Policy Review An Adjustment in Direction

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Birkal

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Approved by Birkal.

Consider this thread a place to take a step back and look with some perspective on our nearing seven year history of the Create-A-Pokemon Project. In my estimation, we have learned volumes of information in this time. We have developed a process that consistently drives great products, regardless of any faults in leadership. We have learned about competitive Pokemon by defining terms and sharing experiences. Most importantly, we have learned what it takes to bring a community of hundreds of contributors together to make something cohesive and desirable. We have had fun, and I can’t thank you all enough for this endless rollercoaster of joy. (happy 4k!)

That all being said, the Create-A-Pokemon Project has faults. For those of you reading this thread that are not Policy Review Committee members, let me iterate a few “popular” problems that we have been addressing lately. The sixth generation metagame has brought ORAS OU to a place where most Pokemon need to have much more “oomph” than any previous metagame, where our fifth generation-based process has struggled to adapt to this power shift. Our playtest (the final examination of how our creation fits in OU) has been plagued with lack of interest due to using an antiqued metagame that is often months removed from current OU. The playtest period also finds difficulty relating to the original concept’s questions due to its centralizing nature as a new Pokemon. Finally, CAP struggles to keep itself based in competitive battling, where users who have not fought in a battle can vote with equal strength as a five year contributor. Of course, this is the nature of how democratically CAP is set up, but it is a concern nonetheless.



In my estimation, we are ready for a change up. With twenty great projects under our wing, I believe it is time to evolve what the project is about and how we create Pokemon. First, let me provide a bit of history, some of which has gone by largely unnoticed. The Create-A-Pokemon Project established itself in 2008 by Cooper, a user with the ambition to start something new. He didn’t enjoy the spotlight and instead brought the mass production of Pokemon to Stark Mountain (the rough equivalent in DP to what we now call the Overused subforum), where users would participate in click-polls to vote. This successfully led to our first creations of Syclant, Revenankh, Pyroak, Fidgit, and Stratagem. By this point, all CAP Pokemon were involved in the same metagame; you could use all of them in battle. They were playable on Doug’s custom server, which gathered large numbers due to the quality of the simulator and the excitement of its projects. They had regular users (Blue Team) that moderator the chat, while (Red Team) members battled on the CAP ladder and worked on the forums.

Somewhere after Arghonaut (CAP6), the Create-A-Pokemon Project decided to create Pokemon without connectivity to other CAP creations. In my research, this move was largely natural, without much reasoning written down. The discussion for a CAP-inclusive metagame didn’t surface largely until Rising_Dusk hit the scene around Krillowatt (CAP10), when it was questioned whether or not we should put all CAP Pokemon together. His philosophy was that each Pokemon stood as a testament to their metagame; users could research the past OU metagame through reading about our creations. Furthermore, it was deemed that competitive players would not want to learn a new metagame with new Pokemon. His dogma took precedence until his departure after Necturna (CAP13), where leadership looked to then-moderator tennisace.

tennisace brought his idea of a revolutionized CAP project to senior staff, behind closed doors. In his mind, the Create-A-Pokemon Project would create Pokemon for the CAP metagame. He wrote a detailed summary on why this was a good idea and posted it in the main CAP forum. Here, I was brought into equation as a moderator, with the intention of leading the new CAP metagame (I was a moderator in OU at the time). The CAP moderators at the time were unaware of this decision, and fought vehemently with tennisace on this decision, to the point where Deck Knight publicly lambasted him and DougJustDoug was brought in to resolve the situation. Unfortunately, tennisace quit the CAP Project entirely as a result of the conflict of interest. The “scandal” of the situation is that he did not confer with the moderators or Policy Review Committee about this change, which went against the democratic roots of CAP. As a result, it left a sour taste in our mouths on the usage of past CAPs and the CAP metagame.

Since then, the CAP metagame and CAP process have become entirely separated. I have personally gone on the record stating that the CAP metagame is a “spoof project” and has nothing to do with our process. This was to ensure that there wasn’t a discrepancy about which metagame we made our Pokemon for (OU). In that time, the CAP metagame has found a renaissance of sorts on Pokemon Showdown, with its own community of veterans and battlers. In a way, it reminds me of the old Blue Team, where people are discussing our creations and how to use them in battle. I am proud that this community has endured, even with the chastisement of the CAP process regulars.

Before I delve into my ultimate proposal, let’s discuss the other side of this coin: the current OU metagame. CAP often forgets that we are intimately tied to OU, and we must consider Smogon tiering philosophy in the scope of our project. If you know anything about the outside world’s opinion on Smogon tiering, it is that we are exhaustingly ban-happy. Since generation four overused, we’ve banned some of the most popular threats in the metagame (and less popular ones, like Wobbuffet). Pokemon Black and White brought some more convoluted bans, namely Aldaron’s Swift Swim + Drizzle ban. This opened the floodgates, which poured into our current generation of Pokemon with bans to some of the most popular Mega Evolutions and versatile Pokemon (Greninja, Mega Lucario, and Aegislash). At this point, tiers have even considered banning moves, entry hazards, and even specific team builds (Baton Pass). It has become messy to say the least. I don’t say this to downplay the contributions of our metagame leaders; they have done phenomenal work to create balanced and enjoyable metagames that are playable. If anything, GameFreak is to blame for giving us overpowered giants that must be compensated for in our metagames.



This brings us to the present. With several successful (yet competitive underwhelming) CAPs under our belt, we are looking out onto a new ORAS metagame that is relatively stable thanks to the World Cup of Pokemon tournament. Conversely, our metagames are looking for an answer to tiering philosophy that resists the ban hammer when necessary. I believe that we can combine both of these ideals together to create something entirely new and revolutionize our project. Enough time has passed since tennisace suggested the combination of our two tribes back in 2012. Therefore, this thread serves as a discussion platform for the Create-A-Pokemon Project to form its own, new metagame (and tier) that is based around the philosophy of finding metagame balance through creationrather than omission.

Let me elaborate. In my ideal world, we would take some form of the current generation of the Overused metagame and control form it into our own metagame. This metagame would eventually consist of past CAP projects and new CAP projects. The emphasis here is that not all past projects would be brought into our new metagame, at least not initially. Rather, we as a project would devote our attention to balancing our new metagame, whether it be through the introduction (or even retooling) of past CAPs or the creation of entirely new Pokemon. Our end goal would be to build a metagame that is consistently fun and balanced for all to enjoy by creating and editing our Pokemon. We would not alter any of GameFreak’s Pokemon, but would rather mold the metagame through our own creations.



Essentially, I am proposing that we convert to continually focus on all CAP Pokemon (ie. the metagame created by all of them), not just one CAP Pokemon at a time. There are several strong advantages to this idea that alleviate many of the ailments CAP has been plagued with in recent times. First and foremost, it grants us greater flexibility in the creation process, particularly with concept synthesis, to cope with the hyped-up OU metagame. With balance now listed as one of our objectives, we can build concepts that address specific threats that threaten balance. We can build Pokemon that have unusual abilities or don’t fit the CAP mold thanks to extra forgiveness embedded in the process. With the potential power to edit our creations post-process, we can explore new depths of the metagame through individual case students and their effect on the metagame. It is an excuse that allows us to have more elastic and diverse discussions.

Secondly, it alleviates the continual headache that is our playtest. Previously, all of our playtests struggle to give us accurate information about how the Pokemon performs in OU due to centralization. Everyone and their mother brings multiple counters to the new CAP, which causes awkward statistics. While centralization still exists in my proposal, it is subdued thanks to the continual nature of our new metagame. Our new “playtest” never really stops; it is simply our metagame and tier. After months of battling, we may discover that we did indeed answer our questions as players ladder and battle. It also gives us an excuse to discuss balance on a continual basis, bringing metagame discussion to an elevated position that it hasn’t had in our project since its introduction.

Thirdly, it grounds us resolutely in the metagame. It will be difficult to have a strong voice in the project if you’re not playing our metagame and are unaware of current trends. Players can quote their battle experience in discussions to provide weight to their thoughts. Since our metagame would be constantly available, we would effectively solve the age-old problem that CAP does not have a metagame to attract competitive battlers. A metagame grows competitive battlers by having a metagame. Since we do not have a metagame for battlers to latch onto, of course we don’t have consistent competitive contributors (unlike when CAP originally started in the OU forum). Rising_Dusk’s concern of player disinterest is a thing of the past. Most of our official tournaments require competitive battlers to learn multiple metagame. In my estimation, players are now more excited to learn new metagames than ever before. And if we’re touting the banners of balance and creation, it will be a tempting proposition to join. We will have a set of dedicated battlers that are veterans to our tier.

Fourthly, consider the CAP brand name. Our past projects are popular, largely thanks to the flavor giants who so graciously lend their talents. I jokingly ask the Pokemon Showdown lobby, “what’s a cap?” almost every time I log on. There is always someone with an answer, and most people are eager to say which CAP is their favorite. We build competitively (and flavorly) enticing Pokemon that battlers are naturally drawn to use. Currently, we stuff them all into a spin-off metagame that is cast into the shadows. With this proposal, we would gradually bring these Pokemon back into the limelight to study and battle with on a daily basis. This is what separates my proposal from any sort of fakemon project or other metagame. We have a rock solid history and an excruciatingly exact process that accommodates for thousands of users to contribute.

Of course, there are many (many) kinks that will need to be resolved. How will we choose which CAPs to edit? How will we determine balance? Will there be a council? Will there be unbannings? How can we fit currently banned abilities into the process? Which parts of current CAP will we keep, and which parts will we need to revise? Will it be successful? I have my own answers to each of these questions, but I would like to explore them as a Policy Review Committee in future threads. Please don’t let tiny details formulate your entire basis of thinking in this thread. We are here to discuss general CAP philosophy. The details can be ironed out once we’ve decided on our direction. Think large scope for the moment.



In my mind, the advantages are overwhelming for us to redefine ourselves as a project. Our process is honed enough to accommodate for our first creations, while our past wisdom can help us redefine some of our previous projects. We’re looking down the barrel of a current metagame that would be a great starting point for us to build a metagame, complete with its own bans, unbans, and rulings. The exciting thing is that we can work to balance a metagame mostly through creation rather than deletion, a prospect that is currently unavailable anywhere else on Smogon. It gives us a new philosophy statement to drive our reasoning and creations. Finally, it gives us a metagame to constantly play and enjoy. The current playtests are too fleeting to learn anything, whereas a full-on metagame will teach new users how to battle and contribute to our discussion. We can finally get real results, every day of the year.

In terms of our short-term forecast, I am proposing this: let’s start CAP21 as if it were any other CAP. We will consider balance in its process, and how to assimilate it into the current OU metagame. While we create CAP21, we can iron out details on new processes, decide on which previous CAP to bring into our metagame, and how our concept workshop will evolve for future CAPs. The CAP21 “playtest” will mark the beginning of our new (currently unnamed) metagame that features current OU with CAP21 that will never be shut down. Afterwards, we will aim to create balance in this new metagame by introducing old CAPs or making new ones.

This is not a finite decision, yet. I have been considering this shift in philosophy for almost a year and would like to formally bring it to your attention now. I would like to hear your opinions on the current state of CAP and whether or not this new ideal is worth pursuing. While I am content with there the process is currently at, there is room for improvement, which I think this proposal will bring in spades. Yes, I am aware that what I am proposing is severe (we’d essentially be forming our own tier), but I think the shift is justified. It will provide CAP with more focus, discussions, and fun.

Thanks for reading and happy discussing!
 
Happy 4k man!

Interesting read. So, I suppose you are suggesting that we could make CAPs for the CAP Metagame again, as the pre-Platinum CAP community did with Syclant, Revenankh, Pyroak, Fidgit, and Stratagem. I think this could work once things are settled with the power creep and Mega Evolution, and possibly even before that.

I believe we actually have a reason to call it the CAP Metagame now! We should learn about our own standalone tier as well, now that we have made 20 Pokemon in the past 6-7 years.
 
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Bughouse

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I disagree with this on a fundamental level because the proposition is based on the idea that adding even more threats to a metagame that already has too many threats will somehow balance it. It won't. I'd rather stick with a mission that is currently fulfilled poorly than move to a mission that is arguably unfulfillable.
 

Cretacerus

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As far as I see it, the issue with the metagame is not necessarily the lack of balance, but the increasing difficulty to prepare for every single threat that has been added over the years. What differentiates ORAS OU from past metagames is not the overcentralization by certain Pokemon, but that nowadays one can't expect to cover every single threat anymore, and is forced to lose against certain team match-ups no matter what. Every OU threat does have its fair amount of viable counters and checks as of now, so there is not much use in adding more of those to the metagame. Rather, the issue is fitting all of them onto one team, something I can't see the "balance through creation" approach - or really any other approach for that matter - solve as easily.

I think the issue mentioned in the OP - namely that a merged CAP metagame would require the potential playtesters to have knowledge on a rarely played metagame - is quite relevant, since that would mean that our practical knowledge would come mostly from a very small pool of people. Also, it would risk undermining the CAP project's goal of exploring and experimenting with the current OU dynamics, in favor of creating our own balanced and independent metagame, something that is already done in lots of other projects, such as OU Theorymon and multiple OM Petmods.
 
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DHR-107

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Posting this for ginganinja as for some reason hes not on PRC.

Request said:
I'm going to preface this because I actually think its a good idea. CAP can finally get its "own metagame" and is less reliant on playing OU, which is an issue atm because not enough people play that meta in CAP, and thus it makes things a little difficult when you make a CAP for it, that said, I do want to bring up one specific issue that I already mentioned over IRC, its not new, but IIRC there wasn't a proper solution discussed.

-How are you going to balance the metagame?

Obviously, CAP will have different balancing standards to OU, just like every tier, but CAP is a special case because it (currently) lacks any form of suspect testing. In fact, CAP has never looked at balancing anything as large as this. On one hand, you can have some sort of suspect thing, but then you need a Council, some sort of special ladder, a ranking cut-off for skilled voters (difficult when you don't have an established competitive playerbase) and everything else that goes with it. You can fix or tweak past CAPs to make them more balanced (assuming they are the unhealthy elements as opposed to standard OU mons) but I find it difficult to see how effective this would be. Past CAP Moderation has previously been very ANTI tweaking of past CAPs, its generally a sore point when discussed over IRC (or at least thats the impression I get), either because its an acknowledgement that we screwed up, or because people prefer keeping the CAPs as to how they are. You could also release a CAP designed to check the unhealthy aspects of the metagame, but I would highly recommend against this. OU saw this in action with a Giratina / Aegislash suspect test / metagame and is fully aware that this generally doesn't lead to some sort of positive metagame.

I guess I like the idea, but don't want us all skipping ahead and then running around like headless chickens when it comes to handling a metagame. Its seriously a big ask, and I hope that there is some sort of plan going around in order to keep the metagame enjoyable.
I have some thoughts on this topic too and will need to spend some time writing them down, but ultimately I am leaning towards agreeing with the overall sentiment, on the proviso that the original caps still have some sort of "retro ladder/metagame" where they stay in their original guises and untouched.
 

nyttyn

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on the proviso that the original caps still have some sort of "retro ladder/metagame" where they stay in their original guises and untouched.
this would have to be on its own server. there's already a bajillion tiers and even challenge cup got das boot to help remedy this issue. i don't think they'd be down for CAP getting two tiers, doubly so since one of them would be likely incredibly underplayed.


At any rate, I'll post more about the minute details sometime today, but for now I think this is a good idea, but for different reasons than others. Namely, I believe that ORAS has become a metagame so bloated with threats and power users that a single introduction will only ever cause the shit show we've seen for the past few playtests. As it stands, our mission statement will pretty much never be fulfilled by simply adding singular editions - any one threat can no longer save a playstyle, can no longer revolutionize a specific archetype, and can no longer fulfil specific gimmicks - the threats to playstyles are too wide, a single user cannot change an archeytpe, and gimmicks are now trivial to hard check/counter if they are a singular mon.

Regardless of if anyone's in favor or against this concept, I plead for them to consider how both we lack OU players, and with how the very nature of OU's continual shifts and extremely vast sea of threats has made our past playtests fail in a very real and readily apparent way. Regardless of how you feel, evidence has shown that singular entites added to the OU metagame for a short period of time simply have no effect anymore unless they are incredibly overcentralizing. Consider these factors before coming to a decision on your stance of all of this.
 

jas61292

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When, as Birkal mentioned, tennisace brought up this idea back after the Necturna project, I was very, very much against it. Part of this was because of the way he went about it, but certainly not all of it. After all, back then I was still pretty new here. Sure, I was on the PRC by then and all that, but really, I didn't know much about how things here were done, policy wise. Heck, the first policy review thing (and one of the only ones before this whole ordeal) I remember was about whether or not we should even have a PRC, which I couldn't even have much of an opinion on at the time.

No, the reason I was against it back then was because it was a shift from the established process that was unwarranted and unneeded. Tomohawk and Necturna were fine project with respect to the OU metagame, and at the time, I could not see any reason whatsoever why we should have wanted to change the way we do things. But that is different from today. I don't want to rehash what has already been said, but I feel that the reality of the ORAS OU metagame and the current makeup of the CAP userbase are making it far harder than ever for us to have any kind of reasonably successful project if we are trying to build for OU. Do I think it is impossible? No. But do I think that it is the best thing we can do right now? Absolutely not. At this point, I would agree that attempting to shift our focus to a metagame of our own would be the right direction to take.

With that said, I have many concerns about how to best do this, and some important disagreements with some of the ideas outlined in the OP. Most notably would be my concerns about integrating past projects, and about potential changes and revisions.

First off I would like to say that I very much against the idea of trying to start this new metagame from scratch. As mentioned already in the thread, we very much have an established CAP metagame userbase, and basically saying "fuck you" to them, and eliminating that metagame for something new goes completely against the idea of trying to leverage that userbase and unite the CAP community again, as Birkal seemed to be getting at. If we are going to have a CAP metagame that we build for, every CAP Pokemon, past, present, and future, needs to be available for play. While I am certainly not against shorter testing periods without some for the purposes of testing tweaks and whatnot, we absolutely cannot just remove a CAP Pokemon from the metagame, with the possible exception of a ban in the same vein as OU, if something is broken to the extent that it is the only real way to achieve what we want.

Second, I highly dislike the idea of editing past CAPs for the sake of balance for one major reason: where does it end? If we tweak CAP X and it is now balanced, maybe suddenly CAP Y needs a tweak, which causes CAP Z to need one, and on and on. Balance is important, but it is also relative. Every change in a metagame effect far more than just a single Pokemon. Furthermore, metagames shift over time, even without changes to the available Pokemon. What seems like a problem today might not be one in a couple months. But if we give the ability to alter Pokemon we may never get to that point. So, with that said, I do not think we should have any process for adjusting Pokemon on the fly once they are a part of the metagame. If we start this up and want to alter older Pokemon before the new meta truly starts, that might be OK, but once they are in, they should not be changed any more than real Pokemon are. That last part though is important. I have no issue altering Pokemon in the same manner as real Pokemon, and in fact, if we are to do this, I feel that we finally must do so. Past CAPs are stuck in the past. If they are to be a part of a current metagame, I don't think we can allow that to continue. Update past CAPs with new stuff from the games that came out since their release. Even alter them a bit once they are out. But after that, leave them alone. OU doesn't alter a Pokemon when there are problems with the metagame. Neither does UU, RU, NU, LC, Doubles or any other normal metagame. And after all, even if we seek to create a metagame, we are still the Create-a-Pokemon Project. If we spend all our time focusing on the past Pokemon, we detract from what we can do with future projects. As Birkal mentioned, this kind of change to the project would open up the door to concepts actively about specific threats and balancing the meta. Let new projects be the balance we seek (if possible), and the the metagame itself do the rest. The more we distance ourself from micromanagement, the better we will be.

While I do have a few other worries, most are minor in comparison to these. Overall, if we can do this in a good way, I think it probably is the best path for us to take at this juncture, and I feel that not only would it help a lot, but it would also be a lot of fun.
 

Da Pizza Man

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I'm not really in support of this idea, and for a couple reasons

First of all, there is no guarantee that our new CAP metagame will be all that different from OU. I don't mean the metagame itself, as a metagame with 20 more Pokémon than another one is most certainly different than another, I'm saying the problem of OU's current problem of the amount of threats it has is likely to remain. For the first couple of CAPs, the metagame is not likely to change too much and the metagame is likely to react to new threats being introduced in a similar way to how it acts now. What I mean by this, is that the tier goes full on retard whenever a new cap is introduced and this happens all of the time, if you need an example, look at where Hoopa-Unbound is currently at in the OU metagame or how the playtests of all of our Gen 6 playtests have went. Honestly, depending on how the tier goes after a while, this problem is going to stay, and if not then it just becomes another OU metagame, where the tier is so full of threats that it becomes a tier, and in the worst situation, both of these problems can arise.

Second, like jas61292 said, this is somewhat of a huge "Fuck you" to current players of the cap metagame. What I imagine happening is incredibly similar to the hysteria that happened when balanced hackmons decided to put in the EV limit and Team Preview into their metagame, but they also added it to Classic Hackmons, causing a bunch of users to complain about this changes and eventually after getting fed up with all of this, The Immortal decides to take down the Classic Hackmons ladder because of all this. Now, imagine doing this, but removing something even more fundamental to that tier, its just going to cause outrage from players of the current Metagame
 

DetroitLolcat

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I'm very intrigued by this proposal. Essentially, we'd stop creating Pokemon and start creating a metagame. I don't know if anyone here is into the competitive Smash scene, but if you are you might have heard of a game called Project M. It's a mod of Brawl, created because many competitive Smash players were dissatisfied with Brawl's physics and poor character balance. Project M emulates Melee's physics and rebalances the characters so that just about every one of them is competitively viable. If I'm reading this proposal right, the proposed new CAP metagame would be a lot like OU's version of Project M. We'd add our CAPs into the metagame then tweak them to create an ideally balanced metagame. This proposal sounds great on paper, but I'm very wary of it succeeding in practice.

For starters, this is a massive undertaking. It's more difficult than anything we're doing now. While I don't personally agree with them, there are many CAP users who believe CAP's userbase isn't capable of creating balanced and interesting Pokemon anymore. If CAP's ability to create good OU Pokemon is being called into question, what makes us think we'd be able to create our own metagame and continually "patch" it as new strategies, Pokemon, and CAPs are added? I feel like that's way too tall an order for anyone but the best OU players around. I'd like to address the four structural points that Birkal brought up in the OP, as I believe we can accomplish many of them without moving away from what CAP's doing right now.

Birkal said:
First and foremost, it grants us greater flexibility in the creation process, particularly with concept synthesis, to cope with the hyped-up OU metagame. With balance now listed as one of our objectives, we can build concepts that address specific threats that threaten balance. We can build Pokemon that have unusual abilities or don’t fit the CAP mold thanks to extra forgiveness embedded in the process. With the potential power to edit our creations post-process, we can explore new depths of the metagame through individual case students and their effect on the metagame. It is an excuse that allows us to have more elastic and diverse discussions.
Balance is already one of our objectives. Just look at CAP's mission statement: "Each Pokémon should add something new or necessary to the metagame, hopefully making the metagame more balanced, and increasing the number of viable Pokémon available for competitive play.". We've made at least two Pokemon (Arghonaut, Malaconda) that were all about balancing Pokemon and strategies. If we want to build Pokemon that have unusual abilities or don't fit the CAP mold, the easiest solution is to relax our Ability or movepool banlist. If we want more forgiveness embedded in the process, we can do that without having to resort to this proposal. I agree with you that the power to edit our creations will allow for more elastic and diverse discussions, though. That is a real positive, and it's one of the reasons why I want to like this proposal.

Secondly, it alleviates the continual headache that is our playtest. Previously, all of our playtests struggle to give us accurate information about how the Pokemon performs in OU due to centralization. Everyone and their mother brings multiple counters to the new CAP, which causes awkward statistics. While centralization still exists in my proposal, it is subdued thanks to the continual nature of our new metagame. Our new “playtest” never really stops; it is simply our metagame and tier. After months of battling, we may discover that we did indeed answer our questions as players ladder and battle.
This part I'm not sold on. The CAP metagame got about 2000 battles in the last month it wasn't interrupted by a playtest. 2000 battles per month isn't nearly enough to learn anything, especially when it's ridiculously centralized on low-level players just bringing in 6 CAPs. It's not enough to assess what's balanced and what's not. Personally, I believe we should replace the playtest with a tournament in either the CAP or the Tournaments forum. In fact, I'm planning to write a separate PRC thread on doing that soon, but clearly that's contingent on the results of this thread. I agree that centralization will eventually fizzle out if you let the metagame run long enough, but that's assuming the metagame itself doesn't fizzle out like the CAP metagame is beginning to.

Thirdly, it grounds us resolutely in the metagame. It will be difficult to have a strong voice in the project if you’re not playing our metagame and are unaware of current trends. Players can quote their battle experience in discussions to provide weight to their thoughts. Since our metagame would be constantly available, we would effectively solve the age-old problem that CAP does not have a metagame to attract competitive battlers. A metagame grows competitive battlers by having a metagame. Since we do not have a metagame for battlers to latch onto, of course we don’t have consistent competitive contributors (unlike when CAP originally started in the OU forum).
I don't believe this a serious issue. CAP not having a metagame has never been and still isn't an obstacle to attracting competitive battlers. We attracted dozens of competitive players after Arghonaut (when we stopped building for the CAP metagame) and we still have a fair few competitive players. Furthermore, we have a metagame right now. The CAP metagame, even when we started taking it more seriously recently, has not attracted new competitive battlers to the CAP project. Plenty of Other Metagame communities don't really draw competitive battlers either. I believe the best way to attract competitive players to CAP is by making our playtests entirely tournament-style, but that's again an argument for another thread. Right now, we have a metagame with its own subforum and analyses. It's barely done a thing in terms of attracting competitive players. For that reason, I do not believe this proposal will do any better in that area.

Fourthly, consider the CAP brand name. Our past projects are popular, largely thanks to the flavor giants who so graciously lend their talents. I jokingly ask the Pokemon Showdown lobby, “what’s a cap?” almost every time I log on. There is always someone with an answer, and most people are eager to say which CAP is their favorite. We build competitively (and flavorly) enticing Pokemon that battlers are naturally drawn to use. Currently, we stuff them all into a spin-off metagame that is cast into the shadows. With this proposal, we would gradually bring these Pokemon back into the limelight to study and battle with on a daily basis. This is what separates my proposal from any sort of fakemon project or other metagame. We have a rock solid history and an excruciatingly exact process that accommodates for thousands of users to contribute.
This is a fair point. To be honest, I wish we could continue the current CAP project and also work on this proposal, but that also seems like a logistical mess. It is a shame that we're not studying our past creations as much as we could be. Personally, I'd like to see mini-tournaments on Showdown of past playtest metagames. Maybe even some sort of ranking system based on those mini-tournaments. On the other hand, we can accomplish this goal by further promoting the CAP metagame we have now.

In the end, this proposal comes down to whether this is more worth doing than what we're doing now. I don't believe it is, although I see this as an interesting proposal that I'd like to work on. But we're very good at what we do now and what we do now is worth doing. It really just feels like a matter of preference, and I prefer learning about the OU metagame by editing it rather than trying to create our own. I also believe many of the goals of this proposal (increased participation, more broad discussions) can be accomplished just as well if not better using our current method.
 

jas61292

used substitute
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Second, like jas61292 said, this is somewhat of a huge "Fuck you" to current players of the cap metagame. What I imagine happening is incredibly similar to the hysteria that happened when balanced hackmons decided to put in the EV limit and Team Preview into their metagame, but they also added it to Classic Hackmons, causing a bunch of users to complain about this changes and eventually after getting fed up with all of this, The Immortal decides to take down the Classic Hackmons ladder because of all this. Now, imagine doing this, but removing something even more fundamental to that tier, its just going to cause outrage from players of the current Metagame
I would just like to say, in case I was not clear in my post, that my problem was with the proposed approach, not the core concept behind it. I don't think anyone within the metagame community would have an issue with CAPs being made for the metagame, and I don't believe that any sort of adjustment to prior CAPs would be any more or less contentious among such people that it would be among the general CAP community. The issue was with the idea of replacing the current metagame with something new. If we do anything here is absolutely must be with the current CAP meta or an adjustment thereof, as a complete change to it is completely screwing over any chance we would have of uniting the greater CAP community.
 

Birkal

We have the technology.
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For those worrying about how this would affect numbers, consider three facets. First, CAP is a strong and recognizable name (think "branding") in the competitive Pokemon community. Many people can list at least a few Pokemon we've made and some aspect of the creation. People are naturally drawn to CAP thanks to our long-standing history and incredible flavor contributors. If we create a metagame that encourages battlers to use our Pokemon in order to participate in the process, people will flock to it. Second, the amount of people contributing to CAP with metagame knowledge would increase over our current position. Since participating will now require specific metagame knowledge (as opposed to OU where many simply speculate), battlers will need to have at least some experience on our ladder to know what they are talking about. I'd argue that the percentage of people who have gained metagame knowledge and participate in CAP will increase. Sure, there are more OU players than CAP metagame players, but only a small percentage of those players contribute to CAP currently. The percentages are borked. Finally, the current CAP metagame numbers are no indication of what our new metagame would actually look like. The current CAP metagame is officially reported as a spin-off project, and we emphasize that during every stage of the CAP process (to the point of deleting posts automatically if they mention the CAP metagame). If we have a metagame that users can use all of our Pokemon in AND contribute to the current project, that's a big draw, in my opinion. I can't imagine that its popularity wouldn't increase when officially endorsed and central to our learning.


Let's switch gears to talk about balance. I think it is safe to presume that no one has a clue how this metagame will look; we've never done something like this with such a large crowd on Smogon. Will we need a council? Maybe, especially if we won't use objective data to guide our tier. Will we need to do continual edits? I personally believe that there are objectives to be learned in making tweaks and adjustments, but it isn't a necessity to this proposal. Will there still be over-centralization on our CAPs when released? Duh, people are excited about our new Pokemon! I'd argue that centralization diminishes over time, which gives more significant data than the current "two week rager" of a metagame we have. I don't think we can have an accurate picture of how this metagame will operate until we implement it.

Regardless, Doug brought up a point on balance that I think holds weight to this conversation:

[21:16] <@~DougJustDoug> I don't think it is that hard at all to create a fun metgame
[21:16] <@~DougJustDoug> (note I didn't say balanced)
[21:16] <@~DougJustDoug> (but balanced is part of "fun")
[21:17] <@~DougJustDoug> Gamefreak doesn't seem to have a fucking clue about making balanced mons or a balanced meta -- and they churn out tons of mons and we make lots of fun metagames with their almost-random creations.
[21:18] <@~DougJustDoug> My guess is CAP can do OK, if only because we pay a ton more attention to the creations themselves, and we'll be producing far less mons than GF does.
[21:23] <@~DougJustDoug> I think the complexity and value of a "balancing system" is way overrated tho. There are metagames with a shitload of complexity to their balancing systems and their metagames are not very balanced and not very fun. There are metagames with almost no balancing systems that are balanced enough to be fun. So my assertion is that balancing system complexity does not correlate very closely with balance or fun.​

At the end of it all, we're looking to make a metagame that is fun (check out Smogon Tiering Philosophy if you disagree). Using new Pokemon with different conglomerations of typing, abilities, movepool, and stats is inherently adds to fun. If you don't think so, then explain to me why battlers in the CAP metagame (try to) use Malaconda. At the end of it all, we'll still be making a metagame more fun (and balanced) than GameFreak, which is an accomplishment in and of itself. Will it be as balanced as other tiers? Who knows. It will certainly have a more conservative approach on banning philosophy, since it accommodates for twenty more threats that the OU metagame lacks. We can't follow OU's bans because our metagame will look much different than theirs, so we will need to formalize our own form of tiering at some point down the role. But overall, balance would be an objective that we strive for, but not necessarily use to solely define our success.

If it wasn't apparent, DougJustDoug will be the closer on this thread. Due to the historical implications of a proposal like this, it would be unfitting to have the person who proposed this concept implement it into the process.
 

nyttyn

From Now On, We'll...
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I'll try to make my thoughts as succinct as possible, but this is a rather complicated subject, and I have rather passionate views upon it.

I will begin by saying I support this wholeheartedly. The root of my support is a belief that, as things stand, CAP cannot continue on its current path. I firmly believe that, given the current state of CAP, and with the outcome the past few have had (both in playtest and in building), attempting to continue with our current mission of building for the OU metagame is the risk of ulcers for the users who still care at the absolute best. Was it because the audience of CAP has changed over the years? Or is it because CAP voter mentality and process simply could not keep up with both game freak's titanic power creep and smogon's ban happy culture? These and more are all possible causes, but regardless, the end result in the same: CAP simply cannot hope to keep up with the OU metagame.

There's another reason for CAP's continued decay, and it's both somewhat tied into the prior mentioned issue, and a number of others: our shortage of viable concepts. In some ways this was inevitable - between our reluctance to go back to prior concepts (you can see all the bitching in concept assessment about 'it's been done!'), and the continued amount of pokemon who fulfill hypothetical niches (special rock type attacker, most new moves now come with viable users, XY's resurgance of priority, just to name a few), we were always going to eventually run into a shortage of concepts. Intensely magnifying this is the pressure to have concepts go through an extremely stringent process - no longer can people feel comfortable with submitting pokemon that would sound fun to build and play with, for there is now far too much pressure for concepts to be 'competitively viable,' due to the fact that in such a metagame of not only titans, but a plethora of them, if a pokemon doesn't make its presence known and in a huge way, it simply fades into obscurity (as seen by our last few playtests). Add into the mix the demand for 'new' and 'interesting' concepts, and we're left with an absolute drought of 'viable' concepts. Right now, this isn't as huge as the prior mentioned issue, but it is very quickly becoming an enormous one.

Finally, consider current CAP culture. What do we talk and bitch about on #CAP? "Oh, CAP isn't competitively balanced!" "AAGH, WHAT IF CRABHAMMER DOESNT GET ON SLATE?!" "Drain Punch is TOO POWERFUA LGAJFLS." Now I don't mind discussions about balance, in fact I think they can be quite fun, but not only have they dominated CAP as of late, they've done so in extremely drama raising and stress inducing ways. Often times, discussions of 'fun' simply don't come into play - it feels like CAP culture ahs simply become bitching about 'uninformed users voting for inferior options,' and with how the CAP userbase is, how could it be anything else? With a casual playerbase making up the majority of a democratic project which, in the eyes of the more devoted CAP users, prides itself on 'competitiveness?' Is it any wonder we've spent so much time and so many angry hours, both over IRC and in the PRC, attempting to 'remedy' this issue? It feels like CAP has no longer become a project aimed at inclusion and enjoyment - much like many other aspects of current Smogon, it feels dominated by an attempt and urge of utmost zeal to cater to only the highest level of play, and enjoyment and culture is suffering for it.

Ultimately, this third issue is the root of my current concerns with CAP. It doesn't feel like we're here to have fun anymore - and don't get me wrong, I'm not proposing we completely abandon balance with the new system and just turn into a reckless fakemons project. But at the same time, I believe that we absolutely need to change our ways, because the current system simply does not work. There's a number of other reasons why I support this proposal (for example, I've always felt that leaving previous CAPs to rot was a waste), but I feel these are the most important roots of my support for this proposal. And seeing how none better have been raised, nor can I think of any solution that would work better, I support it entirely.

With that stated, I have the following thoughts and hypothetical proposals for the future (all of which, of course, are contingent upon this actually going through)

1. Revisions

I believe that, at the start of every generation (and in ORAS's case, as soon as we go through with this), CAPs should get a quick (no more than a few days total on each, maybe a month total for all CAPs) pass over, with their movepools updated to achieve parity with the new generation. Flavor moves will be quickly decided upon with a brief poll (Y/N for each option), and then a second equally short poll for blatantly competitive moves (ex drain punch on a physical fighting type). Universal TMs will simply be added to all CAPs as this process goes on. In the interest of the sake of time, it would also be ideal to do these in lots - say, three at a time. If anything winds up being glaringly overpowered, the moderator team (or a potential future council) can simply have it quickly removed, no problem. In the interest of keeping these from being more than simply updates, only new and updated moves will be voted on (For example, Rototiller could be brought up and voted on as it was a new grass move, Knock Off could be brought up and voted on because it got a change, but Tackle could not as it received no changes).

Beyond generational updates, however, I do not think CAPs should generally recieve changes, as that would be a massive cat and mouse game as has been previously pointed out. Instead, I believe that only truly egregious cases on either the under or overpowered scale (Think Pyroak) should be addressed. The process for this, in my eyes, should be a open thread (for, say, a week) where people can voice their concerns and how they think the pokemon in question should be fixed, and then executive decision should be taken by either a hypthetical council or the moderators. It is a bit undemocratic to completely circumvent democratic voting in these cases, but I think that user input should be sufficent for these - afterall, the entire point for the revision is that what was voted on no longer works, and as such in the interest of not having yet another revamp, it should be decided upon by our best (which is why I'd lean towards a council being established for these sorts of things). Granted, we can cross the bridge of voting when we come to it, but ultimately I think these sort of mid-generational changes should only be in extreme situations, and should be treated as such.

2. Council and Bans

It is my belief that a council should be established. One should not be immediately established - as the CAP metagame is in a very immature state right now, along with a new CAP coming on the way, combined with all of the development that the surge of players (hopefully, anyway) that the CAP meta will gain from this change will bring, but that can be discussed in the future. Ultimately, I believe a council will need to exist to handle only extreme cases - such as CAPs dramatically under or overperforming, or aegislash levels of centralization. As CAP is/will be a metagame biased towards inclusion instead of exclusion (we're literallly pokemon ++ more pokemon), I think that this council should only consider bans in dramatic situations, and as such only exist as a sort of 'emergency protocol.'

3. CAP Inclusion in the New Metagame

I'm going to be real here - there's is absolutely no point to this if we don't include all CAPs we currently have made in this new metagame. Going into this, we already have the benefit of a bunch of pre-made pokemon, and at least SOME established discussion of the metagame already in place. If we effecitvely treat CAP 21 as a 'reboot,' then it will...literally be the exact same as our previous playtest system until CAP 22. And even then it will only be TWO additions - it'll be months and months before we have enough additions to shift up the meta in any dramatic way, even IF we work on previous CAP revisions concurrently to new CAPs.
 

nyttyn

From Now On, We'll...
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User Stratos asked me to post this on his behalf, and I think it raises some very good counterpoints.


I'm sure most of you guys didn't expect or want to hear from me on this issue but i saw birkals proposal (still read prc once in a while) and i couldnt help but be very very concerned. you all are all in favor of rushing into this but you need to step back and consider the opportunity cost first:

currently, anyone familiar with OU can participate in CAP, which is like 90% of the site. if you make this change, then you'll have to be familiar with the CAP meta in order to participate in CAP, which is like 0.1% of the site.

by default this move will basically ensure that no serious tournament contenders will participate in CAP because they'd have to learn a new metagame which has no incentive to learn it and takes away from the time they spend studying a metagame which does "matter." not to mention—no offense, but like, the CAP community doesn't really provide enough of a challenge to top OU players to be entertaining to play against.

it also makes it incredibly hard to recruit new players, because they now have to be recruited through the CAP metagame which if you hasn't been remotely effectively advertised since doug's create-a-pokemon server stopped being listed right under main. unless you can get someone interested in CAP meta you can no longer get them interested in CAP.

so what this significant raising of the barrier of entry for cap means at best is that it becomes even far more insular than it was in the past (because you basically have to "main" cap to participate) and at worst slows the rate of gaining new users or even kills the project.

a second consequence to consider is what it does to the legitimacy of the project. the justification for cap, at least as long as i've been here, was that it was a project that taught us more about OU—not as quickly as playing matches did but hey we could have some fun doing it. now that that's gone, what justifies CAP being a prominent section of the site? you learn about creating pokemon for a balanced metagame, sure, but unless you plan to get hired to gamefreak that's really a useless bit of knowledge. it seems like all you have left is "doug programmed some stuff for chaos and this is what he got in return."
 

Bughouse

Like ships in the night, you're passing me by
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everything stratos said

When aim first approached me with questions about getting involved in CAP back in March, his first concern was about the rigid process and generally "how things work." His second question was how he could contribute when he didn't know the CAP meta. I get the desire to build for the CAP meta since that's what tons of people already think we do. But it will absolutely create a huge barrier of entry to people who know OU* but not the all-CAP meta, and one that they have no incentive to surpass, other than just for fun.

*not that you even have to know OU well to be a top contributor in CAP... I'm terrible at OU but somehow seen as some sort of competitive authority around here
 

Deck Knight

Blast Off At The Speed Of Light! That's Right!
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Going to echo the above posts. OU is the most accessible metagame on the site, where "FULL CAP" as it was once called is one of the least accessible, and can even change if one new CAP happens to mess with another. The first time this was raised the issue was both source and idea. For those who don't know, and there was a long PR Thread on this, Doug is the final word of the CAP project per an agreement with chaos. To the extent anyone was lambasted, it was to point out the fact a bypass of this arrangement was attempted. The only person with the authority to make such a change (except when done via the preferred Democratic channels) is Doug.

Presented before us now it's just down to implementation, and to be perfectly honest, a project like this would require the userbase support to justify using Showdown resources to create it. It would be an addition to CAP rather than a shift in the existing purpose. That userbase not being present, the idea has no legs.

There is also a problem with the foundational premise, that creating a new threat introduces balance. Lets say for example this was Aegislash meta and our Concept was "Aegislash counter." Now you have a meta where teams have to prepare for Aegislash and Aegislash counter, whereby because of the heavy lift of the proposition means you have two OP impossible to prepare for mons instead of one. Or, think if it algorythmically.

RBY: You have 6 Pokemon to prepare for 14 Major Threats.
GSC: You have 6 Pokemon to prepare for Snorlax and also like 25 other things.
ADV: You have 6 Pokemon to prepare for 40 Major Threats...

I'm sensing a trend. And by definition CAP adds a "Major Threat" each time, so people would be endlessly busy.
 

Ignus

Copying deli meat to hard drive
I'm also learning against it for a lot of the same reasons people posted, but I'd have to argue that introducing "major threats" could be healthy for a metagame.
Ever heard of 'perfect imbalance?' It's basically an concept in game design that stops from a single entity (in this case, a Pokemon) from being noticeably overtuned. Let's say we have three Pokemon, A, B, and C. Oh, also, C is exceptionally overpowered. It can beat almost anything that currently exists in the game (A and B) and you can't stop it. The standard course of action would be for C to be removed. That's how OU works. Using perfect imbalance, however, you can introduce a D Pokemon that beats C. Suddenly, C doesn't look nearly as strong as it once did.

But wait! Now we have this super overpowered D Pokemon in our game! What do we do? The answer is actually quite simple. We make D lose to either A or B. This setup of Pokemon Rock Paper Scissors can lead to metagame balance artificially.

That said, Perfect Imbalance also has the potential to ACTUALLY turn Pokemon in to Rock Paper Scissors. So that's a completely different issue.

I don't think it would be impossible to handle the metagame balance portion of the project, but I'm honestly really worried that creating what is essentially a new metagame will actually isolate cap even more in the long run. We might get a couple of new competitive players to join in when we start, but looking a year or two in to the future CAP would have its own metagame, with its own Pokemon, in its own forum... It sounds like a really good way to slowly strangle CAP into its final days. Not sure if it's worth the risk.
 

jas61292

used substitute
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The last few post have been fairly hesitant, and I would like to make a post here expressing why I feel that a lot of the concerns are either exaggerated or really unfounded. This is not to say that there are not valid concerns: there definitely are. But I think some arguments people have been making are not really as true, or as problematic as people make them out to be.

I think one of the most important points to address is what people are talking about with regard to accessibility. First off, I think the whole idea that the CAP metagame is somehow exceptionally inaccessible is just not true. I think the first thing that needs to be addressed in this regard is the whole concept of accessibility. What does it even mean? Ease of entry is really the way I feel people are intending it, and that is the definition I would agree with. Yet no one really seems to back up that claim. Rather, what they are backing up is more claims about popularity. Is it less popular than OU? Yeah, definitely. But less accessible? I'm not so sure. People talk about things like changing threats whenever a new CAP arrives, but is that really so different from the changes that happen all the time in OU? Heck, it seems like the past two generations we are always in the process of banning something, except when a new game comes out and we have a whole plethora of new stuff; far more than a single new Pokemon. What's more, if we did decide to go down the path of utilizing the CAP meta, we would have complete control of our own metagame. We would not be beholden to the twists and turns of the OU suspect process, and, depending on our policies, this could in fact make the metagame far more stable, which is a major key for accessibility.

With that said, barrier of entry for a metagame is very different than barrier of entry for a project. We don't need people to just play a metagame. Rather, we need people to know it and want to participate in a project around it. As mentioned, far more people know OU than any other metagame. But is that so true when it comes to the CAP project? Time and time again people talk about how we do not have people who know OU very well. What's more, the vast majority of our userbase are people who would not care whether we are making a CAP for OU, UU, Doubles, Hackmons, or any other conceivable metagame. Like it or not, the bulk of our userbase is people who participate because they think making Pokemon is cool and fun. Honestly, though, I do not think that is as much of a bad thing as people try and make it out to be. This might come off as a bit radical, but I don't think we need "good OU players" or "good [whatever tier] players" to make a good project for any given tier. Why? Because I would honestly argue that there really is no such thing as "good OU players" or whatnot. Rather there is such thing as "good Pokemon players" or maybe even as specific as "good 6v6 singles" players. But to go any more specific than that is to be overly specific and miss out on the person's true talent. I'd argue that maybe 95% of Pokemon skill is fully transferable from metagame to metagame, at least within the same general format. This is the very reason why we can see people who are normally OU players winning major tournaments for non-OU tiers. Its not because the playerbase is bad. Its because the specific player is good at Pokemon. They just need to adjust to the specifics of the tier. The mechanics, as well as the general strategies and tactics are still the same. If you look at the history of the CAP project I think it should become fairly obvious that specifically playing OU has never been as important to contribution to the project as simply being generally knowledgeable about competitive Pokemon. Plenty of top contributors we have had throughout the years (yes, even in the olden days when we supposedly had more competitive players) have been people who were never known for OU prowess. That's not to say we didn't have some such people, but many were not. Some were known for other metagames, while many others were never renown battlers at all. A basic familiarity with what you are talking about is always needed, of course, but such familiarity can come from a few individuals framing the discussion, as well by looking through the myriad statistics, replays, info threads and other such things that are available. Once you have that familiarity, it is the ability to produce and analyze competitive arguments that is most valuable. And too often do I feel that later part is lost on people. While I certainly can appreciate someone who knows their stuff contributing to discussion, posts that give an opinion as if it is an absolute fact and fail to even attempt to analyze opposing views are really not that helpful to this project.

Even with all that said though, why change? All I have really been saying so far is that the metagame we choose may really not be as important as people make it out to be. It doesn't give a single reason why we should not just stick with the most popular tier. So, why? Simply put, because what we are doing is just not working anymore. Maybe we could continue on for a few more projects as is, but the interest is not there like it once was. I think nyttyn put it well when he said "it doesn't feel like we're here to have fun anymore." This is Smogon. A site about Pokemon. A video game. Ultimately, the only reason people are here for anything at all, be it CAP, Tournaments, C&C or anything else is because they want to enjoy themselves. When, as a project, we stop enjoying ourselves, we stop serving any purpose whatsoever. That is why we change.

Having our own metagame gives us a brand new environment to try things we have never tried. We have complete control, and ultimately we can do things the way people enjoy doing them. To again echo nyttyn, "I'm not proposing we completely abandon balance with the new system and just turn into a reckless fakemons project." In fact, I think such a change wouldn't even call for any real adjustment to our project goals. As I already mentioned, I feel that 95% of Pokemon skill is metagame independent. As such, 95% of what we can learn through a CAP project is applicable to Pokemon as a whole. This is something I believe has always been true, and that, consciously or not, we have all always know. If it was not true, there would be no point to CAP. Why try and learn about OU by creating something that is not OU? Because the knowledge is transferable.

Right now, what we need is a change. Is this the best change we could make? I don't know. But it is something feasible, something in line with what many people have wanted or believed (some for a very long time), and something that I believe can open up a whole world of new opportunities for us. And I would much rather try something new and fail, than sit and do nothing, and watch the project slowly decay because we are too afraid to change.

--

As a side note, I just want to comment on the whole "you can't balance by adding mons" thing? First off, I believe this is simply untrue, as Ignis mentioned above. However, I don't even think that really matters. Deck Knight talked about how the trend over time was to more threats that you need to account for. Each new threat puts a burden on players to cover it. However, a quick glance over at the main Smogon Policy Review forum will show you a thread or two where people are arguing that the number of threats you need to prepare for is already greater than the number of threats it is possible to prepare for. The fact is that, if needing to prepare for everything makes you busy, then we are arguably already at the point where people are "endlessly busy." And you can't be any more busy than that. Adding more gives you more that you need to cover, but also gives you more ways that you can cover threats. It could make things more balanced. It could make things less balanced. It could do neither. So while I will not try any claim that adding Pokemon will inherently make our metagame more balanced, I think the fact is that Pokemon additions alone do not have a positive or negative effect on balance.

With that said, I am completely with what Doug said in the IRC quote in Birkal's post. I don't really think it is that hard to create a fun metagame. I think we will worry a lot about it, but if we actually go and try, I think it will be easy for us to get people to be happy with what we do.
 

Stratos

Banned deucer.
Rather there is such thing as "good Pokemon players" or maybe even as specific as "good 6v6 singles" players. But to go any more specific than that is to be overly specific and miss out on the person's true talent. I'd argue that maybe 95% of Pokemon skill is fully transferable from metagame to metagame, at least within the same general format. This is the very reason why we can see people who are normally OU players winning major tournaments for non-OU tiers. Its not because the playerbase is bad. Its because the specific player is good at Pokemon. They just need to adjust to the specifics of the tier. The mechanics, as well as the general strategies and tactics are still the same.
you're confusing the skill set needed to win a tournament with the skill set needed to make a CAP but really they're pretty different. Any good player can take a good team in a metagame and win a majority of their matches in that meta. A battle with an opponent requires very little metagame knowledge—you need to know enough to be able to guess your opponent's sets and that's it. A match against a known team requires literally zero metagame knowledge. you need a lot of meta knowledge to build a team, and even more to make a CAP. it's true that it's easier for top players to learn a new meta and become one of its top players but it still takes dozens of hours of work to say, learn a tier for slam.

im honestly not sure where i was going with this. you're right, the typical cap participant wouldnt give less of a shit what metagame CAP was for. I'm mostly tailoring my argument to say that moving from OU to CAP means you are 100% cutting off anyone who would participate in CAP not because they want to create a new Pokemon but because they enjoy the metagame and are interested in a forum project that has to do with that metagame.

However, that kind of person, though they tend to be spectacular contributors are also a small minority among the project.

If you look at the history of the CAP project I think it should become fairly obvious that specifically playing OU has never been as important to contribution to the project as simply being generally knowledgeable about competitive Pokemon. Plenty of top contributors we have had throughout the years (yes, even in the olden days when we supposedly had more competitive players) have been people who were never known for OU prowess. That's not to say we didn't have some such people, but many were not. Some were known for other metagames, while many others were never renown battlers at all.
id argue that when people who didnt know OU well are regarded as top CAP contributors it's because they're skilled at talking out of their ass and making bullshit arguments that fall apart to people who know what they're talking about, but because they're the blind leading the blind, they're never really called on it. as someone who's on top of the DOU metagame, it's easy to tell when people are talking out of their ass with DOU (even if to the untrained observer it looks like they're making solid arguments). I was never on top of OU in the same way—i was much more in the camp of people talking out of their ass—but from talking to the people who were and participated in CAP, it was a lot of that deal.

As I already mentioned, I feel that 95% of Pokemon skill is metagame independent. As such, 95% of what we can learn through a CAP project is applicable to Pokemon as a whole. This is something I believe has always been true, and that, consciously or not, we have all always know. If it was not true, there would be no point to CAP. Why try and learn about OU by creating something that is not OU? Because the knowledge is transferable.
yeah a lot of pokemon skill is metagame independent but that's not really the pokemon skill that goes into cap most of the time. like if i play 10 ru matches with you thats going to teach you mostly the same thing as playing 10 ou matches with you, but if i build 10 ru teams with you—sure, some of that skill transfers over to OU, but a lot less of it. CAP is a lot more comparable to the latter than the former.

-----

in all, I think the best contributors to the CAP project have consistently been the ones who put OU first and creating a pokemon second, such as reachzero and pttp. Moving to a separate CAP metagame completely removes this entire "class" of contributors, because the question changes from "do you enjoy OU? Come create a pokemon for it with us!" to "do you want to create a pokemon? come learn this metagame with us so we can create pokemon for it!" however, since these contributors make up a small minority of cap contributors, it probably won't be a catastrophe numbers-wise if you do make this move.

i still think it's a big blow to the legitimacy of the project to change from creating pokemon as a means to learning ou, to creating pokemon for its own sake.
 

DetroitLolcat

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After reading through some of the posts made in favor of the proposal, I do not believe there are adequate reasons to justify changing our direction. I'd like to take a look at nyttyn and jas61292's posts specifically, as they're the most thorough arguments in favor of the proposal posted recently.

nyttyn said:
I will begin by saying I support this wholeheartedly. The root of my support is a belief that, as things stand, CAP cannot continue on its current path. I firmly believe that, given the current state of CAP, and with the outcome the past few have had (both in playtest and in building), attempting to continue with our current mission of building for the OU metagame is the risk of ulcers for the users who still care at the absolute best. Was it because the audience of CAP has changed over the years? Or is it because CAP voter mentality and process simply could not keep up with both game freak's titanic power creep and smogon's ban happy culture? These and more are all possible causes, but regardless, the end result in the same: CAP simply cannot hope to keep up with the OU metagame.
I entirely disagree that CAP cannot hope to keep up with the OU metagame just because it's taken us a little longer than usual to adapt to Generation 6's power creep. CAP's gone through two generation shits in its history, and clearly the shift from 4 to 5 has gone much more smoothly than the one from 5 to 6. We led off Generation 5 by creating Tomohawk, Necturna, and Mollux. All three of those Pokemon were exciting to make and extremely balanced projects for their playtest metagames. On the other hand, the trio of Volkraken, Plasmanta, and Naviathan have not been nearly as successful. One reason is that the power creep from Gen 5 to 6 is much greater than we imagined and also much greater than the one from 4 to 5. Also, we waited a long time for the Gen 5 metagame to settle down before starting our first CAP. For Gen 6, we jumped right into the (quite literal) fire. We waited until Round 3 of suspect testing to begin our first Gen 5 CAP. With Generation 6, we started our first CAP mere days after the first round of testing concluded. It's only natural that it's taking us a little longer to adapt to Gen 6's power creep, but it also means we're not as far behind the curve as we think.

More importantly, we're getting better at adjusting to Gen 6's power creep with each passing CAP. I'm not going to count Plasmanta because that project had a myriad of issues that would have doomed any CAP. Let's just compare Volkraken and Naviathan. Volkraken was far too underpowered for its metagame; there's no chance it would see significant use. However, the same cannot be said about Naviathan. Naviathan didn't keep up with the power creep, but it came pretty darn close. If we gave it an extra coverage move here or a stat buff there, it would have been good enough. I would go as far as to say the "CAP cannot keep up with the power creep" argument cannot be made until we take into consideration the conclusion of the Power Level PR. Furthermore, it's beyond ridiculous to claim that CAP cannot keep up with OU just because we haven't done so yet. It is inarguable that we have shown steady improvement in that area in both building Pokemon and in Policy Review. As an aside, I'm not sure why you're claiming that CAP is not able to keep up with OU in one PR thread while talking about "riding the coattails of CAP20's success" in another.

nyttyn said:
Finally, consider current CAP culture. What do we talk and bitch about on #CAP? "Oh, CAP isn't competitively balanced!" "AAGH, WHAT IF CRABHAMMER DOESNT GET ON SLATE?!" "Drain Punch is TOO POWERFUA LGAJFLS." Now I don't mind discussions about balance, in fact I think they can be quite fun, but not only have they dominated CAP as of late, they've done so in extremely drama raising and stress inducing ways. Often times, discussions of 'fun' simply don't come into play - it feels like CAP culture ahs simply become bitching about 'uninformed users voting for inferior options,' and with how the CAP userbase is, how could it be anything else? With a casual playerbase making up the majority of a democratic project which, in the eyes of the more devoted CAP users, prides itself on 'competitiveness?' Is it any wonder we've spent so much time and so many angry hours, both over IRC and in the PRC, attempting to 'remedy' this issue? It feels like CAP has no longer become a project aimed at inclusion and enjoyment - much like many other aspects of current Smogon, it feels dominated by an attempt and urge of utmost zeal to cater to only the highest level of play, and enjoyment and culture is suffering for it.
This is a fair point, but it's something that can be solved without throwing the baby out with the bath water. I agree that there is a lot of drama and bitching in #cap about past projects, specifically Naviathan and Cawmodore. That can be solved with the IRC ops telling problem users to keep their circle-jerking to another channel. Most people that are participating in these projects are having fun, it's just that the loudest ones aren't because they're the only ones who feel a need to complain. Maybe we need to restrict voting in some way. Maybe we should include disclaimers in polls saying to actually read the thread. Maybe we need smaller slates so the inferior options don't actually get voted on in the first place. And by extension, maybe we need more aggressive leaders who make sure the bad options don't get on slates in the first place. Maybe, to prove all of this, we need better playtesting methods than one ladder in which the CAP's going to see 75% usage. Regardless, these issues are nothing we can't solve going down our current path.

jas61292 said:
I think one of the most important points to address is what people are talking about with regard to accessibility. First off, I think the whole idea that the CAP metagame is somehow exceptionally inaccessible is just not true. I think the first thing that needs to be addressed in this regard is the whole concept of accessibility. What does it even mean? Ease of entry is really the way I feel people are intending it, and that is the definition I would agree with. Yet no one really seems to back up that claim. Rather, what they are backing up is more claims about popularity. Is it less popular than OU? Yeah, definitely. But less accessible? I'm not so sure. People talk about things like changing threats whenever a new CAP arrives, but is that really so different from the changes that happen all the time in OU? Heck, it seems like the past two generations we are always in the process of banning something, except when a new game comes out and we have a whole plethora of new stuff; far more than a single new Pokemon. What's more, if we did decide to go down the path of utilizing the CAP meta, we would have complete control of our own metagame. We would not be beholden to the twists and turns of the OU suspect process, and, depending on our policies, this could in fact make the metagame far more stable, which is a major key for accessibility.

With that said, barrier of entry for a metagame is very different than barrier of entry for a project. We don't need people to just play a metagame. Rather, we need people to know it and want to participate in a project around it. As mentioned, far more people know OU than any other metagame. But is that so true when it comes to the CAP project? Time and time again people talk about how we do not have people who know OU very well. What's more, the vast majority of our userbase are people who would not care whether we are making a CAP for OU, UU, Doubles, Hackmons, or any other conceivable metagame. Like it or not, the bulk of our userbase is people who participate because they think making Pokemon is cool and fun. Honestly, though, I do not think that is as much of a bad thing as people try and make it out to be. This might come off as a bit radical, but I don't think we need "good OU players" or "good [whatever tier] players" to make a good project for any given tier. Why? Because I would honestly argue that there really is no such thing as "good OU players" or whatnot. Rather there is such thing as "good Pokemon players" or maybe even as specific as "good 6v6 singles" players. But to go any more specific than that is to be overly specific and miss out on the person's true talent. I'd argue that maybe 95% of Pokemon skill is fully transferable from metagame to metagame, at least within the same general format. This is the very reason why we can see people who are normally OU players winning major tournaments for non-OU tiers. Its not because the playerbase is bad. Its because the specific player is good at Pokemon. They just need to adjust to the specifics of the tier. The mechanics, as well as the general strategies and tactics are still the same. If you look at the history of the CAP project I think it should become fairly obvious that specifically playing OU has never been as important to contribution to the project as simply being generally knowledgeable about competitive Pokemon. Plenty of top contributors we have had throughout the years (yes, even in the olden days when we supposedly had more competitive players) have been people who were never known for OU prowess. That's not to say we didn't have some such people, but many were not. Some were known for other metagames, while many others were never renown battlers at all. A basic familiarity with what you are talking about is always needed, of course, but such familiarity can come from a few individuals framing the discussion, as well by looking through the myriad statistics, replays, info threads and other such things that are available. Once you have that familiarity, it is the ability to produce and analyze competitive arguments that is most valuable. And too often do I feel that later part is lost on people. While I certainly can appreciate someone who knows their stuff contributing to discussion, posts that give an opinion as if it is an absolute fact and fail to even attempt to analyze opposing views are really not that helpful to this project.
I agree that the CAP metagame would be extremely accessible. However, accessibility doesn't mean that people will actually play it. Out of the main metagames of OU, Ubers, UU, NU, etc., none of them are any less accessible than another. They all have active forums, analyses, etc. Yet some of them are far less popular than others. If we want to attract "good Pokemon players" to our project, it behooves us to create Pokemon for the most popular and second-most stable (behind Ubers) metagames on Smogon. Stratos' point that this proposal will drastically reduce CAP's potential userbase is 100% true. Right now, anyone knowledgeable about OU can participate well in CAP because they'll know what they're talking about. If this proposal passes, it will require knowledge about the CAP metagame to participate in CAP. That quantity of people is orders of magnitude less than those who could participate now. Even if we make it easy for people to get into the CAP metagame, that still doesn't guarantee that people will care about the CAP project. If we want "good Pokemon players" in CAP, this proposal will nearly guarantee we won't get them. People won't play the CAP metagame seriously for the same reason that a lot of OU players don't play UU, RU, or NU seriously. Right now, CAP has a fair amount of "good Pokemon players" in its ranks. That's because you don't need to know CAP or its metagame well to jump in. Look at user: aim last project. He had never participated in CAP before but was a great contributor to the last project because all it takes to do CAP is OU knowledge.

jas61292 said:
Right now, what we need is a change. Is this the best change we could make? I don't know. But it is something feasible, something in line with what many people have wanted or believed (some for a very long time), and something that I believe can open up a whole world of new opportunities for us. And I would much rather try something new and fail, than sit and do nothing, and watch the project slowly decay because we are too afraid to change.
I think this line greatly trivializes what "trying something new and failing" means. If we enact this proposal and fail, we lose a massive part of our user base and any sort of legitimacy our project claims. A lot of top CAP contributors don't even participate in the play test, what makes you think they would participate in the metagame? If people aren't playing the CAP meta, then they can't really contribute positively to the project as Stratos said. If you want to make a change to CAP, a reason of "fuck it I'd rather try something and fail" is extremely dangerous and can't really be taken seriously. This proposal, pass or fail, is a massive risk.

Furthermore, I'd like to see evidence that CAP is slowly decaying. It obviously isn't what it was two generations ago, but it's gotten better since bottoming out during Aurumoth and Plasmanta. The number of positive contributors from outside is increasing. The people who started with CAP are improving. We've survived numerous bad projects in the past and "CAP is dead" rumors for years and still produce reasonably successful Pokemon. Now's not the time to give up.
 
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DougJustDoug

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I have a TON to say about this topic, and I have been working for several days on a proper post. Unfortunately, it's still not done yet, so I'll just mention what I told Birkal when he first proposed this to me -- I think this is one of the most important policy threads in CAP history.

I have been reading this thread very closely, I am working furiously to capture all of my thoughts properly, and I do appreciate all the intelligent input from everyone so far.
 

DougJustDoug

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Introduction (and Warning)

I have a lot to say here, and this post is not for the casual reader. If you hate deep dives into history and background, then stop right now and move on to the post immediately following this one, where I get into specific comments on what Birkal and others have presented so far.

This post is a HUGE narrative of all the context and history that has led me to my current frame of mind on our project direction. I will examine the history and roots of the CAP project, and I will question fundamental values of not just CAP, but all of Smogon, and even the state of competitive Pokemon as a whole.

CAP is not as enjoyable and rewarding as it used to be for me, and I suspect for many others as well, and it has been slowly deteriorating for a while now. This realization, and my subsequent deep reflections about it, has occupied my thoughts for a long time -- the entire XY/ORAS generation, probably. So when Birkal made this thread (without any provocation from me), I knew I would do a big brain dump on the topic, if anything for my own peace of mind. As I wrote this, I realized it has mostly served to help organize my own thoughts and allowed me to step through the long history of factors that have contributed to my current dissatisfaction with the CAP project.

So while this post is fairly self-indulgent, I do think a few CAP diehards might want to know more about this stuff, particularly if you are interested in the history of the CAP project and the history of competitive policymaking in Smogon.

I'll try to keep this as interesting as possible, but I'm covering a lot of territory, so don't even start reading this, if you aren't prepared to jump in with both feet.

The Need For a Change

In the OP, Birkal suggests we need a change in direction, and I totally agree with him. Much of the history and background I cover in this post was inspired by topics Birkal presented. I'm not 100% convinced his proposal is the right one for us, but I think he is looking at the the right problems, he understands the right historical context, and he is approaching the solutions in the right way. Even if Birkal and I are not perfectly aligned as to what to do next, we are both on the same page as to the need for a change in direction.

There are a lot of aspects to the problems with CAP currently, and it's hard to summarize such a complex beast with broad simple statements. But if we can't frame the general problem in a simple way, it's very hard to develop a cohesive solution. So after thinking A LOT about this, I think our problem comes down to something that is at the heart of the CAP Mission Statement. In a single sentence:

CAP has lost sight of how to enjoy the journey, and we have developed a toxic obsession with an impossible, unreachable destination.

I think CAP is in a downward spiral. The roots of the problems started all the way back in Gen 4, not just within the CAP project, but related to several things within Smogon as a whole. And now in Gen 6, the problems are unbearable. If we don't take steps to turn things around, the CAP project is, at worst, unsustainable and, at best, unenjoyable.

I am not suggesting we completely upend the project and totally reinvent our community and processes. As Birkal mentioned in the OP, we have learned A TON over the eight-year history of the CAP project and we have built a great brand and community. I don't want to throw that away, I want to leverage it and add to it! Right now, we are slowly tearing it down, I think. But if we can change our perspective a bit, and realign ourselves with some of the original factors that made CAP catch on and grow in the first place -- I think we can turn this thing around.

Birkal mentioned several problems in the OP, and gave a lot of interesting background context that led to this thread. In this post, I will delve much deeper into our history, and try to point out some long-developing trends that I think have contributed to our current situation. And from there, I'll suggest some ways to think about possible solutions.

Mission and Goals

Let's be clear -- Create-A-Pokemon is about making COMPETITIVE Pokemon. If you haven't read the CAP Mission Statement, go check it out. You'll notice the word "competitive" is mentioned more than a dozen times, yet there is no mention of "OU" in there anywhere. That's because CAP is not tied to OU in any way, at least not from a core principles perspective anyway.

The mission here is to learn about competitive battling by making pokemon that are intended to be used effectively in competitive battles. As opposed to making pokemon that look cute, pokemon that could be great in Contest Halls, pokemon that would be perfect for an Elite Four boss team, or whatever -- which is what almost every other fakemon/fakedex project out there does. They make flavor mons, plain and simple. And when CAP first started, a lot of people assumed (and many still do) that CAP was a fanboy flavor project too. So one thing I and others worked very hard to establish when we formally organized the CAP Project, was that our project would make *competitive* pokemon.

At that time, we didn't have to spell out what "competitive" really meant. Everybody just kinda knew what it meant, without ever defining it exactly. But over the years, our community interpretation of what CAP is doing and what "competitive" means, has drifted quite a bit, I think. And perhaps we need a course correction of sorts, as we realign with our most basic project goals.

Let me explain what I mean...

History of CAP and OU

When CAP first started, the OU metagame was really the only game in town, from a competitive standpoint. Ubers was the list of pokemon too powerful for OU and UU was the list of pokemon not powerful enough for OU. That's why OU often wasn't even called "OU" back then -- it was called "Standard". To this day, you can tell who is an old-timer around Smogon because they still refer to using "Standard Pokemon" or playing "Standard Format" when referring to OU mons or OU battles.

Even though Ubers and UU had ladders and lots of players, those tiers were not really taken seriously from a competitive standpoint. At least not serious like OU, that is. And things like Little Cup were considered a total joke. I gave LC its first home on Doug's Create-A-Pokemon Server, because my server was a place where people had a very creative, and perhaps more open-minded, attitude when it came to competitive pokemon, and we were all interested in exploring innovative new alternatives. Later, I gave NU its first competitive ladder on my CAP server for the same reasons.

Basically, the mindset of most competitive pokemon players then (circa early DP) was that unless you were battling with OU pokemon, you were using broken mons (ubers) which were, by definition, not competitive, OR you were using weak pokemon, which were not strong enough to be considered a serious competitive endeavor. Here's a direct quote of the introduction from the original "A Guide to D/P Ubers Battling" article in early 2008:

"The uber metagame is almost a forgotten metagame, the main reason being that everyone plays the Overused metagame (OU), and the fact that some other people even think that Ubers take no skill to use."

That quote illustrates the general mindset of most competitive pokemon players at that time -- anything other than the OU metagame was not taken seriously.

OU didn't just define the list of pokemon used by competitive players, it also established the standard power level of pokemon that was generally agreed to be required to analyze and develop competitive strategies for a pokemon. This was really the key "connection" of OU to CAP back in the beginning -- it was certainly not because CAP had any burning desire to be part of "standard battling".

For those of you that were around back then, or if you have read any histories of the CAP project -- we started very much as a counter-culture movement of sorts. The existing competitive community did not have any respect for CAP competitively, and we (the CAP project) kinda thrived on the "revolutionary" aspect of what we were doing.

People love to fight for a cause, and with CAP, our cause was competitive legitimacy. So there was very definitely a "CAP versus the world" kinda feel to the project. That made us all band together within CAP, and also we considered ourselves allies with all sorts of other "revolutionary" groups (like LC and NU) that were sneered upon by the competitive pokemon "establishment", as it were. Sure, we wanted to be liked by the "cool kids" in Smogon. But we gained a lot of community strength and unity in CAP, precisely BECAUSE we were outsiders for the most part.

But as much as we thrived on being different, we also knew that we wanted to be serious and analytical about what were doing. We wanted to be clear that CAP was a competitive endeavor. So when CAP first started mentioning "OU" in relation to what we were doing (making pokemon), it was not a description of a metagame we were targeting or a player base we wanted to attract to our project. By saying that CAP was a serious competitive project, it was just ASSUMED we were targeting OU players -- because ALL "competitive pokemon players", and, more importantly, all "serious players", were "OU players" back then. Our use of the term "OU" was really just clarifying that we were a serious competitive project by describing the power level of pokemon we intended to make.

So when we said:
"CAP makes OU pokemon."

We were really saying:
"We intend to make pokemon that are at roughly the same power level that serious competitive battlers use in battle. As opposed to underpowered cutemons that idiots use because they are fan favorites, or ridiculous legends that are so broken you can't even employ proper battle strategies. CAP is making pokemon that are viable, but not broken, and will allow us to learn about serious competitive battling."

I want to clarify this history and use of terminology, because it is very important to the topic at hand. I think we get way too hung up on our "connection to OU" with CAP, as if it is some foundational pillar that is vital to CAP's existence. That simply is not true.

CAP has always been tied to competitive pokemon -- yes, that's very true. And in the past, "competitive pokemon" was virtually synonymous with "the OU metagame". But OU is not the only competitive game in town any more. Not by a longshot. And this thread is directly headbutting with that now-deeply-ingrained-but-false assumption that CAP and OU are fundamentally joined at the hip.

I'll cover much more on CAP and OU later. But before that, I want to discuss the history of our metagame and the idea of metagame design in general.

The First CAP Metagame

CAP did have its own metagame for a time in the early days, albeit not really intentionally. And as that metagame developed, we came to see it as a bad thing for the CAP project. Mainly because it was "not standard", and we feared we would alienate the project from serious competitive players.

When we first started CAP, we didn't have a server or any intention of ACTUALLY BATTLING with our pokemon.

When Cooper started the CAP threads in Stark Mountain, he wanted to package up our creation and send it to Nintendo, with the hopes they might see all the work we put in, and they would add it to the actual Pokemon game. So yeah, I guess we did want to battle with our pokemon, but the only way we expected to get our wish was if Nintendo put Syclant in the cartridge games. At the time, I thought it was a ridiculously naive hope that Nintendo would ever consider a creation from a silly fanboy project. But I was having a ton of fun on this wacky, chaotic new project -- so I went along with the premise that we would send our stuff to Nintendo. I was just a vocal participant on the project, and I kept my curmudgeonly skepticism to myself.

Then when Syclant was finished, and Cooper and others were trying to figure out how to contact Nintendo or GameFreak or whatever (they hadn't figured that part out in advance, ofc) -- I started fiddling around with programming Syclant into a battle simulator. It wasn't part of any planned "playtest" or anything like that. It just kinda... happened.

We all had made this cool new Pokemon, and I didn't want the group fun to end. So I suggested we program it into a sim so we could keep playing around with it. I wasn't "making a new metagame" or "testing whether Syclant was OU viable" or "trying to determine if Mountaineer was OP" or ANYTHING. I was just messing around with a bunch of Java code and wanted to see KOA's awesome Syclant sprite pop up in a DP battle scene and see it Megahorn Blissey's fat ass or shove an OHKO Ice Beam in Garchomp's smug fucking face, even with its aggravating ever-present Yache Berry. Basically, I thought it would be fun. And guess what? -- IT WAS FUN.

So after I made "Doug's Create-A-Pokemon Server" (Yes, that's what it was called. In fact, when many people on the main Shoddy server wanted to cruise over and play CAP mons, they didn't say "Let's go play CAP", they said, "Let's go play on Doug's Server") we all started hanging out and battling with this new fake thing. And because it was a shiny new toy, it got a lot of attention and many people battled with it. And amongst all those battles and chats in main, we talked A LOT about how Syclant compared to "real pokemon".

Some bitched Syclant was too powerful. Many bitched that Mountaineer was too good and unrealistic for Pokemon ("GameFreak would never let an ability negate a 4x weakness!" -- Heat Rotom later said hi, lol). Others bitched Syclant was too frail. A few bitched it had too many good movesets. It went on and on. But even though a lot of the discussion was bitching, people kept coming to my server in droves to battle with the controversial new pokemon -- and everyone had an opinion as to whether it was a "good pokemon" or a "bad pokemon".

Then we made Revenankh, and people bitched even more that it was too good with its virtually unstoppable Bulk Up/Shadow Sneak/Hammer Arm/Rest moveset. After our next CAP, most people thought Pyroak sucked, even though a few top battlers on the server swore by it -- those who had the skill and patience to properly play a Subseeder, that is. And our fourth CAP creation, Fidgit, was almost unanimously loved for its versatility to play a role on almost any team.

By the time Fidgit was created, the concept of "playtesting" was a full-blown thing in CAP, and I was even collecting specific stats on our new pokemon from the CAP ladder on my server. But I began to have concerns about the metagame that was emerging on my server being too different from standard battles. See the OP here:

I was worried that the CAP project was becoming "inaccessible" to regular competitive battlers, if they came to the CAP server and had to make new teams and learn completely new battle strategies in order to succeed against our fakemons. I was worried that we weren't just making pokemon, but that we were making a metagame too -- albeit a completely accidental, and poorly-designed metagame. Here's a direct quote from my OP in that thread:

"For all the work that goes into our pokemon, we have absolutely no process for designing the metagame around it. I don't think we should try. I think we should try to limit the effect of new pokemon, so that they never create a vastly different metagame from the Smogon standard."

My proposal at the time was to make a "CAP Clause" on my server, which would limit all teams to contain, at most, a single CAP pokemon. The proposal was rejected for various reasons, although I like to think I was ahead of my time in proposing that, from a pool of very powerful pokemon, you would be limited to only one per team (XY MegaEvolutions later said hi, lol). But the notion that the CAP metagame was diverging from standard, became a real concern from then on.

In Birkal's OP, he covered what happened to the CAP metagame from Arghonaut onward, and his retelling is a good summary of our later policies towards the CAP Metagame as an independent entity. I'm trying to point out the seminal events in CAP prior to Arghonaut, that contributed to our general attitudes about a metagame separate from OU, and how it was all a bit of surprise to us at the time.

We started out just wanting to make new pokemon and "see what happens". Then later, as we saw what was happening after they were created, it was a bit of an "Oh shit!" moment as we grappled with the consequences.

The Emergence of Intelligent Design in CAP

CAP always had an issue with dumb people posting dumb ideas, but because most early CAP discussions were so chaotic, everyone considered it mostly harmless noise.

As the CAP metagame emerged, dumb CAP posters became a bigger and bigger problem. CAP regulars (none of us were "veterans" at that point really) began to realize that stupid posts led to stupid votes, and stupid votes led to stupid decisions, and stupid decisions led to stupid pokemon, and stupid pokemon led to unenjoyable battles. As we were grappling with a CAP metagame that was fluctuating out of control, we realized the cumulative effect of a few bad decisions could be enormous on the metagame as a whole, so we began to encourage people to post and vote more responsibly.

Here's a thread by Darkie, the newly appointed CAP forum mod at the time, begging CAP posters to be intelligent and reasonable:

"Remember, this is CAP not CRAP. Let's keep it that way."
Gotta love that line...

Later, this thread was made about the CAP Metagame and the need for CAP posters to have REAL BATTLING EXPERIENCE before posting as an authority in CAP:

There were many other threads and chat discussions about this sort of thing, considering whether it mattered if people were actually INTELLIGENT when they posted. For many of you now on the CAP project, you may be thinking, "Duh, of course we want people to be intelligent, and we require reasoned arguments in posts." But, once again, you need to remember the historical context.

Most people thought of CAP as a simple popularity contest at that time. In fact, most steps of CAP did not have any discussion prior to the poll. The poll WAS the discussion thread. We opened the thread with a click poll at the top, and the discussion unfolded AS PEOPLE VOTED. The primary focus was on what the majority wanted, and the posted reasoning and other stuff (off topic posts were commonplace) were mainly an added bonus. Something to read while waiting to see how the poll played out. CAP was about figuring out WHAT people wanted, not WHY they wanted it.

So when CAP started getting more serious about "intelligent posting" and "intelligent voting", it was a somewhat controversial thing. Because many people felt CAP participation should require little more than drive-by click voting every once in a while. And when CAP realized this was potentially wreaking havoc on our accidental metagame, we all had to step back and question the supposed "wisdom of the masses".

These were the beginnings of the CAP philosophy that we could produce better pokemon, and therefore a better metagame, by heeding the advice and desires of intelligent, seasoned battlers in the community, over the idiot fanboy riffraff.

The Emergence of Intelligent Design in Smogon

It wasn't just CAP that was struggling with dealing with an unplayable metagame riddled with stupid battlers and bad decisions -- Smogon as a whole was going through the exact same growing pains. In early 2008, Smogon was coming to grips with the fact that traditional de facto tiering just wasn't working.

From Gen 1 (RBY) through Gen 3 (RSE), it wasn't much debated as to what was "Uber" or not. Yes, there was occasional bickering about why straight 600 BST Mew was banned, but Celebi and Jirachi were not, and other things like that. But for the most part, the pokemon that were broken were obvious and largely unquestioned until DP came along. And as far as rules and clauses go, the rules were minimal and pretty much unanimous as well -- having been the "gentlemen's rules" that had been observed by battlers dating back to the IRC bots and early sims.

At the start of DP, the physical/special move split caused everyone to question if the previous gen "standard pokemon" were still the standards. There were many internal debates amongst Smogon badgeholders, which was a MUCH smaller group back then and was the collective decision-making body for Smogon, about what should be banned or not. There were arguments and administrative decisions about previously banned mons, like Deo-S and Wobbuffet, but the crucial turning point for Smogon tiering was the epic debate over Garchomp.

I won't dive into the competitive issues involved with the Garchomp debate. If you're interested, just read some of the MANY threads on the topic back then. But several things came to a head at that time, in terms of Smogon philosophy and policy, and Smogon was forever changed afterwards.

Garchomp was a controversial pokemon that was clearly within the mechanical bounds of what was previously considered "standard" -- it was just yet another good pseudo-legend dragon, when you get right down to it. But the competitive community LOATHED Garchomp.

On top of that, we had developed a sophisticated simulator (ShoddyBattle) and we had gathered detailed statistics on pokemon usage that had never existed before. The term "OverUSED" had been around for years, but it had always been a subjective interpretation by the so-called experts. With the advent of DP ShoddyBattle, the concept of "Usage" became an objective, statistical FACT. And the numbers were overwhelming that Garchomp was very different than every other standard pokemon. It was the most overused pokemon by far, and its usage was GROWING, even in the face of numerous specific counter-strategies to try to thwart it.

This was the first time people seriously discussed banning a pokemon in structured logical terms, backed with statistics and math. This led to a wave of community innovations related to tiering, which we now call "Suspect testing". It's commonplace now, but back then it was a completely new thing.

The community voted on the ban, a special ladder was made for battling without Garchomp, special statistics were gathered and analyzed, and players had to qualify for voting by reaching certain player rating levels. Even though we didn't really know it at the time, the Garchomp ban was the beginning of two new ways of thinking about playing competitive pokemon:

1) Smogon does not simply learn the best ways to play the metagame with the pokemon and mechanics created by Nintendo -- Smogon is responsible for deciding the content of the metagame, and making the metagame as balanced as possible.

2) The best metagame is made by the most skilled, most intelligent battlers.​

Almost everything that has since developed relating to the now-massive tiering machine in Smogon, is rooted in those seminal events of early DP suspect testing, culminating with the Garchomp ban. After that, over the ensuing years and game generations, we have developed:
  • More sophisticated tests
  • More definitions of what is good and bad for the metagame
  • More sophisticated ways to rate battlers and determine qualifications to vote
  • More leadership hierarchy and councils related to tiering
  • More badges and recognition related to suspect testing and tiering
  • More tiers
  • More bans
  • More clauses

All of that has happened under the now-entrenched philosophy of intelligent metagame design in Smogon, which I paraphrase as:

The game given to us by Nintendo is not inherently competitive, and cannot be competitive without significant restrictions to the pokemon allowed for play and without numerous external rules and clauses to govern serious competitive battles. These restrictions and rules can only be properly considered by the uppermost echelons of highly-rated battlers, skilled in playing with these restrictions and rules.

Questioning the Results

So both CAP and Smogon have followed similar paths, in terms of putting more emphasis and focus on more sophisticated processes and more intelligent participation to ensure we get better results. The results for CAP are the pokemon we create, and the results for Smogon is the OU metagame and its derivatives.

So how's that working out for us?

For the Create-A-Pokemon Project -- Are CAP pokemon markedly better and more successful in battle than they were in the past? Is the CAP project attracting more intelligent, knowledgeable battlers to actively participate in CAP? Is the CAP project gaining the competitive respect and legitimacy we crave?

For Smogon -- Is the Gen 6 OU metagame more balanced than past gen OU metagames? Is the Smogon OU metagame the "standard" for competitive pokemon worldwide? Is Smogon gaining respect and admiration for our tiering processes, clauses, and bans?

Has all this supposedly intelligent design really made things that much better? We are certainly putting a LOT more into it -- but are we really getting that much more out of it?

I can't definitively answer the questions above. I don't plan to actually poll anyone for consensus, as these are rhetorical questions mostly. But if the questions were put to a wider audience, my guess is that answers would be far more "No" than "Yes". And if the questions give you pause to answer them, then they did their job.

For all the effort put into competitive policy for Smogon and CAP -- these questions should be answered with a resounding "Yes", not a timid "Maybe", at best.

The Fruits of our Labors in Smogon

Birkal had an interesting take on the results of Smogon tiering policy, so I'll repost it here, as I agree with him completely, and think it is directly relevant to the questions above:

"If you know anything about the outside world’s opinion on Smogon tiering, it is that we are exhaustingly ban-happy. Since generation four overused, we’ve banned some of the most popular threats in the metagame (and less popular ones, like Wobbuffet). Pokemon Black and White brought some more convoluted bans, namely Aldaron’s Swift Swim + Drizzle ban. This opened the floodgates, which poured into our current generation of Pokemon with bans to some of the most popular Mega Evolutions and versatile Pokemon (Greninja, Mega Lucario, and Aegislash). At this point, tiers have even considered banning moves, entry hazards, and even specific team builds (Baton Pass). It has become messy to say the least. I don’t say this to downplay the contributions of our metagame leaders; they have done phenomenal work to create balanced and enjoyable metagames that are playable. If anything, GameFreak is to blame for giving us overpowered giants that must be compensated for in our metagames."

As Birkal points out, this isn't about blaming Smogon or bashing on our tiering policy leaders. Despite how you may interpret my comments so far, I am not some anti-OU, anti-tiering hate monger.

I have spent many years and literally THOUSANDS of hours working in Smogon to build up our tiers and competitive content, with OU as our competitive center. I was deeply involved in almost all of the early decisions and policies that are the foundations of the current Smogon suspect testing efforts. That's why I have an alumnized Tiering Contributor badge in my postbit, and I'm proud to have it. I can claim to be one of the key "creators" of OU and Smogon tiering policy as a whole, probably moreso than all but a small handful of active Smogoners these days. So to criticize Smogon tiering or tiering leadership, would be criticizing myself and my work -- and I'm not doing that. I'm proud of the work I did, and I respect the massive amounts of work that others have done to try and make a balanced competitive metagame.

But when I pull back from all the details and work and processes associated with our attempts in Smogon to balance the metagame -- I have very serious doubts as to whether it is having the desired effect. And even if it is having a positive effect, I very much question if the benefit is worth the cost.

At this point, it feels like we are working against the direction of the gamemakers themselves, and that is a battle that simply cannot be won. GameFreak continues to churn out more and more increasingly powerful threats, and yet Smogon continues to cling to the idea that a competitive balance can be achieved similar to the game that was played in RS or early DP with a fraction of the competitive elements and simpler, more straightforward battle mechanics than we have now.

Our ban lists get bigger and bigger and our clauses get more and more complex -- and yet there is still a never-ending stream of continued complaints of overpowered pokemon and uncompetitive strategies that plague the metagame.

Meanwhile, the battling systems espoused by the gamemakers continue to grow and thrive. And with every additional pokemon we ban or clause we create -- the further we distance ourselves from the game of Pokemon itself and the more we fuel the disdain of non-Smogoners, a growing world who increasingly think of themselves as the true players of "competitive pokemon".

I'm not pointing out these problems with Smogon tiering and optics because I think it can be changed any time soon -- it can't be changed. The machinery has gotten too big and too involved in Smogon at all levels. It simply has too much inertia to be meaningfully altered.

But don't kid yourself into thinking our tiering policies are humming along unquestioned. Within senior Smogon leadership, there have been many serious discussions about this exact topic -- whether Smogon tiering policy has "jumped the shark", so to speak, and needs a course correction to be much more objective and less... well, "objectionable" to the rest of the Pokemon-playing world.

It's a very hard problem to solve, and the aforementioned inertia of the status quo is hard to resist. And even if we did change things in Smogon, it's arguable as to whether the changes would make things better or worse. Those arguments are happening at all levels. While it's true that senior Smogon leadership is questioning the status quo, there is definitely NOT a majority that wants to change, and no one can convincingly present a solution that most can agree with. So, personally, I don't expect anything meaningfully different to happen any time soon with regards to Smogon metagame policy.

The Fruits of Our Labors in CAP

For all of CAP's history you could say, "As Smogon goes, so goes CAP". Our attempts to use more intelligence and more complex processes to create more competitive results, mimics the path of Smogon competitive policy as a whole. It has been an ideological movement across all of Smogon, and CAP has been a part of it.

We continue to believe we can solve the competitive problems with Pokemon by working harder and working smarter. And just like the above comments about Smogon tiering policy, when I look back on all the details and work and processes associated with our attempts in CAP to create balanced competitive OU pokemon -- I have very serious doubts as to whether our efforts in CAP are having the desired effect.

And just like above, this is not a condemnation of the people in CAP working to make things better. Take everything I said about my involvement in Smogon tiering policy and multiply that tenfold to understand my involvement in CAP policy. I am definitely not "blaming" anyone or anything in CAP, as I have obviously been one of the most involved people most responsible for the current state of affairs in CAP to date. I am enormously proud of what we have accomplished here, and participation in CAP is still the most interesting and enjoyable aspect of my Pokemon-playing hobby. But as I said at the top of this post -- CAP is not as enjoyable and rewarding as it used to be for me, and I suspect for many others as well, and it has been slowly deteriorating for a while now.

The CAP process has become much longer and more involved than it was in the early days, now with a massive emphasis on making a very-good-but-not-broken OU pokemon every time. We have placed ever-increasing pressure and process scrutiny on achieving our stated Concept. And regardless of the explicit Questions we are supposed to answer with each CAP -- the unstated question that seems to be the only one that matters these days is, "Did we make a Pokemon that can be successful in OU play without dominating the OU metagame?"

The answer, much more often than not these days, is, "No, CAP X was a failure" for whatever reason. Sometimes it is accused of being too good. More often, it is accused of being too bad. The criticism often takes the form of,
"CAP X was supposed to do <whatever>, but fails at <whatever> miserably -- even though it was supposedly designed from scratch to do <whatever>. CAP X failed."

On top of that, the reason for why CAP fails each time is almost always blamed on the intelligence and battling skill of active CAP participants.
"Of course CAP X failed at <whatever>. Because no one in CAP knows what they are doing. They don't have anyone with OU battling skills, so they have no clue how to achieve <whatever> in OU. Almost everyone in CAP is fucking clueless about high-level OU play, even the supposed discussion leaders."

And while I don't like the tone of those comments, I can't really say they are false. The fact is that very few active CAP participants are experienced with current high-level OU battling. Many CAP participants and CAP leaders only play OU casually, if at all. So, if CAP success or failure is hinged on having an abundant number of good OU battlers as active CAP posters and leaders -- then CAP is doomed to fail. And doomed to be insulted and criticized all the way down.

Over the years, we have added more and more discussion threads to our competitive steps, and we have placed HUGE emphasis on intelligent postings in those discussions. Yet almost every competitive thread in CAP these days, is roundly criticized for being overridden with "shitty posts" or "stupid arguments made by people who obviously have no idea how to successfully battle in OU".

We are supposedly encouraging intelligent, skilled battlers to participate in CAP by discouraging unintelligent, unskilled participation in CAP -- and it just isn't working, folks. We are not getting increased participation by skilled battlers, or any other battlers really. All we are getting is DECREASING participation across the board (even on pure flavor steps), decreasing numbers of active involved CAP leaders, DECREASING morale and enthusiasm -- AND our CAP creations are still almost random as to whether they are competitively viable or not! And I think all this is due to our current collective community definition of "success", which is virtually impossible to achieve in CAP.

I have said it time and time again, that the CAP process is a terrible way to make a good pokemon. Our process is simply too inexact to hit a precise target. No matter how much emphasis we place on intelligence and structured process -- we will NEVER overcome the inefficiencies and failings of large group waterfall-style decision-making. Sometimes, very occasionally, we will hit our target. Most times we will miss. It has always been this way in CAP, and always will be -- because CAP is a community project first and foremost and always will be.

Something we didn't really have to deal with in the early days of CAP -- is the concept that the OU metagame can significantly shift over the course of making a single CAP pokemon. In DP CAP we had plenty of suspect tests and bans, but for whatever reason, it wasn't too much of a problem for CAP. I don't recall discussing it that much back in the day. Nowadays, it is regularly a point of concern for us. I don't know how much of the difference now versus then is real or imagined.

Perhaps the metagame genuinely fluctuates more wildly now than it did back then? Maybe we just didn't care too much about the fluctuations back in DP, and so we didn't worry about it so much in CAP? Since bans and metagame shifts were pretty much a new thing back in DP, maybe we just didn't realize the massive impact of every ban, so we were blissfully ignorant of how it was affecting the CAP project? Maybe we were less specific or less ambitious with our concepts back then, so metagame changes didn't have as much effect on our perception of CAP success or failure? Maybe we are too specific or too ambitious with our concepts now, so we are more paranoid about metagame changes affecting our perception of CAP success or failure?

I really don't know the answer. I guess it is probably some combination of all the above. Whatever the reason, it seems like the ever-changing metagame is a much bigger cause for concern in CAP these days, and it just adds to the already-abundant negativity and doomsaying that seems to accompany each CAP project.

So CAP has turned into drudgery for many of our most active participants, who on one side are tasked with fending off the stupid comments and complaints of those lesser-skilled than themselves -- while on the other side, fending off insults and complaints from those that are more skilled than themselves.

We have a system that punishes almost all participation! People either hate participating because they are chastised by smug CAP veterans and/or elite battling primadonnas -- OR they hate participating because they are surrounded by idiots who keep making stupid comments and decisions. Many people experience BOTH aspects of this destructive, dysfunctional feedback loop AT THE SAME TIME in CAP. Everyone is basically pissing everyone else off almost all the time in CAP!

And then in the end, when our CAP creations don't hit the mark perfectly according to their concept, it simply gives ammunition to everyone to point fingers at everyone else as to who fucked up, with a big dose of "I told you so!" thrown in to pour salt in the wound.

The whole thing is toxic as hell, and it has to stop.

Break the Cycle

I'm not saying we all need to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. This isn't a "Why can't we all just get along?" plea for us to be nice to each other. I think we have painted ourselves into a corner in terms of our implicit goals, and we don't even realize we have done it. We are attempting to control the uncontrollable, and that is the cycle we need to break.

As I have already said, with a step-by-step community decision-making process, we just don't have enough control over all the interrelated aspects of a Pokemon to hit that narrow competitive balancing point between overpowered and useless. And with the metagame ever-shifting and getting more and more complex with every gen -- that balance point is not only getting narrower, but it keeps moving around, sometimes in the middle of our attempt to hit it!

Maybe things would be easier in CAP if Smogon had different policies towards metagame design and competitive balance. But as I said earlier, I don't expect any big changes in Smogon policy any time soon.

Create-A-Pokemon metagame policy is another matter. We can change CAP if we want to. CAP is a relatively small, nimble project. And because we have a long history of constant policy evaluation and experience with implementing massive policy changes -- we don't have irresistible inertia or addiction to the status quo. CAP has always been about experimentation -- not just with our pokemon, but with our policies as well. If we want to shift our direction, we can do it.

CAP needs to sever ties with OU and all the convoluted tiering and clausing machinery that is now associated with OU. CAP needs to refocus and redefine the roots of what led to our connection to OU in the first place -- our desire to learn about competitive pokemon by making competitive pokemon.

Present State of Competitive Pokemon

"OU" is no longer exclusively synonymous with "competitive pokemon" or "serious battling", and that hasn't been the case for many years. There are thousands of very serious, very skilled, very respected battlers that don't play OU at all. And there are dozens, if not hundreds, of popular battle formats out there. While there still may be some elitist OU diehards that look down their nose at the myriad of competitive metagames out there nowadays -- I really think that narrow-minded breed of dinosaurs is headed for extinction.

"Competitive pokemon" is now a very broad term and most people are accepting the fact that you can be serious about competitive pokemon and NOT play OU. Yes, OU is still the biggest singular metagame in Smogon. But its place in the overall scheme of competitive pokemon is much smaller than it used to be, and it is getting smaller every month.

I did some research on this subject, and here are the battle statistics for all formats from September 2008 through June 2015 on the various simulators used by Smogon over the years (ShoddyBattle, Pokemon Online, and Showdown):



Here are a few key things that jumped out to me in the stats:

  • When CAP started, OU represented more than 80% of the entire Smogon battling landscape. In business terms, OU had "80% market share" or more.
  • Now OU only has 25% market share and is falling fast.
  • Metagames like UU and Ubers, which have long histories like OU, have held relatively constant with their market share, albeit their market share is quite small.
  • Alternative, non-usage-based metagames as a whole now represent more than 60% of all battles
  • Overall total simulator battles have increased by a factor of 25 since 2008. OU battles have only increased by a factor of 9. Alternative metagame battles have increased by a factor of 1000.
  • The number of battle formats with active player bases has grown from 8 in 2008 to 52 in 2015.
  • Currently, there are 30 different battling formats that have more than 10,000 battles per month.
Droves of players have ventured away from OU, towards all sorts of innovative new battle formats. OU is not losing market share to other tiers, it is losing to alternative metagames. Non-standard battles are the new standard!

I realize using terms like "losing" and "market share" imply a dog-eat-dog business-like environment where metagames are fighting with each other for "customers" -- and that, of course, is not a true picture of competitive Pokemon in Smogon. Battling across various metagames is not a zero sum game. If someone starts playing an alternative metagame, that does not mean OU "lost" that player. In fact, that player may still play OU very actively, but simply doesn't play OU exclusively any more. They may still prefer OU by far, even if they battle more frequently in other metagames.

My assertion about the "decline of OU" is, admittedly, a subjective interpretation. And since I collected these stats after already forming an opinion that OU was not the dominant force it used to be -- I'm sure there's plenty of confirmation bias in everything I did with my research. So even though I present my opinion with a bunch of statistics, I will not claim my opinion is a proven fact. At the end of the day, it's still just my opinion, backed up with some stats. ("Lies, damn lies, and statistics", I know, I know...)

But I do hope these numbers are a startling wake-up call for anyone here that clings to the antiquated notion that OU is some kind of irresistible force in competitive Pokemon. Because it just ain't true.

A Broader Appeal

One of the common assertions supporting CAP's connection to OU, is that our tie to OU maximizes "accessibility" to the CAP project, since OU is the single largest metagame in Smogon. And by sheer numbers, that is obviously true. But over the years, CAP has increasingly narrowed the field of people that we consider valued participants in CAP.

It is no longer sufficient to simply follow the OU metagame or play it casually -- we require people that play OU actively and play it well. And while there are plenty such people in Smogon, most of them are not terribly interested in making fake pokemon. So not only do we need top battlers, but we need top battlers that are interested in deep fan pursuits too -- and that's a rare mix. On top of that, we require people with good writing and interest in deep discussion threads, because CAP is, y'know... a forum discussion project. I'm not saying everyone needs to write tl;dr like me, but sentence fragments from your average battle chat just ain't gonna cut it here.

So we've basically said that to be good CAP participant, that can really help make our CAP projects succeed:
  • You need to play a lot of OU on the sims (a time-consuming endeavor) and do it well
  • You have an interest in fan stuff, so you probably play a lot of the actual Pokemon game (which involves breeding, trading, and other time-consuming ingame shit)
  • You like to write posts and read long discussion threads in Smogon (another time-consuming endeavor)
  • And then somewhere along the way, you need to squeeze in time to be involved in CAP creation projects, which zip right along at the brisk pace of only 4-5 months at a stretch.

Yeah, good fucking luck finding those superhumans. They certainly exist, and some of them have been active in CAP, but there are not many of them at all.

I'm not just commenting that almost no one has time for all that, because there are plenty of no-lifers on Smogon. It's mostly about the varied set of skills and interests required to meet this now-nearly-impossible standard for valued contribution to CAP.

We HAVE to change our expectations here and broaden our appeal. This isn't about picking a popular metagame for CAP to build pokemon for. It's about changing our definitions of project success, expanding our concepts of valued contributions to the project, and changing the way we make people feel about participation in CAP.

Otherwise, CAP won't just be inaccessible -- it will be impossible.

Back to Basics

Smogon originally made a name for itself by analyzing the game of Pokemon, and telling others the best strategies for winning in battles with the Pokemon given to us by GameFreak. A relatively small side aspect to that was the acknowledgement of a few gentlemen's rules and bans commonly observed by competitive battlers. There weren't any councils or suspect tests or official votes on any of that stuff, it was what most good battlers were observing anyway in tournaments and other structured play. So Smogon's mission was to inform the world of the best pokemon to battle with ("standard pokemon") and the best strategies to employ with those pokemon.

The content, mechanics and rules of the game were not really questioned, because they were set in stone by the programming of the game itself. Even some extremely broken glitches in the early game's programming were accepted as unavoidable aspects of the competition, and Smogon simply incorporated the best ways to avoid problems with those glitches or use them to a battlers best advantage. The key point is that Smogon's job was to figure out the best ways to play the hands we were dealt by the gamemakers -- not figure out various ways to make bans and external rules to "fix" the game itself for competitive battling.

Later, starting in Gen 4, Smogon got into the business of mass-producing tiers and clauses, and that process has since dominated the competitive landscape of Smogon. It is arguably now the single most defining aspect of Smogon's internal and public perception.

Don't get me wrong, our C&C efforts in Smogon are bigger than ever. We have more analyses and articles on more pokemon, metagames and battle formats than we ever did. And the fantastic site content made by C&C is viewed and used by competitive battlers around the world.

But it seems like Smogon's role as students and teachers of the game of Pokemon, hence the name "Smogon University", has now taken a back seat to our self-appointed role as the lawmakers for what is "competitive" or not.

I don't think this has been a good trend for Smogon, and I don't think it is something CAP should continue to bandwagon. CAP needs to get back to valuing more of the "University" aspects of what we do here in Smogon, and distance ourselves from the "Competitive Legislature" aspects of Smogon.

The Oxymoron of "Competitive Pokemon"

We try to make "competitive Pokemon" here in CAP, and in the past, those two words could work together cohesively. But my concern is that the current concept of "competitive", as defined by OU and Smogon tiering, is diverging further and further from the holistic concept of "Pokemon". So the term "competitive Pokemon" is now almost an oxymoron for CAP purposes.

I just looked at the current top-used Pokemon in competitive Singles play, as defined by Nintendo, the makers of the real game of Pokemon, on the Pokemon Global Link -- and HALF of the top ten pokemon are banned by Smogon (#2 MegaGengar, #3 MegaKangaskhan, #4 Blaziken, #9 Aegislash, #10 MegaSalamence). You can bash on how terrible Battle Spot battlers are, or you can rip on how stupid 3v3 is for competitive play, or you can talk about how clueless GameFreak is when it comes to making balanced pokemon. But the fact remains that what are considered the most "competitive Pokemon" by the maker of the real game and the vast majority of the Pokemon-playing world -- are, by rule, almost completely ignored by the competitive intelligentsia of Smogon.

Can we really claim that we know what is "competitive" or not when it comes to the real game of Pokemon? I think we have convinced ourselves that this alternate reality we have created in OU is somehow better than the game made by Nintendo. And that's just FINE, for those that want to play a custom game (ie. OU). Go for it.

But Create-A-Pokemon is already intrinsically, unavoidably, in the business of making our own custom game. After all, we make completely new, completely fake Pokemon. But we are supposed to be customizing the real game of Pokemon -- not customizing some already-customized version of Pokemon.

We need to stop this perception in CAP that we can pick and choose from whatever Nintendo gives us, and call the resulting base game "Pokemon". Because it isn't Pokemon.

A Lost Art in CAP

Diverging from the real Pokemon game is eroding our potential participation base in CAP, and alienating people that are ardent fans and intelligent players of the game. And when intelligent, potentially active contributors to CAP try to participate in our project, and are chastised for not knowing the details of Smogon's customized version of Pokemon -- that's a loss for CAP.

CAP used to value people that had detailed, analytical knowledge about the real game of Pokemon. That seems to have fallen almost completely by the wayside these days. I'm not talking about fanboys here. I am talking about serious students of Pokemon.

People like X-Act, for example. X-Act is no longer active in Smogon (nothing dramatic, he just got married in RL and moved on), but in his day, he was a respected Smogon admin and one of the seminal contributors to the CAP project. X-Act reverse engineered the exact Pokemon damage formula, which became the basis for every simulator and damage calculator in existence, solely through EMPIRICAL TESTING. He developed the Base Stats Ratings formula because he was dissatisfied with the limitations of the Base Stat Total as an indicator of the effectiveness of a Pokemon's stats. He wrote the first guide on "How to Make a Pokemon Movepool" for CAP, based on his research into patterns exhibited in real Pokemon movepools. These were not considered some bullshit fanboy pursuits. They were some of the most valued contributions in CAP and Smogon history. And guess what? X-Act rarely, if ever, battled OU on the sims.

Does this mean that someone like X-Act shouldn't post in CAP threads? By today's CAP standards, X-Act should keep his mouth shut most of the time -- and that is a damn shame. I'm not saying someone should post opinions about specific team strategies or metagame trends when they don't even have real battle experience with the subject of discussion. But if CAP discussion threads have gotten so narrow in scope, and so specific with our competitive goals, that longtime players and expert scholars of Pokemon have almost no place to speak with authority in our threads -- then CAP HAS A HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM.

On Naviathan, we actually had to vote as to whether to allow SUBSTITUTE in its movepool. On another recent CAP (I can't recall exactly which one), there was debate as to whether giving it TOXIC would be overpowered. When I see discussions like that I can't help but shake my head. On the one hand, we eviscerate posters who don't realize how OBVIOUS it is that Manaphy poses a MUCH greater threat to our pokemon than Keldeo for whatever specific metagame trend reason that exists that week. And yet we very happily get into supposedly "competitive" discussions with everyone as to whether Substitute or Toxic are BROKEN on our pokemon, despite the fact that both of those moves are in almost every movepool of every Pokemon in existence since the beginning of time! Give me a break...

I realize those are isolated examples, and are not characteristic of the entire CAP project. But I think it speaks to my belief that somewhere along the way, we took a turn for the worse. We have become so narrowly focused on the alternate reality version of Pokemon and all of the convoluted logic that is now the baseline for the competitive community in Smogon, that we have lost sight of the interesting, objective aspects of the real Pokemon game that is the true baseline for the Create-A-Pokemon project in the first place.

Putting the "Pokemon" Back in Create-A-Pokemon

Presumably, we have cut corners with regards to adherence to the real game of Pokemon, for the sake of making a more competitively viable end result. But as I have said many times already, we aren't really succeeding on the competitive front, not by the current implicit definition of success. And even if all us CAP diehards really believe we are making decent competitive pokemon (I do) -- the public perception is that we are not, particularly amongst Smogon OU battlers, who we are supposedly trying to please the most.

We need to refocus on the real game of Pokemon and what it has become competitively since CAP's inception. I'm not suggesting CAP become a flavor-focused project. I'm suggesting that we reconnect with the goal we had in CAP from the very beginning -- to make Pokemon that we, avid competitive battlers, believed could exist in the actual game.

Remember that silly notion I ridiculed at the very beginning of the very first CAP project? -- That we would actually send our CAP creation to GameFreak and ask them to put it in the real game? As I said, I never believed it would happen -- But think about the implications of that goal, and how it framed the unstated ground rules for that first CAP project?

It means we were trying to create something that, while competitively viable for our niche interests, would be acceptable to GameFreak according to whatever rules and standards we could glean from the evidence of the actual games. We were trying to make a "real" pokemon, first and foremost -- and trying to work within that framework to make something that would be fun to battle with as well, if we were lucky enough to actually play with it someday in a cartridge game. Our discussions were a chaotic mess, as everyone had their own interpretations of what made sense from the myriad perspectives of flavor, competitive, and game history. But in the back of all of our minds, we were absolutely, intrinsically bound to the real game of Pokemon, because ultimately we planned to appeal to the gamemakers themselves!

Later, after CAP pokemon were implemented on the battle simulator and the CAP forum project was formally organized, our focus quickly shifted to the competitive aspects of our creations, almost above all else. And at that time, "competitive" was not something we associated with the intentions, directions, and products made by GameFreak and Nintendo. Knowingly or unknowingly, we disconnected ourselves from the game makers, and ignored their competitive endeavors over the ensuing years.

In that time, the real pokemon game has become very "competitive". The PGL hosts leagues, rated battles, and online competitions across dozens of battle formats and rulesets. VGC hosts live tournaments around the world with an enormous competitive player base. All these battles are backed with sophisticated statistics on Player Ratings, Pokemon Used, Items, Abilities, Teammates, and much more.

The real game of Pokemon has changed dramatically in terms of competitive battling, yet CAP still lives in a competitive time capsule that was buried back in the DP generation, when "competitive pokemon" was an artificial construct that was the exclusive province of ShoddyBattle and Smogon OU.

Times have changed and we haven't changed with it -- not in terms of alignment with the game of Pokemon and the avid players of the competitive game. That is what I think we need to address most with a change in direction of the CAP project. This isn't just about choosing to make a CAP metagame. It is about realigning the CAP project to grow and flourish in the modern world of competitive Pokemon.
 

DougJustDoug

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Background and Context

This is the second of two consecutive posts. I made a very long post immediately before this one to explain, in great detail, all the background and context that led to my current thinking about altering CAP's direction. In this post, I'll comment on Birkal's proposal and other ideas presented so far in this thread, and present some new ideas to consider as well.

Here are a few key summary points on the background context in my previous post:

  • CAP is not tied to OU, and never really was tied to it
  • CAP tries harder and harder to achieve an ephemeral definition of competitive success with our creations, with limited success. I don't believe the benefits of all the work are worth the cost.
  • Smogon's competitive tiering policies have become a huge industry in Smogon, with limited success in terms of significantly increasing the balance and popularity of the metagame. I don't believe the benefits of all the work are worth the cost.
  • The world of competitive pokemon has extended far beyond where it was when CAP started.
  • Inside Smogon, alternative metagames and battle formats (ie. not OU) now dominate the battling landscape
  • Outside Smogon, competitive Pokemon is now very actively supported and defined by the real game makers, with massive public popularity and success
  • CAP's approach to "competitive Pokemon" is out of touch with the real Pokemon-playing world
  • CAP now punishes participation of all kinds (from both skilled and unskilled battlers), and has developed a toxic community culture and goals
  • CAP needs to disconnect from OU and reconnect with the real game and broader, more modern concepts of "competitive Pokemon"

I realize some of those are shocking to just blurt out like that in bullet form. But if you want justification and background reasoning, feel free to read my enormous post above. Otherwise, it's just a quick rundown of my general frame of mind.


Comments on the Proposal

Birkal presented some great new ideas on the CAP metagame, and did a good job of explaining it all. I pretty much agree with every positive and benefit he mentions in the OP. But I also have some serious concerns about the proposal, as others have mentioned.

I like that this proposal would disconnect us from OU, which isn't helping us much at all these days. Not enough CAP participants are playing OU at a high enough level for us to really make pokemon that can work well in OU (as ginganinja mentioned). That would still be the case, even if we could make the CAP process more refined and exact in hitting our target concepts (which won't happen, as I posted ad nauseum previously). Building for OU just draws criticism to the CAP project, and if we move to focus on our own metagame, I think everyone will be happier.

Focusing on the CAP metagame puts the entire spectrum of CAP "assets" (our pokemon creations) on display, and leverages them to full effect. This is great for CAP and great for enhancing our brand. I could post a bunch of business analogies as to why this is a good thing, but I'll stay away from that, since CAP isn't a business. But the idea of leveraging all your assets is common knowledge, and if you think about it, we really don't do that in CAP today. We only focus on the current asset under construction. And shortly after we are finished, we store the asset away to be mostly forgotten. A CAP metagame would reinvigorate and reinforce everything we have done to date -- which is a lot.

Alternative metagames are all the rage these days, and I have no reservations about our ability to build our own metagame. We already have a CAP metagame and a sub-community that supports it -- all with almost no help from the larger parent CAP community. In fact, CAP almost hinders the CAP metagame currently, and yet the metagame still endures. I think with legitimate endorsement and community support, the CAP metagame would grow quickly.

I agree with others that the CAP metagame really must include all CAP pokemon, all the time, almost no matter what. Almost. If CAP did something really, really stupid then I guess we could have some extreme provisions to allow a CAP to be banned. But otherwise, I think the CAP Metagame is so intrinsically bound to the pokemon we have created, that we must include them in the CAP metagame by rule.

On that same note, I agree that not including all CAP pokemon would probably be seen as a slap in the face to the existing CAP Metagame community that has been working to develop the metagame and build strategy collateral in support of every CAP pokemon to date. I am NOT saying we should fear disruption to the existing CAP Metagame community as the single biggest determinant in how we proceed -- but it is very definitely a real concern to be weighed. We don't want to alienate the existing CAP metagame community, by just swooping in and invalidating the good work they have done so far.

I really love the general theme of "finding balance through creation rather than omission", because it is so incredibly consistent with the theme of the overall CAP project. But I, like several others, have serious concerns about how it would work in practice. I won't rehash the concerns, because they have already been covered well by others. But I do think that if CAP was to implement a sophisticated formal balancing system for the CAP metagame (which I DON'T WANT, but more on that later) then this theme is the right way to go for CAP. Not because I think it will be objectively better than other systems or produce a more balanced metagame than other systems -- but because I think it supports the mission and mentality of Create-A-Pokemon much better than extensive bans and clauses.


Balance: The Holy Grail

My biggest issue with the balancing system Birkal proposes is that fact that it is a balancing system at all! As Birkal quoted me from IRC in an earlier post ITT, I truly believe that there is WAY TOO MUCH hype and emphasis placed on the pursuit of balance, with the idea that it will make the metagame objectively "better". I think it is an enormous waste of time, for the most part.

There are metagames with almost no balancing whatsoever, that are very enjoyable to play and have huge playerbases. In fact, Ubers, which is the place where we intentionally put all the shit that is supposedly KNOWN TO BE BROKEN -- is one of the most popular metagames in Smogon! What does that tell you about the importance of balance as it relates to enjoyment? Hey, I know there is plenty of bitching about PDon and other things in Ubers. But there is equally as much bitching in OU about the latest of the neverending line of suspects that are supposedly ruining OU. And OU expends huge amounts of time and energy to sustain its massive balancing system of bans and clauses.

Honestly, I would like to see CAP stop the madness when it comes to chasing the pipe dream of balance. I would like to see CAP establish an OBJECTIVE baseline list of real Pokemon allowed for play in our metagame, then immediately add to that all the CAP pokemon created to date. Then focus all our time and energy to learn the best strategies to play that metagame. Stop focusing on fixing the game of Pokemon and instead focus on learning how best to play it competitively.

If you think about it -- that's what the current CAP Metagame community is doing already. They don't try to control the baseline list of real pokemon available for play -- they take whatever is decided in OU. They don't try to control the CAP pokemon available for play -- they take whatever is decided in the CAP forum. Their mission is to analyze the best strategies for playing the pokemon given to them, and to play the metagame to maximum enjoyment. And apparently IT IS ENJOYABLE, because there are people that play and support the CAP metagame, almost with no external support or encouragement.

So why do we need to inject a balancing system into the equation? You could argue that the CAP metagame is getting a balancing system currently, by way of all the work that is done in OU. But, you can counter-argue that by adding 20+ high-powered threats that were not accounted for AT ALL by the OU balancing system, that the OU balancing system has negligible positive impact to balance, and may even make CAP more IMBALANCED, when they unintentionally ban top counters to CAP pokemon.

I'd rather see us remove all subjective balancing artifacts from CAP and start our metagame from that point. I realize that is controversial as hell, and maybe not realistic. Note that I did NOT say I want CAP to start with every pokemon in existence from MegaRay on down. I said I want to have an "objective" baseline, and that baseline would almost certainly include a list of so-called ubers. But the baseline would not be determined by polling experts or getting rulings from councils. It would be based on objective information, either from the gamemakers themselves, or from statistical data about the game and/or metagame.

I know I'm saying a mouthful and not explaining any details - and I'm not going to get into details right now, because I'm not actually proposing we do something specific on this front right now. I'm mentioning this as a different way of looking at the proposal before us, and a different way of framing how we could alter our direction.

There have been many comments in this thread already mentioning Smogon as "ban-happy" and other remarks that indicate I am not alone in thinking that Smogon's balancing efforts are overdone or even detrimental. I think many of you would like to see CAP take a more minimalist approach. I'm asking that we explore those notions much further than you probably ever considered possible, within a Smogon-based project, that is.


Other Thoughts

I appreciated the viewpoints and comments of almost every post in this thread. I've re-read the entire thread a couple of times over the past few months, as I have been writing all my thoughts on the topic. And every time I read the thread, it is remarkable to me how passionate and intelligent this group is when it comes to CAP policy discussion. Obviously not everyone agrees with each other, but it is striking how much we all care about the CAP project and our future direction, and how much we are willing to invest in this project and community.

I want to highlight one of nyttyn's comments about the current culture of CAP. He wasn't the only one that mentioned it, but I thought this bit was really good as to the need for cultural change in CAP:

"It feels like CAP has no longer become a project aimed at inclusion and enjoyment - much like many other aspects of current Smogon, it feels dominated by an attempt and urge of utmost zeal to cater to only the highest level of play, and enjoyment and culture is suffering for it.

Ultimately, this third issue is the root of my current concerns with CAP. It doesn't feel like we're here to have fun anymore - and don't get me wrong, I'm not proposing we completely abandon balance with the new system and just turn into a reckless fakemons project. But at the same time, I believe that we absolutely need to change our ways, because the current system simply does not work."

We need to remember that changing the status quo is ALWAYS extremely hard. We are NOT going to have mass consensus on what we do here. I can guarantee that some people are going to be very pissed off, no matter what we do from here on out -- EVEN IF WE DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING. Because now that the possibility of change has been put on the table, if we do nothing, people that want a change are going to be pissed off. So don't anyone kid themselves into thinking that we will make everyone happy here, regardless of how this plays out. In fact, a more likely scenario is that everyone will be unhappy to some degree with one or more aspects of what we do, myself included.

This thread is nowhere near ready for a conclusion. The discussion has been on hold for a few months, as CAP 21 has been the focus for all of us. I am hoping we can pick up this discussion in earnest again, now that Crucibelle is winding down.

I have an alternative/complementary proposal I am working on for framing the direction of the forum aspect of the project in a different way, but still supporting an ongoing CAP metagame and community. That proposal is not soup yet, and may not even materialize, depending on how this discussion proceeds.

So let's ramp this discussion up again and see if we can make something happen. I think there is general consensus of a need for change, but we're not yet clear on the best way to go about it.
 
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Deck Knight

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(Quoted with some formatting edits)
Background and Context

This is the second of two consecutive posts. I made a very long post immediately before this one to explain, in great detail, all the background and context that led to my current thinking about altering CAP's direction. In this post, I'll comment on Birkal's proposal and other ideas presented so far in this thread, and present some new ideas to consider as well.

Here are a few key summary points on the background context in my previous post:

CAP and OU:
  1. CAP is not tied to OU, and never really was tied to it
  2. CAP tries harder and harder to achieve an ephemeral definition of competitive success with our creations, with limited success. I don't believe the benefits of all the work are worth the cost.
  3. Smogon's competitive tiering policies have become a huge industry in Smogon, with limited success in terms of significantly increasing the balance and popularity of the metagame. I don't believe the benefits of all the work are worth the cost.

    Competitive Pokemon as a whole:
  4. The world of competitive pokemon has extended far beyond where it was when CAP started.
  5. Inside Smogon, alternative metagames and battle formats (ie. not OU) now dominate the battling landscape
  6. Outside Smogon, competitive Pokemon is now very actively supported and defined by the real game makers, with massive public popularity and success

    CAP and Competitive Pokemon:
  7. CAP's approach to "competitive Pokemon" is out of touch with the real Pokemon-playing world
  8. CAP now punishes participation of all kinds (from both skilled and unskilled battlers), and has developed a toxic community culture and goals
  9. CAP needs to disconnect from OU and reconnect with the real game and broader, more modern concepts of "competitive Pokemon"

I realize some of those are shocking to just blurt out like that in bullet form. But if you want justification and background reasoning, feel free to read my enormous post above. Otherwise, it's just a quick rundown of my general frame of mind.
I took some time to read and digest Doug's posts and re-read the others on this thread. What I'll do is respond to each of Doug's bullet points and then see where we can go from there. I also changed the bulleted list to numbers for ease of organization.

CAP and OU:


In a historical context CAP and OU have been tied at a hip, for all the reasons you mentioned above. We've always reserved the right to break away from an OU-centered development process, but never done so for reasons of pragmatism, playerbase, etc. The most important part of your first post was the information you provided specifically on the "market share" of each tier. To me, that information can be read from a new policy perspective as "The King Is Dead. Long Live the King!"

My only point of contention would be that OM is amalgamated. If you have it I would be interested to know how that 63% is further broken down, because it might help us better understand how we should construct our goals. Hackmons, STABMons, and Inverse Battles are all great but they mess with mechanics to a much greater extent than what we're called to do (though Inverse has actual in-game coding to refer to.)

Just for edification, Novembers stats pulled from the monthly stats on #Battles Played for a few selected metas with >50,000 observed battles:

OU: 1,450,762
Anything Goes: 469,756
Ubers: 282,109
UU: 183,896

VGC 2015:
388,615
Doubles OU: 171,293

LC: 58,657
OUNoMega: 56,505
Monotype: 212,730

Contrast this with CAP:
CAP (November): 4896
CAP (May): 3092
CAP (June): 716
Naviathan Playtest (June): 1491

We actually had a dropoff in number of battles during the playtest, while our month-over-month numbers for cap the last few months range between 4-5000. This in a metagame where theoretically we are pulling from the knowledge base of over a million battlers. The good news is we're trending upwards in number of battles, which is a testament to the people trying to make the CAP Metagame work.

CAP and Competitive Pokemon as a whole:

What this means, I think, is that we're chasing an elusive unicorn every time we aim for OU. By the time we finish a CAP, OU has already gone through a suspect test phase and we're basically bringing back a nostalgic metagame for the playtest, plus one new addition. For example, this playtest we need to decide if Shadow Tag is banned or not, but we could also have been deciding whether Mega Sableye should get the boot from a Pokemon our CAP was given Mold Breaker specifically as an option against.

In the interest of stability, anchoring ourselves to OU no longer serves its purpose because OU is a constantly moving target that, in the previous suspect round, wasn't even testing a single threat at once. Basically OU becomes a new metagame every suspect test because the explicit purpose is to find out if the new metagame is "more balanced" than the old one, and to ditch the old one if competitive consensus deems it so. Considering the number of times "ban" has been successful, this isn't a good trend for CAP because we're attaching ourselves to metagames with a shelf life. Moreover, this isn't likely to change because "Pokemon Z" is coming out soon, making Volcanion and Perfect Cell 100% Zygarde, along with new tutor moves and possibly new MegaMons altering the whole balance and resetting the metagame once again. And then there's Gen 7, as I doubt Game Freak is finished printing money off of #25's franchise.

The bottom line is we have other options for Competitive Pokemon. VGC 2015 is the official format of the game makers, Ubers is basically Gentleman's Pure Pokemon (Mega-Ray + clauses are the only restrictions there), Anything Goes is "Pure Pokemon," and the benefits of these metagames is that they are not constantly moving targets.

If anything, I think the fact we've just established in CAP 21 we can make a Mega Pokemon that the most logical step for us, process-wise, is to start our metagame project using Ubers as our skeleton and work the tier down from there, using an actual Full CAP Metagame. The only thing that changes for the Playtest is that we add the CAP.

Alternatively, we could look to VGC as our baseline and start making competitive-oriented project around that. The key here is that whatever metagame we are going to build around, it needs to be consistent, learn-able, and not subject to change at the whim of popular opinion. I think if Full CAP becomes its own tier we achieve that, as we're now introducing a threat based around a consistent metagame, and each time we finish a project, our next project can analyze the new metagame changes our previous creation was designed to make. OU is getting less and less relevant to a "Competitive Pokemon" and more and more relegated to what CAP got criticized for in the early days: A custom ruleset metagame with no relationship to "real" competitive Pokemon.
 

Stratos

Banned deucer.
I'm pretty sure Doug included Random metagames in his analysis of sim statistics, and I think saying "look people play hella randbats, so CAP is the future" is very dishonest but I don't think it was intentionally dishonest.

That being said, as someone who was very against this move at the start, I think Doug has convinced me.

I often feel the same when it comes to DOU, that I wish people would stop bitching about balancing so much and just play. I don't enjoy suspect discussions. I enjoy the metagame. I enjoy playing DOU, checking out new strategies, and building new teams. Fortunately we're much less active in our suspecting (tested 4 things (two twice) since XY came out) but even that sometimes feels like a drag, and while I'm genuinely glad we changed what we did, having to deal with people itching for new suspects is infuriating. I kind of wish we'd just take the option off the table at this point.

In the end, the reason I support this proposal is because CAP isn't pulling in OU players anyways. As it is, even now, we have more CAP players than OU players participating in our OU project. And I don't think that ramming our head against the wall repeatedly is going to do anything to fix that because, as Doug said, we're asking for unicorns. So I think we should accept what we have to work with and work with it instead of against it. The fact is, if you're interested in participating in CAP—you probably play CAP. If we actually accept this fact, I don't think we'll ever have a big community, but we can have fun.



edit: i think if we're going to do a CAP metagame, the obvious starting point is the base form having BST 600. Ban Kyurem and Kyurem-Black and Hoopa-Unbound because nobody's going to miss them when they're gone and it's not worth breaking consistency. Maybe ban the most annoying 600 BST mons, like Deoxys-formes, Shaymin-Sky, and Darkrai. Starting VGC is a terrible idea because VGC players don't play it out of loyalty to the metagame but because they want to play the official meta. If you think pulling in OUers is hard, pulling in VGCers would be ten times harder.
 
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Bughouse

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Echoing the randbats point. I play maybe like 5-10x more randbats these days than any other format bc I don't have much time to keep up with metagames or make serious teams.

May have more comments later (it's a lot to take in and process), but I'd like to see those stats re-presented with randbats excluded haha. I don't think it's nearly as bad as it looks for OU.
 
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