Dragoon952
The Winter Moth
Double post *shakes fist at Serebii server*
By the way guys, I've just finished crunching all of the numbers and got around 70-78 as a possible team value total. Does that seem a bit high/low to anyone? I left out Pokemon such as the Rotom Formes, Miltank and Slowking as they don't have their values yet. Would Slowking have the same value as Slowbro, or would Nasty Plot and its stat arrangement make a significant difference?
Joined just to post here? That, is actually pretty cool.So yes, I actually created an account just to post in this thread. Recently I've been looking at getting into competitive battling and became well-versed in Smogon and their rules and systems and I remember it always bugged the crap out of me how their limitations worked. Pokemon got declared "broken" when they were too powerful, so they were banned, with an absolute lack of the foresight necessary to realize that the NEXT most powerful poke would take its place. I remember thinking "rather than just banning something that becomes too powerful, why don't you mark each pokemon's power on some sort of gradient and use a limit system to cripple teams with over-powered pokes by forcing them to pair them with under-powered pokes?"
People can actually find this thread by searching the internet?! Okay, I'm being a bit sarcastic, but I truly would not have guessed that. Amazing!Then, in a burst of random Googling (I honestly have no idea how I found this thread. I think I was looking up the viabiltiy of Draco Meteor on Jirachi) I stumbled upon this thread.
Hmmm....True, the honor system wouldn't fail very hard at this stage. I'm not trying to be antagonistic when I say that Leftovers on every Pokemon isn't that big a deal. I actually have heard Leftovers recommended as the default item for any Pokemon without a specific item-based strategy. I can't see that as something worth restricting.ONE: Items - Yes, I'm aware we've covered this, particularly the reality that an item tends to land evenly in the point spread if all pokemon can use it. My suggestion is, instead, to make an item ITSELF cost points irrespective of who it's equipped to. Noble a pursit as it is to want to balance out the metagame by preventing the same cluster of pokes from being used, I don't feel I'm alone in being sick to death of seeing leftovers on every pokemon who doesn't have a choice item or Life Orb equipped.
I'm aware of the potential for cheating because an item can't be seen right at the outset> But right now there are few enough PVS battlers, most of whom want to see it succeed, that I don't think the honor system would fail very hard at this stage. And, assuming this system is picked up by Shoddy Battlers, it shouldn't be too hard to have Shoddy figure in the math itself, locking teams to their ceiling without having players do the math. Which brings me to my second point...
I hope I'm not being either too cynical for suggesting that we might be laughed out of town by Smogon, nor being too sentimental for wanting this system to gain its popularity apart from Smogon's influence.TWO: Get Shoddy on your side - I'm not sure if you're aware, but Shoddy Battle two is currently in development and is at a stage where implementing a system like this is certainly viable, especially if the math is already precalculated by someone other than the Shoddy programmers. If you could get someone on the inside at Shoddy to take an interest in this system, it would not only help the system gain curious newcomers, but it would make the math a lot easier for everyone involved. Attaching a single value field to each pokemon from a table doesn't seem like a lot of work compared to some of the other monotony faced by the Shoddy dev team, and if they find the system interesting I don't think they'd be unwilling.
The only reason I bring it up is I'm not sure anyone here has really broached the subject to them; if you make this visible to the people with their finger on the power button of the battling community it would go a long way toward getting the system publicized.
ONE: Items - Yes, I'm aware we've covered this, particularly the reality that an item tends to land evenly in the point spread if all pokemon can use it. My suggestion is, instead, to make an item ITSELF cost points irrespective of who it's equipped to. Noble a pursit as it is to want to balance out the metagame by preventing the same cluster of pokes from being used, I don't feel I'm alone in being sick to death of seeing leftovers on every pokemon who doesn't have a choice item or Life Orb equipped.
I'm aware of the potential for cheating because an item can't be seen right at the outset. But right now there are few enough PVS battlers, most of whom want to see it succeed, that I don't think the honor system would fail very hard at this stage. And, assuming this system is picked up by Shoddy Battlers, it shouldn't be too hard to have Shoddy figure in the math itself, locking teams to their ceiling without having players do the math. Which brings me to my second point...
TWO: Get Shoddy on your side - I'm not sure if you're aware, but Shoddy Battle two is currently in development and is at a stage where implementing a system like this is certainly viable, especially if the math is already precalculated by someone other than the Shoddy programmers. If you could get someone on the inside at Shoddy to take an interest in this system, it would not only help the system gain curious newcomers, but it would make the math a lot easier for everyone involved. Attaching a single value field to each pokemon from a table doesn't seem like a lot of work compared to some of the other monotony faced by the Shoddy dev team, and if they find the system interesting I don't think they'd be unwilling.
The only reason I bring it up is I'm not sure anyone here has really broached the subject to them; if you make this visible to the people with their finger on the power button of the battling community it would go a long way toward getting the system publicized.
THREE: The Salamence issue - This is sort of unrelated, but it's topical so I'll go ahead with it. Salamence is probably going to be banned from the Smogon OU tier, blah blah blah that's not really important in and of itself. But what is important is the REASON; because of it's relatively high SpAtk AND Atk stats, a Salamence poses a threat not because it does one thing exceptionally well, but because it does two things very well. Of course, if you KNOW how a Salamence is going to play, like you would with, say, a Blissey, you can react accordingly. People are frustrated because a Salamence can easily play several different ways, all of them equally devastating, and just in figuring out which method is in use you'll probably lose a poke and a half. This was at the heart of what made Garchomp so difficult as well; it wasn't that he did one thing super-well, it was that figuring out which Chomp was being played against you was too costly a discovery.
I bring this up because I've noticed this kind of consideration being given to things outside of the base-stat realm; type coverage in the movepool, for example, is a concern because you don't know at the outset which moves a poke is running, so having access to more moves means more potential danger, even if any one combination isn't more lethal than on a different poke.
But is this consideration being given to pokemon whose STATS allow them to play a variety of ways? pokemon are typically EV'd to accentuate their base stats, because (barring certain circumstances) it doesn't make sense to boost an already low stat as it's a waste of EVs. But some pokemon have base stats which are clustered together enough that you can choose to play them in a number of ways, all equally successfully, and this makes them particularly dangerous.
A good example is Salamence, as I brought up before; Blissey is rated 228 by your numbering, while Mence is only 162. This may make sense for any particular set that Mence is running. But because it's impossible to tell whether you're up against, say, a DDMence or a MixMence until you've lost a poke, while Blissey is always going to be performing essentially the same role, Mence is a much bigger threat and more valuable poke. There's a reason he's up for Uber consideration and Blissey isn't.
Unfortunately, I don't know how to quantify this difference, but I think you have to consider the additional danger posed by the unpredictability of a pokemon in the metagame when figuring in its overall cost to a team. Maybe a system whereby any base stat which is greater than a certain value (80? 100? 110?) gets weighted, so you have more points being given to those pokes with more than one stat which is surprisingly high?
EDIT: Also, out of pure curiosity, how does Hidden Power factor into your math? I notice that you give consideration to the "most powerful move" of each type, isn't that what you said? Hidden Power is a strange issue because it can offer a BP 70 move of any type to essentially ANY pokemon (at least, any which can learn TMs, which IIRC is all but like 15). But, it can only be used for one type, meaning you can't get, say, Ice coverage AND Ground coverage on a poke which learns neither of those move types, but you can get one or the other (which is distinct from how the other learnset moves operate). It might seem like it'd be easiest just to ignore HP as a move from the calculations but some pokemon rely on it to round out their sets, and when a pokemon like Magnezone is granted access to a base 70 power Grass, Fire, or Ice type move it drastically changes its viability in the game, moreso than HP would for other pokes which already HAVE good type coverage. I guess my point being that there are some pokes which are probably undervalued by your math (assuming HP is disregarded) because it seems like they're lacking in type coverage, but a well-selected Hidden Power will more than make up for that deficiency if their movepool only has a hard time covering one or two types (Ice HP on pokemon who otherwise can't deal with dragon types AT ALL being a prime example).
Just some food for thought.
A good example is Salamence, as I brought up before; Blissey is rated 228 by your numbering, while Mence is only 162.
Salamence WAS 22 (216)...before the Stealth Rock modifier I added in to the mix. There was a little discussion about trying to make the modifier less drastic, which might help. Need to look at that more.
Is there any easy way to clean up those numbers so they appear in columns?
Is the type coverage counted on it? This could help some pokemons get right values.
Accidental hexapost? Jesus man, we saw what you wrote! lolbeen fixed, nvm.
The other issue (beyond the Stealth Rock modifier overdoing it by quite a bit) is the fact that there seems to be some disparity in the scaling of the numbers. Most of the focus, I think, has been on getting the pokes to appear in the "right order" in the threat list, so that their percieved level of danger tends to correspond to their place. But whether or not the pokes themselves are ranked correctly, I think the gaps between them might be too large.
For shits and giggles I decided to look up the values of my Steel Gym team. All OU, and I didn't even put Heatran on the list (though Jirachi, who IMO is still grossly overvalued by this system, is present). Here are the numbers:
Metagross - 187
Scizor - 160
Magnezone - 151
Bronzong - 155
Skarmory - 183
Jirachi - 265
TOTAL -- 1101
A 1,101 value team? That's insane. If you do the rounding instead, you get a 111 team; so it's slightly lower when you count in the hundreds, but not much. I see people pulling for the 70-75 range to keep it OU/UU mixed, and I think that's great, but that should mean that 80-90 would yield a standard OU set... and here, an all OU set is pulling down numbers that are 20-30 points HIGHER than expected.
In no small part, I think this is due to Jirachi's overly high rating, which could be balanced out by adjusting the formula to weight stats by some percentile once they were above 100... say, for every point beyond 100 in that stat, a poke gets an additional 1% of its total value added to its stat? So a poke at 100 or less stats gets taken at 100%... a poke at 130 gets 130% OF 130 (169) a poke at 115 gets 115% OF 115 (132), etc. This would help to make "useful stats" count for more on the overall scale, thus decreasing (by relation) the value of pokes like Jirachi with no truly "applicable" stats but a high base stat average, while simultaneously punishing pokes like Salamence and Garchomp whose multiple exceptional stats make them unpredictable and dangerous.
I should note that this math is a) scalar (if it makes for too dramatic of an adjustment, simply step 1% per point down to 0.5% per point. The cutoff of 100 can be moved up or down as well to avoid catching well-placed pokes in its net), and b) may be applied only to certain stats (It almost certainly doesn't matter for the speed stat, and it's probably more important on the attacking stats than the defensive stats. But that depends, I suppose, on which pokemon seem most drastically affected by this approach).
Back on topic, I think another reason the team is valued so highly (and this may or may not be fixed by the above stats) is I think resistances are being counted too strongly. This is most obvious with steel type pokemon, because despite their almost total lack of supereffective STAB, they have incredible resistances and immunities to almost every type across the board (As a rule steel is the only type with more immunities/resistances than neutral/supereffectives, I think). It's especially apparent with a Poke like Skarmory, whose value in a team isn't really very much except as a utility poke (there are far better steel type walls and he's really only helpful as a spiker/whirlwinder). I'm not saying Skarmory isn't good, but for him to be valued above Scizor is insane. Even if the OU usage trends, with Scizor appearing like 1 in 6 matches, are ignored.... Scizor is capable of holding his own in Ubers with STAB tech bullet punch and his high base attack, Skarmory would stand literally NO chance in Ubers.
The root of this issue, I think, is how good sweeping ability completely preempts a need for good defenses. A pokemon with sufficiently high attack and speed (or, in the case of Scizor, sufficiently high priority attack) can get by with essentially NO defenses because it can eliminate most threats without fearing being hit. Meanwhile, Skarmory has higher defense than Scizor has offense, but because its defense/HP isn't high ENOUGH to make it truly useful as a wall compared to pokes like Blissey and Snorlax, it has to take on a role as a utility poke. But even WITH Scizor's tech/bulletpunch modifier, it winds up ranked lower, presumably because Skar's typing and defenses make it seem like a much more successful wall than it is.
What concerns me is the fact that Skarmory's defenses are higher than Scizor's offenses, meaning if a weighted system were introduced, the gap between them would actually GROW, rather than shrinking, despite the above stated reality that Scizor is just a far more powerful poke in general than Skar.
Perhaps the issue is HP's usage in the formula; it seems to be treated as a modifier for defense, much as speed is a modifier for offense. But the most successful wall/stall/defensive pokemon actually have higher base HP stats than defensive stats, so maybe HP needs to get more weight in the defensive side of the formula and the actual Def/SpDef stats need to get less. It may also be worth weighting the entire attack side of the formula to matter more than defense, if for no reason other than the movepool modifiers don't seem to give quite the overall bump to the PV that the type-resistance modifiers do, and the formula may be inadvertently increasing the weight of pokemon with good defensive roles and decreasing the weight of those with good offensive roles. When Blissey has a higher PV than Garchomp and Tyranitar, Jirachi has a higher PV than Heatran (and Garchomp and Tyranitar), and Chansey has a higher PV than Lucario, Salamence, Celebi, and Metagross, I think it's probably a reality that defense is being valued too greatly over offense.
Some food for thought
My point was, though, that you shouldn't use HP as a modifier for defensive stats, because in reality it is THE primary defensive stat. A poke which is being EV trained for bulk, for instance, will always get the EVs to HP first, and then to defenses second (Bronzong, for example is recommended 252 in HP, and then a spread in Sp. Def and Def or Atk).
I think your math treats defensive stats as more important than HP, when in reality I'd say the opposite is true. HP is the most important of the three "survival stats"
Beyond that your math looks good, but I guess what I'm saying is you should just weight the attack side of the formula to compensate for the fact that there are so many modifiers on defense (like immunities). I think the immunities math tends to bump up the defensive side of the equation, while there is no similar bump to the attack side. Which, again, is why defensively-oriented pokemon seem to be ranked higher than offensively-oriented pokemon. Which makes sense at first glance, but really punishes offensively-oriented pokes with generally irrelevantly good defenses (like Scizor, whose main kickass-factor is that he has such a powerful priority move).
*BUMP*
Also, just had the most intense tryout battle with TheFightingPikachu. 70 seems like a really good number to have matches with; I was constantly on my toes wondering if the next opponent would be OU, UU or even NU. Kudos to everyone who's contributed to the system so far - I'm definitely looking forward to more matches like this!