This is just something I've been thinking about lately- how many pokemon/moveset variations can the metagame sustain before teambuilding to cover all threats adequately becomes impossible? After all, there's very restricted space when building teams. 6 pokemon, 4 moves each, 508 EVs each. With every successive game we see more pokemon added and more moves added to existing pokemon that might allow them to beat pokemon that once countered them. It's not as though this expansion is going to stop soon either, since the series is still successful, and a major appeal of new games is discovering new pokemon. However with this expansion, the number of viable threats will inevitably increase, making it increasingly difficult to build teams without obvious weaknesses- how do you account for every notable threat with just 6 pokemon when the number of threats reaches 70, 80, 90 and so on? For reference, the OU viability ranking has over 50 pokemon in A- or better! Now I should clarify, I haven't played any gen 6 meta in a while. But one of the common complaints I hear about g6 is that it's matchup based. Another notable phenomenon is the trend for suspect discussions to revolve around pokemon that have no counters (maybe one or two), but a multitude of checks, all of which can be disposed with the appropriate coverage move (see MMeta, Lando-I). This results in a stalemate with pro-ban camps pointing to the given mon's ability to beat any given check, while anti-ban argues that it has 4MSS and is much more manageable in practice. Personally, I don't really take a side on this debate, it's just something I've observed. I think @Aurist hit the nail on the head when replying to someone about the rate of suspects and bans across all tiers, when they pointed out that frequent suspects and bans are a necessary consequence of the power creep associated with gen 6 I think this is a cool post because let's face it, things have gotten a lot more ban-happy, but I'd say there's probably good reason for that. At the same time, it makes me wonder if we need to rethink the way we approach competitive pokemon, but frankly, I don't know how we should go about it. So yeah, I think this is an interesting topic and would like to see people's thoughts on this. How far can pokemon expand before competitive pokemon struggles to keep up? Are we reaching that point soon and are we feeling its effects now? And lastly, what can be done about it? Or alternatively, do you not view this as an issue?
Quite honestly, on a more general scale when people feel the need to ban anything you've already reached this point. However, it's much more prevalent in the lower tiers; UU had way too many terrifyingly strong offensive threats at the beginning of its lifespan for any kind of defensive team to keep up against all of them. As more pokemon start leaving LU and NU due to more pokemon becoming viable because of UU bans, vital checks and counters that used to keep the metagame in a stable place suddenly go away and you're left with powerhouses that no longer have to account for them on teams. Works the same way with defensive threats as well, since the more offensive monsters you ban, the more defensive behemoths actually stand out. Arguably, as much of a force it once was, Aegislash kept many things in the metagame checked. It was a giant glue you could fit anywhere, and kept so many threats manageable because of being able to tank and dish out massive damage in the same turn. Where I'm going with this is that sometimes having huge threats that you must absolutely prepare for is necessary for the tier to not become completely match up reliant. At the same time, there's a fine line between being the best pokemon you'll ever find for a role in a tier or simply being far too powerful or proficient at one(or many). Not simply centralizing to the point where you must have something specific, but more of the fact that it doesn't need to worry about its checks or counters because it's so damn easy to deal with them. I didn't play OU much and don't play it now but I know Aegislash fell into that latter category: too few pokemon could actually have an advantageous match up against it while it also stone-walled several threats that are otherwise very good in the tier. It was controversial over on Smogon, but something we(me and other LU tier leaders) agreed on that's the perfect example of the former "best pokemon for a specific role while not being broken" is BW LU Nidoqueen. No one would argue it is at least in the top 3 pokemon of the tier, as it could do everything. Set rocks, break walls, check a rather large number of offensive threats with bulky sets, remove T-spikes reliably. However it never did any of these so well that it necessitated a ban. Slowking could still come out on top over Queens lacking Thunder, things like Banded Entei and Kabutops could check it by threatening to revenge rather easily, Rotom-C and Cryogonal can switch in on a large portion of its moveset and trick away its Life Orb or just go for the KO with Ice Beam while winning as long as you avoid the Fire Blast. Which wasn't always on Nidoqueen for multiple reasons. We've been feeling the effects of the number of pokemon and the moves becoming available to them expanding since Generation IV. Back then it wasn't so necessary to ban things because of the fact that many pokemon were still limited. They didn't have the most optimal abilities, move pools weren't so vast, base stats were by and large spread out on pokemon in a way that made them completely manageable besides a few Dragons. And we've already started adapting to how the game is changing since last gen; even in generation IV with smogon's new(at the time) guidelines, we were starting to change how we viewed the game and allowing the mindset that bans are okay slowly creep in. Only banning the most obscene threats is an extremely old mindset that was tossed aside as soon as tiers started coming out for ADV. If you actually want the game to be competitive, you have to remove those threats that leave too little options for people to use if they don't want to be steamrolled by certain pokemon and strategies. And if your idea of fun is to abuse the most powerful pokemon, abilities and moves in the game, we have modes on the simulator for that. There's not really an objective way to evaluate if the game reaches the point where there are too many threats to handle. It all really depends on the people playing and it always has. I don't see it as a problem since we've been adapting as the generations have come out. There's always been a case of "this team does better against this team," aka counter teaming, but then that same team loses to a lot of others. You can't eradicate team match up, it's literally impossible without everyone playing with Smeargles only. As long as you can use a team of pokemon that isn't 100% guaranteed to lose to any one other pokemon, like Cresselia in BW LU, I think the game is fine.
This is a very interesting topic and I think it can be even broader than first thought. I think Pokemon has already overextended past the point that singles competitive Pokemon is becoming less and less viable, and that the inevitable direction for competitive Pokemon is either to switch to doubles as the default style of play or die out completely. There has for a long time been an interesting conflict between the game designers' vision for it's in-game play and competitive play, vs the players' collective understanding of it. Since at least Gen 4 it's been clear that the way Pokemon's attributes, abilities, and movepools have been designed for doubles play, with VGC becoming the official competitive tier to accompany that, while a large majority of players, whose experiences are largely in-game, understand the game mostly from a singles perspective, due to that being how every single Pokemon game has been played ever. It's been only natural that people will default to playing that way because expecting people to shift to doubles because the designers seemingly arbitrarily said so, while not visibly adjusting their games to accommodate for that, is a tall order. Pretty much every single generation of Pokemon that has come has been viewed as a Power Creep. Gen 5 and 6 are the worst offenders of the lot, particularly the later games in their respective gens, introducing enormous amounts of new threats, and buffing the movepools of threats and non-threats alike. BW and B2W2 brought us a bajillion broken legends and other very strong mons, and aside from Wobbuffet and Wynaut being effectively banned for their abilities, was the first gen where we felt a need to go into non legendary/pseudo-legendary pokemon for bans to make the tiers fairer. XY looked like it was to be an attempt at rebalancing, with very welcome nerfs to powerful moves, abilities and even typings. However with it also came Fairy typing and Mega Evolutions as well as a few other changes in mechanics (fuckin Knock Off man, worst buff I've ever seen done in a game), which made a lot of previous unviable pokemon suddenly a top threat or even scarier. We're in a gen where Altaria, Azumarill, Charizard, Clefable, Gallade, Gardevoir, Lopunny, Mandibuzz, Bisharp, Pinsir, Medicham, Beedrill, et al, are all considerable OU threats while Pokemon like Kangaskhan, Mawile, Lucario have proven far too much for the top tier to handle. We're also in a gen with 719 pokemon and 2-3 more potential big threats are being added (depending on if regular Hoopa sucks or not). With the large rebalances to the game came a situation where an unprecedentedly huge amount of Pokemon are viable in all tiers. We thought there was a lot to account for in Gen 5, but then Gen 6 came along. What this has caused is a situation in which there are far more good Pokemon to prepare for than can possibly be prepared for with only 6 Pokemon, causing team matchup to be an arguably equal or bigger impact on most battles than player skill, and these matchups are so often proving to be so close that the many different dice rolls that occur in every turn of Pokemon are becoming more and more impactful. Individual misses, critical hits, and various other luck aspects are proving extremely more meaningful to the outcome of a game than they ever have before and it's leaving a lot of people frustrated and alienated from competitive Pokemon, even those who love it the most. But this is all in singles play. Quietly while everyone has still been playing 6v6 singles, VGC has been chugging along happily, and the doubles-focused design in the game has made for a better time to play doubles Pokemon than ever. If we look at the doubles play here and on Pokemon Showdown some things are very noticeable. Firstly is the need for far, far less bans in the tier beyond the initial "cover legends etc" standard banlists. Secondly is how much less of a role matchup plays in individual battles, and how much less impactful luck is on the tier, even with far less bans. Where in singles each individual Pokemon on your team is usually the answer to X threat, X threat, and X threat, and losing them to brief unluckiness can sometimes mean losing a game period due to X threat's ability to do its job much better, that impact is hugely lessened in doubles where things work much more in conjunction and there are more ways to prepare for individual pokemon and strategies than having to rely on 1-2 answers to it. Doubles is simply a more fun, less frustrating, and more competitive mode of playing Pokemon than Singles is, in this Generation. The clear, consistent skew towards doubles in the way Pokemon are being designed for play has led to this point where Doubles is simply a better way of playing competitively. It's an odd conflict between the way we play the in-game and the competitive, and no doubt many people would be resistant to the idea of Doubles being the standard format, but I think this is inevitable and the only way for competitive Pokemon to move into the future and continue being a fun and interesting thing to do. Whether we're all willing to shift is another matter entirely.
You're all noobs and can't deal with threats so you ban them. Anyway, competitive Pokémon seems to be chugging along fine, even with a power creep. It's hard for people to adjust to needing more bans, and everyone plays at different levels competitively so their views can be skewed (e.g. you'd probably not find me in a tournament, but you would find me being silly in NU). Tournaments and Ladder are also different, as ladders are primarily a testing ground for teams, or just for fun battling, and tournaments are where teams that are held together strongly and work are put into play, and this is where differences in whether someone believes something is broken or needs a ban comes from. Or at least I think so anyway. Of course it'd be great to just shift everything to doubles as Aurist has said, but it's a completely new meta with completely different playstyles, and would be very hard to adjust to. There are also those people that would probably say "but pokemanz isn't supposed to be played like that!!1!1!" but then those people think Stall isn't how Pokémon is supposed to be played so they don't matter. I'd like to play the lower tier version of doubles personally, because I find the lowest tiers more fun and relaxed (NU doubles let's gooo \o/), but it'd be a while before something like that would exist. On bans/suspects, personally I think some could've been avoided, or people could be not as quick to say something is broken. But that's the opinion coming from someone who uses Meganium on ladder, not someone who plays tours and uses damage calcs and uses specialised EVs. There's also the fact that in tiers, like NU, we keep receiving changes in Pokémon that make them instantly broken, like every mega given to an NU Pokémon not called Audino or Camerupt, or stuff like Reckless Emboar. Stuff like this makes it very easy for people to say the opening statement of this post. Sometimes, I also think it's hard for a suspect to not be one sided, or that, even though theorymon is disallowed, it sometimes runs off this basis accidentally, even if it's based off experience. How the game plays sometimes feels like it differs to how suspects put forward how the game plays, for instance, things are often sacced in a game to deal with threats, but this is kind of seemingly pushed to the side in a suspect. Meh, I'm just rambling at this point. Anyway, people will always complain whether you ban something or whether you don't, and bans have had to increase due to power creeps. Though I feel it's good to have centralising pokemon that keep a balance in the meta, which is what I thought of Mega Steelix in NU but better players don't share that opinion with me so w/e. Just whatever you do, stop using buzzwords - Unown is as uncompetitive as Swagger.
Power Creep in games is a well known issue. Here's an Extra Credits episode on it. Many of the points raised aren't directly applicable to Pokémon because it's largely focused on WoW-like games and some others but it's interesting anyway. As much as we bash Game Freak for many things I would be very surprised if they weren't aware of these kinds of things. So it all comes down to if they have the intent to balance for singles play. To a degree I think they have to, since their games still largely feature singles battles and most importantly a battle tower which is supposed to be a slightly more "competitive"environment than the rest of the game and they must at least consider these features when balancing. They wouldn't balance to the degree that we would perhaps like but that's why we as competitive communities have tiers and bans. I am in agreement with the concept that bans as we knew them in DP and before are outmoded as I think everyone being truly honest with themselves should be. However I would argue that they were outmoded come GSC with extremely dominant Pokémon like Snorlax. RBY maybe not since the pool of resources was so limited that counter strategies to dominating strategies aren't really easy to come by so as soon as you ban one Pokemon another is likely to usurp it. The biggest element of power creep in Pokémon as I see it is definitely the expansion of movepools. Stats play a huge role obviously, that's why Smeargle isn't the best Pokémon or anything close to that. But think about it for a moment. Terrakion in BW2 OU. For a moment Put Terrakion in Advance. It no longer has Close Combat or Stone Edge to work with, it becomes so much less of a threat than it was before. Things like Swampert and Skarmory that can deal with it to a degree when it has Close Combat can suddenly take anything it wants to throw at them no problem. Expansion of movepools turns decent Pokémon into a monstrous one. To a large degree this is what "we the fans" have asked for in many cases. "Free Flare Blitz Flareon" and similar things are pretty common and personally I like not having a restrictive movepool. But it's definitely something that makes power creep a lot more significant than it otherwise would be. To answer the question I would say that competitive Pokémon isn't indefinitely sustainable because Game Freak isn't immediately interested in that, especially not in singles play (and arguably not even in doubles play because even in doubles some power creep elements to the degree we saw in DPP, think Mega Kanga/Mega Mence like Garchomp/Normal Mence in DPP are starting to arise.) which, no offense to doubles at all, is how I prefer to play the game at the moment (maximum offense to triples though triples is garbage). Do I think we'll need to switch to doubles to be playing anything respectable? I don't think so for a while. People are already fairly used to the "ban happy" nature of newer metagames and understand that a certain (pretty high) level of banning is needed if you're going to create anything competitive and more importantly, fun. There will always be people who will call it ban happy but there will also always be people who insist that Pokémon Blue is without a doubt the best Pokémon game in all aspects, people just have their biases. So as long as we as competitive Pokémon players adapt to how Game Freak produces the game and enact forms of artificial balance as appropriate Pokémon could remain competitive to at least a degree that makes it playable in singles or doubles. It shouldn't be up to us as players to enact artificial power creep removal but given the attitude of Game Freak to competitive play (bigger is better) it is fairly mandatory for many people's enjoyment.
Spoiler: random stuff from other ppls posts Pnerd I think makes a reasonable point in that some element of centralisation is important. There will always be pokemon that disproportionately influence the viability of other pokemon, but aren't really broken. It's really a matter of finding that balance, but at the same time it's pretty much impossible to know where that balance is. Is this something people generally think about? Do they even need to consciously consider it? And lastly, where do we draw the line? The answer to the first question is no (I assume). And I'm not too concerned about drawing a line between "good" centralisation and "bad" centralisation. There have been pokemon doing that for years that have never been in danger of getting banned (I'm thinking of things like Heatran, Skarmory, Tyranitar). It's tempting to draw comparisons with old-gen metas, how they're top-heavy but still good (RBY is debatable tho, as much as I really enjoy it), but that simply isn't possible, things are so much more diverse now. That was a bit rambly but w/e As for doubles being better or the future, while doubles is affected way less by power creep than singles, at the end of the day, I simply enjoy playing singles more. I'm not sure what it is. Certainly it's to do with the battle duration. Also the need for complicated EV spreads (I really fucking hate EVs). There's obviously more to it than that, and I'd have to pick up doubles again to give a definitive answer, but I simply don't like it as much. I don't really think it's fair to force players to switch to a very different format, but as has been mentioned that's where GF's focus lies. Not saying anything against doubles or anything and it's cool that it's picking up steam and all, but that's not what I want to play, and I think a lot of people would feel the same way. Honestly, the only trends I would count on seeing from the devs are the ones Aurist described unfortunately. I'd say there's a world of difference between balancing for battle tower and balancing for a competitive community- the standards are much higher and much more detailed fine tuning is necessary. And then you've got the fact that official tour banlists are a bit of a joke, given that they're based on lore and what's legendary, rather than what may be broken (Phione? Really?). Most of those bans don't actually improve the metagame afaik, which makes you wonder how much they really prioritise competitiveness. TL;DR: I agree, centralisation can be good but there's not much to be done in that regard. I acknowledge the game is trending towards doubles and I kinda don't like it. In my limited time playing ORAS I felt things generally were alright, things weren't totally matchup based. But then my time spent playing gen 6 has really been sporadic in that regard. Still, I'm sharing Weavile's optimism that things will be ok for the foreseeable future, it's just the long-term prospects of singles battling that look bleak. As I said though, I'm far from an expert on gen 6 so take my perspective with a grain of salt (Not to mention I haven't played OU since XY). It's really up to the community as a whole. It's funny really, one of the possible reasons for suspecting something is because it makes the meta stale, yet at the same time we have complaints stemming from an excess of diversity. I guess it draws attention to the fact that when a really good pokemon is used a lot, the meta will seem stale not because there aren't lots of useful options, but because people are only picking a few of them- all those other options are still there and only some of them will be discretely worse (as opposed to relatively) as a result of the really good pokemon's presence. There's a lot of potential diversity in that situation, it's just not being used. Please don't take this question as a serious suggestion but if we arbitrarily restricted the pokemon/movesets usable on a large scale (e.g. only obtainable in the current games, no transfer from previous ones) would it harm competitive pokemon? I suspect only in the sense that it would be really unpopular- the meta might still be enjoyable, it'd just piss heaps of people off. That's pure speculation though.
I would say Game Freak takes some consideration for competitive gameplay, as evidenced by the existence of variables that allow you to optimise your pokemon's potential, attainable through sheer effort and a lot of gameplay - EV's, IV's and Natures - , as well as special locations that are accessed after you beat the main story that put every pokemon at the same level, thus frustrating the main component on how to beat the game: grinding. In these facilities, like the Battle Tower, you must rely on items, movesets and the pokemon species itself, with some of them being restricted by Legendary and Species Clause. BW2 even had Challenge Mode, that basically raised the levels of trainer's pokemon, added more pokemon, improved movesets and held items for notorious NPC's (Colress, Rival, Gym Leaders, etc.) and raised the AI for all trainers. Battling an AI could not compare to battling an actual human being, so Wifi, now PSS, was introduced for that exact purpose, as well as trading and communicating. This would become the prime focus for players to extend the pokemon experience in the main games, other than "catching them all", due to the obvious limitations in the story and places to explore. However, for some people, such as myself, Wifi was impossible to get and i could only battle people that were close to me, which, as time went on, was no longer an option. Wifi battles were, in most instances, very time consuming due to the choice of a move taking a long while to process, Leftovers animation and surprise disconnections. Illegal EV spreads were also possible. It was in this context that simulators, like PO, were created. The effort of achieving a favourable nature, perfect IV's and maxed EV investment was at the distance of a few clicks. Encounter rates, catch rates, one time appearance pokemon and so on were no longer an issue. Story and side features were abandoned for the sake of battling. This style of playing pokemon was, is, and possible will be, secondary to how the main games are played, seeing as none of these simulators are official and brand recognised by Nintendo or Game Freak. However, as much as simulator play distances itself from the way main games are played, they still have to abide by the change of mechanics and new pokemon GF introduces in every batch of games, regardless of how centralising we deem them to be. The process of suspecting and banning items, abilites, moves and pokemon is just the way simulators find to maintain a distance between the main games, a distance that is shortened everytime GF introduces new stuff. Simulators will always take time to react and "restore balance". Game Freak isn't this evil corporation who takes notice of simulators and works to fuck them over. They're aware Pokemon has been considered as a competitive game and that places where you play mostly competitively exist. The biggest change between generations was probably the change from Gen 3 to Gen 4, and as far as my pokemon knowledge goes, this is when GF started to put some natural, less strict balance to their own releases, lessening the artificial process of banning in simulators. The introduction of new evolutions to Johto native pokemon and the physical/special split allowed for Mamoswine and Weavile to act as the best checks to the overpowered Dragons. The Dragon-type was so superior that simulators were forced to take action, resulting in the first pokemon ban to Ubers that wasn't a mascot. Dragon abuse was not diminished in Gen 5, but the most notorious change was definitely the weather abilities, and their endless durability if no other weather ability/move or Cloud Nine/Air Lock were used. This led to weather teams being the dominant force in every tier that allowed any of its perma-users, and ridiculously weak pokemon like Hippopotas or Vulpix being banned from lower tiers due to their ability to activate weather. On the 3D vanguard, GF decided to nerf both these dominant forces, limiting weather abilities to 5 to 8 turns of activeness and introducing a new type that had a perfect matchup vs Dragon: the Fairy-type. It was far superior than Ice in dealing with this type, and it's type matchup would also revive the Poison and Steel types, that were generally overlooked if not in conjunction with superior types. As an exchange, they made Steel less efficient defensively, being neutral to Ghost and Dark. So GF is constantly trying to restore some order, but taking something in return, trying to make it so that a specific playstyle isn't exceedingly good for more than one generation. Emphasis on trying. However, GF's main issue will always be selling a franchise to the audience, an audience of which most of us in this community (14-20 year olds) are a minority overall. This is why a number of outstandingly strong pokemon - Mega Evolutions - were introduced in this generation, as to captivate the younger audiences into the older generations by making some of our classic partners reborn with new evolutions. It also works by making the older audience identify themselves with some of the new pokemon, a process that was emphasized with the ORAS games. Nevermind the fact that most of these pokemon ended up shooting their regular forms at least one tier up and brought great instability to the main and side tiers, that will always be secondary to GF, but primary to us. Everything else has been covered quite well by the posters above.
There is also the "issue" that the "power" of each mon is set just because of how the franchise works take any other competitive game / genre as example: in CounterStrike you have nerfs (mostly to weapons that are deemed to be "too powerful" like the AWP), in MOBAs characters stats / spells are hit with nerfs/buffs so that they can become stronger/weaker to make (ideally, and probably utopistically) everyone viable, in RTS you have nerfs/buffs to certain units that belong to specific classes to make sure they are all playable and, if not equally strong, at least possible to play around, in fighting games (like Street Fighter) you have a similar treatmnet to the various characters in the game, where you nerf the damage of some moves or the range or whatever else this can't happen in Pokèmon, because the biggest thing about Pokèmon is the offline in-game, it's a game historically designed to be played on portable consoles, we can't expect Nintendo to "rebalance" its "characters" to make them stronger / weaker, we won't ever see "balance patches" supposed to, like the name implies, rebalance mons: take for example Starcraft 2 Spoiler Zerg Swarm Host Cost modified from 200 Minerals and 100 Vespene to 100 Minerals and 200 Vespene Supply cost increased from 3 to 4 Movement speed increased from 2.25 to 2.95 Swarm Hosts now require the Burrow research in order to burrow Swarm Hosts no longer collide with Locusts Spawn Locusts – This ability has been reworked Auto-cast removed, Spawn Locusts must now be manually cast Spawn Locusts cooldown increased from 25 seconds to 60 seconds Casting Spawn Locusts no longer requires a Swarm Host to be burrowed Locust Weapon speed increased from .8 to .6 Locust duration increased from 15 seconds (+10 seconds with Enduring Locusts) to 25 seconds or Dota 2 Spoiler Bounty Hunter Track bonus gold for self increased from 150/200/250 to 200/275/350 Track cooldown reduced from 10/7/5 to 4 Chaos Knight Reality Rift damage increased from 25/50/75/100 to 60/80/100/120 Reality Rift mana cost from 70 to 50 Phantasm illusion duration increased from 34 to 42 Queen of Pain Blink range increased from 700/850/1000/1150 to 1300 Blink cooldown from 12/10/8/6 to 15/12/9/6 Sonic Wave now does Pure Damage and affects Spell Immune Sonic Wave damage reduced from 350/475/600 to 290/390/490 (Scepter reduced from 350/530/725 to 325/450/575) I know these numbers might not make sense for a lot of people who don't play these games, but for comparison, imagine if we had a Pokèmon balance patch, this would go something like (not actually trying to balance anything just an example): Spoiler Aegislash King's Shield attack drop reduced from -2 to -1 Base Defense and Special Defense reduced to 135 Staraptor Typing changed from Flying / Normal to Flying / Fighting Base Speed increased to 105 Base HP increased to 90 Moves: Air Slash flinch reduced to 20% Iron Head flinch chance reduced to 20% Traits: Serene Grace added effect boost from 100% to 50% Natural Cure no longer cures Toxic Poison obviously these are only small examples, but what I'm trying to say is that it's impossible to fully balance Pokèmon, because of how the game was designed, it's supposed to have you hunt for the strongest mons (legendaries) in a single player adventure, and the game designers decided that the competitive part of the videogames would have been VGC (Nintendo's official metagame), so they banned the thing that is supposed to be unbalanced (legendaries aka "the strongest pokèmon) while changing movepools / mechanics of certain moves to make VGC competitive
When I first looked at the title of this thread, I immediately scoffed at the idea, but that was maybe because I took "sustainable" as actual income and not in the sense it's being used in in this thread. Upon opening it though, I pretty much immediately switched gears upon understanding and thought about it. As those above me have stated, there has been a pretty gigantic power creep since Gen IV, so much so I'd rather refer to it as a Power Tidal Wave. Gen IV had plenty of combinations running through it, nearly to the point where it was too much for the time. Then Gen V introduced weather and the Wifi clause, shifting around a large amount of Pokemon in terms of how they held up. Electivire? Suddenly golden child of Gen 4 to relatively crappy Pokemon due to losing its surprise factor. Politoed and Ninetales? Suddenly saved and bringing a host of friends new and old with it (Jellicent, Sawsbuck, Gorebyss, Kabutops, Victreebel, etc). At the time, I was relatively scared of the new, powerful metagame, but as I got used to it I was relaxed and got used to it. Keep in mind this is someone who started the metagame without help this time (was helped in Gen 4 on Pokebeach) and was terrified of Klinklang. Now take this feeling and multiply it times 10. That was the result of Generation 6. Dragons are suddenly no longer the kings of the pack, Bisharp and Mandibuzz shot to the top ("Started From The Bottom", anyone?), and the Megas... ooh boy, the Megas. Saving some forgotten Pokemon like Mawile and Pinsir to giving awesome Pokemon like Mewtwo and Gengar even more power, Megas ultimately shook up Pokemon in a massive way never before seen. Suddenly it became a necessity to carry one of these (then) 26 Pokemon on your team. That alone is stressful - how do I prepare for (after considering Ubers, so think OU) 20 possible Mega Pokemon (at the time) while still having a good team? In all honesty, you really can't prepare for all of them, just the most popular. And this isn't even taking into account massive trend within the metgame - Greninja, Talonflame, Aegislash, etc. At one point or another, even the regular Pokemon were molding the metagame to what it has become. Jirachi was suddenly no longer a golden child, Volcarona was suddenly bad in OU, and even Pokemon like Infernape began to lose their luster. This paragraph doesn't even take ORAS into account, which introduced 20 more Mega Pokemon that only further impacted the metagame and further shifted it (Beedrill and Lopunny, going 0 to 100 real quick in power). The topic of this thread isn't to reminisce on old times, however. It's to discuss whether or not competitive battling will be feasible in the future. Things will clearly be harder to comprehend as more and more Pokemon are added, but as Game Freak continues to find ways to sell us the same game over and over again, we too will continue to find new ways to shape our metagame and somehow make it work. Things may expand, but ultimately we will find a way to make it work. Humans are competitive by nature, why let a game die out that lets them exert this very basic drive just because there's an overload of features?
mm yeah perhaps I was overreacting a bit when I was all like "GF don't care about singles, long term prospects are bleak" etc. I guess the nerf to weather is a big deal, to the point where XY probably did enough good things to outweigh the power creep occurring, but the same can't really be said about ORAS imo. Personally I don't really see much evidence of any competitive balancing prior to XY, but that's beside the point. I don't doubt competitive singles will continue to thrive for a good while. Sorry for doing this but I had to, I'm like 98% sure G4 Evire is regarded as being trash by many players, particularly those who play regularly. Anyways Because this overload of features means lots of threats, but you're still restricted to six pokemon when covering this increased number of threats. Not only is there a greater quantity of threats, but existing threats are gaining new options, which means new ways around their checks. This increases the burden on teambuilding to the point where a cohesive and well-balanced team might still be weak to a number of threats, resulting in a matchup disadvantage that is unreasonable. What unreasonable means is up to both your own perspective and debate. This article (I highly recommend reading those articles btw, lots of stuff to think about) points out that a competitive game really should allow players of equal skill roughly equal chances of winning at the start of a match. Obviously pokemon will never ever reach that ideal, matchup advantages will never come close to being eliminated, not even in RBY, which undoubtedly has the least diverse metagames available to us. However when you consider the other extreme, that games are won or lost based on whether your threats correspond with what your opponent was unable to account for, would you want to compete in that kind of environment? Of course if your team loses to X threats, and covering those threats only exposes more weaknesses, maybe that team simply wasn't viable in the first place? That begs the question of what can be reasonably expected of people in determining whether a team or core is viable or not- how difficult is it going to be to make a team that fares reasonably well against every threat? It also demonstrates just how much of a grey area this entire discussion is- the distinctions between what is acceptable and not acceptable are both extremely vague and extremely subjective. I definitely feel like in general a lot of people don't think critically about the whether something being centralising is good for a metagame. Granted, much of the time the thing in question is genuinely bad for the meta, but still. As someone who doesn't play NU but lurks all the tier subforums, I can't help but wonder whether that was something that could've been considered in the M-Lix suspect, but again I don't play the tier so I don't know. My opinion based on this discussion is that our current tiering processes are adequate. But could things, be they the processes or the community mindset, or w/e be better in terms of creating enjoyable metagames?