np: Doubles OU Stage 5 - Little Bunny Foo Foo | Gravity + Sleep Ban will Allow Spore!

Haruno

Skadi :)
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Hi My name is Dawg, and I'm a member of the DOU council. I was just going to make a personal response - that reflects my personal view and not necessarily that of the DOU council.

I've read several times that this issue is not within precedent or words to that effect, and that dou council is abusing power / ignoring suspect tests. This is not true.

Regarding Precedent
t
he issue Arising in this circumstance is that council should not go against the result of a suspect test. This is possibly a fair evaluation. It has precedent allegedly in other smogon matters and I can understand the concern in this one. However It is important to note that DOU is not alike any other council monitored tier on this site. DOU is doubles and not singles. The reason action was taken (IN MY VIEW) was there were two suspect tests that occured, one of Azumarill and one of Jirachi, and it is my conjecture that the reason that one of these was not banned by the community was due to a split vote that occured for a number of reasons. I dont think that this matter is befitting of any existing smogon precedent because split votes in this manner of "combo" pokemon cannot sufficiently exist in singles tiers. This is not an addressable problem in other tiers, and as such the precedent is inapplicable - given the current situation.
A) That in the both tests people were split onto which of the "Azurachi" combo was the more problematic, and wanted to ban just one - Fair enough.
B) That there was a failure, in part by the general community to consider the combo of "AzuRachi" more so than they already had.

Process

In order to address the split, and whether there was still an issue the council utilised Phase 1:
A. Restrict Azumarill + Jirachi
B. Leave Azumarill + Jirachi

THE COUNCIL VOTED 5-1 That something had to be done about Azumarill Jirachi. This was not a close vote. If we added another 3 Community members, the vote would still have passed *NO MATTER HOW THEY VOTED*.

The only issue for reform that might be suggested here is that MAYBE a community vote (at least a wider one) could have been conducted to determine whether the wider community reflects the council's OVERWHELMING view that something needed to have been done by Azumarill.

Addressing the Split
Finally, (As I need to literally run to work now because I wrote this) The council used Phase 2: to determine the problem, in another Majority verdict the council voted that Jirachi was the issue 4-2.
In this way the council used a manner to address the vote split by experienced players voting what the real issue was.



Takeaways:
- the Council does care about your tier.
- the votes were not close and would have passed with new member/s.
- this issue is not analogous to other smogon issues due to the nature of the tier.

and like real talk, i really need to run for work now. RIP ME.
What a surprise that the council figured out something was up with jirachi + azu after holding two seperate suspects for them! And what a surprise that they voted to restrict it when given the chance! Now that we got that obvious bullshit out of the way, let's address your first point about doubles vs singles.

Now onto the first point, cores exist in singles for ages where one mon (or a combination) allows a certain mon to thrive due to removing their checks. Notable examples would be dugtrio + gene where dugtrio beat gene's "checks," mega sableye + dugtrio where trio beats the mons that can check sableye an otherwise easily checked mon. See where I'm getting with this? The point is singles do indeed have cores or combinations which allow Mons to bypass supposed checks, now obviously they can't work side by side like they do in doubles but the point remains that they do work similarly to azu + rachi in how azu is easily checked and rachi invalidates said checks.

So doubles can't differentiate themselves solely with that. Now the rest of your post was talking about how the suspect threads and voters didn't sufficiently address this in their votes/discussion. That is obviously bullshit since a quick scan through either rachi or azu suspect and you'll see that the combination is mentioned a large amount.

If the doubles council failed in such a way that voters were misinformed that voters voted "incorrectly" then that's your fault and you need to just suck it up and leave said decisions aside and not just override it completely since it creates an awful precedence for other tiers.

Overall I don't see how you can see this as anything other than a blatant abuse of power from the council and the last time something similar was done (shadow tag at the end of xy ubers) the decision was swiftly overturned and the negative PR has plagued ubers for years to come and I'd like to hope that the doubles council would override their decision but that most likely won't happen so enjoy the negative PR as shown via this thread and IS.

Tl;dr #respectthesuspect
This wouldn't have happened with stratos as TL
 

kamikaze

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Ok I know there is discussion in multiple places, but I will try to address as much as I can here. I will likely be restating things already said, as well as not being able to address everything but bear with me.

I would like to preface this by saying that people have the right to be upset about this as before the vote I too said that we shouldnt be voting on Jirachi and Azumarill because of the repercussions which have inevitably come up. Unfortunately the rest of the council disagreed and wanted to go through with the vote. As a tier leader however I am perfectly willing to take blame over it as I should have stressed it more and put my foot down on it.

While I do disagree with the council going through with the vote, I dont think people's comments on them are fair and are trying to warp the story for the sake of drama. Its been said that the council is just disregarding a community suspect and rendering it invalid just because it didnt end up like the council wanted. I want to at least clarify things in their defense since the matter isn't so cut and dry, and though disagreeable the council was not attempting to completely disregard community input and force a suspect to go a specific way out of ill intent.

Background:
As was mentioned in numerous other posts their was a big issue in the tier because of the pairing of Azumarill and Jirachi co-existing on the field and allowing Azumarill to simply set up and become a massive threat. The majority of the council disagreed with doing a complex ban on the pairing so the focus was analyzing which of the pairing was more at fault and running a suspect test on it. The first of the votes was held on Jirachi because people argued that it was powerful and helped too many other Pokemon than just Azumarill. Then a second suspect was done on Azumarill, the other member of the pairing, because the previous one failed to identify Jirachi as an issue for the tier, but this also resulted in a majority of No Ban. However in both suspects, a large number of people felt that the duo of Azumarill and Jirachi was a major issue in the tier but the currently running suspect for them was not the one they wished for. This led to 3 camps of people (Ban Jirachi, Ban Azumarill, Ban Neither) within each suspect. It became an issue of people accepting a problem but simply not knowing how to deal with it.

What Led to a 3rd Vote:
The council then decided to act on it in a different manner rather than neglect the tier and the people who voiced concerns for action to be taken on it. Rather than retrying the same individual votes that were done with the community and overriding the previous community vote, the 3rd vote would look at it from a combined perspective analyzing both pokemon at once. The intent was not to override and ignore the community but attempt to try a different perspective on the suspect. I didnt agree with this completely since I personally felt the status quo was manageable and knew there would be issues with making a change this late in the tier as well as two suspects being done on the matter already, but I did not completely put down the hammer on this as there were still points for the other side. While a 3rd public suspect could have been done for this, a Council vote was used because there were various issues with the current suspect process with using solely Ladder as a metric because of its inability to properly educate users on the suspect at hand. A solution for how to change the suspect process has not been settled on at this time, but members of the council felt that handling the combination of Azumarill + Jirachi needed to be done as soon as possible which is what sparked the vote.

The Voting Process:
The process decided on was a 2 stage voting process with only 2 options per phase. The 1st phase focused on whether or not to act on the combination of Azumarill and Jirachi at all, while the second involved picking which of the two was more at fault if the 1st stage was passed. The idea behind this system was to keep voting at 2 options each stage to prevent the factor of vote splitting to have a heavy impact. The suggested runoff vote system of voting with multiple categories is not something I am a fan of because with smaller sample sizes its not uncommon for votes to be extremely evenly split and a winner being decided by a small margin and not being too definitive percentage wise. This can be mitigated by using some sort of winning cutoff but another you thing you have to consider is that there are two overall sentiments (Restrict AzuRachi and AzuRachi is fine). The issue being that that while the Azumarill + Jirachi group is quite united, the group for restriction is extremely split on which way to go and are fighting one another for voting majority which creates an immediate advantage for the the united group even if the restriction group has a much bigger overall total majority. This was the issue in our current suspects. The chosen process was to decide on whether or not a sentiment exists to act on it, and if so to choose which way to follow through. There are obviously flaws in the system as pointed out by Isa earlier in the thread about the fact that those who voted Leave AzuRachi in the initial phase are made to vote on the second phase about banning one if gets there. I was in this position and while I could have chosen to abstain from the vote if I wanted to, I voted one way because I felt it was better for the tier than the other. Even with the flaws, ultimately the council felt this system was better than runoff split voting system so that is why it was used. I am quite open to hearing about other systems or solutions to handle this but I still stand by the fact that a pure split voting system with multiple categories isnt the best way to handle this.

Transparency:
Yes this was a major oversight that should have been made more public on the forums. In the future, I will stress that things to be voted on by the council will be posted in a metagame thread beforehand to gauge the community input and keep them updated.

Resolution:
Jirachi will Remain in Doubles OU. The previous vote will be overturned
 

Platinum God n1n1

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I'm glad to hear that you were not in favor of making this decision (even though you didnt stop it from happening)

its still very concerning that our council thought this was acceptable.
another concern is that all of the council came to the same conclusion on banning jirachi. A lack of diverse opinion is ineffective for a council and not representative of the community as a whole.

the fact that the council used the azu suspect as leverage to re-suspect jirachi, then when azu was not banned they looked for correlating votes to some how conclude that people voted wrong, and finally when all else failed we end up here. this pisses me off

and with masses changes coming from Sun and Moon I have no faith that the council is responsible to oversee potential suspects with out trying to manipulate the outcome.

considering that lack of diversity in the votes and the poor judgement by the council I would like to see a shake up of the council. and with input from the doubles community. we should have a system in place to determine on who goes on council. Our system should be transparent and everyone who is an active part of the community for an extended period of time should have a say. This is something you can and should work on implementing


finally Gravity+sleep vote came out of no where
this isntly like swagger that people have moaned about on a daily bases for months. in the last month of this generation leave it the way it has been played for the past 2 years. there was no public discussion on this either vote
and there is really no sense in making changes at this point. please undo this
 
I'm glad to hear that you were not in favor of making this decision (even though you didnt stop it from happening)
another concern is that all of the council came to the same conclusion on banning jirachi. A lack of diverse opinion is ineffective for a council and not representative of the community as a whole.
the fact that the council used the azu suspect as leverage to re-suspect jirachi, then when azu was not banned they looked for correlating votes to some how conclude that people voted wrong, and finally when all else failed we end up here. this pisses me off
There was no diverse opinion because they all agreed. Hopefully, their decision was reached through more discussion and not just raw voting, so it would not have any meaning to have council members who are on only to provide the complementing opinion to the popular one of rest of the council.
 

nyttyn

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So what's the game-plan for Doubles council overwrite votes moving forward into SM, then? The wording of the post, especially near the end, implies that not only was it seen as acceptable to launch a council vote so soon after two different community votes on an issue (with the issue in the post being made out to be transparency alone which I feel was not the case), but also that Council votes will remain an acceptable solution in the future when community consensus does not 'agree' with the council's desires.

I understand that you wish to defend this as a case of "not so cut and dry," but if the game-plan moving forward is to continue to allow for things like this to continue to occur, it doesn't matter how publicly you announce council votes, you're still essentially stating that the council will continue to perform suspect votes among only themselves if they (for whatever reason, which may potentially include a feeling that the community's wishes were not properly represented) do not agree with a community vote. Regardless of intent, I don't see how that's acceptable, nor what the reason of allowing public votes to continue will be if the council will simply override the opinion with their own private vote.

If your desire is to simply make sure the "correct" bans always happen, then you should swap over to a council voting system, because this reeks of trying to have your cake and eat it with the good PR of public votes and the council having the ability to essentially enact its will as it pleases (edit: which, in my mind, completely defeats the purpose of a public suspect vote to begin with).


p.s. i don't mind council quickbans for obviously broken shit after it comes out ofc (ex: m kang in OU shortly after XY release), but those are a different beast entirely from allowing public suspect votes and then saying it is okay for the council to override them if they disagree.
 
Just gonna repeat this on forums. Please stop saying that they did this because they disagree with how either suspect vote went. This has nothing to do with any of them simply wanting to get their way in a vote. They don't think that you were wrong and your vote was incorrectly placed, they're just trying to fix a problem. That would be why they had the suspects in the first place. Yes, it obviously should have been done in a better manner with more oversight from the community. This is a very unique situation (no, the mence vote was not the same situation because we obviously fixed that jirachi combo problem by removing mence) and a learning experience for everyone. There is going to have to be some reform done to our suspect process to more accurately represent the wishes of the community, and there are many different opinions on how that should occur. I, and I'm certain everyone else agrees, would greatly appreciate it if we could present our opinions in an actually sensible manner. It's very easy to get carried away in the moment, but no wants to listen to you rant on a subject rudely. To everyone who doesn't yet have a plan to suggest or an opinion stated on the matter, please be respectful of other people's opinions as well.

As far as my opinion, I think that all suspect votes should occur by council ballots, not through suspect tests. It's obviously not a perfect solution to any problem, but it eliminates a great number of people's current complaints. Granted, it adds other problems such as the possibility of bribery or the sale of a vote (as absurd as that sounds, i would not put that out of possibility over time), and adds in the factor of a member's willingness to thoroughly test out the suspected mon.

In addition to that, a voting system for council members with a requirement of tournament success for nomination would help to improve the system. While this might result in a very similar council after the first vote, I could definitely see it having a positive impact in the future. It also would ensure a willingness of all council member to participate in the council, as they would have to actually go through the process of trying to get voted for.

The dilemma for me comes in the fact that I have yet to come up with a plan to ensure that council members actually put in the time and effort to make the most informed decision possible. Any form of test that requires the use of the suspected mon just opens you up to a lot of counter teaming which will skew your view of the mon in question, but there has to be some way of assuring you actually see it in action enough. As the council members will and are all experienced players, they obviously have a decent grasp of the meta game so some absurdly drawn out and boring process for only a small group of people, such as a suspect ladder, seems slightly absurd.

TL:DR Stop saying the council doesn't care about your vote. Act like an adult. Also we should just do council votes in the future instead of suspects.
 
Perhaps that's a bit of a stupid idea (and it's definitely not something that has been done before), but if the problem is that either Azumarill or Jirachi is broken, community couldn't decide which, there are opinions about council ignoring the community's opinion (even if I'm fairly sure you had a good reason to do it), and there is no time for suspect test before Sun & Moon.

Essentially, ask community which to ban: Jirachi, Azumarill or neither and give voting permissions to anyone who had voting permissions in Jirachi or Azumarill suspect test. This would give community an opportunity to vote for whatever they think is broken in that combo (making the suspect test feel meaningful, essentially correcting the wording of questions in two previous suspect tests) while avoiding a problem of "half of a community thinks Azumarill should be banned while the other half thinks that Jirachi should be banned".

If it would be feasible to do, then I don't see why not consider something like that.
 
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Platinum God n1n1

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is a Tiering Contributor
They don't think that you were wrong and your vote was incorrectly placed, they're just trying to fix a problem.
This is ridiculous . I voted no ban because there is no problem with Jirachi .

A lot of other people voted no ban because there is no problem with Jirachi .

The council members thinks there was a problem but their opinion of a problem doesn't trump the votes of a suspect .

New generation new council
 
This is ridiculous . I voted no ban because there is no problem with Jirachi .

A lot of other people voted no ban because there is no problem with Jirachi .

The council members thinks there was a problem but their opinion of a problem doesn't trump the votes of a suspect .

New generation new council
Perhaps instead of simply complaining, you would like to pose a solution besides "new council". That's not really going to provide help towards the actual problem here.

Edit: As Checkmater pointed out to me, this does make it seem like I'm not in favor of council reform. The problem I was referring to would be the Azu+Rachi issue, not the issue of council flexing on us all.
 
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Checkmater

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I'll be honest, I was ok with council votes before this one. It wasn't my first option - would've preferred trying removing tc points and/or harder suspects reqs before resorting to that - but I don't think you can approach council voting with the same mentality as you did prior to this vote. Council votes should involve a heavy amount of transparency, and we can see this in the swagger ban. There was large amounts of discussion involved, people chimed in, council members gave their opinions and participated in discussion. Even if we had received reasonings with the announcement post this would've been poorly managed by any standard. Imagine if we'd received those reasonings: we'd still be being hit in the face with a council vote and 6 long paragraphs without any prior announcement.

So when someone pushes heavily for council votes, I advise caution. It seems rash and overeager, and, regardless if you think the council cares about your vote you can't deny that what council has done is send a strong implication that they do not care about your vote, they do not care about your input, and they do not care about what you have to say. Because that's exactly the message they've sent, so jumping into bed with the idea of council votes after they've just shafted you is a bad idea, and I think they should repair their reputation and the community's regard first.

If we get more transparency like we did in the swagger vote, like in kami's post, then we can start talking about council votes for things that aren't primarily mechanical/new/immediately gamebreaking. Until then, let's explore some other options.

When the pigs take the milk you have to say something lmao
 
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if you've seen me in the ps room you know my thoughts on this situation
everyone hates the suspect process in this community because it's entirely too easy to get ladder reqs and we don't want a bunch of outsiders voting in our community's decisions. people have asked to remove tc to filter voters but that's not going to help. some randoms could get reqs anyway and say "i do not think salamence is banworthy. i do in fact think we need to look at this crazy startegy someone found on the ladder the other day. it involves terrakion taking 6 beat ups from a nidoking and having maximized attack." even if we wanted to filter who they are that would really come down to a matter of choosing who we think are valid members of the community to vote in a suspect test which is not something i would entertain even for a second as this could lead to crazy drama that we don't need and don't want.
i think we should just reform the suspect process entirely: remove posting and ladder reqs by removing voting. just make a thread dedicated entirely to discussion and let doubles council+doubles c&c/competitive forum moderators decide what they think about the opinions expressed in the thread itself. there would be no tc chasers voting, no randoms voting, and we would have the opinions of the highest ranking players in the community determining what would be best for the meta's future. quickbans could remain a council only thing.
edit: Hashtag i didnt mean i like tc badge i meant i didnt think that was going to make a difference in a lot of votes, some of them just vote abstain anyway.
 
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Idyll

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As a council member and Tier Leader who thought it was fine to go through with what was essentially ignoring the voice of the very community I was meant to represent, I express my apologies. Still, I would like to show in this post the perspective of a "guy who tried to disrespect the suspect".

This council voting was not intended to "correct" what was presumably seen by the council (us) as a "mistake" by the public. Rather, what we intended to do was "fix" what was seen as a problem seen in the metagame we oversee. As we all know, both suspect tests for Jirachi and Azumarill ended up with a majority for remain, which we accepted as this is the views of the community and the "ideal" metagame we will have going forward. However, recently, we were given complaints about the AzuRachi combination even after everything that was done, so, with limited time and the state of our suspect system still up in the air, we decided to take matters onto our own hands--and then, of course, we all know what happened next.

My personal view on AzuRachi is actually quite even; I thought that it was very dominant, something that was almost "crossing the line" in a sense, but prior to it being brought up it was never something I ever thought of touching (again) as we just did suspect tests with both. However, when it was brought up, it's something that I was unsure of how to tackle; as much as possible, I wanted to lead the metagame in the direction that I perceive is closest the community's interests, but I was torn between respecting the people's wishes and taking the state of the metagame to what I felt is "balanced". I knew that changing something in the metagame, especially at the period we are in, would not be a very good play, but still I pressed on with the idea in order to keep the metagame at a "balanced" state. I knew that this would face some backlash from the public but thought it would be fine as this act would be aiming to fix a problem. I could have put my foot down, somewhat aware of what the public reaction would be (though not aware enough, regrettably), but I did not and instead went with the vote. In retrospect, I was shortsighted; by doing this council voting, I was both ignoring the judgement the suspect test results on what the "ideal" state of the metagame is and disrespecting a majority of the community's voice, entirely the opposite of what I aimed to achieve. While there were concerns raised on the metagame state, addressing these concerns would be directly opposing what the community thought of AzuRachi, and the council would be essentially spitting on their faces by changing something on our own in this manner. As a TL, I could have handled this much better, and I apologize for being part of this disaster.

So what's the game-plan for Doubles council overwrite votes moving forward into SM, then? + other stuff
We will not override public votes with council votes.

Going into the generation, we will have a metagame thread as usual. There, the community may bring up and discuss Pokemon worth looking into with suspect tests. Also, any pokemon that show a great deal of strength may be up for council vote to decide whether or not they should be quickbanned in the interest of time to get the tier prepared for SPL. Beyond that we will bring back proper public suspect testing; we are exploring other potential suspect options but there will be public involvement, one possible system being the "nomination" system used by LC as shown in this thread. Another is possibly involving the power rankings, we'll see.

Why does no one want to do a complex ban when it is clearly the solution here?

What is the big issue with complex bans when sometimes they're whats needed?
We ban the whole Pokemon instead of parts of it because that's what is simple. Banning only parts of a Pokemon in order to balance only adds unnecessary subjectivity to our tiering system; I don't want to assume what complex ban proposal you're referring to, but regardless of whether it's Belly Drum + Azumarill or the AzuRachi pair itself, they'd still just be limiting it as they hit a move or practical application in possible partner pokemon, respectively. A complex ban is something that we use when something(s) negatively affects a metagame at a significant scale, examples of these being GravSleep here in DOU and the old Aldaron's Proposal limiting DrizzleSwim in Gen 5 OU. Azumarill + Jirachi is ultimately just two Pokemon and can be dealt with in a simpler manner, recent fiasco aside. If we determine that AzuRachi is a combination that is unhealthy and unmanageable then we should deal with them by either banning one or both; we shouldn't try to go half-and-half by keeping them at a limited capacity. A complex ban also opens up quite a precedent; we'd be opening ourselves up to stuff like Mega Mence without DD, Mega Mence without Jirachi as a partner, and possibly even crazier stuff like "Zekrom without Bolt Strike?" and there's not much stopping us from doing that if we hypothetically implement one.
 

Pocket

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First of all, I want to personally express that I never lost trust in the council, even with this incident. I know every member of the council are great people who are open minded and value the collective dubs players they represent. To me this incident was simply the council's awkward way of appeasing their fam.

With that said, does the community believe that azurachi is a problem? It seems like the council believes that it is a problem. If the majority agrees that this is an issue, we should address it properly this time. I recommend opening this up to public discussion, where people can suggest how to address this problem if it is a problem. Maybe hold this discussion for a week. The council can then perhaps grant certain users the power to vote alongside the council. The council can select these users based on the quality of the discussion posts, their cumulative contribution to the xy doubles community, and/or based on their performance in tournaments.

One thought that came to mind is banning Belly Drum. One turn to maximize attack that also ignores prior Intimidate drops is ridiculous. I think that this set up move is too powerful in the presence of redirection. It can also be further abused by pairing the BD sweeper with Transform and Psych Up.

I understand that only Azumarill has been an issue with BDrum, whereas other BD sets have not even surfaced the DOU metagame.however, that makes this ban relatively benign, bc it is 1) simple and 2) addresses the problem with minimal collateral damage (since other BD users virtually don't exist), both desirable traits of a good ban.
 
One thought that came to mind is banning Belly Drum. One turn to maximize attack that also ignores prior Intimidate drops is ridiculous. I think that this set up move is too powerful in the presence of redirection. It can also be further abused by pairing the BD sweeper with Transform and Psych Up.

I understand that only Azumarill has been an issue with BDrum, whereas other BD sets have not even surfaced the DOU metagame.however, that makes this ban relatively benign, bc it is 1) simple and 2) addresses the problem with minimal collateral damage (since other BD users virtually don't exist), both desirable traits of a good ban.
banning belly drum itself is a ludicrous idea. it would make a lot more sense at that point to ban azu, since you even state in your post that azu is the only problematic belly drum user...so...i don't see how banning belly drum would be a practical solution. any other strategy involving belly drum (such as transform or psych up, like you said) is a shitty gimmick that can easily be shut down by taunt, fake out, etc, so belly drum isn't ban worthy itself.
 

Pocket

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We don't need to ban Belly Drum, but we should discuss if azurachi is a problem, whether we should do something about it, and how. apparently 5/6 of the council believe that it is problematic, which to me sends a red flag. Maybe this issue needs to be re-addressed? That is what the dubs family needs to decide
 

Ununhexium

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We don't need to ban Belly Drum, but we should discuss if azurachi is a problem, whether we should do something about it, and how. apparently 5/6 of the council believe that it is problematic, which to me sends a red flag. Maybe this issue needs to be re-addressed? That is what the dubs family needs to decide
Well if Belly Drum gets banned then nobody is gonna use Azu really
 

Bughouse

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imo a totally valid decision would have been to hold a revote in blind voting without holding an additional suspect giving permissions to everyone who qualified in either the jirachi or azumarill test (since proximity to end of gen and tbh would be an unnecessary burden on those who already deserved a vote) to do a runoff vote of ban one, ban the other, ban both, ban neither.

I would not mind this being done even now, if you want to run with this idea.

I think the council is within their rights to decide there's still a problem with the metagame and recommend to voters that some sort of solution should be done. That's why councils pick what gets suspect tested. I just don't think they have the rights to do that with six votes against the will of maybe a hundred. Once the public votes, the default should always be that the outcome should be respected. Council voting itself has its place and can be used at times, but this was not one. In early XY, we tested Kanga, it stayed, and then we retested in 6 months basically out of boredom. This shouldn't have happened. So don't take my criticism of the current council and leaders as being unique. Lots of tier leaders and councils have made questionable decisions in the past and will again in the future.

Moving forward, I think using an LC-like system could be appropriate, as could incorporating power rankings from seasonals. I do think however, that it is important that there are still opportunities for players who don't play Doubles year round to qualify to vote. Any tier that is open to some degree of public voting needs to have that public voting be truly available to the public, not just a subsection.

My biggest concern is that public confidence in the council has deteriorated as a result of this, and you have some important decisions to make about the initial banlist for SuMo. I hope you make that decision making process as transparent as possible (at the very least post vote results by member), possibly even holding a public vote if any aspect is particularly contentious among the council (see for example how Smogon has done this before long ago: http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/vote-initial-gen-v-banlist.81568/)
 

Checkmater

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is a Tiering Contributor
Idea: Weight-Voting by Suspect-Ladder

So we've identified that current suspect-ladder system is flawed in that we get too much sway from tc-hunters/singles players/new players due to the low difficulty of the doubles ladder. While I do feel this can still be solved to a degree by removing tc-points, this does gimp doubles players from an avenue of being able to get badges.

I'll plug that idea before getting into the nuances of weight-voting, as I still like the idea of removing tc-points. While some people have tried to point out the case of players on the ladder who make fresh Smogon accounts just to vote in the suspect, I honestly don't think they're a problem because if you're fresh off the boat and making teams that can make reqs you deserve to be able to vote. Generally, this demographic of player has interacted with doubles resources heavily, or talked a lot in doubles chat, or asked someone for teambuilding help. Contrast that with a singles player who sees a suspect, grabs teams from the resident milkman and just plays 60 games with a team that is good, the prior case/player has much more metagame knowledge and is more of a part of the community.

But, without further ado...

What is weight-voting?

Weight-voting is an idea to give good players (and presumably, members of the community) more of a say in contrast with other groups. If we give certain players a heavier amount of say in deciding a suspect (say 3x, or even more or less depending on what one decides is appropriate) then we can say that #1 player gets 3x the vote of the average player, and #2 gets 2.8 x the vote of the average players, and so on and so on, maintaining a baseline of normal votes, but giving players more say proportional to their ladder position. Thus ladder can be more competitive and people'll keep laddering throughout a suspect test, and we let the best community members and those with the most metagame knowledge have more of a say.

Some mechanical clarifications:
  • The ladder wouldn't have elo decay
  • Weighting is decided at the end of the suspect, with a snapshot of the ladder
  • The rate at which value of a vote drops as you move from #1 to #w/e can be determined through different methods, ie exponentially, logarithmic-ally, or logistically, depending on what part of the ladder one feels differentiates players the most.
  • The cutoff for baseline vote-value could be anywhere (ie at #20 and below your vote is normal value, etc)
  • This could even allow us to make suspect reqs easier if we really wanted
 

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