Announcement Ubers tiering: going forward

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Alright, we believe this thread has run its course. Thank you to everyone that shared their opinions - though there are some disagreements on the details, it seems most of us are supportive of this new direction.

However, I should make clear first that there are some things that will not be happening:

We are not making a "Ubers UU." It is utterly pointless since we do not have enough Ubers to justify doing so. This COULD happen in the far future once there are enough Ubers to justify doing so, but it is not a possibility at present, and it would likely be many more generations before it is even feasible.

We are not making Ubers OU, or Ubers AG, or otherwise throwing out our current banlist. Some people were asking for this and I believe they are missing the point of what we are trying to do here. This new tiering policy is intended to make Ubers distinct from both OU and Anything Goes. I believe the OP covers the distinction between OU and Ubers well enough. As for Anything Goes, it is the only metagame that is motivated by pure minimalism. Note that Ubers has never been about pure minimalism, but rather minimalism under a set of constraints: we've had clauses and other rules in place since the beginning of time in order to preserve competitiveness. It doesn't make sense to suggest that Ubers would be more Ubers-like if we threw out the banlist and started over because Ubers has never had a state where it had no constraints. Otherwise, we would have been Anything Goes since the very start. The only area in which we were pure minimalist was Pokemon bans, but the removal of Mega Rayquaza has forced us to redefine ourselves. However, that redefinition was never Anything Goes.

What we are trying to do is not pure minimization per se, because Anything Goes has, again, already got that covered. You can think of what we want to do next as a constrained "find minima" optimization problem, where the goal is to minimize our banlist while keeping the metagame playably competitive. This is not a pure numbers game - it could mean that one thing gets added, or perhaps one or two things get taken out. We will be testing these things accordingly. But we're taking it one step at a time, in an orderly manner so that we can analyze metagame changes from a proper reference frame. Throwing out everything amounts to little more than creating chaos on the basis of faulty assumptions.

We are not using "fun" as a primary tiering metric. This is impossible. Fun is purely subjective and impossible to base policy off of. The goal of the tiering metrics that certain individuals among us dismiss as "spooks" is to try and add some objectivity to the process so we have a clear basis of evaluation for metagame elements. It is true that pure objectivity in the process is impossible, but the metrics are still necessary to justify policy and be reasonably confident in tiering decisions once they are made. Perfect is the enemy of good, so they say.

The plan we will be proceeding with will be the one outlined in the OP. We will keep you posted once we get more of the details ironed out. Feel free to PM me or Hack if you have any concerns that weren't addressed in this thread.
 
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