Nayrz said: To bring this topic to a conclusion, 1 will be considered the primary choice and will be chosen if discussion is either inconclusive or has low community participation. Click to expand...

Kevin Garrett said: I vaguely recall there being discussions over the inclusion of Farceus in Season 10 of Smogon Tour during the development and short-lived transition to PokeLab. The players at the time were not in favor of its inclusion in the metagame. As much of a question as it is about could this be implemented in the tier, it’s also a question of should it be allowed for the benefit of the metagame. If there’s a similar dissension among currently active DPP Uber players, then there’s little value in debating if it could philosophically be permitted in the tier. Click to expand...

zf said: Farceus is tier-warping for sure.



The BW comparison is interesting to me because BW is an innately more offensive metagame than DPP and therefore pressures Arceus more than the DPP meta can. Arceus just has less threatening it in DPP and is stronger because of it.



It can sponge some of the hardest hits the tier has to offer, especially at +1 SpD or when it resists them. You almost always have to resort to defensive answers or itself to win. Click to expand...

I'd like to begin by tackling the single most relevant point to all of this discussion, the fact that Option 1 (enabled and unrestricted Arceus) is being set as the primary choice orin case of inconclusive discussions.Regardless of how you feel about Arceus and its impact on DPP Ubers, that stance is an incredibly misguided attempt at dealing with this issue. We're talking about completely flipping a decade-old lower-tier metagame upside down. In these situations more than any other, the onus should rest on the side trying to radically tamper with the current state of the tier. The status quo should prevail in cases of inconclusive discussions, meaning any modification to the tier should only ever be the result of overwhelming support, not the other way around. Despite Ubers' current attempts to minimise bans and allow as many strategies as possible, that is hardly relevant since that strict policy itself is only set upon newer generations and there is no tangible existing policy that we can use to fall back on for DPP Ubers, so extending that as an excuse to facilitate the entry of Arceus in any capacity is unreasonable at best. How are playerbases supposed to ensure that these discussions are handled reasonably and due process is followed by Tier Leaders when it's possible to arbitrarily set the default on a proposed metagame that has never existed while ignoring the actual tier that has been actively played for over a decade? This is essentially setting the standard upon retroactively applying policy to entirely alter an oldgen, which just does not fit the spirit of how these tiers are dealt with on Smogon. Going back a couple months, these past generations were frozen in place for other lower tiers, and while this policy does not directly extend to Ubers (although I wouldn't mind if it did), the general sentiment behind that development, and one that permeates Smogon tiering as a whole is that the tiering of these ancient generations should be prevented and these tiers shouldn't be changing its pool of elements over time, unless it concerns game mechanics (which is something I personally agree with). The "organic" state and stability of these tiers is vital, and to bring about such a profound and thorough change should require substantial backing from the side proposing such change, not from the side aiming to maintain the status quo, and I just do not see anything close to that level of support for Arceus to be allowed into DPP Ubers on those terms. With that in mind, I sincerely hope that the default event in case of an inconclusive discussion can be altered to fulfil these concerns, in order to ensure that altering oldgen metagames is at least made as a result of considerable backing by the playerbase and to also avoid setting a dangerous precedent where the goal posts can be moved to manufacture an intended result by the people making the decisions. One more thing I'd like to mention in this vein, I was initially against even considering Arceus and I'd like to apologise for that, because these discussion threads are always a positive and discussion should always be encouraged, I was too focused on the outcome of not wanting to touch the tier that I overlooked the benefits to even just discussing it.Moving onto the debate itself, M Dragon has already elegantly tackled the "glitch aspect" of Fullceus and I admittedly am not well-versed in that subject to comment on how precedents work in this regard (but it seems like allowing the glitch is not the preferred route in these cases so that's also something to be considered), so I will instead delve into other points.I'm instead more interested in discussing Kevin Garrett 's post which I believe to be one of the critical dimensions of this decision: the fact that DPP players did not and still do not want Arceus in the tier. This arceus conundrum has been a hot button topic for a decade, quite literally, and there have been multiple opportunities to free it into DPP Ubers. A few people claim that inertia on the decision-makers' end is the main reason for these discussions never going anywhere, but the truth is, in no era has there ever been any pressure from the playerbase to bring about this change. Back when these discussions first happened, the playerbase was not in favour of Arceus' inclusion into the tier, and more recently when the fullceus glitch discovery came about a couple of years back, players were still against these wholesale changes. DPP players value the health and enjoyment of the tier, opting to prioritise keeping the radical and unhealthy element that is Arceus (will be discussed further down the post) at bay for the sake of a better tier over closing any sort of philosophical loophole that may or may not exist with this. The main argument I've observed regarding the addition of Arceus is that of not wanting to "double down" on a potential tiering "mistake" that was made in the past (as explained by SoulWind ), but the truth is that there's very little real merit to that stance, which borders on pure conjecture and preys upon a speculative outlook on a history that has given us no hard proof of such.We're talking about making the biggest change possible to a decade-old metagame, not about introducing a marginal strategy. I see allowing Arceus in any capacity as something closer to potentially unbanning Mega Rayquaza in ORAS (I mention ORAS Ubers because that's the tier I'm most familiar with coupled with DPP), where you'd be retroactively freeing something that's been out of the tier for being extremely unhealthy and “too much” (even if unofficially) when it was the current generation, meaning you’d be shaking up the entirety of the oldgen, eventually turning a healthy and stable metagame into a volatile and unhealthy one (I'm also not sure that DPP Arceus wouldn't be even more broken than ORAS Mega Rayquaza, given that the latter is much more one-dimensional and the metagame possesses a lot more reliable tools to deal with it).Due to that, we should ask ourselves: do we really want to introduce a radical and ruining element into a currently healthy and balanced tier because of a potential previous oversight that is not even necessarily there? Should we go against what the DPP players have always wanted and still seem to want (my unofficial survey of the DPP Ubers playerbase showed that the majority still does not want Arceus to be brought into the tier in any capacity) for the sake of being "clean" with tiering a metagame that has been an oldgen for 9 years now, since the release of Generation 5? As policy-makers, do we value having a supposedly clean and simple tier list over what this small and avid playerbase considers to be broken or undesirable in a tier that is only played through unofficial tournaments in isolated moments for fun? Yes, "fun" is subjective and doesn't have a tangible place in tiering, but at the end of the day, as chaos has always repeated, there's no point to a tier that isn't played and alienating the playerbase that still plays it after 10+ years for no apparent reason seems like the wrong move in this case.Finally, I'd like to point out why(both Farceus and Fullceus), in terms of how it impacts the metagame.Simply put, DPP Ubers just doesn't have the tools to deal with the power levels of Arceus, when you take into account the absurd offensive threat it poses and couple that with its ludicrous bulk (and yes this is going off of experience, not purely "theorymonning", although I do have more experience with Fullceus rather than Farceus). I don't understand the BW comparison at all, DPP is infinitely less equipped to play around Arceus, not necessarily because of the actual pokemon or mechanics (although lead matchup and the lack of team preview does make it considerably more difficult to deal with), but because of the general pace and intricacies of the tier itself. Be it from the prevalence of spikes+phasing to just the additional options for Pokemon in terms of moves and sets (such as Kyogre's SpDef set with Scald being one of the best Pokemon in BW), BW just isn't broken by Arceus, while DPP just does not possess those same tools required to deal with the versatility and general ability that Arceus brings to the table.DPP Arceus would instantly be the most used Pokemon for a reason, being the scariest offensive threat in the metagame, with very little offensive counterplay and being able to muscle through defensive cores on its own or with very little support (SD Arceus-Normal + Magnezone is something that has been problematic in my many games of DPP w/ Arceus), while still being able to be a top defensive/support Pokemon for the kinds of teams that require it. It warps the tier around it in a way that most games come down to "my Arceus vs your Arceus" which results in a vastly uninteresting and uncompetitive metagame. From my personal experiences with all three metagames (DPP Ubers, Farceus and Fullceus), Arceus overshadows and simply overpowers the intricacies and subtleties that make DPP Ubers what it is and always has been, one of the most balanced, healthy and nuanced generations we have in our circuit. We'd be introducing a broken element into a tier that is not only incapable of accepting it in a positive way, but also has been stable and healthy for so many years without said element. zf has already gone over some of the relevant calcs regarding Farceus (no need to even mention Fullceus here) and I think those are an accurate representation of how it would look like in this tier. For instance, Toxic Spikes teams with Giratina-A are already extremely powerful and prevalent, we'd be now throwing in a Calm Mind Arceus-Steel/Ghost or an SD Arceus-Normal/Ground and pushing those over the top. Arceus is and has always been "too much" for DPP to handle, which is why it's historically been met with vehement aversion from the playerbase and hopefully continues to do so until this issue is properly buried.