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SuperKlaus posted:It's not germane to Stealth Rocks but I would like to know why competitive Pokemon has bizarre tiers based on metagame analysis and no points-based balancing like virtually every other (non-card) game where you select what to use from a list of game assets. Seeing as the phone game and now Let's Go assign Pokemon overall power numbers, there is probably a framework for balancing lists in place there that just needs to be grown. Every miniatures game in existence does this. VGC is really the only format that "matters" and the first couple seasons of a new gen oftentimes outright ban some legendaries and such A point system would require a ton of work, since you're not just balancing for the individual Pokemon, but the moves they know. Like does a Pokemon with low base stats but an awesome move pool and ability "cost" more than a really high statted Pokemon who has a so-so movepool?
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Mar 28, 2019 00:26
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Waffles Inc. posted:VGC is really the only format that "matters" and the first couple seasons of a new gen oftentimes outright ban some legendaries and such And their are Pokémon with amazing stats that are kinda unusable like Slaking and Regigigas
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Mar 28, 2019 00:40
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Hustlin Floh posted:Breaking NEws: Smogon has moved Monpoke to the banned tier fuuuuck!!!
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Mar 28, 2019 01:55
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thetoughestbean posted:And their are Pokémon with amazing stats that are kinda unusable like Slaking and Regigigas Or even pokemon with fairly middling stat totals that punch way above their weight because they're minmaxed (Mega-Beedrill comes to mind,)
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Mar 28, 2019 02:05
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The competitive tiers can make for some interesting scenes because most Pokemon need not only good stats but the right movepool and gimmick to really compete in the higher tiers, while some look good on paper but don't really come together.
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Mar 28, 2019 02:51
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SuperKlaus posted:It's not germane to Stealth Rocks but I would like to know why competitive Pokemon has bizarre tiers based on metagame analysis and no points-based balancing like virtually every other (non-card) game where you select what to use from a list of game assets. Seeing as the phone game and now Let's Go assign Pokemon overall power numbers, there is probably a framework for balancing lists in place there that just needs to be grown. Every miniatures game in existence does this. So let me actually talk about competitive games and how Pokemon fits in with the structure of other competitive games. Generally speaking, all competitive games start with a basis of "everything is allowed, we design everything to be on the same playing field." Of course, in any game, design can never achieve true balance and there will be things that are severely underpowered or overpowered, and this calls for updates to the game and sometimes bans. Points based balancing is a tool that designers can use to even the playing fields, or setting up various formats entirely. Magic first invented the idea of "standard" so that designers were free to make cards that weren't always competing with the most powerful cards ever printed, and then crystallized designing for "limited" so that sets could be filled with commons and uncommons that didn't have to fit into tier 1 decks to be played with. Points based balancing is a tool to CREATE a competitive environment, not a measure of how balanced that competitive environment is. What people have said in this thread about Pokemon stats not corresponding to viability really isn't meaningful criticism this system, and doesn't solve the actual issues at hand with Pokemon. You can certainly assign every Pokemon a point value and make a competitive format based on that, and it will create a metagame. Maybe not a perfect metagame, but no metagame is perfect and it really doesn't matter whether things are weirdly balanced or not. What actually led Pokemon to where it is now with competitive battling is more of an extension of these reasons: 1. The handling of intentionally overpowered Pokemon. Lots of competitive games have intentionally overpowered secret/boss characters. This isn't unusual in any genre. However, Pokemon has such a massive number of them that they are able to form their own metagame. When there's that many legendary Pokemon that are intentionally overpowered, people WANT to be able to play with them, meaning people will naturally create a format for them to be played with. As the numbers of these Pokemon grows with each gen, the amount of interest people have in playing with them grows and it creates pressure on players to make formats that use them. 2. The handling of mythicals. In a similar vein, it's easy to ignore that you basically couldn't get Mew in RBY and say if we want to do anything competitive, just don't allow Mew. Some people might not like it, but it's not a pressing concern. With Pokemon as it is now there's a huge number of Pokemon not allowed in VGC formats because there is no guarantee they are obtainable by players. Since these Pokemon are NOT designed to be overpowered, people especially want to see how they would perform in normal circumstances, which creates an immense amount of pressure for people to create their own formats that allow them. 3. Pokemon are not designed to be on an even playing field. A lot of Pokemon are just weak early game things and there was never an attempt at giving them a niche in battles. There's the adage of "you can beat the games with anything" but that's not really accurate nor reflective of why this is an issue. The game heavily discourages players from using, say, Pyukumuku or Wobbuffet. This points out that it's not so much that the designers think Pokemon being weak in competitive battles doesn't matter because kids can still use them in the games, it's that Pokemon are designed to be cute or interesting or be an analogue to some animal first and foremost, and then the actual battle implications are largely ignored. Obviously other competitive games have joke characters that are underpowered, but these are just one-offs and not something like 50% of all "game pieces." When that many of your game pieces have absolutely no relevance in any serious format, people will make formats for them. 4. Gamefreak was late to the party on competitive battling. Serious competitive Pokemon battling communities started springing up in Gen 3, around 2003-2004. VGC was not a "serious" thing until VGC 2011 for Black/White. As a teenager, I remember Skarm (Smogon staff) getting invited to an official tournament, not knowing until the weekend before that Groudon/Kyogre/Rayquaza were allowed and that it was 3v3 rather than 6v6, and the winner beating Skarm's sun team with Air Lock on Rayquaza (the Rayquaza was using Fly and Hyper Beam). If you actually cared about Pokemon battling, you had to go to unofficial sim communities, and that leads to the next point... 5. The goals that players try to achieve in designing a metagame are not the goals that are best for that metagame. There is a game design adage that I know Mark Rosewater, long time MtG head designer, coined a long time ago: players are very good at pointing out problems in your game, but not good at finding solutions to them. Because all the players who cared about battling ended up in their own community with no established rules, they had to create a set of rules that made sense to them. And when you create a set of rules you are creating them to achieve specific goals. The goal of Pokemon players that first established the singles formats were to find ways as many Pokemon could be used as possible. This led to creating usage-based tiers, the details of which got hammered out down the line (growing up the online community I "belonged to" was a UU Netbattle server that used a VERY different UU list from Smogon, the most popular server, the criteria for something to be UU was not actually based on anything in particular besides what we felt was ubiquitous in OU). However, trying to maximize the number of Pokemon that are useful across all formats isn't actually a good goal, and honestly metagames shouldn't be "created" in the first place. Metagames happen because every game starts out on the ground floor of "everything is allowed" and then you just sort of see how it shakes out. VGC does this, banning the things I talked about in points 1 and 2, leading to the results I highlighted in points 1 and 2. 6. The official competitive format is not reflective of the general gameplay. VGC is 2v2 pick 4 of 6. Needless to say, no battles in the actual game are 2v2 pick 4 of 6. The actual VGC format that was established is so drastically different from what people actually experience playing the game that of course people are going to want to play something more like the normal game. There is a 3v3 singles format officially supported in the wifi modes that GF uses as a "competitive singles" format, but you run into the same issues of missing a lot of pieces people care about from points 1 and 2, as well as being very different from the 6v6 format that the game itself supports and people have grown accustomed to. Essentially, because GF was so late on introducing official competitive formats and because those formats don't actually satisfy the desires of a vast majority of players, unofficial formats have immense momentum behind them. Because the people who established these unofficial formats had a set of specific goals in mind when making those formats, the rules were made to fit those goals. Those goals didn't really make a lot of sense in the first place, and everything after that has been people working to make sure that things continue to look the same. Because the developers don't actually care about this at all, they often create things that ruin the gameplay of these unofficial formats, and from there more and more obtuse rules have to be put in place to make sure those formats aren't ruined, which gives most leeway for people in charge to craft rules that shape the metagame to their particular liking.
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Mar 28, 2019 03:06
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Countblanc posted:It seems weird to be like "they're trying to emulate things you can do in the game", and then suggest an arbitrary limit It's really not that arbitrary. The average player of any given game is not going to have rare event-only stuff from more than one generation ago, never mind stuff that only comes from side games that has to be transferred in. The barrier to entry on getting some things "legitimately" gets higher and higher as time goes by and hardware ages out and becomes more difficult to find, and the game turns more and more into rewarding players for hoarding than for the ability to make strategic decisions. Again, in gen 6, the games started marking pokemon that came from gen 6 with a little pentagon, and official tournaments didn't allow the use of any pokemon without that marker, for exactly this reason. Let's take Mew as an example. The last international Mew event was the 20th anniversary Mew, dates varied but the last one in America ended August 2016. There have been various Asian events since, there was a UK-only RBY VC event, but let's assume you don't live in Korea or the UK and you're not willing or able to go to another country just to get individual pokemon, and say that the last internationally released Mew was in 2016. Before that, it was 2010. Before that, we're into the realm of IRL distribution events because it was on the god drat GBA, despite it being 2007 and DP already being out. The only legit way to get a Mew without being there for an event is to buy My Pokemon Ranch, which only interacts with Diamond and Pearl (and Platinum in Japan), then store 999 pokemon on it. That means that if you want to get one of the most versatile and useful Pokemon in the game, starting from just having a 3DS and one gen 7 game, you have to buy a Wii, you have to buy My Pokemon Ranch which you cannot officially get any more because it's a WiiWare title, you have to buy the inferior version of gen 4, which will probably still cost original retail price because Pokemon games don't lose their value, you have to play that game for dozens of hours mindlessly catching or breeding literally a thousand pokemon, then you need a gen 5 game and a second DS, or a friend who has one and will help you, then you need a Pokemon Bank subscription - which, incidentally, is the first thing in this chain that you still have the ability to buy directly from Nintendo. You want a Manaphy? Buy Pokemon Ranger and hope the one egg per game hasn't already been transferred off, or use special hardware or dodgy software to fully reset the bonus content save file that's separate from the game's normal save file for reasons. You want a Jirachi? That chain goes even further, go buy a Gamecube GBA link cable and the Pokemon Colosseum bonus disk or a European or Australian version of Pokemon Channel, then start transferring all the way up from the Game Boy God drat Advance. You want a Celebi? 100% Pokemon Colosseum in loving Japanese and use the Japanese bonus disk, and no the Japanese bonus disk doesn't have Jirachi. You want Wish Blissey? gently caress you, you can't have Wish Blissey. In conclusion, if Smogon are going to claim to be simulating the games as released, they should at the very least have the pentagon restriction, and arguably should be even harsher about event-only stuff. Dabir fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Mar 28, 2019 |
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Mar 28, 2019 03:59
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"My theoretical Pokemon battling lacks verisimilitude. This is very troublesome to me, please rectify."
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Mar 28, 2019 04:03
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"help, people are having a discussion on the internet"
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Mar 28, 2019 04:05
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show me on the doll where the effortpost touched you
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Mar 28, 2019 04:06
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Actually you can just pokegen them and there just as legit
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Mar 28, 2019 04:14
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Hey, bout to play Ultra Moon for the first time. Which starter is the least useful for completing the game? I like being forced to use caught Pokemon. I realized the reason I thought Pokemon was boring was because I kept accidentally picking starters that carried me through the game (looking at you Swampert, soloing the entire elite four and champion)
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Mar 28, 2019 04:28
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Nasgate posted:Hey, bout to play Ultra Moon for the first time. Just box your starter. It's fine.
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Mar 28, 2019 04:29
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Nasgate posted:Hey, bout to play Ultra Moon for the first time. Sorry man all three starters are pretty great.
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Mar 28, 2019 04:44
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Bongo Bill posted:Just box your starter. It's fine. Ugh, but now I need to decide if I want a cute owl or kitten forever
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Mar 28, 2019 04:47
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Nasgate posted:Ugh, but now I need to decide if I want a cute owl or kitten forever wtf
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Mar 28, 2019 05:13
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Bongo Bill posted:Just box your starter. It's fine. don't punch your Pokémon
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Mar 28, 2019 05:24
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Dabir posted:don't punch your Pokémon Drayden wrestles his dragons. Which is apparently good exercise... for the dragons.
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Mar 28, 2019 05:28
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Rowlet has the cutest animation of any Pokémon ever
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Mar 28, 2019 05:47
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Waffles Inc. posted:VGC is really the only format that "matters" and the first couple seasons of a new gen oftentimes outright ban some legendaries and such IIRC there was an online battle simulator that had a points based system but it never came close to the popularity Smogon and Showdown reached and I think they sort of disappeared as ORAS and gen 7 were released.
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Mar 28, 2019 06:09
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Vegetable posted:Rowlet has the cutest animation of any Pokémon ever poplio can love you unlike the garbage owl
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Mar 28, 2019 06:27
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Elfgames posted:poplio can love you unlike the garbage owl Brionne has the best animation for the middle stage of the starters too (although Rowlet isn't garbage, all starters are precious). Speaking of starter middle stages, I really wish they would show us the second stage for the gen 8 guys already.
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Mar 28, 2019 06:54
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I really want to use turtwig again. Doubt he's gettable in let's go though, but world tree turtle was the best. And then I found out people want 60+ bucks for Platinum. Field Trip for Let's Go Eevee: Eevee is awesome! My alolan golem is putting in work, with shroomish and clefable coming in solidly too. I'm probably gonna go poke Fuchsia then Saffron, because man, I'm getting totally over this Team Rocket thing. Frankly, I'm shocked they just don't shank the kid trainer and call it a day. Also, ghost pokemon are horrifyingly dark when I sit and think about it. I'm definitely gonna try to chain for a shiny ponyta because they are SO PRETTY. The last slot may go to alolan raichu, lapras or a seadra. Maybe the goldeen... they are all cute water types, honestly and I'm trying to use critters I hadn't before.
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Mar 28, 2019 07:07
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Aerofallosov posted:I really want to use turtwig again. Doubt he's gettable in let's go though, but world tree turtle was the best. Look, we've been over this: You can't shank a kid who has an army of loyal monsters, the monsters will kill you. And even if you DO somehow survive the monster attack (unlikely) there's a very real chance that kid is going to come back as a ghost and haunt/murder you. Just give the brat half your cash and let them be on their way, the Pokemon Mafia isn't paying you enough to give too much of a poo poo about them anyway
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Mar 28, 2019 07:14
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That's true. Would the monsters be able to pop out of the pokeball if their master keeled over?
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Mar 28, 2019 07:26
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The anime seems to suggest that pokemon can leave their ball if they really feel like it, see Wobbuffet.
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Mar 28, 2019 07:37
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Brionne has the best animation for the middle stage of the starters too (although Rowlet isn't garbage, all starters are precious). Speaking of which; anybody wanna throw in what kind of pokemon they're hoping for in this gen? I just need a corgi and a plague doctor, if I can get either of those two things my life shall be complete. Also an expy of the Queen with a team of nothing but corgis while we're at it.
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Mar 28, 2019 07:46
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A fully evolved dragon Pokemon that doesn't look like garbage is always on my Pokemon wishlist.
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Mar 28, 2019 07:51
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I got a Dawn Stone.
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Mar 28, 2019 07:59
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Dan Didio posted:I got a Dawn Stone. Whatcha looking to evolve anyway?
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Mar 28, 2019 08:23
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Flopsy posted:Whatcha looking to evolve anyway? Whatever the thing is before Gallade, which I now have.
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Mar 28, 2019 09:08
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Dan Didio posted:Whatever the thing is before Gallade, which I now have. Gotcha. Better to evolve em' sooner than later if you're going with a physical moveset.
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Mar 28, 2019 09:42
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The only thing I want from Gen 8 is an easy way to get honchkrow reasonably early
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Mar 28, 2019 09:47
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Nasgate posted:A fully evolved dragon Pokemon that doesn't look like garbage is always on my Pokemon wishlist. 
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Mar 28, 2019 10:46
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Flopsy posted:Gotcha. Better to evolve em' sooner than later if you're going with a physical moveset. I evolved him at 26 and got Swords Dance, not sure I could have managed to evolve him much earlier.
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Mar 28, 2019 11:26
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Nasgate posted:A fully evolved dragon Pokemon that doesn't look like garbage is always on my Pokemon wishlist. Salamander, Garchomp, Haxorus, Jangmo-o, Hydreigon and Tyrantrum are a truly ugly sextet of monsters, though. I don’t think it’s even like thoughtful ugly. It’s just lazy ugly.
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Mar 28, 2019 12:02
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tyrantrum is insanely good
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Mar 28, 2019 13:04
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Vegetable posted:Dragonite, Kingdra and Altaria look perfectly fine. What the gently caress???? Tyrantrum is like in the absolute top tier pokemon designs. And Haxorus is a doofy axe dragon and rules
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Mar 28, 2019 13:08
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Calling garchomp "lazy ugly" is a new tier of galaxy brain. I call it "Galaxy Brain 2".
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Mar 28, 2019 13:10
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Zore posted:What the gently caress???? Yeah, I don't see anything wrong with dragon pokemons
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Mar 28, 2019 13:19
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