Rejected SS PU Scrafty Revote

[Excal]

Previous thread: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/scrafty-in-ss-pu.3711926/

With PUPL coming up, I wanted to call for a revote on Scrafty in SS PU. This metagame was in an incredibly good place post-SCL and it didn't sit quite right with me to haphazardly ban Scrafty right at the generation's end. The voting results were extremely close, some people who qualified didn't get the chance to vote, and looking at who voted Ban/DnB, several of the tier's most notable players voted Do Not Ban. Examples include jonfilch, Leru, xavgb, z0mog, and avarice, who combined had a record of 22-9 in SS PU in the last SCL. In addition, the council was open to a revote a few months down the line at the time of the ban.

Observing the metagame post-Scrafty ban, I strongly feel that it has not improved and that during PUPL it will be worse off than if Scrafty were still free. I still care about this tier and would like the chance to improve it, restoring it to its previously very healthy state. If the vote turns out to keep it banned once more, that's totally fine of course. But I think given the circumstances, there should be a revote that takes effect before PUPL starts.

gum Chloe Shaneghoul idk who else might still be on PU council and I'm not bothering to check TY

 

[Shaneghoul]

Hi excal, thanks for making this thread and re-engaging this topic. I'm going to give my thoughts on this first as a player who has played a lot of ss pu since the ban and then from a technical perspective as one of the tier leaders.

You say that the metagame hasn't improved since the scrafty ban, I'd like to ask on what basis you make this claim? From my playing experience the metagame is largely the same except you're no longer restricted by having to account for scrafty, a broken element as deemed by the community. I think there was some worry that terrain teams featuring the likes of thievul and swoobat would end up being overwhelming with scrafty removed but if you were to check the win rates of these builds in circuit, classic and sspl I think you'd find that they've actually struggled quite a lot. I will concede that it's a bit harder to make progress on stall without scrafty but that was kind of the problem with scrafty in the first place, it made too much progress which is why it was banned so I don't see how this argument holds up. All that's really resulted in is teams having to take more account of stall in the builder with stuff like toxic supergeist or taunt split weezing, which I generally don't see as a bad thing. The meta seems to have adapted well in general with the likes of audino rising in usage to help handle ghost types and more bulky offensive teams that use supergeist as the slash check seeing more success, and as a result not forcing the meta towards gigalith balance as much as previously. Building feels fresh and I feel like I can have success with a lot more than I previously could.

Quite frankly I've seen nothing in the post scrafty meta to suggest it's in a worse place than it was before, and I think if you ask the (admittedly small) group of players who have been actively playing/building sspu since the ban you'll find similar sentiment. Though obviously I can't speak for others and am very happy to be disagreed with, going to tag DugZa sensei axew OranBerryBlissey10 avarice gum tlenit who are all involved in sspl in some way in case they have any thoughts.

The next point then is looking at this from a tiering perspective. If (and as I said above this is a very big if which I heavily contest right now) it's deemed that this should go to vote, how would we form a voting pool? For this to be a valid vote it would have to be made up of people who have been actively playing the post scrafty meta as they would be most qualified, and to be honest at a generous estimate that's like 15 people. I think you would have to at least wait until the end of sspl to get enough qualified users, but then we'd be taking action in the middle of pupl which won't be happening. The only reasonable way I could see this being done is waiting until the end of pupl and then re-evaluating the situation to see if a vote is needed, as otherwise you simply don't have a large enough pool to make it a fair vote.

Then just as a last question. You mention that some people didn't even get to vote, could you expand on this a bit more please or was this meant to be more of a throwaway remark? This is the first I've heard on this and if you have a genuine issue with how the technicalities of the suspect process were handled could you please share, as that's a fairly big claim to make and would probably affect the need for a revote if legitimate. I'm aware that not everyone who qualified to vote ended up voting but we felt we gave a very reasonable amount of time and of course everyone who was eligible was tagged. We figured that due to the nature of the test, many people just decided not to vote which was something we were expecting and so I'm not sure where the idea of people not getting to vote comes from.

Ultimately, this was a community result decided by a super majority so I think it's important to respect that decision, and in the absence of strong support for a retest from the players who are actively playing the metagame I think it's hard to justify a retest. That combined with the lack of a strong voting pool would have me inclined to push this discussion to after pupl, where (provided there is strong support for it) it would be easier to justify a retest. This isn't a final decision or anything of course I just wanted to get my thoughts out there. I encourage anyone to contribute to the discussion I just ask we keep it civil. Thanks!

 

[Excal]

Hi excal, thanks for making this thread and re-engaging this topic. I'm going to give my thoughts on this first as a player who has played a lot of ss pu since the ban and then from a technical perspective as one of the tier leaders.

You say that the metagame hasn't improved since the scrafty ban, I'd like to ask on what basis you make this claim? From my playing experience the metagame is largely the same except you're no longer restricted by having to account for scrafty, a broken element as deemed by the community. I think there was some worry that terrain teams featuring the likes of thievul and swoobat would end up being overwhelming with scrafty removed but if you were to check the win rates of these builds in circuit, classic and sspl I think you'd find that they've actually struggled quite a lot. I will concede that it's a bit harder to make progress on stall without scrafty but that was kind of the problem with scrafty in the first place, it made too much progress which is why it was banned so I don't see how this argument holds up. All that's really resulted in is teams having to take more account of stall in the builder with stuff like toxic supergeist or taunt split weezing, which I generally don't see as a bad thing. The meta seems to have adapted well in general with the likes of audino rising in usage to help handle ghost types and more bulky offensive teams that use supergeist as the slash check seeing more success, and as a result not forcing the meta towards gigalith balance as much as previously. Building feels fresh and I feel like I can have success with a lot more than I previously could.

Quite frankly I've seen nothing in the post scrafty meta to suggest it's in a worse place than it was before, and I think if you ask the (admittedly small) group of players who have been actively playing/building sspu since the ban you'll find similar sentiment. Though obviously I can't speak for others and am very happy to be disagreed with, going to tag DugZa sensei axew OranBerryBlissey10 avarice gum tlenit who are all involved in sspl in some way in case they have any thoughts.

The next point then is looking at this from a tiering perspective. If (and as I said above this is a very big if which I heavily contest right now) it's deemed that this should go to vote, how would we form a voting pool? For this to be a valid vote it would have to be made up of people who have been actively playing the post scrafty meta as they would be most qualified, and to be honest at a generous estimate that's like 15 people. I think you would have to at least wait until the end of sspl to get enough qualified users, but then we'd be taking action in the middle of pupl which won't be happening. The only reasonable way I could see this being done is waiting until the end of pupl and then re-evaluating the situation to see if a vote is needed, as otherwise you simply don't have a large enough pool to make it a fair vote.

Then just as a last question. You mention that some people didn't even get to vote, could you expand on this a bit more please or was this meant to be more of a throwaway remark? This is the first I've heard on this and if you have a genuine issue with how the technicalities of the suspect process were handled could you please share, as that's a fairly big claim to make and would probably affect the need for a revote if legitimate. I'm aware that not everyone who qualified to vote ended up voting but we felt we gave a very reasonable amount of time and of course everyone who was eligible was tagged. We figured that due to the nature of the test, many people just decided not to vote which was something we were expecting and so I'm not sure where the idea of people not getting to vote comes from.

Ultimately, this was a community result decided by a super majority so I think it's important to respect that decision, and in the absence of strong support for a retest from the players who are actively playing the metagame I think it's hard to justify a retest. That combined with the lack of a strong voting pool would have me inclined to push this discussion to after pupl, where (provided there is strong support for it) it would be easier to justify a retest. This isn't a final decision or anything of course I just wanted to get my thoughts out there. I encourage anyone to contribute to the discussion I just ask we keep it civil. Thanks!

Based on all public/tour SS PU replays + my playing experience post-ban, I think the metagame hasn't improved because idt building diversity is indicative of a metagame being better/worse. Scrafty's centralization brought a strong fundamental balance to the tier that I believe has diminished. Strengthening stall is concerning to me because Scrafty was one of the few Pokemon keeping it in check and making it harder to adapt. I think terrain has not been optimized/properly explored since the ban, and I could see it being effective in PUPL/not a good dynamic for preparing in the tier. I can't claim that the metagame is necessarily worse off atm, but I think it could be in PUPL + I do not think it has improved with the ban, which is why I think a revote before PUPL should be considered.

The way you'd go about a voting pool is to use the original voting pool and add on people who have played + had success in SS PU post-ban. That's how it has been done in the past. You will see some overlap between the two groups, which I think is a good thing. Essentially, Scrafty got banned once SS became an old generation. In these circumstances, similarly to DPP OU Latias and SM UU Quagsire, a revote after a few months makes a lot of sense and doesn't do harm, imo.

Ultimately, while unavoidable, I think Smogon's suspect test/voting process is extremely flawed. Having revotes for influential tiering decisions of old generations is a good way to validate a previous vote and strengthen a test result's quality. Going into specifics about this test, I don't think its flaws are unique from other suspect tests and I think the process was followed properly.

My main gripes, independent of suspect process, were the following:

• We didn't give enough time for the metagame to adapt to DD Scrafty, which I think would have happened (there was already very quick/healthy adaptation to it even in SCL finals)
• I believe there were a significant number of very qualified voters (those who participated in & succeeded in SCL) who voted DnB, which should be considered when evaluating a revote

We've had several supermajority decisions in history get revoted on, so I don't think that a revote is disrespectful to a decision. If it's not supported by the playerbase, fair game, but I don't see a downside to revoting.

Ty for your thoughtful and in-depth response. I'm fine with whatever y'all end up deciding to do.

 

[Shaneghoul]

I think you raise some very valid concerns as to potential issues that might arise in the metagame, and to a degree I share some of these concerns, but as of right now, these are largely based on speculation that has yet to be proved valid. In tournament games stall has proved strong but not overwhelming and whilst there have been attempts to optimise terrain in replays such as these two, it still hasn't found its footing and functions more as a cheese pick that might get the occasional win if not prepped for properly. I'm absolutely not ruling out future improvements on the structure, especially as more people explore the tier come PUPL, but the fact that 6 months removed from the ban there hasn't been much movement on that front suggests to me that future improvements shouldn't break the tier.

I also strongly oppose the idea of reusing the same voting pool from 6 months ago when the majority of those players have not touched the tier since then, and as a result, would have an uninformed opinion about the current state of the tier. If a revote were to occur, it would have to be with players experienced with the post-ban tier, as the question a revote would ask is "Do you feel the tier needs the presence of Scrafty to stabilise it", and that's not a question that can be answered by players who only played the tier with Scrafty in it.

I think the circumstances of the initial test were different to that of traditional old gens as the tier had only just barely transitioned to becoming an old gen and we were still in the middle of our circuit and had just finished PUWC. This led to the voting pool having a large number of players who had played with Scrafty in our ongoing tournaments but had no intention of continuing to play the tier from that point onward. Retroactively, this may have been a mistake, but that's the reality of it and it's why I'm so reluctant to consider re-using that pool for a vote now.

What this really boils down to though is that, up to this point SS PU has been a competitive tier in the tournaments it has featured in post the ban, and there hasn't been much direct evidence to suggest otherwise up to this point. With that in mind, we feel it would be a mistake to potentially destabilise the tier going into PUPL.

I don't fundamentally disagree with the idea of a revote, and I understand your point about it being used to strengthen previous tiering action. I just feel that the timing would be poor for it right now. I recognise that you bring it up now as you'd like it to be broached before PUPL, but I don't think we've given it enough time to allow the tier to settle before taking that kind of action. The worst-case scenario to me would be us holding a revote now, Scrafty remaining unbanned, and then us finding out in PUPL that the tier has issues and being forced to visit tiering action again after the tournament (the inverse situation of Scrafty being unbanned and then us having to ban it again post PUPL is also equally dire).

On account of the above-mentioned reasons, we've decided that we won't hold a revote now, but will absolutely consider the possibility of it post-PUPL, where we will have more meaningful tournament games to look at and a much stronger voting pool to work off of. Thanks again for bringing this up, I think it's been very productive and I'm glad we're able to revisit this topic, and I hope you're able to understand the decision we've reached for now.