Haruno
Skadi :)
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.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
the 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.
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