Kiliminati

I could just leave it at the title, but everyone knows posts aren't taken seriously until you reach at least 783 words. There are many complaints about how the TC has been functioning for the last couple of years. It has come to the point that events like the PSL consider taking tiering into their own hands. Apparently this hasn't been alarming enough for the TC, because we still don't see much action. Most of all the TC seems to be lacking passion, which you can see in the uninspired way the ban on Garchomp has been announced. When you make drastic decisions like bans, or suspect tests, there needs to be a good explanation of 'why' and what you'd hope to accomplish from the taken actions. Failing to do so shows a lack of respect to the competitive community.
 
The only member of the TC that we see frequently engaging with the community is gbwead and occasionally Bluebreath, this is not enough. TC members get a lot of negative attention, sure that's a fact, but that is part of the job. If criticism is the reason you do not share your points of view with the community then you should not be in the TC. Being part of the TC is a big responsibility, because you literally influence the enjoyment players get from playing this game competitively. It is not your day job, it is not your parttime job, but it has to be something you're passionate about.
 
But I don't want to be that hard on the TC, I simply think the TC is overwhelmed and that it is not fair for us to expect so much from a team so small. Yeah you already know where I'm going with this. The TC needs to adopt an overseeing council and a separate council for every tier. Because overseeing every tier (5 right now) is basically impossible when doing this as a hobby. No wonder that people burn out and that we see a lack of commitment, action and engagement. How are you supposed to be deeply knowledgeable about every tier without playing this game for multiple hours every day? To make matters worse, we have enough mons to justify a RU tier, but that would mean even more work from merely 5-6 players. Players that, besides their TC duties, hopefully also want to enjoy the game as well. 
 
But that's not all the changes we need, we need changes to tiering policies, like what the definition of Ubers are. Because they are outdated. We need to see more transparency in the monthly votes the TC does and we need to have strict activity requirements for TC members.
 
I'll summarize what I think the TC needs to function better.
 
- A separate council for every tier of 4 members. With an overseeing council of 3 members. The overseeing council members need to be very active within the community. Voting for a tier specific measure would require votes from the appropriate tier council and the overseeing council.
- Transparency about what is being voted on and how the votes are progressing. Votes can be kept anonymous but we have a right to know what is going on behind those sealed doors. Having a thread for this in the last week of every month could be sufficient for example.
- A rewriting of Uber definitions, or simply new guidelines on banable offenses.
- Frequent checks on the activity of council members. If you are in a tier council you should have at least 100 games played in that tier for that season. Checks can be made per season and these checks need to be publicly available. Overseeing council members need to have general knowledge of all the metagames, so having around 40 matches in every tier per season is a fair thing to ask for.
 
I hammer on transparency because it's such an important thing for any 'body of power'. How are we supposed to trust something that we don't know anything about? A lack of information just causes more friction and aggression between players and TC members, while we should have a common goal. Banning hydreigon To play a fun and balanced game. Anyway that's it, there is really not much more to say. Literally everyone knows and wants things to change, so I'm hoping we can get some discussion going on what those changes should be. Like I said, it's not the TCs fault that things are happening slowly, or not at all. We shouldn't blame them. In stead we should all point fingers to Munya and ask 'why is BurntZebra still in the council? he is bad'.
 
Thank you.
 
Hail Hydra, @Kyu

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.
 
 

Quoting Animal Farm, I like you.

Anyway, while the blatant lying and laid-back attitude about the situation came as a surprise, we all knew deep down that the shiny rate was bullshit; which is why so many volunteered to help prove that something wasn't quite adding up- thank you for that. This event right here pretty much shows the relationship that exists between the player base and staff right about now, and I hope to see improvement. Because if there isn't improvement, it won't only be the forum community that becomes upset- it will trickle down to the players who don't even know the forums exist.

I gotchu Thinkie
 
Let's assume that we would like to know the probability of finding at least one shiny by the time we have reached exactly 40,000 encounters. In order to find this probability, we can use n (wild encounters) = 40,000, k (number of successes) = 1, and p (probability of success per each encounter) ≈ .000122, or the fraction 1/8192. When we put these values into the equation P(k < 0) = (n k) factorial (p^k) (1-p)^n-k (or use the binomial test), we come up with .00757342, which subtracted from 1 equals about 99.24%. So it is extremely probable that we will have found a shiny by 40,000 encounters (if the rate is as advertised), but as stated above, you could always just get really, really unlucky :P.
 
[spoiler]Yes, I did it cause I'm a statistics nerd[spoiler]thanks Panda for your correction[/spoiler][/spoiler]

http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/monotyperandombattle-248063108
 
Pelipper the fucking legend

Today I was looking through a box I hadn't touched in ages and found the best IV'ed wild pokemon that I've ever caught:
 

 
It's hardy nature but whatevs.
 
Was just wondering if any of you guys have ever caught a pokemon with amazing IVs, and if so, if you ever saved a picture of it/kept it somewhere in your PC :P

no one giving a shout out to @Kiliminati smh

Listen, I know you're new around here, and don't understand the finer points of the delicate political and societal ecosystem of the PokeMMOTM landscape, but I will not sit here quietly and take this blatant disrespect of the most esteemed PokeMMO political office.
 
First of all, Bestfriends is a long time and beloved member of the community, providing quality of content for dedicated PokeMMOTM players, such as coverage on ingame playthroughs, and even brief discussions of pokemon outside of story, looking at notable pokemon like Hercalacross and Sailamence. Sure, it's his first time in office, and he hasn't done a significant amount, but he had to take time to hand select his cabinet, a strenuous and time consuming task. To say he hasn't done anything and deserves no such title, despite his past contributions and the fact he won the election is blatant slander. Quite frankly, it's nothing less than political mudslinging of the lowest degree.
 
He hasn't demanded any sort of respect from any authority, not that he needs to. You said it yourself; You don't even understand what the mayorship placement entails, and yet you're outright flaming and aggrieving this man for doing his best in his elected position.
 
Speaking of demanding respect, you made time to advertise your own thread, with your own VERY IMPORTANTTM DONUT STEEL Super Survey That Will Stay On Everyone's Permanent Records as a completely shoehorned addition to your post. It isn't enough to outright insult our mayor, but you also have to advertise your own content? Well, I guess all that matters is you've found a way to feel superior to everyone involved in the election and everyone who posts on the forums at the same time, so you've got that going for you.
 
Yes, the first post of the thread is garbage. Unfortunately, after the complete and utter collapse of the original Mayoral Regime after the devastating Riga.exe bombings of February, the original systems in place for this system were destroyed, and Fred was the only person who could run the election. Yes, it wasn't professional, and yes, it made the position seem like a joke, but to anyone experienced in the community, lengthy prose about it's importance isn't necessary; it's understood implicitly.
 
Ultimately, the person going around the forums actively aggrieving people and spamming links to their thread is not our Divine Emperor, Mayor, and Supreme Authority of All Things Above Bestfriends, it's you. And if you can't even manage some Poke-Respect for our mayor, then I don't know how you can expect to receive and Poke-Respect yourself. From my perspective, the troll here isn't Bestfriends, it's you.
 
Additionally, just to explain some of the roles of the mayor and the benefits it provides to the community, since you professed to not understanding it, allow me to list them:
 
The mayor maintains order, acting as a speaking point and representative of multiple facets of the PokeMMO community. They assist new players, educating them and introducing them to larger groups of the community to become involved. They maintain a constant thumb on the pulse of the playerbase, listening for discontent and attempting to resolve problems. They are literally granted divine powers and hold a great sway on the growth of our crops, ensuring we survive the winter.  
Quite frankly, you should do more research before posting.

I pressed logout.

Who is Zehkar again?

welcome

welcome

welcome

welcome

welcome

welcome

yes

Funny when the king of traitors post it.

Okay so that sig I have to put off longer now because just my luck I get my laptop back thinking it's fixed and it isn't so I gotta send it back in
 
 

Well shit

IGN: Kiliminati
 
Motivation: To beat Jay and JJ. And to get first place, of course, but that goes without saying.
 
My #1 favorite thing to do in PokeMMO is interact with the community. This game, without a shred of doubt, contains the best group of players I have ever had the privilege of knowing, and I would like to take my participation with each and every one of them to the next level. Managing a team, along with having the opportunity to recruit some of the best competitive players PokeMMO has ever known, will surely help me reach this goal.
 
Experience: Ex-staff member, hosted the most recent Prom Night official that we have all come to love, reffed a few official tournaments, and have participated in many different forum competitions over my time here that really helped to strengthen the bond I have with the community even more. 
 
Three other things about myself, just cause:
 
[spoiler]- The ability to communicate effectively is definitely my strongest attribute, and will without a doubt come in handy for everything that managing a PSL team entails.
 
- When I put my heart into something, I see through it all the way until the very end, no matter how easy or difficult the path is to get there.
 
- I try to see the positive in every situation, regardless of the circumstances. In the end, it's all about having fun ^_^[/spoiler]

Text: Kiliminati (Animated Purple/Silver Text)
BG: http://picpuddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/tumblr-backgrounds-giflumineux-and-small-girls-perfect-oqkvdrnp.gif
Pokemon Outline: http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2013/046/4/7/649_genesect_by_pklucario-d5v2mm9.png

Tell him I said VGNA VGNA 

ugly sophies