SuMo Beta Tiers

Blast

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This generation, beta tiers were mostly handled one full shift at a time, only being allowed to start after the tier above it went official. But with so many official tiers this gen, this isn't really an option for gen 7. Under this system, PU has to wait just shy of a full year before it can even get a beta ladder, and I'm sure even non-PU players would agree this is extremely unfair, myself included.

So I want to use this thread to look into ways to get around this issue. At the same time, I want to be mindful not to jump into starting certain tiers /too/ early, what with all the inevitable chaos surrounding quickbans and presumably quickshifts (although a certain degree of instability is pretty much unavoidable). As a starting proposal, I was thinking of something like this:
Month 1 (obviously not one month right after the games are released, but asap): UU Beta is formed
Month 2: RU Beta is formed
Month 3: Allow UU and RU to settle for a month
Month 4: The first official tier shift takes place, and NU Beta is formed
Month 5: PU Beta is formed
Month 6: NU and PU settle for a month
Month 7: Second official tier shift and from there the system just continues normally

If anyone has any better ideas I'd like to hear them as well, but with gen 7 just around the corner this is a really important issue to address.
 

TheFourthChaser

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I don't think this is unfair, it's merely the nature of the system. Higher tiers are always going to dictate the ones below them and time is necessary for any sort of low tier stability. While the proposed solution offers some tier to be played earlier on, it'll be volatile to the point where it has little impact in the long term metagame development and I'm unsure if thats even worth doing. If low tier leaders find this to be a fine idea then go ahead imo but when it comes to something like SPL or Grand Slam I'd rather have the normal process take precedent and give metagames proper time to grow.

My main worry is putting "rushed metagames" into official tournaments for the sake of their representation. Giving all metas time to develop properly is more important than this imo.
 
We don't have to put the new metas into official tournaments just because they exist. If anything, the tiers would have more time to stabilize this way because they'd just exist for longer. I don't really think having to wait a long time is really "unfair", but I and basically every other PU player I've heard talk about it would much rather initially have a crazy mess of a tier that wouldn't really be taken seriously and not anywhere near resemble what the meta would look like a few months down the line than straight up not have a tier for almost a year. If anything, it's fun to deal with the craziness and then look back on the ridiculousness of the initial tiers after they've had time to stabilize.
 

phantom

Banned deucer.
How is this even remotely sensible? It doesn't make any sense to me rush the development of official tiers just b/c PU doesn't want to wait, which is not "extremely unfair", just an inherent consequence of PU being the lowest lower tier. One month is not enough time for each tier to properly settle. There's also more that goes into giving these tiers the proper time to settle other than just the tiers being more stabilized, it matters in garnering an initial playerbase that will stick around for the gen (and yes this is an issue that will persist years later). I guess you can the make the argument that these tiers are always going to be unbalanced so why not start them anyway, but I feel like there's a difference between a tier being unbalanced and being unplayable. A lot of the tiering efforts will also be extremely pointless since a tier with only a single month of development will experience volatile tier shifts that will drastically change the tier below it in a short period of time. First month of UU stats for instance that projected the future RU looked far more different than the stats used when RU went in beta b/c a significant portion of the strongest Pokemon in the first month of stats ended up moving to UU/getting banned from UU by the time RU hit beta. I don't really care too much about the time period each tier has to wait (as long as the time each tier has to wait is fair relative to the tier above), but you're kidding yourself if you think one month is nearly enough time.

edit @ below:

I never implied that these metagames would be official in that one month, just that a month is not enough time for the tier above to stabilize to the point where an unofficial (or beta tier) can establish below it w/o interfering with the development of tier above and w/o being a clusterfuck of a tier.
 
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Acast

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How is this even remotely sensible? It doesn't make any sense to me rush the development of official tiers just b/c PU doesn't want to wait, which is not "extremely unfair", just an inherent consequence of PU being the lowest lower tier. One month is not enough time for each tier to properly settle. There's also more that goes into giving these tiers the proper time to settle other than just the tiers being more stabilized, it matters in garnering an initial playerbase that will stick around for the gen (and yes this is an issue that will persist years later). I guess you can the make the argument that these tiers are always going to be unbalanced so why not start them anyway, but I feel like there's a difference between a tier being unbalanced and being unplayable. A lot of the tiering efforts will also be extremely pointless since a tier with only a single month of development will experience volatile tier shifts that will drastically change the tier below it in a short period of time. First month of UU stats for instance that projected the future RU looked far more different than the stats used when RU went in beta b/c a significant portion of the strongest Pokemon in the first month of stats ended up moving to UU/getting banned from UU by the time RU hit beta. I don't really care too much about the time period each tier has to wait (as long as the time each tier has to wait is fair relative to the tier above), but you're kidding yourself if you think one month is nearly enough time.
I don't think anyone is claiming that a month is enough time to establish a metagame. If I'm understanding the arguments correctly, I think they just want a metagame to play in the meantime while the upper tiers are sorted out.

I don't know the technicalities of how tiering was done at the start of new generations in the past, but how about we do this: For every usage-based tier that gets officially created (OU would obviously be first), as soon as that tier has its own set of usage statistics (a month or two after being created) we can create an OM that would fill the same role as the next tier down, but not give it official tier status. The OM would just serve as a metagame to play for the lower-tier fans while they wait for their real metagames to be established. These formats wouldn't even need tier leaders or any sort of tiering council because they're just OMs that are going to change drastically from month to month anyway. This way the lower tiers get a metagame to play relatively quickly, but the actual lower tier metagames won't be established until the upper tiers have settled down.
 
My main concern about starting tiers like this is suspect testing / quickbans. If the lower metas are willing to hold off on bans while in beta, I'd fully support this. I'd even be okay supporting this with bans if we established some objective criteria (more on this at some point soon).
 

atomicllamas

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We actually started discussing this in SS a bit ago. Right now where we were at was tiers would be formed after 2 months of the above tier being official, ie. 2 months after OU starts, UU will begin, then 2 months and RU will begin. I agree with Spirit that using only one month of stats to form the subsequent tier is kind of ridiculous cause I doubt even the best players will have any grip on the meta one month into the tiers existence. Especially in Beta which means their are going to be a ton of stupid mons in the tier to screw up the tier below it. For example, in this process you would have based Gen 6 NU on the RU meta game with Azelf / Kyurem / Sableye (actually that might have happened, but it wasn't really great), had you done this with Gen 6 RU we would have ended up with Suicune (and other gross stuff I don't remember) as well.

I think a compromise could be the following: OU becomes official (or settled / initial quickbans implemented), 1 month later an unofficial UU(beta) ladder is put up and a Gen 7 UU discussion thread is placed in Other Metagames. During this month no bans are enacted, but it allows TLs to see who is invested and competent enough to be on council for UU. After the month is up UU becomes official based on those 2 months of official OU stats, gets its own forums, and the council can implement bans as they see fit (I'm sure some bans will occur quickly given the month of beta can also identify clearly stupid shit). At the end of this month the process is repeated with RU (beta ladder, thread in OMs, no bans), without factoring UU beta usage at all. Next month is UU's first official shift (2 months of being official), and RU goes official, gets a forum, is allowed to implement bans, etc. A month later the process repeats with NU.

The timeline of this proposal takes one month longer than the one in the OP for PU to become official (PU can start implementing bans 8 months after OU goes official) but will use less dubious stats than those proposed in the OP, and allow TLs / councils a good idea of what could be problematic in these tiers. But yeah, that's my idea of how to do this more efficiently than gen 6 without taking an extremely long time. I think the most important part is that we enter with a solid time frame between tier formation and stick to it, unlike generation 6.
 
I'm completely fine with that, I didn't realize that it would only be one month slower to stick with that proposal

I don't think no bans at all for the first month is very fair. You don't know how ridiculous things could end up getting; I really don't want to have to deal with having Hoopa or something absurd like that dropping to PU and just having zero checks whatsoever but still have to be put up with for a month. Maybe right at the start of the beta tier let the tier leaders quickban extreme cases of mons that are obviously not okay and obvious will obviously rise to the tier above it the next month? (I'm talking like XY RU Suicune tier stuff, not XY RU Kyurem tier)

edit: yeah I see what you guys mean, I'm fine with no bans for just the one month of "beta"

I also don't really see the point of starting off with just a single thread in other metagames. All the lower tiers did that in XY and it just seemed incredibly constricting and pointless, iirc most people then thought it was a bad idea in hindsight.
 
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Lord Death Man

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I disagree with making exceptions for things that "are obviously not okay" if we go the no-ban route (which I also disagree with). It's way too objective and, and if we'd be using to see if, for example, Staraptor is okay for UU, why couldn't, or shouldn't, we use it to see if, say, Terrakion is also okay? I don't think we should limit tier leaders ability to run their tiers unless we remove absolutely all objectivity from it. I personally think we could even benefit from not having TLs annouce themselves until after the month is up, if we go that route.

Also, Suicune had plenty of solid checks/counters in XY RU Beta (Toxicroak, Shaymin, Raikou); Kyurem didn't. Kyurem was BL last gen, Suicune wasn't. Kyurem seems like it would have been more obviously broken in that scenerio.
 

atomicllamas

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Do you mean subjective?

The reason I proposed no bans in the beta month is a) that's how it worked last gen b) the stats are gonna be based on one month of crap meaning the meta could heavily change before becoming official, given the tier above will be implementing bans and generally be more developed. We aren't limiting "tier leaders ability to lead their tier" cause the tier doesn't exist yet (in an official capacity).

As for kyurem vs suicune (off topic but meh) there were checks and counters for kyurem as well (Zong, Cobalion, Escavalier, etc.), and in spite of Shaymin / Raikou / Toxicroak every game came down to who played their suicune the best / who crit the opps suicune first at +6. From actually playing the meta it was super apparent that suicune was way more unhealthy than kyurem. Maybe that was your point, but then we shouldn't be doing bans for at least a couple weeks anyways (which again is why I proposed no bans in the beta month).

Okay, agree @ below
 
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Lord Death Man

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Yeah, I meant subjective, and the key point about Suicune was "from actually playing that tier." Suicune was not, on it's face, more broken than Kyurem; you'd have to play the tier to come to that conclusion, and a month is a very short amount of time in a new tier, so banning stuff based on what you premeptively feel is more obviously broken doesn't make much sense. If we set up a month of no bans, it should be absolute.
 

Ununhexium

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Yeah, I meant subjective, and the key point about Suicune was "from actually playing that tier." Suicune was not, on it's face, more broken than Kyurem; you'd have to play the tier to come to that conclusion, and a month is a very short amount of time in a new tier, so banning stuff based on what you premeptively feel is more obviously broken doesn't make much sense. If we set up a month of no bans, it should be absolute.
So what you're saying is that if Mega Charizard Y were to drop to RU within the first month of beta that we shouldn't ban it because we know feel it would be broken there even though it would totally and irrevocably be so.
 

atomicllamas

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So what you're saying is that if Mega Charizard Y were to drop to RU within the first month of beta that we shouldn't ban it because we know feel it would be broken there even though it would totally and irrevocably be so.
No, his point was any exception drawn to the no bans for the first month rule (if we go with that) would be completely arbitrary, and therefore if that is what we go with there shouldn't be any exceptions.
 

kokoloko

what matters is our plan!
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just start w/ uu on jan 1 and do a wave of quick-bans by the end of the month. let the meta settle during feb.
ru on march 1. quick bans by the end of the month. let meta settle until the end of april.
nu on may 1... you get the idea.

updates every month.

you get all your GS tiers by summer this way and its not too rushed.

if anyone needs help finding the balls to actually run a tier in beta i'll be around.
 

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