Rejected ADV Baton Pass v184

[Star]

As the title indicates, we've had this topic come up and various decisions made a truly ludicrous amount of times. The most recent BP related shenanigans have mainly involved Ninjask passing Speed Boosts, paired with techs like Swagger, Sand Attack, or Toxic to circumvent the usual counterplay.

The ADV council has decided to ban Soundproof from ADV OU. Our most recent tiering actions regarding Baton Pass freed the previously banned Mr.Mime, and its return made StatPassing chains viable and problematic for the reasons we took action in the first place. Astamatitos' recent post does a great job at explaining how they work.

Banning Soundproof over Mr.Mime is our prefered choice as it's more consistent with our precedent actions that are still in place, namely the Sand Veil ban.

We also decided for this "quick" ban as it falls in line with our previous Mr.Mime ban and doesn't alter the tier in any way, thus being a solution that should accomodate for every side of the argument we got to speak with (mostly community members on Discord and ADV council members).

We want to make it clear though that we hope this is the final action under the current ruleset to deal with Stat passing chains. In the future, should this still be an issue, the actions taken will be more severe, and we will hold a discussion on SpeedPass, StatPass or Baton Pass as a whole.

The last time we made a decision on BP, we were extremely clear that the next time this came up we would only be considering more severe measures (banning SpeedPass, StatPass, or Baton Pass as a whole). We will firmly be sticking to this, and any other incremental bans will not be considered and shouldn't be discussed here.

This thread is mainly to open up the discussion on what the next steps should be for ADV to address the latest issues with Baton Pass. The only paths forward up for discussion are SpeedPass, StatPass, Baton Pass as a whole, or doing nothing. If any of these 3 get enacted, it may also come with removing some of the other BP-related rules currently in place. The council is currently inclined towards a SpeedPass ban as a solution, but we are of course open to community input. You can also expect a survey in the near future on this topic.

Please limit discussion in this thread to the topics mentioned. Things like Swagger will be looked at separately (and in parallel) to this, but are a completely separate issue.

 

[dk]

i am but a humble adv ladder gremlin at this point so my stakes in this are not as great as frequent tournament players, but i think it's uncontroversial to say that at bare minimum drypass ought to remain intact no matter what

i dont have any swoon-worthy sell for this viewpoint beyond the largely intuition-based feeling that the tier only stands to lose substantially in terms of depth from having such a balanced pivoting tool caught in the crossfire of tiering action against actual problems. the even-keeled risk/reward baked into drypass goes a long way in sprinkling in more consistency for faster paced teams, for one, especially in the context of trapper-oriented progress plans or teams based around defensively underwhelming progress-makers (the squishy fighters of loom/hera/medi, zard, marowak if you're feeling spicy, etc). adv archetype balance is a big part of why the tier is so good; there's no reason to unnecessarily jeopardize it for the sake of clause brevity that makes the ruleset look ever so slightly neater (and does nothing else positive)

none of this is an appeal to actual tiering philosophy and the concept of competitiveness, but thats ok because its obvious that drypass itself is completely fine. just please dont give in to the weird pr armchair people that would rather have rules be shorter than have the tier play well

give speedpass the axe if you're gonna do anything

thank you for reading and remember to eat your vegetables

 

[baddummy]

Of the four options, I think 2 are fine, and 2 aren't feasible.
Banning Baton Pass outright, or banning any stat pass simply has too much collateral damage. Banning BP would break Zap Dug teams, which have been a consistent style in the metagame for a while now, and would stop mons like Celebi or Jolteon from escaping dug traps. Zapdos and Celebi dry pass a fair amount just to maintain momentum for some teams, you'd completely remove this functionality.
Even just banning stat pass completely changes the way somebody can play around Celebi, because they don't have to respect the possibility of it CMing (or perhaps SDing) up and passing the stats away.

Banning just speed pass has a small amount of collateral damage, that being Agility + BP Zapdos. I haven't seen Agi + BP Jolt, but it learns it too. While Zapdos sub passing is pretty common, it agility passing is much less so. This option removes some flexibility from Zapdos, but it still retains by far its most common uses of BP - sub, or just dry passing. The upside of this option is that it would outright kill Ninjask teams with no possibility of them recovering.

Doing nothing is a viable option. I would strongly urge the council to follow up and get rid of the relevant problem moves that Ninjask uses to cheese free subs - those being Swagger, Sand Attack, and Flash for good measure. Assuming that the aforementioned is done, I believe that this is my preferred option for now. While Ninjask teams could obviously still fish some wins, they could also clank into a team with roars that it can't coin flip its way out of. It is worth noting, Ninjask could still run toxic and chip down roar mons if this option is picked.

Short version:
Doing nothing, follow up removing the problem moves: This is my preferred option and one I would encourage the council to take.
Banning speed pass: Has some collateral damage, but is viable.
Banning Stat pass or just BP outright: I would rather we do absolutely nothing at all than take either of these options.

 

[Star]

Of the four options, I think 2 are fine, and 2 aren't feasible.
Banning Baton Pass outright, or banning any stat pass simply has too much collateral damage. Banning BP would break Zap Dug teams, which have been a consistent style in the metagame for a while now, and would stop mons like Celebi or Jolteon from escaping dug traps. Zapdos and Celebi dry pass a fair amount just to maintain momentum for some teams, you'd completely remove this functionality.
Even just banning stat pass completely changes the way somebody can play around Celebi, because they don't have to respect the possibility of it CMing (or perhaps SDing) up and passing the stats away.

Banning just speed pass has a small amount of collateral damage, that being Agility + BP Zapdos. I haven't seen Agi + BP Jolt, but it learns it too. While Zapdos sub passing is pretty common, it agility passing is much less so. This option removes some flexibility from Zapdos, but it still retains by far its most common uses of BP - sub, or just dry passing. The upside of this option is that it would outright kill Ninjask teams with no possibility of them recovering.

Doing nothing is a viable option. I would strongly urge the council to follow up and get rid of the relevant problem moves that Ninjask uses to cheese free subs - those being Swagger, Sand Attack, and Flash for good measure. Assuming that the aforementioned is done, I believe that this is my preferred option for now. While Ninjask teams could obviously still fish some wins, they could also clank into a team with roars that it can't coin flip its way out of. It is worth noting, Ninjask could still run toxic and chip down roar mons if this option is picked.

Short version:
Doing nothing, follow up removing the problem moves: This is my preferred option and one I would encourage the council to take.
Banning speed pass: Has some collateral damage, but is viable.
Banning Stat pass or just BP outright: I would rather we do absolutely nothing at all than take either of these options.

Just to be clear we will take look at Swagger as that move has proven to be generally uncompetitive in other tiers over the years and has viable non-BP uses (Salac Pert for example), but Sand Attack and Flash are not remotely on the table. They are undisputably just terrible moves outside of specifically being used to pass stat boosts, and like the initial post mentioned there will be no further incremental bans to address BP.

 

[watermess]

I'm glad were finally at the stage where there is a reasonable consensus among top players and council players that incremental change is going to do anything more than alter the form in which we experience baton pass cheese, while it might seem extreme to consider banning bp fully, we have to ask ourselves, how much longer do we give a shit? fr lol.

don't get me wrong I can understand newer players wanting to try their hand at cherry-picking the right bans to solve our problems, but the reality is that adv has an otherwise healthy, evolving, exciting metagame that keeps all of us plenty enough engaged, so I see no reason to painstakingly draw out this process that has been brewing for the last 5 years.

anyway, my angle on any cheese related ban at this point is simply this, we've spent far too long trying to perfect the recipe, lets throw out the soup (ban baton pass) and move on with out lives, or decide we are happy enough with the soup (do nothing and forever hold our peace) and finally get to leave all this behind us.

 

[vapicuno]

"Post exaggerates the language used so as to make this seem to be more of a problem than it is (if the thread's title wasn't coercive enough).." - Astamatitos, in the previous BP thread. The fact that we're revisiting decisions is not a bad thing but rather a continuous improvement as the community figures out the boundaries, unless we are willing to claim that we are oracles.

That said, all previous bans apart from mean look pass had speedpass as an enabler, so I find very little reason to ban anything other than speedpass at the moment. The potential way of bypassing that would likely involve some sort of defense + attack boosts to an eventual speed booster, which would require quite a serious amount of ingenuity. I think we can let the community figure out post-speedpass ban if they're able to exploit this and revisit the rules later.

There's still a lot of creativity in statpass and imo there is no need to reach beyond speedpass. For example,

Apart from CM and SD pass, Berry pass (such as Liechi Zap, which Mana recently used in CI7), curse pass (Vaporeon, Jolteon [wanted to show a tour replay but got wiped!!], Umbreon) still offer unique and interesting games to watch.

 

[McMeghan]

For what it's worth, my personal stance is heavily against banning all form of statpassing and I will not budge unless there is a strong community outcry for it (and I know it's not the case atm).

So likely, as much as I like some standard applications of speedPass, I will most likely be on board for a speed pass ban instead, which covers Ninjask and some other applications I personally prefer to see our of the meta anyway.

 

[w_r]

I'd honestly make a detailed post but I doubt it would make a difference at this point. The op completely ignored a huge portion of the demographic which simply requested smth to be done on ninjask (speed boost ability) / swagger / sand attack. Instead we are offered an ultimatum that serves to benefit neither the tier nor the playerbase.

The funny part is that even if speed pass gets the boot it comes with freeing something random like removing the limitation on the number of different stats that can be passed (for eg cm + acid armor or sd + acid armor) which needlessly complicates the existing interactions within the tier.

It's not difficult to see where all this will lead to in the future, multi stat pass is probably broken if some people deem speed pass to be broken which I personally believe is a mu fish and not broken (imagine a pkmn receiving +6 in all stats except speed only for it to reveal agility without bp in its moveset lol). If stat pass gets booted we're left with dry pass which may align with the ideals of the current council which mostly comprise of multi gen / tier players and not purely adv mains. It's simple to streamline things and not care about the intricacies of the tier which is what I understand from the lazy tiering and lack of an open mind when dealing with the issue at hand.

Tldr; adv has a unique identity, it has a limited number of viable strategies & the physical-special split makes a large pool of the pokemon unviable (which is already small to begin with). Banning speed pass makes strategies revolving around agility zap redundant and makes zap rather one dimensional it's the same with salac berry pass that is seen on certain offensive structures. I'd also like to remind people choice scarf doesn't exist as an item in adv unlike other tiers which makes the speed stat most important out of the five stats.
If you want my opinion I'd probably vote to do nothing and wait for the swagger / sand attack thread or even a ban on ninjask which was what I originally pushed for to minimize collateral damage. I hope everyone grasps what is at stake currently and makes an informed decision. Happy laddering

 

[Cdijk16]

I think that most (and only) problematic baton pass strategies are in the form of Ninjask speed pass and to a far lesser extent, Zapdos speed pas.
I think that fully banning BP is unnecessary to resolve the issue and causes way too much collateral damage. There's a lot of balanced Dry Pass and Sub Pass strategies that would get removed by a full BP ban. StatPass strategies other than Speed pass such as CM/SD Pass from Celebi are also a balanced and a healthy part of the meta, there's no need to ban them.
Doing nothing would leave Ninjask pass alone, so I'm not in favor of that.
Speed pass causes some moderate collateral damage in the form of removing the fairly healthy Salac pass Vap and the less busted uses of Agility Pass Zapdos, but it solves the main issue of Ninjask pass.
Out of the 4 options, I am most in favour of banning Speed pass for reasons given above.
Edit: If possible, I would prefer to only have Ninjask pass banned in order to preserve Salac Pass Vaporeon, but the OP says that's not an option.

 

[BigFatMantis]

Most of the arguments I'm reading seem to just focus on Ninjask being the main issue - so why does there need to be a further complex ban/re-work of the baton pass ban limitations? Simply ban Ninjask from ADV OU and these problems are mostly solved without any real collateral damage - if you ban speed pass nobody is going to use Ninjask anyways in OU so what's the point of banning speed pass and undoing the current baton pass clause (which seems to have more reactive effects on the meta) when you can just ban Ninjask and have the only collateral damage be, well, Ninjask. I don't really see many people complaining about speed pass from anything else besides Ninjask - in fact the other speed passers seem to have some level of viable strategy that doesn't turn things dumb like Ninjask does.

If people truly think that Zapdos speed passing is busted and has to go then sure ban speed pass - but it doesn't to be the case from what I'm reading and from what I've heard from others talking about. It seems to be just a Ninjask issue mostly. And banning Ninjask (a pokemon) is what we're supposed to focus on anyways when tiering pursuant to tiering philosophy if that can fix the problematic issue. And that seems to have the least negative/unpredictable effect on anything else because, again, nobody is going to use it anyways if Speed pass was banned. And if a speed pass ban means we now get to chainpass again (why?) then just ban Ninjask and keep the current BP clause in place.

 

[Vileman]

Every time BP is brought up in adv the arguments are around what's the current trend. Multi Stat passing, more than x amount of bpers per team, mr.mime... so now it's obviously gonna focus on ninjask as the main culprit.
Thing is, I can understand the council being tired of dealing with this. The adv community really needs to think one step ahead and stop pretending like a small patch will fix the issue, only for it to come back some time later. Last time Mr.mime out of all things was banned (and then soundproof to free it) rather than taking more drastic measures on BP. I think we can all agree Mr. Mime is not broken. Neither is ninjask once you take speed passing out of the equation.
I am promoting banning speed passing. I'm really sorry if this stops you from cheesing a win here and there, but at the end of the day the most problematic part about BP is speed, without it you can manage to revenge kill whatever got bp'd in.

Advers: stop thinking small patches will fix a bigger issue. From the outside your stubbornness of needing BP in the tier leading to one million BP threads in pr looks a bit ridiculous. Fix the core issue at once and just get going with a better tier.

Disclaimer as it's been brought up the point isn't clear: just ban speedpassing and problem solved. I'm not promoting a full BP ban in adv.

 

[vapicuno]

Every time BP is brought up in adv the arguments are around what's the current trend. Multi Stat passing, more than x amount of bpers per team, mr.mime... so now it's obviously gonna focus on ninjask as the main culprit.
Thing is, I can understand the council being tired of dealing with this. The adv community really needs to think one step ahead and stop pretending like a small patch will fix the issue, only for it to come back some time later. Last time Mr.mime out of all things was banned (and then soundproof to free it) rather than taking more drastic measures on BP. I think we can all agree Mr. Mime is not broken. Neither is ninjask once you take speed passing out of the equation.
I am promoting banning speed passing. I'm really sorry if this stops you from cheesing a win here and there, but at the end of the day the most problematic part about BP is speed, without it you can manage to revenge kill whatever got bp'd in.

Advers: stop thinking small patches will fix a bigger issue. From the outside your stubbornness of needing BP in the tier leading to one million BP threads in pr looks a bit ridiculous. Fix the core issue at once and just get going with a better tier.

1. Why does the council have to be "tired" of making good decisions that benefit the metagame? Unless said council members are players spread thin across multiple generations, and maybe even unconsciously or consciously wanting to make every metagame look like every other so that, unconsciously or consciously, their skills are transferable and it's easier to dominate multiple metagames without a keen appreciation of the uniqueness of each? Regardless of the result, can we believe that this decision is about developing the metagame rather than keeping elements to reinforce known metagame elements at the expense of creative metagame evolution?
2. Why is every critique of BP in this post about its problems and not its value? Perhaps because "from the outside" people do not understand the intricacies of it and would prefer homogenizing metagames (back to point 1)?
3. Get going with a "better tier"?
Ladder stats for November
RBY - 22726
GSC - 9402
ADV - 233796
DPP - 67865
BW - 55024
ORAS - 57489
SM - 143778
SS - 60579

 

[Vileman]

1. Why does the council have to be "tired" of making good decisions that benefit the metagame? Unless said council members are players spread thin across multiple generations, and maybe even unconsciously or consciously wanting to make every metagame look like every other so that, unconsciously or consciously, their skills are transferable and it's easier to dominate multiple metagames without a keen appreciation of the uniqueness of each? Regardless of the result, can we believe that this decision is about developing the metagame rather than keeping elements to reinforce known metagame elements at the expense of creative metagame evolution?
2. Why is every critique of BP in this post about its problems and not its value? Perhaps because "from the outside" people do not understand the intricacies of it and would prefer homogenizing metagames (back to point 1)?
3. Get going with a "better tier"?
Ladder stats for November
RBY - 22726
GSC - 9402
ADV - 233796
DPP - 67865
BW - 55024
ORAS - 57489
SM - 143778
SS - 60579

My point was not that adv is a bad tier. It's regarded as one of the best, that's not news. I meant it as improving it and making it better by removing what's yet again being addressed as an issue.
I'll let each to their own about how we appreciate things in game. Personally I don't see any beauty or value in letting people pass speed bc its "creative" and gives a niche to some pokemon. In reality, and also re: point 1, BP has been had to been dealt with over and over, to the point where you all convinced yourself you'd rather ban Mr.mime than actually deal with the problematic move accordingly. The point was what I said at the end: you're all so obsessed with letting little niche things stay than you'd rather not fix the issue with an honest effort but would rather just pull complex bans which in the big picture makes no sense (again: adv really banned Mr.mime out of all things only for then to yet again realize the problem is still there)

Disclaimer as it's been brought up the point isn't clear: just ban speedpassing and problem solved. I'm not promoting a full BP ban in adv. Banning speed passing would be the final step needed.

 

[Triangles]

Sparsely used disruptor strategies are a sign of a healthy metagame. If you want to look to nature for parallels, the mutation of hemoglobin that causes Sickle Cell Anemia increases resistance to Malaria in the population. Remove these aspects and you have a very stagnant, vulnerable situation for the metagame where the checks and balances of Ninjask pass fall out of usage, potentially resulting in a worse overall situation for the tier.

 

[ABR]

"The only paths forward up for discussion are SpeedPass, StatPass, Baton Pass as a whole, or doing nothing. If any of these 3 get enacted, it would also come with removing the One Stat Passer Per Team Clause that is currently in place."

I am generally an advocate of tiering simplicity and absolutely feel and understand the desire to just solve this issue at once. However, I am against all of the above options and want to advocate for a ban of the ability Speed Boost.

Doing nothing: This lets the current Ninjask stuff roam free, and it is widely accepted as problematic.

Banning BP as a whole: This is pretty widely accepted as catastrophic for ADV and would remove an extremely large portion of viable, healthy strategies.

Banning StatPass: This would end the issue, and not cause as much collateral as the above, but still cause too much collateral for a large majority of ADV players. I see the personal appeal but this option is just not currently marketable or desired.

Banning SpeedPass: This would solve the jask issue. However, I and many others believe that freeing MultiPass in response to this would be a grave mistake and just allow a different type of cheese to fester. AA + CM chains or whatever else would be our new problem to deal with and is something we should avoid altogether. Additionally, this option has collateral in the eyes of some, relating to salac vap, agility pass zap, or dd pass smeargle.

As such, every above option either has excessive collateral or creates new problems. If we were to ban SpeedPass, it would have to be an addition to the current clause, another sentence added to it or whatever.

However! If we cannot remove pre-existing clauses as a result of the overall SpeedPass ban, its appeal in relation to a more jask/speedboost centric action is totally gone. If we have to keep all the current stuff regardless, and neither of SpeedPass or jask/boost stuff is more simple than the other, we would simply go with the option that has less collateral.

Therefore, I believe it is in everyone's best interest for there to be a simple ban of the ability Speed Boost. I say Speed Boost instead of Ninjask because we banned Soundproof and not Mr. Mime.

Please consider this, and thank you for making the thread so we can better our beloved tier.

edit: if clause is not undone, and there’s a genuine fear of agilizap etc stuff, then speedpass ban is fine

 

[Kollin7]

My preferred outcome is the banning of Speedpass.

The argument is not that Speedpass doesn't have counterplay (in fact it has quite a fair amount between phasing, intimidate, and boom). The crux of my argument would be that it's an extreme matchup fish in a way that other positive matchups in this tier are not, and is therefore uncompetitive cheese.

If I bring your standard ZapDug team vs Aero spikes, I almost definitely have a tough matchup, but it's not even close to the level of near unwinnable your standard ZapDug team is vs Speedpass. If Speedpass was an archetype that actually was valid vs several styles then you could easily make the argument that all teams should just be prepared to face it. But that's exactly the thing. It isn't good vs a lot of the metagame. It's a very dishonest fish that can near auto-win vs some teams that are meant to be prepared to face actually common meta strategies.

Secondarily to my opinion on what the solution would be, I'd also like to give my two cents on the discussion of Ninjask not being an option on the table. I can understand the council (and some spectators) feeling that ADV has done this song and dance so many times and should just be done with it. However, I also think ADV is a very active community (the most actively played generation outside of current gen by the way) and there's not really a good reason to not be incremental if we want to. If someone thinks Ninjask is the prime issue and not Speedpass itself, I personally disagree, but also think it's a reasoned stance to have. Why not just let people vote for that if it's what they feel is the best step to balancing? Who cares if some users who don't even play ADV think it's silly to revisit the topic if we feel we should? When has tiering ever had this sort of finality to it?

 

[Eeveeto]

Not entirely on topic (if it was my way, BP would be entirely unrestricted in every Gen, but I am realistic in that regard), but Swagger is a move I consider to be unhealthy and fun ruining in every single Meta, it should be universally banned on the same level Fissure and Double Team are. I am not in favor of banning Confusion in general, but Swagger is a bullshit almost every Mon learns, so it can, at least in theory, be abused by anything, especially Mons that are already strong without it or considered uncompetitive for other reasons (like Ninjask in this case).

 

[TyCarter]

Swagger should be a universal ban at least for singles metagames anyways, it's some bushleague shit. Ok got that out of the way so I'll move onto the actual relevant topic at hand.

Everyone has covered it but there's like only 1 real option here that isn't doing nothing presented by council. It's banning speedpass. Banning speedpass would address the Ninjask issue which is what I can safely say a lot of our ADV playerbase has grievances with. But it would as stated already cause unintended collateral that takes agilizap pass sets out of the equation and salac vapo.

I'm not against banning speedpass as I think it's probably the most feasible choice presented by council. I do think the adv council should at least consider the option of banning Jask/Speed Boost as a choice as well. I do not think that is too unreasonable.

 

[verbatim]

Thing is, I can understand the council being tired of dealing with this. The adv community really needs to think one step ahead and stop pretending like a small patch will fix the issue, only for it to come back some time later.

Looking at the history of the tier it seems pretty apparent that every time the issue has been speed centric, and looking forward if you reeeealllyyy squint you can maybe make argument for DD Pass Smeargle being the next issue (I would bet that it would not be, but I can see other people feeling differently and it's not exactly a thing that will be all that missed. Vap and Zap are unfortunate casualties, however).

I'm personally of the opinion that you really could just ban Ninjask, a known problem that I can find negative comp discourse around going at least as far back as 2006, and be done with it, but if that is truly off the tabled then of the presented options a SpeedPass Ban seems like the most sensible way forward.

 

[berry]

I'm pro Ninjask ban (or speedpass if Ninjask is completely off the table, I don't see why a step-by-step ban where Zapdos or other speedpassers are limited if they still present themselves as a problem in a couple months is off the table). Before reading these posts and hearing more opinions I was pro statpass ban outright, but I've since realized this is far too constraining and it removes too many other strategies as collateral for what's the real issue (my change of heart was mostly rooted in dazi's post in the other thread and kollin's in this one, and their explanations are stronger than what I could provide). The biggest issue I see in Ninjask and its ability to pass into mons that punch far above their weight class like Marowak, (edit: and how brain dead this whole archetype plays against teams that have to legitimately out-strategize it) who is typically just one flinch away from stealing the game. On top of being uncompetitive, I think that the speedpass strategy as a whole relies on an extremely simplified gameplan that specifically aims to out-luck its supposed counterplay instead of having an actual plan against it like any other competitive team should bring. This last piece is more or less my expanded opinion on hclat's post, where the archetype is nothing more than a ridiculous mu fish.

In addition to the hopefully en route Swagger ban, I also want to ask about why Sand Attack and Flash are labeled as completely off the table. Nobody who uses these moves even thinks they're trying to do anything other than outluck their opponent. Is keeping these moves *really* what the meta needs? Isn't Smogon's whole tiering philosophy trying to balance competitiveness and enjoyability? Is there a point in keeping them when these strats clearly achieve neither? Every side tour that matters already bans them because it's universally agreed upon that they're awful to play against, no matter how non-centralizing they are- they do nothing to make the game more skill-based, no matter the Pokemon using them or how they've been used in the past.

Additionally, I just had a quick question about how a hypothetical speedpass ban would be implemented, as I currently see a couple of different directions where it can go.

1. Agility / Dragon Dance / Speed Boost / Salac Berry + Baton Pass being limited on the same set
2. The user instantly forfeits if they use Baton Pass while possessing a Speed boost
3. Baton Pass is "greyed out", preventing its use until the PP of every other move is depleted

Each posses their own downsides, but 1 (the most reasonable option) doesn't account for circumstances where a Speed boost might be gained anyway through the use of an omniboost or sets which may choose to run an "either Agility OR Baton Pass" gameplan where they choose to execute one or the other.

 

[johnnyg2]

I personally think the council is in a difficult situation.

On one hand, you got the adv community giving you flack bc there's always optimization going on with baton pass and its not fun to play against. We spend a lot of time playing this game and wonderful tier and we want it to be as competitive as possible, regardless of how many complex bans are in place. We've gotten a lot of new players in the past few years who haven't been around for the frankly over a decade of baton pass shenanigans the tier has gone through, and I can understand the frustration on how slow it seems the council is moving. On the other hand, you have the policy review mains and smogon tiering staff thats constantly giving you shit because of how much special treatment the tier gets and that baton pass is banned in almost all other tiers, just ban it here blah blah blah. There's also a matter of tiering philosophy: as we all know, it's not possible to predict how specific bans and the 40th order effects that happen when something gets banned with the creative players we have in this community. I would suggest we shouldnt be too inflammatory -- I know that the new council along with McM, Star, and M Dragon actively care about the tier. There's gonna be new people on the council and we all do this for fun anyway. I also think Star's post was more in jest and I didnt take his opening paragraph too seriously. I am happy action is being taken once a critical mass was reached

When the thread was first posted, I was thinking we should just be done with it and ban stat passing. I was tired of having new optimization come up but still wanted to preserve the move baton pass. However, the more I think about, with whats on the table, banning Speed pass is probably the best option. I don't think just a blanket ninjask ban will solve the problem, as despite Zapdos being not nearly as bad, it still is effective with this style although not as much as ninjask. Nor do I think mud slap/swagger/etc need to be banned if speed pass is gone. Those strategies, while highly annoying, don't rise to the point where it is overbearing without Speed pass in my opinion. We've never seen a metagame with Speed pass banned, why don't we try it and revisit if it's a problem?

I also think CM Pass, SD pass, etc are not overbearing on their own to the point of banning them. Maybe AA + Cm Pass becomes a problem, but I really don't think so? I personally think the ban list wrt to baton pass should be as follows:

Ban speed pass
Keep sound proof banned
Keep one form of Baton pass boosts around (no undoing clauses in my opinion)
Keep trap, assist, and ingrain pass banned

If this is still a problem, we should revisit it in the future. There's always more time down the line -- I don't think people are gonna stop playing adv anytime soon.

 

[DarthTyros]

For those that haven't watched my video on this topic I'll be basically sharing alot of the opinions I shared in that video here but I have a few more things here that I didn't say here in more detail.

1: Speed Pass as a whole has a very similar principle, it encourages match up fishing to the extreme and often times it immediately wins or loses if it gets or doesn't get said very favorable mu. Ninjask just happens to enable this strategy the best but both Dragon Dance Smeargle and Agility Zapdos basically do the same thing and all 3 enable the same undesirable unhealthy strategy that in my mind really shouldn't be a part of the ADV Meta game as it forces unresonable team building restrictions for the offensive oriented styles it targets. Even if it isn't given it's dream Match up speed pass employ's various tricks to quickly gain an advantage and as long as the speed passer hold's that advantage they have a good chance at winning the game and it has a tendency to luck it's way around those unfavorable Match ups with moves like swagger, twave, sand attack so on which really only become super dangerous in the context of speed pass which is very good at giving it's user advantage super fast.

2: Many users disagree with how the council has handled the speed pass issue as some people just want Swagger/ Jask Banned. However I would argue that historically speed pass as a whole has been problematic and even though Zap/ Beagle pass isn't as consistent as Jask it basically does the same thing and having that still exsist because its worse still isn't a good idea since thing's tend to become retroactively broken over time and who isn't to say that the same thing won't happen again with Smeargle. I think being given an opportunity to get rid of all these negative aspects of the tier is very good idea and it would prevent things from becoming a problem later on.

3: Players have also been hesitant to ban speed pass flat because of the collateral. However It is my opinion that a lot of these claims are overblown as Speed Passers such as Zapdos and Vaporeon will not have there Viability really impacted by the speed pass ban as these Pokemon in the modern meta don't use those tools very often anymore regardless and still remain strong Pokemon despite there inability to pass speed . The same can't really be said about the recipients Marrowak, Ursaring and Belly Drum Hariyama all of which I don't think alot of players will miss to much with he exception of Ursaring which has basically become a meme amongst the community but even then these sets and Pokemon overall impact things very little outside of speed pass.

4: Some players are also reluctant to vote due to the potential of 2 Pass being unbanned. This one is also very strange as it means that Acid Amour Vaporeon will be viable with CM/ SD Pass Celebi but without speed or Mr.Mime it is incredibly unlikely that this style will become overpowered, it just means that these teams have extra tools and since these styles are seen as the healthy aspect of the metagame I don't see how this would negatively effect the tier as they will still have the same issues that they would have had with the option of using Acid Armor Vaporeon.

Closing Statement's: I believe that a Speed Pass Ban will positively effect the tier as would the new 2 pass rule. This has been a long time coming and I'm happy to see that the council has had the foresight to take action against this when it was given the opportunity too. So when I am given the opportunity I will be Voting YES for a SPEED PASS Ban and hopefully everyone else will follow suit.

 

[Star]

After discussions with members of the community, council internally and Smogon tiering leadership, we've aligned on the following path forward.

We would like to hold a suspect test on SpeedPass. If SpeedPass is banned, we will also remove the Soundproof ban that is currently in effect. We will not remove the One Boost Passer Clause, at least for the immediate future. We think this is optimal for a few reasons:

1. It definitively solves the issues currently plaguing the meta with Ninjask Pass teams. We do not believe that freeing Soundproof (Mr. Mime) will cause any issues with the SpeedPass and One Boost Passer Clause restrictions both in place.

2. It cleans up the ruleset so that ADV OU's bans around BP actually target the problematic element itself (Baton Pass) rather than trying to tier around it. Ninjask (or Speed Boost) and Soundproof are clearly not broken outside of their relationship with BP and banning either of them instead of going after BP is antithetical to our general tiering policy. We've repeatedly made exceptions for ADV with regards to this in the past, but are looking to rectify those mistakes now by going directly after Baton Pass rather than its abusers just as all other official Smogon tiers have done.

3. We keep the One Boost Passer Clause in place for now and alleviate concerns people have expressed about potentially freeing MultiPass strategies (albeit without speed) that may or may not be broken. We may still experiment with removing this clause in the future and/or use venues like a suspect slot in ADVPL to try out the meta without this clause.

Feel free to discuss thoughts on this approach further in this thread. A suspect can be expected in the near future, it will be open to the public and have a ladder component.

 

[Myzozoa]

I regret to post contra to the topic boundaries stipulated by the OP, but I also want to reiterate what others have said:

I suspect a majority in the substantially active ADV OU player base would prefer a step-wise tiering approach to this issue, such as beginning with a Speed Boost ability ban or Ninjask ban. Other forms of stat passing and speed passing are widely believed to be at an appropriate power level for the tier, and are not as widely considered to bring about novel situations where you have to hope you have the right phaser and/or predict perfectly in order to survive. Currently, Ninjask is enabling some strategies that I reckon would perhaps not feel awesome to have in the upcoming SPL.

In addition to being a very active metagame on this site, recently there was a $4500 cash prize ADV OU tour, and there is an ongoing ADV league throughout the year, as well as a long history of ADV OU tour youtube content creators. These things I've mentioned speak to the tier's large active player base that depends on smogon to standardize the ruleset. It's important to get this policy right, but also we don't have to do anything in a rush. Imo, any of the three options mentioned in the OP would be more than seems to be necessary as the next step. They may end up being the right choice, but I think something like that would really be better decided with a vote after a suspect process.

There is a very active and large player base so it's not unreasonable to want them directly involved w something like a big change on baton pass like those proposed in the OP. As we recently saw, DPP OU had tiering action to review dry pass, which is just to show that we can and probably will revisit this as needed, such as if a Ninjask or Speed Boost ban is found to be insufficient.

It is really not my intention w this post to make it sound like 'oh the council is refusing to listen to the community again' cause honestly usually councils are pretty reluctant and mainly make pr threads looking for reasons not to do obvious tiering processes, so in that sense it's refreshing to see this council leadership in tiering. On the other hand, I think it's easy to lose track with a lot of issues being raised in this thread and all the many proposals now that have been posted, and forget that a lot of people are disappointed rn that a limited proposal that just restricts Ninjask isn't seemingly on the table. It feels like we're being railroaded to take agi zap pass and other speed pass strats out of the tier when users aren't sure they want to go that far yet.

 

[vapicuno]

PROXY POST FOR Hclat

We've repeatedly made exceptions for ADV with regards to this in the past, but are looking to rectify those mistakes now by going directly after Baton Pass rather than its abusers just as all other official Smogon tiers have done.

I keep hearing this argument, and don't think people should accept it at face value. I don't trust it. Nowhere in the Tiering Policy is it written that we need to make as few changes as possible. The closest thing I found is "We play, to the best of our simulator's capabilities, with the mechanics given to us on the cartridge", with examples of sleep clause and freeze clause. No prior or potential BP bans change simulator mechanics - they just outlaw certain Pokemon/move combinations. Each ban has substantially weakened unhealthy strategies, and calling them mistakes and exceptions to tiering policy is subjective-at-best.

Personally I suspect this argument and the "line in the sand" approach come from a bias towards making the tier more similar to other tiers to aid other-gen players in succeeding at ADV with surface-level tier knowledge. This is not backed by tiering policy guidelines. It's ok for agendas to inform choices of council members. But hiding them behind the vague idea of "tiering policy" to steer a suspect test a certain way is deceptive and shady. At the very least, specific supporting verbiage in the tiering policy should be highlighted since it's the main driver for an (unpopular) suspect.

I echo the cases made by others in the thread, particularly Myzozoa and baddummy, and I believe we will be able to get a ninjask ban without blanket-outlawing speedpass down the line. I'll be voting for no change.

END PROXY POST