for how to fix CAP. We all agree that there's a toxicity and as such there's room for improvement. My intent with this post is to convey the problem staring us in the face three pages in: our lack of direction. There's a lot of worry, some confusion, and not enough focus. I could quote for you various things said in this massive thread but you can go back and read that for yourselves. What I'd like to present instead is a small yet impactful discussion I had with DougJustDoug today regarding the current direction of this session of PRC as it is of now.
[13:18:45] #DougJustDoug: The Adjustment in Direction thread makes me sad.
[13:18:45] #DougJustDoug: I don't think most people realize what will most likely happen if we shoot down the proposal.
[13:19:48] @sparktrain: To clarify my position, I don't want to shoot down the proposal. I just feel like it should be revised a bit.
[13:19:59] Reapehify: Doug, your proposal doesn't need to be rejected.
[13:20:05] Reapehify: You just need to be open to drafting it.
[13:20:22] #DougJustDoug: I'm open to it.
[13:20:34] #DougJustDoug: But that's not how CAP PR usually turns out.
[13:20:42] #DougJustDoug: I've seen this movie before.
[13:20:46] #DougJustDoug: Many many times.
[13:20:50] Reapehify: So be the executive and fiat a decision.
[13:21:08] Reapehify: You know even legislature needs someone who clamps down and gets everyone to focus on the bill at hand.
[13:21:09] #DougJustDoug: Nope. I don't like doing that.
[13:21:22] #DougJustDoug: Particularly not a proposal like this
[13:21:38] #DougJustDoug: Because it's not really about the conclusion of the PR thread
[13:22:00] #DougJustDoug: It's about whether other CAP leaders are behind it and believe in it.
[13:22:25] Reapehify: I've heard a lot of 'that sounds good in theory but it wouldn't work in practical application' around here.
[13:22:36] #DougJustDoug: If others don't believe in it -- it really doesn't matter what I do in terms of "executive fiat"
[13:23:19] #DougJustDoug: Yeah, and CAP fence-sitting has been then demise of many past PR proposals
[13:23:20] Reapehify: Well, it does matter if the PRC doesn't have a leader, or a chairman if you will, who doesn't help focus the council when things become chaotic.
[13:23:24] #DougJustDoug: Much to my chagrin
[13:23:46] #DougJustDoug: This isn't about chaos.
[13:23:54] #DougJustDoug: The thread isn't chaotic
[13:24:08] #DougJustDoug: People are just scared of change.
[13:24:17] #DougJustDoug: They are not saying "Im scared"
[13:24:26] Reapehify: I think that's underselling people's motives.
[13:24:40] #DougJustDoug: But that's what I think is the underlying driver. I may be wrong on that point.
[13:24:40] #DougJustDoug: js
[13:24:48] Reapehify: Okay, so express it.
[13:25:10] #DougJustDoug: People say, in effect, "I want to fix the problems, but I'm worried about this proposal. We need a different proposal."
[13:25:11] #DougJustDoug: And that will lead to this proposal dying.
[13:25:17] #DougJustDoug: And CAP will probably hold to form and do nothing. Because when all is said and done, CAP has proven time and again, that more is said than done.
[13:25:39] Reapehify: So then provoke change by asking them how this proposal can be altered.
[13:25:44] Reapehify: I haven't seen any give and take.
[13:25:50] #DougJustDoug: Everybody is great at shooting down ideas. And they are terrible at coming up with workable alternatives.
[13:26:06] Reapehify: It sounds like you're bitching and moaning, now.
[13:26:22] #DougJustDoug: I am.
[13:26:38] Reapehify: Being passive and expecting better is contradictory and illogical.
[13:27:07] #DougJustDoug: I think my actions in that thread have been far from passive. I am the most active person in the thread, by far.
[13:27:09] Reapehify: If you want change, help foster it. Ask what can be amended/clarified with your proposal that would make people want to give it a chance.
[13:27:18] Reapehify: Yes, action, not reaction.
[13:27:39] Reapehify: You can't act, have everyone else react. It creates a cul-de-sac.
[13:28:05] #DougJustDoug: My proposal was a reaction, on my part.
[13:28:10] Reapehify: People have responded to your proposal, maybe in a negative light.
[13:28:12] #DougJustDoug: Remember, I didn't start the thread
[13:28:35] Reapehify: And your proposal while maybe taking from others' thoughts isn't a response to them.
[13:28:53] Reapehify: Nor does it account for responding to those who made criticism of your proposal since.
[13:30:05] Reapehify: Personally, I like the proposal in theory too; but I'd be glad to see things with more legalese, that is, more concrete and agreeable from that point of view. Without you having to come into CAP and clarify points you might have not been able to put forth in the initial post.
[13:30:40] Reapehify: A lot of people would be more open to trial run the idea...if it was altered.
[13:31:46] Reapehify: Jas said to me the other day, and I paraphrase: "The idea seems too good to be true. It sounds good in theory but it doesn't sound good practically. I would rather fix it so it works better in theory and practically too before I run with it."
[13:32:47] Reapehify: In PRC he even cited maybe going with sparktrain's proposal which altered Doug's, after it was also clarified more.
[13:33:31] Reapehify: The point is, while the proposal set forth by Doug definitely seems like a positive starting point for a framework, it needs more work before it's taken to market for a trial run. Or at least that's the consensus I've come away with.

*edited to fix typos and remove all non-PRC users at time of discussion.


For those of you who were interested in reading that all, I think the bold statements underline what I'm driving at. For those who couldn't be bothered or simply don't get it let me clarify so it is abundantly clear without interpretation. This PRC council likes to talk the talk but it hasn't walked the walk. With the exception of a few (i.e. Bughouse, Doug, sparktrain) no one has clearly outlined their intentions for what the solution is. There's been a lot of bickering, but that bickering has tired everyone out and we're now at an indifferent state. Like Doug has said, there has been an awful low production of ideas in contrast to criticism. Why has that been the case? Because unlike most committees, this one doesn't have a chair to supervise and focus discussion. Everyone is on equal ground as I mentioned earlier, and as such there's no one taking charge. Doug's personal beliefs disallow him from making the necessary decisions and no one else was elected to my knowledge to serve in such a role. Despite the difference in size from the process of CAP, at its core PRC is still a collection of people with different ideas and beliefs. When you put so many varying people in the same room on equal ground, you're naturally going to hit an impasse like we have here. How can we fix this faux stalemate? Let's regroup and focus on our objective. The mission statement from the outset was, and I quote Birkal: This thread serves as a discussion platform for the Create-A-Pokemon Project to form its own, new metagame (and tier) that is based around the philosophy of finding metagame balance through creation rather than omission. This has been lost in the shuffle and ultimately tossed to the side as if it's not as important. But go full circle and I think it plays a key part in solidifying Doug's proposal in the near future.


With all that in mind I'd now like to make some motions to help further PRC now and in general.

1. First and foremost, I'd like to put forth a motion that at the beginning of every PRC session a 'TL' (Chair) is elected after the initial committee has applied and been assembled. Someone who is able to remind everyone 'hey, this is the mission statement, let's focus to achieve it.' or 'hey, x put out a great idea, how can we make it better instead of shooting it down altogether?' I'd like to point out though for those who are unsure that this person wouldn't be making any sort of slate, but instead objectively keep us on task - they wouldn't have anymore say than anyone else, they'd simply help keep the focus of PRC like any legislature would necessitate.
2. I'd like to put forth that we should elect such a person now; although it's rather late in the PRC session, I think someone who's willing to help keep focus on the current discussion whatever it may be would allow us to tailwind to a strong finish as a unified group.
3. Since no one else outside of Doug or sparktrain have put any thought into a solution, I'd like to put forth a motion that we focus one or the other (and sparktrain's proposal is an altered Doug proposal, so in essence it's Doug proposal either way) and amend/draft it to the point that it does satisfy the majority of committee members here. I truly believe Doug's proposal poses a great framework for the future of CAP and in tandem with giving CAP its own stable meta, would be most inclusive for both people and CAP alike.
4. Lets stop expecting everyone to interpret everyone else and come away from it with the same idea. Let's stop guessing and assuming what people are thinking. Doug shouldn't be guessing you're all scared and hesitant; in contrast you all haven't really put out your bottom line. Let's take off the kid gloves and be blunt with each other. We're all adults here, we can be both honest and earnest. Let's walk away from this knowing we put everything out there in the best interest of CAP because as it stands the status quo is unacceptable. And we can all agree on that.

Cheers.
 

Imanalt

I'm the coolest girl you'll ever meet
is a Tiering Contributor Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnus
I'm going to be blunt here (am I ever not).
This proposal is really bad. It both stretches the very limited metagame knowledge that our playerbase has more, resulting in even more cases of people who do not have really solid grasps of a meta trying to use their "knowledge" to make conclusive statements. This proposal also fundamentally misses what is in my opinion the single most important thing in terms of a pokemon's viability, which is how it interacts with specific metas.

I'm going to start off with the second point I just made. Pokemon are good or bad because they do specific things in teambuilding. Increasingly, as the number of threats has increased throughout generations, and as teambuilding strategies have changed, this has become about trying to teambuild from a threats-based perspective. That is, teams are built trying to find a combination of 6 mons that best allows the team to deal with the common threats in a metagame. As competitive pokemon in general has gone to this style of play, cap has not. We are in this thread discussing a very outdated model of "pokemon fits x role" rather than "pokemon allows teams to beat x y and z." Separating a pokemon being built from the meta it is being built for drastically changes how we think about it from being threats-based towards being role-based. This is fundamentally a poor and inaccurate way to look at competitive pokemon. This is my single biggest hang-up with this proposal. We should be looking to adapt towards looking even more at the question of "how does this pokemon allow us to beat these threats in this metagame." It doesn't matter what metagame this is, this is a fundamental truth of what defines the value of pokemon in gen 6. I think this is part of where the early stages of crucibelle struggled. We said we were supposed to be a utility counter, when this is an era where all pokemon are utility counters, they just accomplish that in other ways.

Then we get to the other issue. The reason in my understanding for us building for OU in the past is that it was the best known metagame of any type on smogon. This is still true. Its not even close to not true, as even if its overall share of games is declining, it is still much more commonly played than any other meta which requires teambuilding. Because of this being true, this is still the metagame we have the ability to speak to the most as a community, with the exception of the cap metagame, which in my opinion has two issues that I'll touch on later. The big gist of this though, is that we can speak a lot more knowledgeably about OU than we can anything else. If we try to speak about OU and battle spot, and doubles, and whatever else, we will by necessity be speaking less knowledgeably. This would be very bad. The argument can be made that we would attract solid players from those metagames to post, but I'm dubious. A lot more people play OU than any of those metagames, and we've struggled to bring in OU players. If we did a cap aimed at uu, or ubers, or lc, or doubles, I'm sure that would bring in people from that respective meta. But saying we're making a pokemon targeted at no metagame will not bring in players from a wide variety of tiers, it will just result in people kind of giggling at us saying "look at cap not having a clue what they're doing again." (This has been the reaction I have heard from a decent number of non cap friends to this proposal).

Hopefully people can now agree that we should be building for a metagame, so I'll finish with my two objections to building for the cap meta, as has been discussed earlier in the thread. First it lacks the depth and development of more commonly played metagames, as amount of play and number of high level players both impact the development of a metagame. Secondly and probably more importantly, the cap metagame is less played by the types of users we want to be attracting, the "working middle class" players as Doug termed them (although I think there's a lot of potential dispute over what level this is). This would be dangerous for keeping up and improving the quality of our userbase, which has been a commonly stated goal.

This post has been a whole lot of "Your ideas for change suck" and given I think I'm the biggest proponent of change in cap, I figure I should probably actually say what I do want. Honestly I don't know exactly what I want, and would welcome outside input, but my current position is that the entire cap process is flawed, as we have tried to patch every little hole we've found in it, and now we've ended up with more patch than process. I want to see us start more or less from scratch, have conversations with the players we'd like to be attracting about if they would be interested in cap, and what they would want cap to be if they were interested, starting only from the core idea that cap is a competitive discussion based process around designing a pokemon.
 
For those who are interested in going back over Doug's suuuuper long (in Microsoft Office count: 9 pages long) proposal, I've boiled it down in bullet points to necessitate the essentials and removed the exposition. It should serve beneficial moving forward.

  • Drying up middle class, 'income equality'. So what CAP needs to do is re-establish a working middle class again.
  • General competitive knowledge/skill constitutes middle class.
  • Create new definitions and expectations for CAP; create new direction for CAP that include “good battlers” around “good” pokemon.
  • "Stupid" and "clever" are local to the metagame being played – different strats, ev, etc. for different metagames.
  • Build for all metgames by building for no metagames; “good pokemon” are good in all tiers.
  • One is pure theory (CAP), and the other is pure experimentation (suspect testing) – remove the mentality that elite battlers are necessary for validation.
  • We build “good” pokemon by following competitive archetypes. (refer to Deck Knight's post)
  • Pokemon need to be “cartridge-legal”, meaning no Hackmons or CAP in reference to creation.
  • Tier CAPmon via playtest after creation; Allows us to know how it's successful, not if it's successful.
  • Allows us to reach out to other metas then, and ask them to participate. Creates an inclusive atmosphere. They can give meta input based on their tier on CAPmon.
  • Not concerned about CAP metagame; leave for another PRC. Will not take design cues from CAP.
  • Stop making specific concepts; make general concepts and let specific ideas emerge in due course.
  • Use “pivot” method to help CAP become the best it can be: Start with general good idea, use competent feedback from consumer to shift from initial idea to what works better. Repeat.
  • Start with general good idea, use competent feedback from consumer to shift from initial idea to what works better. Repeat.
  • “good” pokemon also includes stats, ability.
  • CAP is so specific and myopic; following OU but OU also has no idea what its doing with metagame/tiering.
  • CAP has no designation of what's “good”; follows OU.
  • Tiering factions vying for their metagame in CAP discussions is an issue.
  • List competitive archetypes in this PRC to create a list of viable archetypes for future CAPs. (refer to Deck Knight's post)
  • Be more specific than “Wall” or “Sweeper” but more general than “ Slow Hazard setter with one status move and the ability to setup physical”; And if we miss some, we can add to the list as we go along in the future.
  • We will pick one of those archetypes as the "Concept" for a CAP. (Change concept submissions?)
  • Still have limits on movepool, stats, etc. So it limits issues with faction/lobbyist voting. Still have slates and the current structure.
  • CAPs may end up being more diverse
  • Lowers the bar for general competitive knowledge and raises it for specific metagame knowledge; helps everyone bring something to the table.

My short commentary on Doug's proposal:

How do we determine valid legal archetypes? One of the things that has been valuable about the concept system is that it gives us a central focus. Take Stratagem, Mollux, and Crucibelle - the focus there was on the contours of typing and how to support that, in three differing ways. I still think there's a place to take concepts a little bit further than, say, "Ultimate Bulk Up User." At the same time, before we had concepts that's basically what Revenankh became for that metagame. I think there should be a way to capture the best of both of those worlds, I'm just not sure what it looks like. I'd call it a sub-concept, and I wouldn't necessarily mind doing two discussions/polls, the first on "Archetype" and the second on "Sub-Concept."

Edit: Might as well throw a few things against the wall and see if we can clarify our direction by working through something somewhat concrete.

Archetype Descriptor Pool:

Purpose:

Revenge Killer
Stall-Breaker
Sweeper
Tank
Utility
Wall
Wall-Breaker

Style:
Hyper-Offensive
Offensive
Defensive
Balanced
Stall

Physical
Special
Mixed

Cleric
Support
Stat Boosting
Pivot
Win-Con

The broad idea of this pool is that we choose One element from Purpose and One to Three from Style. A few examples being:

Wall Mixed Pivot Support (ex: Mandibuzz)
Stall-Breaker Pivot Support (ex: Gliscor)
Sweeper Physical Win-Con (ex: Mega-Charizard X)
Sweeper Stat-Boosting Physical Support (ex: Excadrill)
Tank Physical Stat-Boosting (ex: Quagsire)
Tank Mixed Stat-Boosting (ex: Mega-Slowbro)
Utility Pivot Support (ex: Amoonguss)
Revenge Killer Hyper-Offensive Physical (ex: Weavile)

Terms generally follow the Pokemon Dictionary we have on site. I note that you could technically add more elements to these Pokemon because of what they can do, e.g. Weavile CAN use Swords Dance but for all practical purposes it's there to immediately KO whatever was KO'd on your side before it. Excadrill CAN be a Win-Con (and often is), but its chief niche is the fact it simultaneously scares out foes with high offense and can Rapid Spin away hazards. The Scarf set doesn't stat-boost but the LO set does. Again, none of this is perfect but it's a good starting place to be "specific enough."

Also noteworthy about the way this is set up is that the Purpose is intended to be clarifying. You can easily argue the following roles for Ferrothorn:

Tank Mixed Stall
Tank Mixed Support
Utility Pivot Support
Utility Stall Support

There's a lot of overlap here, but the focus can result in different kinds of Pokemon, just to work this out by example:

Tank Mixed Stall (ex: Ferrothorn, Hippowdon, Skarmory)
These Pokemon have excellent mixed defense, credible offense against relevant targets, and can either lay multiple hazards, phaze, or both.
Tank Mixed Support (ex: Ferrothorn, Clefable, Cresselia)
These Pokemon have excellent mixed defense but have more generic supporting capabilities like paralysis, Leech Seed, Healing Wish, etc.
Utility Pivot Support (ex: Ferrothorn, Amoonguss, Latias)
These Pokemon primarily provide support for their team but can also pivot in repeatedly to keep providing it.
Utility Stall Support (ex: Ferrothorn, Forretress, Skarmory)
These Pokemon generally have high defenses conducive to Stall but are primarily there for the additional hazard laying and phazing options than tanking every hit.

Like any categorization system you can quibble with the choices, but this is at least a framework.
 

snake

is a Community Leaderis a Top CAP Contributoris a Contributor to Smogon
CAP Co-Leader
Hi! This is my first post in the PRC thread. It might take me a couple posts, but I'll settle in soon. sparktrain has pointed out most of what I've noticed, but I'd still like to give my own play on it.

I've read Doug's post, and I've begun to understand it a little bit better. I feel very strongly about one point. To me, Doug's proposal will be more effective if we limit the first few CAPs under this proposal to 6 vs 6 Singles. I know it severely limits our scope, but Doug's proposal changes the CAP creation process drastically. However, this edit could be effective.

Most people who are already affiliate with and participate in CAP can relate to 6 vs 6 Singles. With Doug's proposal, I can see people playing tug-of-war between, for example, 6 vs 6 Singles and 6 vs 6 Doubles. "General strategy" in these two metagames are extremely different (ex. entry hazards are not as common, and everything uses Protect in Doubles). Would it not be frustrating to see arguments of: "Hey! We should give this Rapid Spin!" And then "No! Doubles don't need a spinner!" Granted, we could pick between these 6 vs 6 Singles and 6 vs 6 Doubles; however this idea runs problems. Again, I know this proposal extends beyond these two metas, but I just picked these two as examples.

If we pick one metagame with a "general strategy" (ex. 6 vs 6 Singles and 6 vs Doubles again) at any point during the CAP process, the players of the metagames that don't get picked will feel cheated, as they will either a) be forced learn the metagame with a new "general strategy" that was picked just to participate or worse b) not participate. Most people will probably pick option b) either because they are angry their metagame wasn't picked, don't have time to learn the other metagame, don't have interest in the other metagame.

By limiting our scope just 6 vs 6 singles, we alleviate this issue. Although we won't get 6 vs 6 Doubles players, we will get a large pool of 6 vs 6 Singles players who all know and love the "general strategy" of 6 vs 6 Singles. The 6 vs 6 Singles tiers (OU, UU, RU, NU, PU) already have differences between them, even if they all have 6 Pokemon against 6 Pokemon sparring one on one at a time. If we pick a metagame that some people don't play as much, at least they don't have to learn another "general strategy" that Doubles has, for example. Sure, an OU player might have to learn new threats in RU for example, but that's not so much of a change to something like Doubles or Triples or whatever.

My views might be shortsighted, but this is what I thought of when I read Doug's proposal. I know there's much more to his proposal than just this point, but still I feel like this would be a good first post in the thread. Thanks!
 
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Ignus

Copying deli meat to hard drive
I'm worried about this proposal as it sits right now, but I also don't want to see it rejected. So, I'm going to give exact tweaks to Doug's proposal that I want to see implemented in order for it to have my support - as well as the support of a lot of the people who are currently against the proposal as it sits. If there's a good reason to not do one of these things, I'd love to hear solid reasons for it, but as it stands, these are the bare minimum of what's required to make the proposal viable for CAP as the project exists now.

These changes don't have to be permanent; if we find out that CAP can handle these changes as a starting point then I'm perfectly okay with moving closer to the original proposal. But it has to be something we move at slowly. I don't want to see a CAP fall apart for stupid reasons - I don't believe we can fail a project, but it's completely possible for people to lose interest, and for people to leave due to frustration with stupid rules. All of these changes work towards two things: Maintaining the structure of CAP and furthering the goals of the original proposal.

Change 1: Limiting Scope, for at least one CAP, to 6v6 Singles
This change is pretty obvious what the reasons for it are. Partially it's for the current contributors' comfort. We have a large majority of consistent CAP contributors who know 6v6 singles better than any other meta, and this change will help make the transition smoother to attacking multiple metas. Also, this change lets us focus the scope of discussion better while we first test the waters for the changes to CAP. If this proposal works properly, we could so an influx of newer contributors, which while nice, could also lead to an increase in toxicity, if contributors don't know how to play the meta properly, it's easier to dismiss their opinions. That means that us, the so-called 'veterans' of CAP should have at least baseline knowledge of what we're talking about. Being able to jump into a new metagame is a skill that needs to be honed, so lets do it slowly and carefully.

Change 2: Choosing a specific tier to play in at least before the Stats step of the CAP process
This is easily the change with the most disagreement, so please, bear with me. Here's a quick list of the reasons before I elaborate for 10 years. Feel free to read just this, if nothing else.
  1. As it is now, justification for submissions in the Stats step of the process is based almost entirely off of the calculations with threats in OU.
  2. If we define what metagame we're targeting, it's much easier to reach out to players in that community and recruit.
  3. Moving the decision of what metagame we're hosting to before the playtest stops us from spreading out players to different ladders
  4. Gives contributors time to research and understand the context in which CAP exists during the project, instead of only afterwards.
Those are the main 4 reasons to make this change, so let's start from the top.
1. Within CAP, oftentimes some of the strongest arguments for and against a certain design decision comes from damage calculations, comparisons, and other types of what I call contextual arguments. It doesn't matter how much damage Groudon is going to deal to you in a tier where Groudon doesn't exist. Similarly, it doesn't matter how much damage you deal to Stunfisk in a metagame where it isn't used more than even 0.5% of the time. These contextual arguments contribute positively to CAP, but will be almost entirely irrelevant with the proposal as it sits in its current state. Solid justification for the way we build our Fakemons is CAP's whole deal, so why should we purposefully inhibit solid, reasonable discussion points? Please understand that I'm not arguing against the idea that good, interesting pokemon are great in every tier. A well built pokemon will do it's job regardless of where it is - the problem is that there are still varying levels of power between metagames. The difference between a Flare Blitz from Charizard-X and Arcanine is a very real difference. This is a quantifiable difference, and while it isn't an end-all, the difference between a 2HKO and a 3HKO can and will vastly influence what can and can not switch in against a Pokemon. These matter. The sooner we figure out how CAP interacts with its surroundings, the better we can make decisions.

2. One of the biggest reasons for this proposal, in my mind, was to reach out to the theorycrafters lurking in the bowels of the sub-groups within Smogon. There are plenty of smart bastards in every nook and cranny of this forum, and the sooner we look for and grab them, the sooner we can get them hooked on arguing with strangers. I don't just want the people we find to participate in the playtest, only to be bored by the in-between CAP lull that happens every project. I want to toss them straight into the meat of the discussion. The sooner in the project we grab these people, the more likely they are to stick around. I enjoy the hell out of the CAP process and the more people I can get to come hang out and scream about fake pokemon, the happier I am.
If we choose a specific metagame, It's also much more reasonable to ask Moderators of that specific forum to dump a temporary sticky promoting the current CAP project. If we ask every single metagame to do the same, CAP stops being something special for that sub-group to participate in. We want them to think "This is the only opportunity I will get to build the PU pokemon of my dreams." We want to define our target audience so that they feel obligated to come and contribute as a member of that Sub-Community. It's a matter of marketing. We're doing this to increase our 'good contributor' base, and moving from group to group will increase the long-term novelty of the project.

3. We already have problems with ladder size for the playtest. Think about that. For an event that is supposed to be the culmination of the project, we seem to struggle with participation more than we do with the Art Polls. I realize that this isn't quite the case, as the Playtest has many more games than there are votes in the Art Polls, but it's a matter of perspective. I was originally drawn into CAP because the scale and style of how the process was structure made me feel like I was part of something bigger than myself. Keeping the sense of This is a big deal, and my votes and contributions are important is what pulls people into the process.
The amount of people playing in the playtest can be considered a direct reflection of how 'big' the project feels. The speed of the queue time makes a big difference between feeling like you're part of a big project and feeling like you're waiting around in a ghost town - and having multiple playtests only exacerbates this issue. Let me give an example of how I'm imagining the queue time:
~Standard Proposal, with a total of 25 players~
10 players in queue for CAP playtest: OU
5 players in queue for CAP playtest: UU
3 players in queue for CAP playtest: RU
...
~One Playtest Ladder~
25 players in queue for CAP playtest: (arbitrary metagame)

Having multiple players on at the same time means having variation. Having variation in battle is what Pokemon is all about. Spreading out our playerbase goes directly against this.
That said, there is the counterargument that by expanding our scope to multiple metagames we don't only have 25 players, we have 50, or even 75 simultaneous people on the ladders. This, unfortunately, isn't quite true. Remember what I was saying about novelty of the CAP being in a new metagame? This applies to the playtest, too. It the proposal might artificially enhance our playerbase for one project, but after that, there'll be a significant decline in the number of players participating in future playtests. This is a change for the long-term appeal of CAP. I want there to be enough people in the playtest for years to come.

4. Whenever I see a CAP project starting up, I start playing OU again, so that I at least have a baseline understanding of how the metagame works. I've been playing pokemon for so long now that I understand how the game works, but it's still necessary to have at least some understanding of what's good at the time. Tier lists help with this quite a bit, but they aren't nearly as valuable as just sheer experience in the metagame. Knowing the math on paper is a great thing to have, but knowing lure sets and variations within the metagame is just as valuable. Basically, what I'm saying is that the sooner the Metagame is chosen, the more likely informed discussion is to appear. I want to know what I'm getting myself into before I start arguing with people. I like looking like I know what I'm doing. Everyone does. Give us 'middle class' contributors the time we need to get our shit together. We're here because we enjoy the process, so let us have the tools we need to make our discussion as well informed as possible.


Change 3: Redefine 'Archetypes' as an extension of the current Concept Process
I'd argue that a big part of the Concept Stage has already become creating an "Archetype". A good concept used to be about answering questions about the metagame, but this is changing. These days, a good concept is just as likely to come from any design that gives the CAPmon clearly defined strengths and weaknesses as it is to come from a CAP that answers a question. That said, limiting it to only Archetypes might hinder ideas that would make a great CAP. Necturna is a great example of this. I personally think it's the most creative concept to ever hit CAP, and it deserves praise as an example of when CAP goes really, truly right. It didn't particularly answer a question, either, other than "Sketch is some cool shit, yo". We shouldn't be limiting the Concept stage, just in case we strike gold again. Archetypes are great jumping-off points for CAP, but the truth is that they aren't the only place good ideas will come from.
As such, we should just expand our definition of what makes a good concept. Let's not bother with asking questions or building an archetype if the question or archetype is boring. Just make a Pokemon that's fun, interesting, and targeted towards the competitive group of our choice.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Those are the only changes I particularly want to see. If I've misinterpreted one of the aspects of the current proposal, please let me know so I can fix this writeup. If these changes are ok with everyone, I can get started with a formal proposal for the changes.
 
By limiting our scope just 6 vs 6 singles, we alleviate this issue. Although we won't get 6 vs 6 Doubles players, we will get a large pool of 6 vs 6 Singles players who all know and love the "general strategy" of 6 vs 6 Singles. The 6 vs 6 Singles tiers (OU, UU, RU, NU, PU) already have differences between them, even if they all have 6 Pokemon against 6 Pokemon sparring one on one at a time. If we pick a metagame that some people don't play as much, at least they don't have to learn another "general strategy" that Doubles has, for example. Sure, an OU player might have to learn new threats in RU for example, but that's not so much of a change to something like Doubles or Triples or whatever.
I'm not sure that's limited enough of a scope. Here's a basic idea of what I mean. Let's do a test run of the proposal with "hazard removal for balance teams" as the general concept. Balance is an archetype that exists in every format, and hazard removal is important to every balance team, so this should probably be the easiest concept to actually execute on.

So we don't want a hazard remover to get worn down by hazards when coming in repeatedly, so we probably want it to float and not be actively weak to Rock. So probably a Flying type with no Rock weakness, or an active resist on a Levitating mon.

Next, we want to talk about balance breakers. These are a subsection of mons that ruin balance teams. It's hard to justify adding another mon that falls to common balance breakers to your balance team. As it turns out, a fair number of balance breakers in every 6v6 tier happen to balance break with Bolt-Beam coverage, or break through with Fighting with generally good coverage moves. Given that we don't want to take Super effective damage from Ice, Electric, or Rock, we can't go with a Flying type, but Flying typing is the easiest way to get around Fighting types.

And all of this is completely ignoring that I haven't yet asked whether this mon wants Rapid Spin or Defog for clearing hazards. Without Defog, this mon needs to reliably destroy ghosts, and with Defog it needs to get rid of very specific threats in each tier.

Put that together with Ignus's point about stats and it's not so much that 6v6 Singles is to focuses, but that it's too general.

Really, this whole proposal comes off as really defeatist. Basically, the flavor of this proposal seems to be that we can't design competently for OU, so as long as somebody uses it somewhere, we can chalk it up as good enough. Given that we've just come off the most successful realization of a concept since Necturna and Mollux, I don't really see the point of looking at CAP this way. So here's my proposal on how to approach the problem.

  • We build pokemon intended to be generally useful in competitive pokemon battles, according to a known set of good "competitive archetypes" that are applicable to multiple competitive metagames and rulesets. Instead of "generally useful in competitive Pokemon battles", we could narrow this down to a more specific type of format (perhaps 6v6 singles RU and above) for the various reasons outlined by myself and others.
  • The "Concept" for a given CAP project will be one of those general "competitive archetypes". With the alteration to the above bullet point, users have the freedom to be more descriptive and creative with CAP concept submissions. Intricate roles and team archetypes that are unique to a specific set of metagames (again, perhaps 6v6 singles PU and above) may be freely explored.
  • The specific direction of each competitive aspect of a CAP pokemon and which competitive games it is expected to play best in -- will unfold and potentially change over the course of CAP discussion threads, but will be guided to stay within the general archetype defined by the Concept. This part of the propsal frankly doesn't work, as we'll end up with typing for one tier, moves for another, and abilities completely up in the air.
  • Good general competitive knowledge will be valued in CAP discussions especially in the minimum target tier. Expert tournament battling skill is appreciated, but not expected. Disrespect or scorn for any metagame or battling format will not be tolerated.
  • One or more playtests will be held to determine which tiers, metagames, and rulesets are most appropriate for the CAP pokemon just created. Because we have a concept of minimum viable tier, we now have a method by which we can work with this. Suppose we start with PU as the general minimum target area. In that case, we simultaneously run an RU and PU playtest. If CAP preforms well in PU, but not in RU, we have a successful PU mon. If it preforms overbearingly well in PU, but is underwhelming in RU, we have a successful example of BL 4. Good performance in RU makes it an RU mon. If it actually becomes overbearing in RU, we can test in UU. If we design a mon for PU and it ends up being BL 1 or above, I would mark that as a failure. Likewise, a PU mon that isn't good enough to pass muster in FU is also a failure.
  • After the playtests, the pokemon will become part of the CAP metagame. But this policy proposal makes no provisions for how the CAP metagame is structured now or in the future. However, after these changes come into effect, we will form a plan on how to structure the metagame as a whole with the next policy proposal.
So the good thing about this proposal is not only does it tell us exactly where this pokemon belongs in the grand scheme of things as far as power level is concerned, but it also gives us focus and direction as early as concept assessment, which Doug's and sparktrain's proposals lacked. It also fixes one of the bigger problems the process has right now, which is that whenever it comes to deciding whether a mon should get more or less, it nearly always defaults to choosing less. For example, in Naviathan movepool discussion, Crabhammer, Seed Bomb and Heavy Slam were all discussed as viable options that did receive quite a bit of support, and in full honesty probably would have left the DD set still pretty poor in comparison to the CM set, but nobody wanted to take a chance on it. To be fair, OU is the highest point the metagame can achieve without going to Ubers, so opting low makes sense, but leaves us with underwhelming mons as a result. By starting on a lower tier, we can take chances with experimentation. It lets us know what's too good, and what's less good than we imagined, giving us far more information about competitive pokemon than we get from the process we're currently using.
 

Stratos

Banned deucer.
i think dougs proposal is overcorrection

I do think that CAP has a culture problem which makes it less fun than it should be. Well I think it has multiple. But one of them is that people (myself included) will see an idea that they think is a terrible idea for fulfilling the concept, and that won't work at all, and they legitimately get upset at the thought of it winning the poll. An attitude that would be much more conducive to enjoying the project would be not worrying so much about "success:" sure, argue for the idea that you think is best and point out flaws that you think other ideas could have, but there's no need to get emotionally invested in making sure the "wrong option" doesn't win. If it does, just accept it and keep moving on from there. If the CAP ends up overpowered or underpowered, who cares, its not like smogon's opinion of cap could get any worse and theres no other negative consequences to making a broken mon or a bad mon, we just get to have fun. I think a simple paradigm shift would go a long way toward removing the 'stress' and 'strife' from CAP projects and making it fun. When Doug talks about the early CAP days with all that wistfulness in his eye, thats what he makes it sound like—a low-stress project where everyone was kind of just like "fuck garchomp lol lets make a fast ice type" and had a fun time with it, without worrying too much if it would be just the right power level and fill just the right niche.

I think doug's proposal swings the pendulum too far in the other direction by completely defocusing the project. If you remove the basic anchoring of a metagame to build for, discussions get really simplistic. How will we make the pokemon best for the role if we dont even know what pokemon it would need to beat to fulfill that role? Sure there are traits that make Pokemon generally good—a good defensive typing with useful support moves and good defenses, or a good offensive typing with good offenses and high-power STABs, or an all-around good typing with all-around good stats and recovery—but there's no challenge in making a "pretty good overall" pokemon with no more specific focus in that, and the novelty would wear off quickly. Stats discussion would be really uninteresting, and typing discussion would just be confusing. Hell, even gamefreak builds for a specific metagame, at least when theyre not making bullshit mons that they dont intend to be used competitively.
 

Birkal

We have the technology.
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DougJustDoug and I are interested in chatting with PRC members about this in real time. We're both planning on being in #cap on SynIRC around 10:00am CST (GMT -5) this upcoming Saturday (3/5). If you'd like to join our conversation, we'd love to have you! There are a lot of proposals out there, and it would be nice to talk about this entire proposal live. If you can't make it, no worries; we'll get the log posted later that day. Either join us on your IRC client or click here to join directly.

Hope to see you there!
 

Birkal

We have the technology.
is a Top Artistis a Top CAP Contributoris a Top Smogon Media Contributoris a Site Content Manager Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Admin Alumnusis a Senior Staff Member Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnus
Here is the entire, unabridged four hour log we had of discussion yesterday. You absolutely do not need to read all of it, but I know some people were interested in viewing the log who weren't there. The main takeaway is that we are not at consensus with any of these proposals, specifically Doug's proposal. While I personally still think it's within CAP's best interests to pursue it, I am more interested in what the community as a whole desires from this PR thread.

So at this point, we're looking for more proposals and discussion of previous proposals. We can go back to the initial proposal of this thread (making CAPs for the CAP metagame), edited proposals (like sparktrain's), or something entirely new. Doug and I will eventually be closing this thread, but we're interested in hearing your thoughts on how we should proceed here. Thanks again to all that showed up for the conversation!
 

Deck Knight

Blast Off At The Speed Of Light! That's Right!
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I have a proposal that's a middle way between the initial proposal of making a new tier, and instead we make each CAP a different journey by design:

Proposal for Selecting Discussion Parameters each CAP


Yesterday we had a long chat in #cap about the Adjustment in Direction Policy Thread.



One of the central points of contention was how to control discussion, and put it in a context so that everyone is discussing the same thing. I do think we want to move away from what I call “tier-lock” where we build for a specific currently existing metagame – defined by a tier.


I think the Smogon community has moved past that in large part thanks to the customization available in Pokemon Showdown. Every month we have at least two non-standard environments, plus a RANDOM nonstandard environment to ladder on. Mechanically speaking, we’ve moved well beyond the limitations we had in previous generations.


Finally, another very important point we agreed on in the chat is that CAP’s culture is about the journey, not the destination. What I’m about to propose is that each CAP, we actively choose the path we start that journey on – and then letting the discussion bring us to wherever that leads.



My proposal is as follows, with two key decision points noted below:


1: Before Leadership Nominations, Before Concept, or After Concept.


2: Pokemon Only or Pokemon and Clauses.



The proposal in its most radical form is that:


1. Each CAP we set a List of Restricted Pokemon and List of Relevant Clauses via vote from a Discussed Slate of Modified Tiers not unlike our Abilities Discussion has a List of Restricted Abilities and our Moves discussion has a List of Restricted Moves.


2. We create an initial ladder on Pokemon Showdown with these custom parameters, which will be the base metagame we add the CAP to for a final suspect test. Because our CAP Process lasts for around 3 months, by the time moves and abilities are discussed there will be players familiar with that metagame.


3. Once the CAP Project is finished we introduce that CAP onto the custom ladder as a new threat and hold the playtest tournament as usual.




Mechanics:


Process:

In a new Metagame Slating Discussion stage, posters will make arguments regarding an idealized metagame they would like to be the focal point of that project, with the stipulation that not less than 2 significant [as defined by usage] eligible Pokemon must differ from a tier shorthand (enforced Modified Tiers). These can be either Additions or Subtractions (e.g. UU + Lopunny-Mega + Slowbro (all) - Florges; OU + Aegislash - Landorus-Therian; Ubers - Groudon (all) - Kyogre (all)). In the slating Discussion, posters will explain why their metagame would be compelling to test and then add a CAP as a second alteration to it. The CAP will then proceed as normal with the Restricted Pokemon and Relevant Clauses in effect for the whole project.


Timing:

Policy-wise I think the best place to decide which metagame we are going to use is before Leadership Nominations (Moderators can make the initial slating threads). This will give us the period of time it takes to accept applications and vote on leadership to test out the base metagame and start forming intelligent community consensus around a concept for it. Everyone starts on the same field and observations come from participation rather than pre-existing knowledge. I feel this is superior to choosing merely before concept just because of the additional time to play, and it also gives leadership an idea of what it’s in for. If the center of the Base Metagame is “closer” to UU than OU, more UU players might sign up for leadership for example.


The other viable option I think is after concept, because we’ve decided what we want to do and now we’re deciding where we should apply it.



Purpose:


The Purpose here is to make each CAP its own unique journey. Done properly, the custom metagames will be different enough from existing tiers so that no particular knowledge base is sufficient to criticize other players, except regarding basic competitive knowledge.


It also opens up new questions: What kind of Pokemon operates best in a metagame with no Sleep Clause? Is Fissure Machoke really going to dominate a metagame with no OHKO Clause?



This proposal allows us to test those metagames, to reach conclusions about what is going on within it, and to build a CAP that addresses them within that context. We all start on the same page, but we get to experiment with every facet of legal options within the game, learn as we go along, and shape our discussions based on that new information.


It will have the bonus of increasing server traffic and server discussion because that participation will be the basis of metagame knowledge.



We have the technology. Let’s use it!
 

Stratos

Banned deucer.
OU is a perfectly fine metagame and it seems more like people are using it as a scapegoat than anything. In the past year, it's banned two Pokemon: Gothitelle and Landorus-I. Is two bans in a year hard to follow? Not at all, unless you don't actually play mons anymore, in which case I find it really, really unlikely that you actually plan to learn an entire new metagame which has no written resources for it just so you can do CAP. Hell, VGC's banlist in 2014 was like 270 Pokemon, then in 2015 it was like 30, now in 2016 it's like twelve. It's literally an entire different meta each year, and yet tons of people still learn the new meta and write tons of shit about it and everything.

If you stop doing official metagames, you can absolutely kiss goodbye to the thought that anyone who does something other than CAP will also participate in CAP. It's up to you to decide whether you're ok with that consequence—even as is, most CAP participants started with CAP and do nothing but CAP (and don't even play OU, only all-CAP), so you may not feel much of a loss—but I'm telling you it will happen.

With Deck's proposal though, I feel like there's absolutely no feasibility to it. If you're cutting a new banlist out of whole cloth for each new CAP, you would get just as much out of the process by not making a new pokemon as you would by making one. There'll be so many unknown variables that making a Pokemon for a basically completely unexplored metagame will be nothing more than shooting in the dark and nothing really will be learned from it. Each CAP is already its own unique journey and we don't need to completely pull the rug out from under the entire project in order to make it that way.
 

Cretacerus

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I don’t believe that those opposed the proposal are necessarily “just scared of change”, but rather that there isn't actually much reason to change the premise behind the CAP project. The concept of learning about competitive battling through creation is not any less valid or interesting today than it was in the past, and should definitely remain the basis of the CAP project. In my opinion, this competitive nature of CAP is ultimately the main justification of the project's place on Smogon, which is first and foremost a website dedicated to competitive battling.
Creation for the sake of creation (even though resembling the “mindset of GameFreak” more closely, and “putting us in GameFreak’s shoes”) simply doesn’t have the same niche on a competitive forum. Shifting away from this competitive environment towards a more casual one just seems to cause an even bigger discrepancy between the CAP project and the “more serious” parts of the website. I absolutely agree with Stratos above that CAP has to maintain a common ground with the general Smogon community in order to remain open to casual participants, rather than going its own path with solely full-time CAP participants.
Even today, OU is still easily the most recognized and iconic format on Smogon, and thus by far the most suitable setting for competitive discussion on this site. The majority of users are at least somewhat well versed with and interested OU, so there isn’t really much reason to abandon it for other, less prominent formats. There is still so much to explore in the metagame and every CAP will result in a completely new and unique journey even if we keep solely to OU. Sure, drastic changes can definitely generate a short-term peak of interest, and I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing an UU CAP (or similar) someday, but for now I don’t think fixing something that isn’t broken should be our priority.

Unfortunately, a simple change of policy probably won’t be enough to solve the problems the CAP project is facing today, since most of them seem to stem largely from communication and cultural issues. People will only stay interested in the project if they feel their involvement is acknowledged and appreciated, which sadly just isn’t the norm anymore today. A lot of the posts in this thread agree that the general toxicity and lack of appreciation displayed in discussions are major factors behind the current state of the CAP project, so these are the real issues that we have to tackle in order to improve it in the long run.
These issues can’t be solved with a simple change of policy, but given time and effort I believe we can improve the environment of the CAP project as a community. A respectful and constructive competitive discussion is definitely not impossible, and we all can play a part in making it happen. Discussion leaders and senior contributors have an especially large influence on the general mentality of the community, oftentimes acting as role models for newer participants and aspiring contributors. Their attitude towards the CAP project strongly affects how people from other parts of the forum view us, both positively and negatively.

Overall, I do think that the original premise of the CAP project is still the right way to go, and that it has proven itself to be interesting and enjoyable throughout the years, given the right approach. This approach can certainly still be improved, and seeing how this post hasn’t made any concrete proposal so far, I’d like to use this opportunity to make two rather simple suggestions.



Reintroducing Likes:

I understand that this proposal might be somewhat controversial, considering that Likes were removed from the CAP project barely a year ago. As many may know, this was done for the sake of restricting the common bandwagoning among more casual users based on a post’s popularity rather than its actual content. Back then, disabling Likes was a logical decision in order to further increase the competitiveness of our CAP process, even at the cost of removing some of the benefits Likes might have held. And most people will agree that it certainly succeeded in this regard.
However, it seems to me that we have now reached a point where the CAP project is overthinking many of its previous priorities. While competitiveness might have been the main concern a year ago, our current priorities seem to be shifting more and more towards increasing motivation and participation even at the cost of competitiveness itself. Therefore, I believe it could certainly be worth taking a second look at the concept of Likes, and the benefits they might bring to the table:

Motivation is probably the most immediate benefit of Likes, since they provide a simple and convenient way of conveying appreciation towards other users. Writing up comprehensive competitive arguments can be very tedious and time-intensive as most people here will know, and it’s a great feeling to at least have them acknowledged by other people even if they don’t get to respond to it. Following the removal of Likes, many actually good posts failed to receive any reaction on the forums, which can be rather demoralizing in the long run. The last two projects saw a definite tendency towards shorter posts and one-liners, and while I don’t want to blame that entirely on the absence of Likes, it seems to me as if the larger and more comprehensive posts just aren’t getting the appreciation they used to. And while Likes can in no way guarantee a quality discussion, it can at least subconsciously make people’s contributions feel more appreciated, and thus keep them interested in the project.

Another benefit of Likes is their role as a communication tool during discussions, allowing more users to get involved in the process and give quick feedback to other users. Good posts tend to gather a larger amount of Likes, and posts with more Likes are more likely to be read. While this system can certainly be abused and has gained a negative reputation due to the prevalence of bandwagoning in the past, it can nonetheless be useful for placing emphasis on the important arguments in the discussion.
In the absence of likes, good and coherent posts tend to get much lesser response and support, as only few people would actually create a post just to express their approval. Controversial posts and arguments about minor details usually end up being much more prominent in those threads, and ultimately run the risk of overshadowing the posts that actually matter. So while the removal of likes obviously restricts bandwagoning, the important arguments also stand out less, and are more likely to be overlooked and dismissed among the other posts.


Constructing a more explicit threatlist:

The threats discussion is one of the most important parts of the CAP process, and heavily defines the end result of each project from the very beginning. The resulting threatlist generally acts as practical interpretation of the original concept, and provides us with a common ground for discussion throughout the later stages of the project.
However, in past projects we also had to experience how certain ambiguities in the threatlist can create major confusion in later stages of the project, and even derail the discussion in a way not foreseen by the original concept. Too often, people would strictly follow (their interpretation of) the threatlist without considering the actual reason why each individual group/Pokémon was on it in the first place.

Ex 1: Volkraken was meant to form an offensive core with both Lucario and Latias, and defensive Dragon types were added to the threatlist as a way to increase its reliance on its two teammates. However, for the majority of the project people actually became fixated with having it be countered by any form of Latias and Latios, even though those two posed a major threat to the entire core (endangering the already very fragile concept). This actually went so far that Thunder Wave was banned on Volkraken due to the risk of them being crippled and revenge killed by our own Latias.
Ex 2: During the Crucibelle project, we decided that Water-types were supposed to be pressured offensively by its strong STAB options, since they would otherwise be very threatening to the balanced teams Crucibelle would find itself on. However, the discussion shifted increasingly towards turning Crucibelle into a straight-up Water-type counter in order to raise its viability on balanced teams and increase its overall niche in the metagame, even though that meant going against the original concept's emphasis on maintaining the natural weaknesses of its typing.

In order to prevent similar confusion and misinterpretation in future projects, I'd like to propose adding short descriptions to the threatlist, which display the rationale behind the individual group’s place on the list especially for the less intuitive inclusions which aren't directly related to concept or typing.
Furthermore, I believe a differentiation between offensive and defensive threats could be very useful as well, since both hold completely different implications on later stages, and can make all the difference between success or failure of the concept.
 

Deck Knight

Blast Off At The Speed Of Light! That's Right!
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I don’t believe that those opposed the proposal are necessarily “just scared of change”, but rather that there isn't actually much reason to change the premise behind the CAP project. The concept of learning about competitive battling through creation is not any less valid or interesting today than it was in the past, and should definitely remain the basis of the CAP project. In my opinion, this competitive nature of CAP is ultimately the main justification of the project's place on Smogon, which is first and foremost a website dedicated to competitive battling.
Creation for the sake of creation (even though resembling the “mindset of GameFreak” more closely, and “putting us in GameFreak’s shoes”) simply doesn’t have the same niche on a competitive forum. Shifting away from this competitive environment towards a more casual one just seems to cause an even bigger discrepancy between the CAP project and the “more serious” parts of the website. I absolutely agree with Stratos above that CAP has to maintain a common ground with the general Smogon community in order to remain open to casual participants, rather than going its own path with solely full-time CAP participants.
I don't believe anyone has proposed shifting away from a competitive environment to a casual one. The main proposals deal with *which* competitive environment we should explore. Some are more vague about this environment than others, and my personal preference is for the proposals that are the least vague. The competitive environment is the context of our journey, the "base path" if you will and if we decide to trail off in a different direction, it's because we made a democratic decision to do so.

Cretacerus said:
Even today, OU is still easily the most recognized and iconic format on Smogon, and thus by far the most suitable setting for competitive discussion on this site. The majority of users are at least somewhat well versed with and interested OU, so there isn’t really much reason to abandon it for other, less prominent formats. There is still so much to explore in the metagame and every CAP will result in a completely new and unique journey even if we keep solely to OU. Sure, drastic changes can definitely generate a short-term peak of interest, and I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing an UU CAP (or similar) someday, but for now I don’t think fixing something that isn’t broken should be our priority.
My counterpoint here is that OU is not a static frame of reference. OU changes on a regular basis after suspect tests so that it can easily be said that if you played OU 3 months ago and went on hiatus, you would have to "re-learn" OU. It may be the most recognized and iconic tier, but one thing it isn't is static. OU is a moving target and from a realistic perspective our CAP projects almost always end up being "last season's OU" for lack of a better description. Since CAP attracts new participants all the time it can be safe to say that they will have to learn a metagame regardless, so why pretend that what we're going to be playing in CAP is going to resemble the OU metagame three months from now when historically that isn't the case?

Thus my proposal (and others) to simply acknowledge we'll be playing a different metagame from whatever OU is going to be down the road at the outset, and have people argue for why we should play with specific metagame alterations to currently recognizable tiers. I think doing this with major, substantive changes to metagame threats keeps the general knowledge base of OU intact while also removing a lot of the cultural problem. It will also be done in a way that it almost certainly can't mirror an ongoing suspect test. I'll be blunt on one thing, a huge cultural divide is the Expert Complex where if you're not up to date with this month's OU contours, you "lack competitive knowledge." If possible I'd like to keep the familiarity of the popular tiers without breeding the contempt, for whatever sense that makes.

That's really my overarching question: Is there any interest in making arguments about HOW a tier needs to be changed to make it more competitive/enjoyable?

That's the core of what I want to do, whether it means we make Pokemon for CAP which is OU + 21 or if we alter OU substantively and then use that altered environment. I think it's a huge opportunity to learn and examine *which* parts of a metagame people think are healthy for it or not.


On Likes: The biggest liability of likes was the bandwagoning and acting as a "pre-vote" indication of support. Those are huge liabilities and I don't think any increase in motivation is worth these downsides.

More Explicit Threatlist:

This, I like a lot.
Constructing a more explicit threatlist:

The threats discussion is one of the most important parts of the CAP process, and heavily defines the end result of each project from the very beginning. The resulting threatlist generally acts as practical interpretation of the original concept, and provides us with a common ground for discussion throughout the later stages of the project.
However, in past projects we also had to experience how certain ambiguities in the threatlist can create major confusion in later stages of the project, and even derail the discussion in a way not foreseen by the original concept. Too often, people would strictly follow (their interpretation of) the threatlist without considering the actual reason why each individual group/Pokémon was on it in the first place.

Ex 1: Volkraken was meant to form an offensive core with both Lucario and Latias, and defensive Dragon types were added to the threatlist as a way to increase its reliance on its two teammates. However, for the majority of the project people actually became fixated with having it be countered by any form of Latias and Latios, even though those two posed a major threat to the entire core (endangering the already very fragile concept). This actually went so far that Thunder Wave was banned on Volkraken due to the risk of them being crippled and revenge killed by our own Latias.
Ex 2: During the Crucibelle project, we decided that Water-types were supposed to be pressured offensively by its strong STAB options, since they would otherwise be very threatening to the balanced teams Crucibelle would find itself on. However, the discussion shifted increasingly towards turning Crucibelle into a straight-up Water-type counter in order to raise its viability on balanced teams and increase its overall niche in the metagame, even though that meant going against the original concept's emphasis on maintaining the natural weaknesses of its typing.

In order to prevent similar confusion and misinterpretation in future projects, I'd like to propose adding short descriptions to the threatlist, which display the rationale behind the individual group’s place on the list especially for the less intuitive inclusions which aren't directly related to concept or typing.
Furthermore, I believe a differentiation between offensive and defensive threats could be very useful as well, since both hold completely different implications on later stages, and can make all the difference between success or failure of the concept.


There are some places in CAP where being too detailed can be a problem but I don't think the threatlist is one of them. Mollux's threat list was very specific in what it wanted to achieve and I think it helped that project immensely. The more abstract the CAPs concept the more I think we need to really hammer down on why something is supposed to be a threat to the CAP. One of the biggest issues of course is that many threats share the same type so that in the course of preventing Ferrothorn from walling you, you may inadvertently also remove Heatran or Celebi. It's a very fine line to draw but aiming for it would be very helpful.
 
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