OU: Strategy The Day the Music Died

PG24

<Pride> I'm my wildest fantasy
Advanced Member
Member
A few years ago, I got back into Pokemon around the release of Platinum. The "kiddie" image the series soon attracted forced me to shamefully withdraw from playing before that. It wasn't until later in life that I learned that caring what others think of you is nothing but a bs fear. With this, I preordered my copy of Platinum and quickly researched the Pokemon I had missed out on since Generation II.

With me getting back into Pokemon, I also began to explore the competitive side of the game that I had never realized when I was younger. Sure, battles with friends on the old link cable were fun, but the battles on Shoddy against others on the internet were something different. Instead of playing just for fun, I was playing to win due to the level of competition. Fun only came with a win, while losing simply lead to more practice. Every battle only lead to more experience to apply to next. This, to me, was "fun".

For me, Generation IV was great. There was a great balance in it to the point where skill was ultimately the most important factor in determining the winner. The amount of threats was enough to where you could cover most with your team, but you still had to watch out for the lure or threat that requires you to play around it with a skillful approach. The game itself was deep in tactics, from the lead matchup to scouting every threat to get a full understanding. There were just enough archetypes out there to where each game was diverse and required a different approach, but there was no overlying archetype that completely dominated

With the start of Generation V, I was hyped. At first, I defended some of the changes this generation brought, but the thing that I could never defend was just the sheer amount of broken threats simply dumped onto the game. Along with the new Pokemon, old friends long forgotten were given major boosts via Dreamworld. The most important of these were the weather starters in Politoed and Ninetales, who were gift wrapped a free pass to the top of OU purely because of their new abilities. Weather (kek) by design of Game Freak or just pure coincidence, a lot of the new and improved threats introduced were able to take advantage of these weathers. A lot of skill was removed as the game became based purely on team matchups. The cleanup process with the suspect testings became a dragged out process that only brought more threats to the limelight. It seemed to finally calm down at the end of BW1, but BW2 only introduced more threats that, strangely, seemed to abuse weather as well. All progress made in the suspect tests prior seemed to be for naught, as we even wasted time unbanning things to accommodate to this change. Any fun I found in Pokemon last gen was completely drained due to the drop in overall quality. My only hope was that Gen VI would fix things for the competitive scene.

In a way, Gen VI did fix things by bringing weather back to a niche archetype instead of the defining factor it was last gen. While this was good, it still didn't fix the fact that the Pokemon itself were overpowering on their own. Gen V somewhat began the trend of this "power creep", but Gen VI really expanded on it in a big way. Along with the megas, which take advantage of the increased stat totals and buffed abilities, we also have seen Pokemon such as Greninja and Aegislash who are unpredictable and force situations we often times can't or have no hope to prepare for. Like the previous generation, suspect tests are a constant now that tries to balance the metagame. This often does not work, as with the banning of one overpowering threat, another will simply rise to take advantage of the situation. On top of this, new games this generation are adding new megas for us to use. Like BW2 did to BW1, this basically craps on any potential progress made with balancing the game.

While Gen IV did introduce the idea of suspect testings, it never had to do this many as the previous two gens to strike a balance. There is just too much of a power creep being pumped into this game to where it'll take years to find the perfect balance. Most of the blame can be put on Game Freak for this. After all, this is a game where the target market is children. Children are very easily fascinated by strong and cool things. The competitive audience just isn't big enough to where Game Freak should really care about trying to balance the game. On top of that, I don't even think it's possible to balance it in the future (without a serious retcon, which is nothing but a pipe dream) as this series continues to grow and grow. Fun, for me at least, has died.

As this series continues to grow, what do you think the future of competitive Pokemon will hold? I myself think that the skill and "fun" involved with winning the game has and will continue to decline due to the power creep, but I'm far more interested in your opinions. After all, we all have different opinions on issues due to our different viewpoints and experiences. ^_^
 

One Approved

;
Advanced Member
Member
As this series continues to grow, what do you think the future of competitive Pokemon will hold? I myself think that the skill and "fun" involved with winning the game has and will continue to decline due to the power creep, but I'm far more interested in your opinions. After all, we all have different opinions on issues due to our different viewpoints and experiences. ^_^

All that for that? I kid.

To be honest, I think the opposite. As we get farther and farther into ORAS, I feel like the more broken threats will get banned and it will start pushing towards a higher skill level to win. I've heard a ton of people say this, and I agree: BW1 was close to being set. We had quite a bit of diversity at the end of the first BW games, and the game itself I think was quite balanced. Then BW2 happened.

To me, the problem wasn't all of the stupidly powerful threats that BW2 introduced (although Tornadus-T was pretty stupid lol), I just don't think we had enough time to settle the metagame down between the time BW2 was released. We had barely over a year iirc from the time BW2 went live competitively to the time XY OU started to happen, and that's not even close to enough time. I mean, it took us almost 3 years to ban all the stupid shit from platinum (see: Salamence), and we were expected to do the same for BW2 in like half the amount of time. I think given enough time we would have been able to pull it off, like we almost pulled off BW1 before the new games were released.

I think with this series, as long as ORAS has a larger chunk of time to settle down, I think eventually, all the broken stuff will get booted. It will undoubtedly take a while, but I think with enough time we'll get back to the way things were. Broken threats gone and more skill needed to win than matchups.
 

Scattered mind

Competitive VG Forums Mod
Forum Mod
Member
Well we now have a chance to see what the metagame could look like if there were no Megas
Smogon added a no Mega OU ladder :)
Mega Pokemon are not the only reason to the power creep gen 6 has brought to us but it is certainly the biggest.
 

PG24

<Pride> I'm my wildest fantasy
Advanced Member
Member
One Approved said:
As this series continues to grow, what do you think the future of competitive Pokemon will hold? I myself think that the skill and "fun" involved with winning the game has and will continue to decline due to the power creep, but I'm far more interested in your opinions. After all, we all have different opinions on issues due to our different viewpoints and experiences. ^_^

All that for that? I kid.

To be honest, I think the opposite. As we get farther and farther into ORAS, I feel like the more broken threats will get banned and it will start pushing towards a higher skill level to win. I've heard a ton of people say this, and I agree: BW1 was close to being set. We had quite a bit of diversity at the end of the first BW games, and the game itself I think was quite balanced. Then BW2 happened.

To me, the problem wasn't all of the stupidly powerful threats that BW2 introduced (although Tornadus-T was pretty stupid lol), I just don't think we had enough time to settle the metagame down between the time BW2 was released. We had barely over a year iirc from the time BW2 went live competitively to the time XY OU started to happen, and that's not even close to enough time. I mean, it took us almost 3 years to ban all the stupid shit from platinum (see: Salamence), and we were expected to do the same for BW2 in like half the amount of time. I think given enough time we would have been able to pull it off, like we almost pulled off BW1 before the new games were released.

I think with this series, as long as ORAS has a larger chunk of time to settle down, I think eventually, all the broken stuff will get booted. It will undoubtedly take a while, but I think with enough time we'll get back to the way things were. Broken threats gone and more skill needed to win than matchups.

scattered mind said:
Well we now have a chance to see what the metagame could look like if there were no Megas
Smogon added a no Mega OU ladder :)

While that's cool, artificial metagames like this and Clear Weather from last gen have no merit. Sure, they can be fun to play a few games or even win a niche tournament featuring them, but they're overall pointless.
 

Chaos Jackal

Legend of the Past
Member
I'm not exactly a battle-hardened veteran in competitive. I began playing competitively in Gen V, and my skills became sufficient enough for me to claim I do not suck towards the end of BW2. I have not known much besides the state PG24 has described as constantly deteriorating. Therefore there isn't as much for me to compare. It's hard to deem weather bad when weather metagame was all I knew up to a point. I may call weather boring and annoying, but did I not start my competitive way in a metagame defined by it?

I was never the most dedicated player either. I have often drifted away from competitive play, following with a return and yet another departure. In fact, I am through such a period of absence right now. And it is from these periods that I can draw most of my conclusions as to the future of the metagame and my own beliefs and feelings concerning it. I have dropped out for various reasons and durations in the past, but this time it feels more like a total burnout. Perhaps it is that the game itself as a whole doesn't attract me; ORAS was the first time I didn't buy a Pokemon game ever since Emerald. It isn't a game with a competitive approach in the manner we do it online. Yes, battles exist, even official tournaments and ladders. But that's about it. There is no effort done to make the game more balanced or equal. We of the competitive online communities have since the beginning attempted to create a controlled environment. However, the resources we're given are those of an uncontrolled one. We're given a piece of radioactive waste and what we attempt to do is to survive for as long as possible without the radiation killing us.

Yes, I do think that competitive play is deteriorating. It is far too difficult to manage the power creep now, and the time given for us to adapt is very restricting. The metagame had just managed o settle from XY when ORAS kicked in, bringing new monsters to the scene and transforming old threats into absolute horrors (Greninja being perhaps the best example). How long will it take to stabilize this? The metagame is chock full of titans now. It is no longer the age where banning Garchomp and Salamence dealt with the stuff that could eliminate a whole team easily. Every Mega Pokemon of today's OU has the power to completely obliterate a DPP or even BW tier. It is perhaps the point which causes an old question that many other games have faced to arise: if everything is overpowered, is anything actually overpowered? Perhaps it is a means of balancing, but it is a means I don't like. Balance through the fact that I can be shot just as easily as I can shoot is taking the fun of the game away. Some may argue that this ruthless, unforgivable metagame actually requires more skill, but I consider it restricting. In a way, it resembles Ubers; and while I have played Ubers in the past, I did so in order to experience such a metagame, a metagame where teambuilding didn't go with what threats your team might have faced based on its composition, but where, no matter the composition, some threats HAD to be addressed, where you had to account for E-Killer whether you played Rain, Sun, Sand or weatherless, E-Killer alongside another ten threats. But the current stage of affairs takes this even further, to the point that even Ubers managed to break. Tiering evolves, yes, but is this way of evolution actually helpful? I do not think so.

I'm afraid that the situation won't improve. It will only get worse with time. The game isn't made to be like this. It doesn't account for us, and managing to keep playing competitively means we will have to put up with any bright new ideas of GF to make the game "cooler", and will force us to stretch things more and more in order to accommodate for these novelties.
 
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