earlier in the year when the first thread talking about latias’ return to the dpp metagame was brought up i thought about responding to it in attempt to deter its unbanning from actually being realized. i assumed, however, that like every other time latias’ unbanning was brought up it would simply dissipate into a pet project tournament or pipe dream thing that would be talked about in discord chats until the next iteration of it was brought about. this time, i guess people really fell for the dream of freeing latias after its 8 year banishment from the metagame, and this time it might actually require some serious input to prevent a seriously ridiculous crisis in tiering from occuring.



i’d like to thank tony / sam / rui for bringing this to my attention and demonstrating the massive public interest in a suspect for latias that i assumed would only be fleeting. i’ve read most of the posts in this thread (and the PR one) thoroughly and have come to the conclusion that most of you, if not all, are completely missing the point of tiering as a function of competitive pokemon. while i will concede that some of you (i.e. bkc) have valid arguments and are probably right about latias’ actual presence in the metagame (at least in the short-term), i believe that this suspect test is essentially an impasse in the entire tiering of old-gens. a tiering crisis that, if permitted, will let us manipulate and change old-gens ad nauseum -- or just whenever we get tired of it and wish to change it to something different.



before i actually get into the meat of this post and the serious arguments, i’d like to talk about how outright silly one of the noted arguments is. a completely separate thread in an actually privated forum should be made for real discussion, as the public one in RoA is absolutely ridiculous.



on everybody preferring the current (the whole week of it) metagame to the one prior



if you actually believe that “preference” holds any weight in tiering of ANY generation or should, then you’re completely missing the point and should be thrown out of any tiering discussion, period. attributing a metagame’s health or viability to its enjoyability is absolutely out of the question for any tiering regime that wishes to posit itself as genuine or competitive. i developed this opinion after my retirement as TL as i realized just how dangerous a capricious council is to the integrity of any competitive game. i have a very strong suspicion that many of you are confusing metagame health with the rush of fun you get when you include latias into your teambuilder and get to use it on some ladder. metagames should be completely predicated on strict criteria developed in order to manifest the ‘best’ metagame possible. by best, i mean the elimination of everything we deem ‘broken’ or ‘unhealthy,’ terms that i may define later to avoid further conflation with ‘fun.’



ii. on the current state of dpp ou and the public’s response to it

dpp has, for some, reached its logical maxim in its current state. clefable, dugtrio, breloom, ttar, jirachi, para-spam, whatever. dpp has for many grown stale and reflects a metagame which has been dried up of innovation and represents a finished state. whether this is true or not, it seems to have entered even the highest players’ discourse. as per my last post, i don’t care in the slightest if dpp has become a stale, dead, terrible, unplayable, whatever metagame if it is not because of some broken pokemon / mechanic promulgating it. the final form of a metagame is supposed to be its most boring, as the stages it goes through are exhausted and the ability to push the metagame forward is mostly left to a circular diagram of specific counter-teams to the reigning paradigm looping back into a slight modification / tech and then going back to the reigning paradigm. let us assume that for the moment, dpp has reached its conclusion.



dpp’s staleness is not an excuse for modifications of tiering. a metagame can be completely unenjoyable and be the absolute paragon of what should be sought after in a competitive game. the angelicizement of dpp has probably contributed to this backlash at least in part. outsourcing to a theory posited by bkc, the obsession with 2007-2010 as smogon’s golden age and dpp’s hailing as the greatest metagame possessing the highest tier of skill has inevitably contributed to its own destruction. oversaturated with appraise for the past 5 years, dpp has finally reached a point where its late-game metagame sickness is unignorable for the majority -- or maybe the authority’s opinion on the game has just shifted. whatever it is, the desperate grasping for a change in what was previously a publicly celebrated metagame contributes, if not only slightly, to the rush for a change. bw suffered the reverse; instead of being the loved metagame of the masses, it was the one ‘ruined’ by an early tiering decision that essentially doomed the tier to weather wars in its future.



so, dpp is inevitably centralized as nearly every metagame is after a certain point of existing. combine the outright massive playerbase of dpp as opposed to gsc / adv / rby in the past few years, it only makes sense that this would occur to this generation first. the freeing of latias, definitely for some, is a wish to free the metagame from centralization by introducing another aspect to it which supposedly...loosens the current controlling core over its direction? here’s a tip: latias will only increase centralization and make the metagame even more oriented towards trapping, paralysis, and multiple steels + ttar per team. latias is a god damn good pokemon, and its inclusion in the metagame only exaggerates these already existing principles. latias is no solution for centralization -- even if some of you really really want it to be.



iii. is latias broken?



so...is latias broken? well, at the moment, latias probably is not actually broken -- which may just be due to the absolute force the metagame has shifted towards in responding to pokemon reminiscent of latias’ qualities. steels, ttar, u-turners, etc. all limit latias’ viability in the current metagame. osgoode is correct - latias probably does suck because of the sheer unfriendliness manifested against it in the meta’s current state. people are overpreparing for it like hell, and i am going to extend my own thoughts that this entire ladder phase is unnatural and absolutely useless as a picture into the metagame, as is the latias-centric tournament hosted a few months ago.



yep, both of these isolated experiments are absolutely garbage and worthless. the sample size of players involved in this suspect / tournament are either a) not even using latias-meta based teams in a suspect supposed to test its viability, or b) overestimating / specifically catering to latias’ inclusion in the metagame. unless suspect tests hosted in current gens, in which we get an organic picture of a pokemon’s performance in the metagame, we are instead intentionally gaining a biased picture of how this pokemon will perform in the metagame.



unlike excadrill which ran through multiple spl seasons, multiple smogon tours, multiple official circuits, and multiple side tours which contributed to a holistic picture of its unbanning, the latias ladder is hopelessly biased and proves absolutely nothing about its entrance into the metagame. latias’ is it / isn’t it broken status contributes to this ambiguity -- nobody is really quite sure how to approach it. people are intentionally manipulating latias’ presence in the metagame, and there is absolutely nothing anybody can do about it unless this little test is extended to an incredibly grand scale. you want to prove latias isn’t broken and actually organically test its viability? test it en masse over the course of thousands of tournament games over a circuit of about a year (because it isn’t the main metagame anymore) and then get back to me on whether latias actually is / isn’t broken. this isolated ladder test is garbage. all it tells me is that people want latias to be unbanned because of the obvious bias towards its existence in the metagame. people can’t really help this, of course, as the metagame is so small and isolated in building and testing that its a natural occurrence for a pokemon being retested or dropped down.



if the dpp council actually wants to be credible, unban it based upon your own lengthy hypotheticals and personal experience than letting this sham of a test actually play out.



so...is latias broken? if the metagame evens out and takes a turn away from its current stance - which i don’t see it doing anytime soon - then latias may still possess some incredibly powerful qualities. the main argument for latias’ innocence is that its banning was unjustly conflated with the impact of a stronger threat in salamence, which possesses qualities that allow for the absolute destruction of teams that otherwise would wall latias heavily. this also brings up the question of is latias only not broken because the entire metagame is catered towards it specific faults? eh, who cares.



iv. latias being broken doesn’t matter



this is the real part of the argument: latias’ brokenness doesn’t matter at all and the judgment of latias now is inevitably opposed to what we considered broken in the past; our judgments don’t matter, dpp is a finished metagame except for anomalous circumstances such as baton pass which threaten the competitive integrity of the game itself.



tiering has always been consistently re-fashioned one generation to the next. we like to imagine our terms of ‘broken’ and ‘unhealthy’ have maintained the same over the stretch of nearly a decade, but the small but evident shift in tiering perspective has rendered these terms completely subjective and floating up in the air. tiering has fundamentally changed in the past decade, and even if it isn’t perceived as so, the type of things we consider broken have shifted. consider the old definitions we used to use which now lie completely defunct; the last attempt to revive them in modern tier usage was probably during the late bw era, if even that late. slowly but surely, through every generation we have altered what we consider broken and now we seek to apply the current definition to a Pokémon banned under criteria vastly different than what we used back when it was originally banned.



tiering and our approach to it has fundamentally changed whether you all like it or not -- and i believe that the retroactive application of these newly developed concepts onto latias is a nearsighted attempt to set a dangerous precedent. for the past 4 years we have toiled with bw to no end -- and for what? the original banning of chlorophyll was done on the same whim as we approach latias now. a few users (usually powerful, influential) get tired of a metagame and wish to change it for their own selfish enjoyability. you can easily imagine and propagate a tiering idea when the rest of the forum adores you and turns you into a cult personality. or, maybe they're just too afraid to oppose you because of internet points.



i’d extend this specifically to ojama (as i was even asked to post this on behalf of certain users not wanting to do it themselves) as i give bkc the benefit of the doubt in the purity of his drive to ‘fix’ dpp. but in the unbanning of latias, we finally reach the absolute peak of favorable tiering and will reach a bw-esque cycle of favoritism towards trends and patterns. we get bored with a metagame, we seek to alter it in the only way we can: ban or drop mons over and over until we move so far away from the original intent of the metagames crafters.



we unbanned excadrill to ‘fix’ the reuniclus based metagame of 2 ish years ago, then after a period of delusion in which we all deemed excadrill to ‘suck anyway,’ we realized it was more problematic than ever thought, and had to ban sand rush outright to preserve its legality. while not ostensibly a complex ban, we recovered excadrill through alterations to definitions and arguments that posit sand rush as the intrinsic problem. poor windsong, i guess.



so here we are again. we're ready to completely alter a metagame again because our preferences have shifted so greatly and we've become bored with it. just as we became bored with bw and decided to put it through a revolving door of alterations and rhetorical gymnastics. old metagames should be left alone purely for the reason that our eyes will never be able to adjust to how we handled them in their time -- forget a gap period of 8 years in tiering. if we keep allowing repeated changes to metagames because we “know better” then soon we'll reach a point of constant changes and cycling through banlists which invalidates the years of posted material done both on the site and the forum. we either consider metagames dead and finished, or we liken them completely to the current generation. the latter precedent allows us to alter metagames at will and continue the perpetual cyclical approach we now take towards tiering to new heights. bw’s constant fluctuations should serve as the best counterpoint to arbitrary flavor of the month tiering -- yet we still seek to make the same mistake. the ‘slippery slope’ argument is very real when tiering of old gens can essentially be attributed to the whims of a few top players (which happen to be the same every single time).



old generation councils should not be mechanisms to reform tiers in the absence of public consent. they should be purely reactionary after a metagame’s official death in the presence of a new generation. despite my own personal grievances with tiering over the years, i recognize that once a metagame is settled and finished unless an exceptional circumstance arises no new bans / drops should take place. as much as i wish i could turn back time and prevent mega sableye from being banned (it really isn’t broken) i will never support a current campaign to drop it back down to overused for the sake of metagame preservation.