Some food for thought: EVO would act as more of a means of fixing and revising the existing pokemon metagame and tiers. With that in mind, in a sense, EVO almost has more in common with the
Revision Process than actual CAP.
The problem here is people treating EVO like it's just a limited version of CAP when it's real objective should be to "fix" the existing game in an easy, fun, and efficient manner. I'd say its role would be somewhere between CAP and the Revision Process.
At the very least, the time and energy saved would make the process worthwhile. Otherwise, let's just ban the Revision Process and create a new CAP anytime we feel like an older CAP isn't fulfilling its intended role in quite the balanced manner we had hoped it would. (I know that's not a perfect analogy, I'm just trying to make a point...)
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I don't want to go quote-happy, but now that I've fully read through the thread, I wanted to address something real quick:
Magmortified said:
EVO inevitably shortshifts the process by working off of something that was already made. Are we really learning more about how making a competitive Pokemon works if we're only improving an already-implemented concept? No.
Beej said:
As far as the actual product Pokemon that will result from the EVO project, I'd argue that they will be teaching us less than the CAP Pokemon because of the limitations that have been discussed.
Again, I think people need to get out of the mindset that EVO would be a lesser, more restricted CAP. There's more to game design than just making up new ideas. Here are some things we could learn from EVO that we
could not learn from CAP:
- We would learn to identify and separate elements from a pre-existing design. It would develop our skills at identifying worthwhile gameplay elements that should be emphasized and the elements that relegate a pokemon to "broken" status. You don't learn such identification and analysis skills in CAP.
- We would be able to break down and understand exactly why certain pokemon became broken despite the developer's best efforts. Why did certain D/P evolutions become relegated to UU despite revamped designs? By analyzing the pitfalls the original designers fell into with their designs, we can avoid them in our own creation process, CAP. (History repeats itself and all that jazz.)
- Our revision skills would become more refined at a presumably faster rate than anything that could be done in CAP. By becoming talented at making broken pokemon competitively relevant, we will become better at designing CAP pokemon with proper concepts and metagame roles.
I think far too many underestimate the value of evaluating and intelligently refining existing designs, as well as how positively they would impact the other aspects of our CAP and developing metagame.
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Finally, a quick note on fanboyism in regards to the initial selection process: Yes, fanboyism will impact the voting. However, as long as the end result is a competitively viable pokemon, I don't see how it really matters.
Had it been a CAP, yes, it would have mattered. CAP is supposed to identify and fill specific gameplay roles and niches that have not been addressed, and having fanboyism affect it would damage the metagame.
But there are a finite number of UU and NU pokemon, and the EVO process would be about fixing them via evolutions. As long as we don't let fanboyism influence the actual competitive aspects of each EVO project, it really shouldn't matter which pokemon we evolve in which order as we would ideally address all of them in the end anyway.
Yes, it would be nice to evolve those that would have the greatest impact on the metagame first, and ideally, we would all keep that in mind when selecting an EVO candidate. Regardless, the end result would just be one more viable OU pokemon (and community experience), and that certainly wouldn't hurt anything. Bickering over whether one pokemon should get evolved before another or not is kind of pointless if both would eventually get evolved anyway. The metagame obviously didn't implode with the lack of an EVO last time for any of the major candidates, and I'm sure any future candidates could wait an EVO project or two for their turn.
Remember: If a specific, unfulfilled metagame niche needs to be addressed, it should be done in CAP. If we want to fix the existing game as it is, then we do it one poke at a time in EVO, where even a fanboy-influenced selection process wouldn't damage it as long as the goal is to fix a broken pokemon.