senzui

Don't nerf Conk if Hydreigon will remain the same monster it is please

I agree with basically all of the criticism in this thread, and I already ditched the TC a couple months ago because I don't foresee the TC getting fixed anytime soon (or ever). However, I think a good amount of solutions in this thread are missing the mark to some extent, which is reasonable, since I don't think people realize how deeply fucked the TC currently is. So, let me go into it:
 
First of all, I'm going to go ahead and point out the system is structured in such a way that makes it heavily resistant to change. To be frank, tiering is extra work, and the staff seem significantly more interested in having the formats be literally playable with all pokemon at least theoretically usable than actually making competitive, you know, good. Notice the operative word here is "staff"; for a while, the TC has been basically hammered into complete non-choices, as tiering decisions have been basically made by higher staff. The obvious example is the individual pokemon changes, the first notable one being removing Draco Meteor from Hydreigon's movepool. You could say the TC made that decision, sure, but the answer is not really. A more accurate breakdown is we were told we 100% shouldn't let Hydreigon be banned, and they don't want to remove Draco from Hydreigon later if they add it and it ends up broken. So, we were forced to agree "okay, yeah, don't release draco on it". In a technical manner, we made the judgment call that Draco Meteor Hydreigon would be too much, but in reality, we really had no choice in the matter. The limitations we were handed down basically made it the only possible option, and negotiating other solutions (just ban hydreigon/add it and remove it later if it's a problem) were basically no sold as possible options.
 
This trend of "Yeah, you guys decide, but there is literally only 1 conceivable choice" has resulted in basically every single OU related decision since Unova, and quite frankly, kills any drive to actually care about anything tiering related. If there's only 1 option that's even being considered, why even have a TC to make that decision? This is obviously exacerbated by the fact that banning is something to be avoided whenever possible, and bans are typical placed with the idea that at some point an update/nerf will be released to undo the ban at some point.
 
Of course, this only really addresses the issues plaguing OU tiering, not the rest of the tiers. To go into that, we have to go over the fact the TC is basically unchanged in policies and structure despite being like, half a decade old. The biggest issue is the massive emphasis on forum engagement and participation; discussions take place on the forums, when adding TC members, some level of involvement on the forums is preferred/expected, etc. This might have been fine before, but quite frankly, the forums here are extremely dead. Forums (no, reddit doesn't count) just aren't really used anymore, and making them so integral to the tiering process is a ridiculous oversight. The fact you basically can't get involved in tiering in any meaningful way other than messaging TC members without getting on the forums is absolutely ridiculous in current year. TC and tiering communication in general is awful, and it's caused partially by apathy on the TC's side (massive inactivity btw, but this is an old horse), but also by the fact policies basically push communication to threads in a forum people who play the game don't even use. It's pretty telling that a lot of the people I'm seeing in this thread are people who were using the forums years ago, when it was actually, uh, useful.
 
Even ignoring that, there is basically no meaningful structure to the tiering process itself. The definitions of banworthy are literally irrelevant, since the rules for banning have heavily changed since staff became more involved, and the process of requiring a forum thread for suspects and such is literally laughably pointless. At present, it's just whoever actually cares to say or do anything throwing out a vote on things people are mildly vocal about. The literal 2.13 active TC members scream about something that they want banned ASAP, and bring it up every month until something changes. That's about it. It's not like there's much structure on what to do, and most people just aren't involved enough to generate structure. There's not really any guidelines on what's considered acceptable to ban other than "try not to touch OU", so the discussions quickly turn circular with only 2 or 3 people actively participating to any extent, and none of them really agreeing on the line for banworthy, even if half the time they agree something might be strong.
 
Ultimately, all of these things are only issues as long as they persist. If they can be fixed, there isn't a problem, but as I said originally, the system is heavily resistant to change. Removing old, irrelevant TC members is more work for staff (read: Munya), and quite frankly, from their perspective, isn't even necessary if the TC is still working "fine" (which it isn't). To be fair, I'm sympathetic to Munya & staff in general on this point, since the way the system is structured and the fact staff hide in a brimstone bunker as far away from the playerbase as possible makes picking out new TC members a huge hassle. Not only that, but in all the time TC has been around, it's absolutely been common that someone new is added to the TC to replace an inactive/quit/removed member, and then proceeds to just not participate at all. At a certain point, cycling through TC members can feel pointless, when you end up replacing an inactive player with an active player who doesn't participate, and then turns inactive. However, ignoring this doesn't make it not an issue, it just guarantees it will literally never get fixed.
 
Since TC inevitably ends up clogged with inactives who can't be bothered to do anything, and replacing them with active members is an exercise in futility, nothing meaningful gets changed since the TC itself isn't willing to instigate any change. Not to mention that actually enacting meaningful change requires active discussion and cooperation with higher staff, which effectively makes doing anything a million times more difficult and frustrating. It's not uncommon that we had to force Munya to float an idea higher up the river, just to get told a flat "no" with little else. I'm also gonna throw a disclaimer here; it's not that higher staff never engage or discuss with the TC. For example, Kyu would frequently show up whenever we had to discuss something related to an ingame change he'd have to push (ie, modifying how an ability/move works) that had relevant competitive impact. However, normally these discussions are instigated by the higher staff themselves, and things as vague and open ended as "The TC is completely broken and needs to be changed completely" isn't going to garner much traction.
 
So, what are we left with? A system that, as is, is broken in the following ways:
Communicates through an irrelevant channel (Forums) for announcements, community engagement, and identifying potential members. Ends up clogged with inactive users without any failsafes to handle them, so that even when they are replaced, the issue quickly repeats. Has rules and guidelines, but basically none of them are followed due to being some combination of outdated, wrong, or bad. Is extremely resistant to change, due to being comprised of inactive users, the difficulty of pushing forth actual change, and lack of receptiveness/attentiveness to these problems by staff. Is left with extremely little freedom in making independent decisions, due to constant (generally poorly defined & understood by the TC) restrictions imposed by higher staff. Lacks any drive, ability, or function with which to push back and address any of these issues. Ultimately, splitting up the TC into subdivisions of ideally more informed/active players won't fix anything in the long term. Even if it temporarily helps address the stagnant state of the TC, it doesn't fix any of the other fundamental problems. While something like the activity checker ThinkNice mentioned would ideally help combat the inevitable stagnation issue, in practice, I see it requiring too much staff involvement/effort, since any member purged by this system must then be replaced by someone staff deems "acceptable" and meets stringent activity requirements. There's just like 0% chance something like that would really get enforced long term, if at all; it's just too much of a hassle for them to upkeep.
 
So, in order for a proposed TC rework to be viable imo, it would need to meet these requirements:
Deal with not only the current TC stagnation of inactive users, but provide a method of cycling out inactive ones in the future. The system needs to be flexible enough to not just remove inactive users, but easily be able to replace them. The second part is both extremely important to actually making it feasible long term, and also probably the most difficult required change tbh. Actually allow/give the TC more meaningful/varied options for dealing with tiering policies independently. I legitimately don't think there's much point in having a TC if a lot of decisions end up being made half by default due to restrictions imposed on how we can/can't handle potential or currently problematic pokemon. Stuff like "Suspect Tests" as done in PokeMMO where someone throws up a thread and says "we might ban this, discuss" are so pointless that I can't even fathom why we still bother, a far cry from suspects performed by Smogon. This doesn't just have to mean being more open to just banning pokemon (since I sincerely doubt anyone high up will change their mind on this for some reason), but having actual tools to make better tiering decisions would be a significant boon. Completely rework the currently written/codified TC guidelines. And by "rework" I mean literally delete every tiering policy thread I've ever written, they're like half a decade old and nobody follows them anymore, write something else ffs. Especially regarding the vague guidelines brought down by higher staff, since even looking back I'm still not 100% sure on what we were/weren't allowed to do. SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVE COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT AND INTERACTION. This is literally the most important thing, and I wouldn't really give a shit about anything else if this could get fixed. The forums are not a good way of involving the community in tiering anymore, because the game playing community largely doesn't give a shit about this place. I am 100% convinced the best way of handling this would be having Smogon style Suspect Tests where players who meet specific requirements could vote on proposed suspects, but the last time this was suggested, I was hit with a pretty fat "no". I don't expect this to ever be compromised on, but it is such a fucking good idea holy shit just do it already ffs. If staff is still insistent on being against this, then come up with something else, but the current system of sitting in a shitty chat on the PokeMMO discord and memeing once a month before writing up garbage and posting it in a thread nobody cares about is terrible for getting people to actually care about tiering. Some of these have some proposed solutions already in the thread (and in the bullet points themselves), but not all solutions are perfect. Either way, these are all major, fundamental flaws with the TC that need to be addressed to have any hope of it not being completely worthless garbage. I probably missed some stuff in writing out this post, but I think these four bullet points succinctly cover the current issues that need to be addressed. If you get nothing else out of this post, at least read those four bullets. Frankly, I don't have super high hopes for most of this, but I saw this thread and figured I should probably comment on the issue, since the sad state of the TC has been apparent for a while, and I don't see anyone from the TC saying or doing much about it.
 
Also, I'm gonna throw out a disclaimer. I left the TC a few months ago, and it's entirely possible some of this has been addressed since I've been gone. I HEAVILY doubt it, especially given the existence of this thread, but it's worth mentioning before I get dogpiled for outdated information.
 
tl;dr: haha no, read it. alternatively, read everything starting from the sentence above the last set of bullet points.
 
 

Thanks @RevzSM
Here is a video which might help u 
https://m.bilibili.com/video/BV1nT4y1L7YM

It had to finish today to have that Jan-Mar Apr-Jun Jul-Sep Oct-Dec cycle. 
Although they indeed should've announced it with anticipation. 
 

I'm all for Little Cup matchmaking, I think it absolutely should be added.
 
but...
 
Can we just stop throwing unnecessary shade at Doubles and try to sacrifice Doubles in the name of Little Cup? Doubles clearly is not even the least popular format in matchmaking, as getting in the top 100 requires the 2nd highest rating of all 4 formats. You can hate Doubles all you want but at least get some facts straight. Why not focus on the point that matchmaking for all 4 formats has been successful for the most part, therefor you can argue there's room for one more possibly.

because we can only have one wish fulfilled per month
 

I vote to ban Hydreigon from OU.

Good evening fellow catchers, I hope you are doing well (as good as it can be considering the current global situation).
 
Before I get to the interesting part, let me introduce myself and why I am writing this post.
 
My name is Philipp, or Philcomm in PokeMMO. I am a software developer located in Germany. I played PokeMMO for a couple of years now as a member of the german Team ÁvE and I am still a huge fan of the project.
In my free time, I work on a lot of development projects in different fields, one of them has to do with PokeMMO.
 
Let's get to the interesting part.
 
In my time playing PokeMMO, I bred a couple of Comps for others and myself. I also ordered some from others. But this always happened inside my team, because I felt like the tools necessary to create a global breeder market are just not good enough.
 
So I came up with an idea to make the breeder market a bit more competitive. Where breeders can see a lot more requests than just in their team.
 
I present: The PokeMMO breeder market.
 
This is a website based application that helps out the two roles, buyer and breeder. The goal is to create a much better market experience for both, the customer and the breeder. For that, I sat down with some Breeders such as CaptnBaklava, to create a system that makes sense.
 
To give you a better understanding of how the system works, I created a workflow overview that gives inside for both roles.
 
A customer creates an Order. The Order contains info about the Pokemon the customer wants. These include: - Which Pokemon
- Level (for now, you can only choose 50 or 100, this will change in the future)
- Nature
- Ability
- Held Item
- 4 Moves (this is subject to change, I got tester feedback that sometimes there are more than 4 egg moves wanted)
- 6 IVs
- 6 EVs
Once the Order is created, everyone can see the Order listed in the public section
Breeders then can give Offers. These contain how much the breeder will charge when doing this breed, and how long it will take the breeder in days
Once there are a good amount of offers, the customer then can pick an offer. Once an offer is picked, the Order gets removed from the public section. From now on it is only visible for the Breeder and the Customer
The breeder now starts breeding the pokemon. While doing that, the breeder can update the status of the Order. The available states are:
- accepted (default)
- starting (to use when the breeder actually starts breeding)
- breeding (while in the breeding process)
- leveling (self explaining?)
- finishing (prepare the Order for the customer to pick up)
When the state of an Order is set to "Finishing", the breeder has the ability to mark the order as finished by clicking the "Finish Order" button. This gives the Customer the signal that his order is ready for pickup
After an Order is marked as finished, the Customer now has the ability to use the "Close Order" button, to ..., well, close the order. Closed Orders are not visible anymore, neither to the Customer nor the Breeder.
 
To make it a bit simpler for you to see what the advantages are for each role, I listed them below
 
Breeder
Wider Range Customers, customers and customers... and more customers.
With this tool, you will get a lot more Orders.
Easy Order Management
The Breeder Market makes it very easy to manage your open orders
 
Customer
A competitive market
You have the decision of which Offer you accept. Since the Breeder doesn't know what other Breeders offered, they probably want to offer you the best price possible Order states
You can see your order's state. It is like ordering a package and having a tracking tool  
 
That was a lot of text, I know. You now probably want to take a look at it, and you can.
 
But before you do, here are some things you should know:
The Breeder Market is in Beta state, meaning there might be bugs. The more bugs you submit to me and the more details these bug reports contain, the faster I can fix them and improve the experience for you. The databases are pretty secure. But we have all been there that a service we use has a data breach and our passwords are leaked. To prevent this, please consider using a random generated password. If you dont wanna bother remembering it, you can use a password manager like 1Password or LastPass. The databases are not stress tested yet. I don't expect too many users to use this in the beginning. If I am wrong, and the databases won't hold up, I will very quickly switch to a better solution. The styling is not final. I am aware that the styling is not the best, I am not a designer, I am a software developer. Your day job is designer? Feel free to reach out to me. The app's styling is only tested on newer browsers (Chrome, Opera, Edge, Safari etc.), I don't expect the app to be styled properly on Internet Explorer. Please don't ask for Internet Explorer support, since this would be a lot of work (more than you would expect).  
If you have feedback for me, feel free to submit it via the forum as a private message.
Feedback about the user experience or improvements for both Customer and Breeder site are highly appreciated.
 
To create an account, please use your PokeMMO Username as the Username, so the Breeder/Customer can write you ingame. Please do NOT use your PokeMMO password though.
An in-platform message system is in the work, but not ready yet.
 
I think after all the reading (hope you did), you earned the link to the application: https://breedermarket.philcomm.dev/
 
Don't worry, mobile optimization is on the way, give me some time.
 
If you wonder what is planned for the future, here are some features that will be added (order not relevant):
 
Order filtering Better Pokemon Selection Notifications Rating System Export Customization Comment system  
If you have domain suggestions, I am also open for that (don't suggest breedermarket.com, that is already in use)
 
Feel also free to give me your opinion on this:
 
I thought about introducing an alternative registration system, in which the server chooses your password. So you enter the email and username, and the server returns you the password. This way, even if this service gets hacked, passwords are safe since they are generated by the server, not by you, and it is very unlikely that you have the same password for another website.
I know that this system might be a bit inconvenient for some of you, thats why I am recommending using a password manager. What do you think? Let me know

Stay safe and I hope you enjoy what I created

PS: I tried to upload images, but the system doesn't let me upload all of them (even though they are less than 1.95MB together) :(

Yo I also easily countered Garchomp with my Mandibuzz and Umbreon please remove from Ubers

Garchomp getting banned had been discussed since April, check the Competition Alley section

Have you considered joining the TC?
 

Have you considered joining the TC?
 

Have you considered joining the TC?
 

Have you considered joining the TC?
 

Have you considered joining the TC?
 

Have you considered joining the TC?
 

Have you considered joining the TC?
 

Have you considered joining the TC?
 

Garchomp getting banned had been discussed since April, check the Competition Alley section

Tutor moves mechanics were updated. Check out this guide
 
 

So the update was on July 29th and each season is supposed to last 3 months, that means this first season should be ending on October 29th, right?
 
I ask this because I want to get the tentacruel hat and I want to make a mean of how many points I'd have to farm daily

So the update was on July 29th and each season is supposed to last 3 months, that means this first season should be ending on October 29th, right?
 
I ask this because I want to get the tentacruel hat and I want to make a mean of how many points I'd have to farm daily

I think you have to post that on the Suggestion section. However, the staff have already stated several times that only moves that existed up to 5th gen will be implemented/updated.

Gastrodon, crobat and scizor careful should do fine. There are also dugtrio, scizor banded, tyranitar scarf and weavile to trap it, but to get a free turn you gotta predict or sacrifice another mon.

simply get good and stop relying on scouting and countering