[Tier Policy Discussion] Usage's actual role in tiering

[OrangeManiac]

ITT (2nd edition): Trying to use long text walls to describe why the OP is a fgt.

 

Honestly, if people want to criticize the tiering policies, tier council members or whatever then go ahead and do that but I don't think this thread is for that. This thread honestly serves no purpose anymore and it was about what was going on like a year ago about a certain situation. So I suppose it's best to trash this thread and make a new to tiering policies, calling out council members etc.

[LionKIng]

ITT (2nd edition): Trying to use long text walls to describe why the OP is a uguu.

 

Honestly, if people want to criticize the tiering policies, tier council members or whatever then go ahead and do that but I don't think this thread is for that. This thread honestly serves no purpose anymore and it was about what was going on like a year ago about a certain situation. So I suppose it's best to trash this thread and make a new to tiering policies, calling out council members etc.

its a whole, and if nothing has changed since a year ago well something is wrong. + the founding council members of this tiering are now gone, and we are stuck with what they taught was a good way to run the game. But in the end I see more negative stuff hapenning then benificial and this is for every tier. Tier members + tiering itself is an issue. And thats without talking about the usage stats that we arent getting anymore since noad left us. So in all, alot of stuff isnt working and needs to change.

[Gunthug]

Soo tiering by usage just doesnt work on such a small scale. a 32 man tourney per week if it even happens, becuase we've seen months without a tier in officials isnt an accurate way to gather info on tiers. Also its the same 40% that join the tournaments each time. 

 

We do not have the luxury to own a huge playerbase like showdown, thus making tiering by usage really difficult and not accurate for the following reasons.

 

When something is banned, i'll take blissey for exemple they resort to the next thing they currently have and that thing was porygon, because it was used by alot of people throughout the metas and it was banned due to usage in the next usage patch. But since then people got time to grind up, make chanseys and moveset them properly to replace blissey because it waas the next best thing. Porygon was just a short term answer the result of the dificulty to make a comp. Now a days nobody uses porygon, or hardly since there are better sp def walls in the OU meta and im pretty sure it drops under the % it needs to be in OU. 

 

So not only having a small player base to get results from, they are the same people over and over again. And we have a grinding issue making it hard to addapt to the meta fast enough. If only the problems stopped there.

 

Since the platerbase is so small, 2 flaws come from it. One being that a small group of people or a team can decide to get something banned from a lower tier into the next one just by using it in the tournaments they enter, as we all know the strenght of comp players in tournaments is not equal at all, you will have noobs that got a slot and they will get first rounded, you can easyly abuse the tiering system that way by bringing a pokemon you want banned in UU or NU. Not only that but theres the bandwaggoning effect, I call it this way because people are not creative and will steal ideas from other people for a short period of time untill they can steal an other idea from someone else and that also plays with the usage stat because on a larger scale this effect would have no effect on that pokemon, but since its such a small playerbase it does have a huge effect. Its not hard to reach the banning % on a pokemon since the player base is so small. I do not have the number of times you have to see a pokemon in X number of tourneys, thats not my thing but im pretty sure its not that much. 

 

And when they decide to move stuff from a tier to an other, like they did with the big 6 in UU, results were really poor to say the least. 5/6 of them got banned and 4/6 got banned almost instantly, so thats an other reason to why it does not work, we've tried it and all it does is give us bad tiers and no time to adapt to the upcomming one, giving older players with a bigger and widder comp pool to have a HUGE advantage on the competition, and thats why the same players win over and over on other people, because they have more comps to chose from and they adapt easyer than their fellow noobs. 

 

So yeah, this is my reasoning on why tiering by usage does not work, at all. And I ask a review on how things are done.

 

Also some of the tier council are complete incompetents and they have no idea on what they are doing or what they are saying. Their is better suited people out there then a few on my mind, will not name them but everyone probably knows who they are. 

I know we discussed this quite a lot in team chat, but go back and read the OP and senile's response (and the rest of the responses - interesting to see this is where our "discussion request thread" idea was born, well played JJ). This is definitely not the thread for your critique of usage-based tiering

[LionKIng]

I know we discussed this quite a lot in team chat, but go back and read the OP and senile's response (and the rest of the responses - interesting to see this is where our "discussion request thread" idea was born, well played JJ). This is definitely not the thread for your critique of usage-based tiering

well this is where tyrone directed me, so this is where ill be posting. 

[Gunthug]

why was this thread even still open? the issue in OP was resolved months ago

[BurntZebra]

its a whole, and if nothing has changed since a year ago well something is wrong. + the founding council members of this tiering are now gone, and we are stuck with what they taught was a good way to run the game. But in the end I see more negative stuff hapenning then benificial and this is for every tier. Tier members + tiering itself is an issue. And thats without talking about the usage stats that we arent getting anymore since noad left us. So in all, alot of stuff isnt working and needs to change.

I wouldn't say the "founding" council members did that much of a better job than the current tier council. Robofiend is still here. Amanu didn't do *that* much as far as I know. Senile and ThinkNice made a lot of thought provoking conversations in 2014 of competition alley and formed a lot of the policies today. This is not to say that it was perfect at all though. There was a time with heracross, dragonite, snorlax, salamence, tyranitar, and dugtrio all banned, which made for a horrible defensive meta, and ultimately resulted in a reset of the meta. UU was also not great either, dominated by vileplume, steelix, blastoise, hypno, and fearow, with no chance of change as tiers were pretty much static and there were very few changes outside of bans. NU was also just total poo as there was no system of usage to actually form tiers.

 

If there was no usage system, hoenn would have completely messed up tiers, along with NU just being more screwed up than before. I don't think any tier council members are to blame at all, as most decisions aren't that close. Most decisions were unanimous or with a vote of 6-1, so unless you're calling out the 6 people, then its pretty unnecessary. 

 

Not completely sure on the delay on usage stats, as they are ready to some extent, although some usage pools are small and Tyrone may be waiting until we get some more usage. I wish there was some better way to handle usage, as currently, apparently it is so secret and private that only staff members are capable of handling it, meaning that someone like Robofiend or I cannot process the information ever, and we are entirely dependent on staff to compile usage. 

 

I also think its fairly safe to say that power based tiering will never come back. I'm not sure what could be done to the current tiering system without an update, as you have not provided any solution, but only can mindlessly complain. 

[DoubleJ]

It was kind of inferred in a couple posts that the old tier council is better than our current rendition. I just want to say that this is false, imo. The council has truly evolved over time for the better, and today there is the least amount of subjectivity in place which truly limits decision making. Discussions are mostly fueled in part by the community, and tier council members rely heavily on input from the community to help them make a decision. With a bigger council there is even less room for a single agenda to be pushed through or one member to influence everyone in the group.

 

In the prior tier council, when there were only three members overseeing the entire game, I commonly saw Senile or ThinkNice bully other members into voting along with them and molding the tier however they saw fit. Some of the time this worked, some of the time it didn't. Now though, there is room for opposition and true discussion behind the scenes. Unfortunately sometimes this leads to heated arguments and a lot of attacks which are what ultimately led me to leave the tier council. 

 

Zebra though makes a solid point in the post above, no matter what we've done, the tiers almost always seem to go to shit. I think it's just the nature of PokeMMO and the PokeDex we work with. I said this a year and a half ago, but for OU, there is really nothing we can do to improve the meta. It will almost always revert to a boring and bland tier dominated by a handful of pokemon. This can be said for every tier. There is just no balance when you use an incomplete Gen 3 PokeDex with Gen 4-6 mechanics. 

[LuisPocho]

Zebra though makes a solid point in the post above, no matter what we've done, the tiers almost always seem to go to shit. I think it's just the nature of PokeMMO and the PokeDex we work with. I said this a year and a half ago, but for OU, there is really nothing we can do to improve the meta. It will almost always revert to a boring and bland tier dominated by a handful of pokemon. This can be said for every tier. There is just no balance when you use an incomplete Gen 3 PokeDex with Gen 4-6 mechanics. 

well, actually it´s imposible just because the council doesnt have enought tools to balance any meta.... I mean, they can only ban pokes from tiers and maybe ban some moves.

[Robofiend]

This thread is just a reiteration of an argument that happens all the fucking time, so to summarize the key points:

1. No, we're not going back to "power based tiering". We're going to keep moving things into their proper usage tier (based on how much they're used in that game) unless they break the game. Power based tiering is just too spooky and doesn't really make sense.
2. Yeah, usage stats are broken right now because of staff turnover and the fact that they do this shit by hand. I've offered multiple times to write a script that summarizes team summaries (i.e. lists of pokemon that each player uses) into a simple usage stats table, but it's never materialized. I suppose I should ask Tyrone, because, to his credit, I've mostly asked Noadshade.
3. Whether or not the original council did a better job or not is irrelevant, all of the original TC is rip. Also the metagames were arguably worse than they are now (game mechs were more favorable), everyone complained then too, and Senile/Think did most of the decision making. While the current council isn't perfect, we're at least somewhat democratic and no one can force a decision like in the old days - I consider this a plus.
4. Yeah, the game mechanics, available pokemon/moves, and general slow pace of the game suck. Unfortunately, the Tiering Council can't do anything about that, so we just try to make the best decisions we can with what we have, considering both the raw usage and the community's input.
5. Usage stats don't make bans happen: the Slowking/Scizor situation is a great example of this. While Scizor wasn't as highly used as Vileplume, Slowking, and Kangaskhan at some points, it was banned because there was a good reason to. It's the same reason that Metagross will never be banned despite being consistently highly used - it's just not broken. To top it off, no one wants it banned so there's no reason for the Tier Council to consider it. While some bans (Gengar or Blissey/Snorlax) have been tightly contested, most bans that actually go through are usually suggested and supported by people outside of the Tiering organization here.
6. While it might seem like PokeMMO is always going to have imbalanced or centralized metagames, we work on the assumption that some degree of diversity is possible and beneficial: even if we can never achieve a truly great metagame, we can at least get closer to one. I generally don't put too much stock in arguments that say every Pokemon metagame is (centralized / imbalanced / there is always something that's "too good not to use") because if you play DPP or ORAS metagames you'll see that balanced, diverse and evolving metagames can and do exist. Given good tiering decisions and improved game mechanics, they're vastly more competitive than centralized/imbalanced metagames that plagued the earlier games (ADV, GSC).

TL;DR: Sorry not sorry, this is one of those times where it's better to just push the devs to give us Technician Bullet Punch, Zapdos, Heatran and Focus Blast than it is to ask the Tier Council to change policy.

Edited February 20, 2016 by Robofiend

[OrangeManiac]

For I don't know how manieth time, just lock and archive this thread already