Ok so I had two new ideas to propose that PO can potentially implement after the success it attained with Smogon: 1) Separate Tiering for Mega Evolutions: So this is something that I has wanted to see for quite a while, and I was so glad when it happened on Smogon. It makes sense, as there are many cases were we see unviable pokemon being classed in higher tiers due to their respective mega evolutions being viable there. It really skews with the whole viability=usage aspect that the tiering system tries to propose, and that the mega pokemon serves a completely different importance compared to the regular form of the mon. I will leave the link of the thread on smogon that goes into great detail about the reasoning on why this should occur. Also, people may wonder what would happen to mons where the regular form is used more than the mega (ex: Garchomp, Latis), well if the regular forms do not drop to the tier below, than the mega form could not possibly be used due to the fact that the base mon is not available to use, its just that simple and I believe it is easily to implement. If the mon is holding a mega stone, its considered the mega evolution. Smogon thread: http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/separate-tiering-of-mega-pokemon.3546062/ 2) Have monthly tier shifts: Another idea that smogon had implemented in that we could hold monthly tier shifts instead of the ones that occur every three months currently. If we stuck to our two month shifts, then maybe I wouldn't have proposed this, but I feel that the three month shifts are quite long to wait for if we want updates to occur. I believe that this is partially the reason why we see less activity on PO, because the tiers become very stagnant when compared to Smogon's. We could raise the cutoff to a higher percentage so that there wouldn't be too many shifts each month, and we could still have the "big" update on the third month. This should be highly suggested imo, because I feel PO would need this new system to freshen things up from time to time. I want other opinions on this, as I feel we need to address these issues if we want PO to grow to the community it once was. Tagging @Draciel @Finchinator specifically
1) is currently not possible and has coding limitations. Believe me when I say it has been discussed to hell and back and it is just not possible right now. 2) is a bit risky with how much more volatile PO's tiers are usage wise, but this is ultimately a case for tier leaders to discuss.
Monthly Tier shifts are atrociously bad for lower tiers. As someone who has led lower tiers for at least 6 years, I can tell you attempting to balance a tier /every single month/ is impossible. What's the point in trying to balance things when the whole tier can be completely different 7 days later? I can say from experience that monthly tiering shifts destroy any attempts to balance lower tiers. The first is just a transparent attempt to drop things to lower tiers because they /obviously/ belong there without some trait (like how Blaziken would be LU or NU without Speed Boost). Attempting to tier Megas Separately ignores the fact that you have to use the base on your team, and that a number of megas rely on some part of their base for their usage. Mega Zam, Mega Gyara, Mega Slowbro, Mega Manectric, and arguably Mega Zard-X all use some part of their base form to be as good as they are. Either way, PO doesn't have the ability to do this without manually (and therefore arbitrarily) dropping things to lower tiers. It's been discussed already. The Smogon discussion on the subject was lolzy in how obviously being pushed from the top it was and how little justification that wasn't "I want more things in my tier." Most of that discussion was atrocious; I'm sure there was more discussion on irc or wherever, but that thread was terrible. If lower tiers are "too stale" to some arbitrary liking, then we should begin to resuspect old bans or to suspect the most likely cause (like what UU last gen with Roserade and Deo-D). Completely altering the way we tier things because the tier was stale for 4 weeks is a joke.
Most of what I was gonna say has been said already by devo and blitz, but still I will address your points: 1) We did have a very animated discussion about tiering megas separately, but we didn't go through with that because of some limitations regarding the 'statsextractor' which prevented us from having separate Usage stats for base-forms and mega-forms. As a result the only plausible solution to do this was to drop stuff manually (which was discussed a lot as well) but it was ultimately rejected because it violated the basic tiering guidelines. So at this moment this is not possible to implement, however in future if we somehow get stuff working this will definitely be the first thing we do. 2) I agree to what has been said before regarding the second point, I do not think tier shifts based on 1 month's worth of usage stats gonna help the lower tiers at all, furthermore it's gonna destabilize them a whole lot more. We will be going back to 2 month's usage based tier-shift from the next cycle, the TLs and I agreed that's the best course of action regarding stability in lower tiers.