there is going to be an explosion here, no doubt about it. there's 53 BL pokemon right now, many more "suspects" than there are for OU. actually, unless i am missing something big here, what is stopping anyone from using a team with five or six BL pokemon? if the mess weren't cleaned up for 6 weeks, what would we have tested? how well pretest-BL pokemon fare against other pretest-BL pokemon? waiting 4-5 weeks to clean up the mess makes no sense in that regard. someone correct me if i am missing something here, thanks.
I understand that there will be an explosion and that the mess will be difficult to sort out. I am just saying that in the event that something does take hold of the game, we will want an early screening process to make the game is actually fun. I don't know what you guys aren't understanding about the main part of this test being efficiency. The UU ladder is dead during a lot of the day. COMPLETELY DEAD. We don't have the option of just creating a new ladder here, we are going to be completely destroying this tier and completely alienating its players. In October, there were 12000 UU battles compared to almost 200,000 on the OU ladder...and now we're breaking everything up and making people make new adapted UU teams. This is not exactly a recipe for a successful test, which is why I am suggesting that we put as much emphasis on the player as possible. We need to keep the players on board or else this will be all for naught.
The usages are going to be much more stacked on the pokemon that are broken (since there are fewer players), assuming there are any, and it is going to be painfully obvious to the player after only like 15 matches if something is as broken as what I'm talking about. Then, forcing the player to play in that kind of environment for another extremely long month or even 6 weeks is going to just beat an already dead ladder. We actually want results here, and we want them to be fast but reliable.
If something comes up that is broken, I think we need to jump on it and ban it to make the tier playable for those who want to test it. That's why I suggested the initial phaze with limits and then a longer second phaze, to cut out anything troublesome that may pop up and then start delivering results. This plan offers more flexibility and consistency than anything that has been offered in this thread so far, both are qualities I feel we should be looking for.
Now that I've told you why I think "let's just wait the broken things out" is a bad idea, let me tell you the reason I disagree with "we'll just use executive action and take things out". We are announcing this to the public and its going to be a public vote with set deadlines under what a lot of people are agreeing for. Then, if something were to happen, they would support completely contradicting yourself and picking things out...ignoring the plans we have already. Since this "long first test" doesn't account for flexibility among the testing administration or fun for the player if something broken were to happen (which you can't just rule out like everyone seems to be doing...), we would need to basically go back on our word in front of the whole community. Needless to say, I prefer a flexible schedule.
Just because I support a quick vote to cut out broken shit, doesn't mean that I automatically assume that there is broken shit and will let it impact my opinion. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if
nothing was banned at the first vote (it's an option too!). I don't see why this concept of "we're dropping 53 things that we've already said were broken in UU into UU so maybe there is one or two things that are still broken so we should do something to have a failsafe just in case" is that tough to understand (ignoring grammatical reasons, of course).
I already said I understand and agree with Obi's cautionary proposal, I just think that it is unrealistic to think that there wont be something Rayquaza-like when we drop these BLs down.
Yes, it's a great pokemon, but if it was head-and-shoulders better than the other BL's -- it would be OU. And it's not. It's BL.
Actually I think you kind of have it backwards. BLs aren't BL because they are worse than other BLs, they are BL because they are worse than OUs and Ubers. That is quite the difference, especially considering the rest of your post.
Project For Now: Define a list of priorities (i.e. Which Pokemon you want to test and in what order)
All of the Borderline pokemon in the UU tier is what we are testing, I'm pretty sure thats the answer. Unless I am not understanding the question.
Also I really think this should stay out of Policy Review until we have something agreed upon lol. Why bother putting this jumbled mess of a thread there when we can just collect our thoughts here?