jpw234
Catastrophic Event Specialist
So, I'd like to start an open-ended discussion about a broad problem (or rather issue, it's not strictly negative) that Smogon is going to have to come to grips with as a community at some point. So why not start that conversation now?
Basically, as we're navigating through OU in the 6th generation of Pokemon games, the concept of "matchup" has been an increasingly prevalent concern. Lots of players feel as though OU is not a very rewarding tier to be playing competitively because certain matchups are seen to be "unwinnable" from team preview. Certainly not everybody feels this way, but there is definitely an increasing sentiment to this effect.
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I recently had a conversation on PS! about this topic, and I'll c/p some of my relevant thoughts here:
So, to expand on that idea in a clearer way: when the pool of Pokemon is small enough and reasonable similar in terms of power, we have a situation where teambuilding is, in a pretty real sense, a search for the single "best team". DPP OU is probably the quintessential example of such a phenomenon. The threatlist is manageable enough that you can realistically attempt to handle every relevant threat with just 6 Pokemon. Obviously there is some matchup in even these smaller tiers, and there is still room for different playstyles and etc. But we typically don't think of matchup being a major factor in this type of environment.
As the pool of Pokemon gets much bigger, the ability to handle every relevant threat in the metagame diminishes rapidly. We've seen this moving into ORAS with a pretty significant expansion in our threatlists and in the number of viable Pokemon. In this sort of situation, you can no longer search for the single "best team" in the abstract, rather, you have to search for the best team in a particular metagame, based on its expected matchups against the other common teams you will face. There will always be some Pokemon or matchups that you accept a worse win percentage against. This doesn't have to mean an auto-loss in those bad matchups by any means, and there should still be room (except in the absolute worst of cases) for a skilled player to overcome these matchups, but matchup becomes a more controlling concern.
-------------------
Now, we don't have to necessarily agree exactly where exactly this line is drawn. Maybe you believe that you're perfectly capable of handling most of the relevant metagame threats in ORAS (I hold this view; I know plenty of good battlers do, WhiteQueen being the most prominent example off the top of my head). But given the trajectory that GameFreak has established - power creep is kind of a necessity for them to keep selling games - we all kind of have to acknowledge that there will be a tipping point at some point, and that has serious implications for what we do here.
The most important thing is that a situation where matchup is a relevant factor in teambuilding does not mean that a game can no longer be competitive. The analogues I'm going to refer to are the competitive Magic: the Gathering and Hearthstone scenes, simply because I'm familiar with them. I'm not arguing that these TCGs are "the same" as Pokemon, there's obviously massive differences, but the style of metagame in particular is a relevant thing to reference.
In a game like Magic, particularly in older formats with a larger card pool, it's impossible for any deck to have positive matchups against the entire expected metagame, and that's okay - Magic's competitive scene is growing now more than ever. Instead, each archetype has a typically accepted backbone of cards, and then some room for flexibility to improve different matchups, where you can tweak your deck to have better or worse percentages against the decks you're expecting to play against. At a big tournament, you can personalize your deck with these tweaks to perform better against the expected metagame, pick the deck that you expect has particularly good matchups against the expected field, or even innovate an entirely new deck that the metagame isn't prepared for. What's more, there's still plenty of room for in-game skill to control your destiny, despite an expected amount of variance.
I anticipate that Pokemon could possibly settle into a form of competition similar to this. We already have a number of established archetypes - Sableye Stall, rain offense, hippo balance, Sand offense, manectric volt-turn, etc., so this type of thing is beginning to form already. We can, similarly, understand the winrates of "typical" teams of each archetype - for example, hippo balance has a decent matchup against manectric offense but has a poorer matchup against rain. There's room for tweaks within each style to change this - maybe the volt-turn team runs a GK Thundy to beat hippo, or the hippo team runs a Gastrodon to beat rain, etc. And there's room for in-game skill to overcome the effects of matchup with good predictions and decisionmaking.
-------------------
The biggest issue with transitioning into this style of competition is our tournament formats. TCG tournaments are capable of tolerating a pretty large amount of variance and matchup because of their formats. For example, most large Magic tournaments have up to 15 rounds of Bo3 Swiss games, where you can lose plenty of individual games and even one or two matches to variance or bad matchups. The fields are also very large, so you have to ability to just dodge your bad matchups sometimes. Because of this larger sample size, better decks and players tend to shake out toward the top, although there's always the potential for newer players or weird decks to have an explosive run, or for very good players to have bad days and finish poorly. This is also offset by the fact that the tournament cycle is pretty short, with the biggest tournament happening twice a year and major events happening as often as 3 times a month. So even if the best player in the world has an awful day this weekend, he has plenty of opportunities to redeem himself.
Our current tournament formats, particularly the individual tournaments, are not structured in a way that can tolerate a similar amount of variance. For example, check out the OST, which is billed as the biggest individual Pokemon tournament anywhere. The OST is an entirely bracket-based format where each round is just a Bo3. In a world where matchup is a larger factor (maybe you think that's this gen, maybe you should be imagining gen 8 right now), it's entirely possible that much worse players simply get good matchups in 2 games out of 3 and knock out deserving players in very early rounds. This might be tolerable on its own, except OST is only run once a year - so a good player who gets poor matchup once is just SOL until next year. This applies similarly to Smogon Tour playoffs (although the Smogon Tour point system is itself a good example of a way that we can hedge against these concerns) and as well to individual games in team tournaments like WCoP and SPL (although the fact that you win/lose as a team, with up to 10 matches played each week, also helps hedge against matchup/variance).
-------------------
Now, I'm not saying that we just can't run any tournaments like OST. But we're already seeing this concern manifest itself, where SPL/WCoP players lose interest because they can get screwed by matchup, and of course OST had plenty of matchup concerns this year (pokeaim/char-y?). We have limited resources - due to the complications of scheduling games over the internet and a limited amount of staff, we can't run the OST (or a similar high-profile tournament) every two weeks. I get that. And I don't have all the answers (I'm not a TD or heavily involved in the tourney community, so I'd like to hear from those people). So, I'd like to have a discussion - is there a way we can change our tournament structure to better accomodate what Pokemon is becoming? Do you disagree that how the metagame works is going to change as power creep continues? Did I type way too much? Discuss.
Basically, as we're navigating through OU in the 6th generation of Pokemon games, the concept of "matchup" has been an increasingly prevalent concern. Lots of players feel as though OU is not a very rewarding tier to be playing competitively because certain matchups are seen to be "unwinnable" from team preview. Certainly not everybody feels this way, but there is definitely an increasing sentiment to this effect.
-------------------
I recently had a conversation on PS! about this topic, and I'll c/p some of my relevant thoughts here:
[12:09] %jpw234: previously the pool of mons was limited enough
[12:09] %jpw234: where you could realistically act like you were finding the best team
[12:09] %jpw234: as the pool becomes bigger
[12:09] %jpw234: competition shifts to like a magic/hearthstone style where you're to an extent playing against the meta
[12:09] %jpw234: and you have to accept some matchups
[12:09] %jpw234: but those games still thrive based on their tournament formats
[12:10] %jpw234: in those TCGs you have a bunch of viable deck archetypes and they have better/worse matchups against each other
[12:10] %jpw234: some innovation comes in tweaking an archetype to improve matchups or like "spiking" atournament with a totally new unexpected type of deck
[12:10] %jpw234: and people just know like some matchups are worse than others and that's fine
[12:10] %jpw234: so i think mons will start to shift towards that style
[12:11] %jpw234: where maybe we know that like manectric offense has a meh matchup against ttar balance but you can change up your manectric team in some ways to improve that
[12:11] %jpw234: and then maybe you come in with a totally wacky new stall that is unexpected and wins
[12:11] %jpw234: and then gets absorbed into the meta
[12:09] %jpw234: where you could realistically act like you were finding the best team
[12:09] %jpw234: as the pool becomes bigger
[12:09] %jpw234: competition shifts to like a magic/hearthstone style where you're to an extent playing against the meta
[12:09] %jpw234: and you have to accept some matchups
[12:09] %jpw234: but those games still thrive based on their tournament formats
[12:10] %jpw234: in those TCGs you have a bunch of viable deck archetypes and they have better/worse matchups against each other
[12:10] %jpw234: some innovation comes in tweaking an archetype to improve matchups or like "spiking" atournament with a totally new unexpected type of deck
[12:10] %jpw234: and people just know like some matchups are worse than others and that's fine
[12:10] %jpw234: so i think mons will start to shift towards that style
[12:11] %jpw234: where maybe we know that like manectric offense has a meh matchup against ttar balance but you can change up your manectric team in some ways to improve that
[12:11] %jpw234: and then maybe you come in with a totally wacky new stall that is unexpected and wins
[12:11] %jpw234: and then gets absorbed into the meta
So, to expand on that idea in a clearer way: when the pool of Pokemon is small enough and reasonable similar in terms of power, we have a situation where teambuilding is, in a pretty real sense, a search for the single "best team". DPP OU is probably the quintessential example of such a phenomenon. The threatlist is manageable enough that you can realistically attempt to handle every relevant threat with just 6 Pokemon. Obviously there is some matchup in even these smaller tiers, and there is still room for different playstyles and etc. But we typically don't think of matchup being a major factor in this type of environment.
As the pool of Pokemon gets much bigger, the ability to handle every relevant threat in the metagame diminishes rapidly. We've seen this moving into ORAS with a pretty significant expansion in our threatlists and in the number of viable Pokemon. In this sort of situation, you can no longer search for the single "best team" in the abstract, rather, you have to search for the best team in a particular metagame, based on its expected matchups against the other common teams you will face. There will always be some Pokemon or matchups that you accept a worse win percentage against. This doesn't have to mean an auto-loss in those bad matchups by any means, and there should still be room (except in the absolute worst of cases) for a skilled player to overcome these matchups, but matchup becomes a more controlling concern.
-------------------
Now, we don't have to necessarily agree exactly where exactly this line is drawn. Maybe you believe that you're perfectly capable of handling most of the relevant metagame threats in ORAS (I hold this view; I know plenty of good battlers do, WhiteQueen being the most prominent example off the top of my head). But given the trajectory that GameFreak has established - power creep is kind of a necessity for them to keep selling games - we all kind of have to acknowledge that there will be a tipping point at some point, and that has serious implications for what we do here.
The most important thing is that a situation where matchup is a relevant factor in teambuilding does not mean that a game can no longer be competitive. The analogues I'm going to refer to are the competitive Magic: the Gathering and Hearthstone scenes, simply because I'm familiar with them. I'm not arguing that these TCGs are "the same" as Pokemon, there's obviously massive differences, but the style of metagame in particular is a relevant thing to reference.
In a game like Magic, particularly in older formats with a larger card pool, it's impossible for any deck to have positive matchups against the entire expected metagame, and that's okay - Magic's competitive scene is growing now more than ever. Instead, each archetype has a typically accepted backbone of cards, and then some room for flexibility to improve different matchups, where you can tweak your deck to have better or worse percentages against the decks you're expecting to play against. At a big tournament, you can personalize your deck with these tweaks to perform better against the expected metagame, pick the deck that you expect has particularly good matchups against the expected field, or even innovate an entirely new deck that the metagame isn't prepared for. What's more, there's still plenty of room for in-game skill to control your destiny, despite an expected amount of variance.
I anticipate that Pokemon could possibly settle into a form of competition similar to this. We already have a number of established archetypes - Sableye Stall, rain offense, hippo balance, Sand offense, manectric volt-turn, etc., so this type of thing is beginning to form already. We can, similarly, understand the winrates of "typical" teams of each archetype - for example, hippo balance has a decent matchup against manectric offense but has a poorer matchup against rain. There's room for tweaks within each style to change this - maybe the volt-turn team runs a GK Thundy to beat hippo, or the hippo team runs a Gastrodon to beat rain, etc. And there's room for in-game skill to overcome the effects of matchup with good predictions and decisionmaking.
-------------------
The biggest issue with transitioning into this style of competition is our tournament formats. TCG tournaments are capable of tolerating a pretty large amount of variance and matchup because of their formats. For example, most large Magic tournaments have up to 15 rounds of Bo3 Swiss games, where you can lose plenty of individual games and even one or two matches to variance or bad matchups. The fields are also very large, so you have to ability to just dodge your bad matchups sometimes. Because of this larger sample size, better decks and players tend to shake out toward the top, although there's always the potential for newer players or weird decks to have an explosive run, or for very good players to have bad days and finish poorly. This is also offset by the fact that the tournament cycle is pretty short, with the biggest tournament happening twice a year and major events happening as often as 3 times a month. So even if the best player in the world has an awful day this weekend, he has plenty of opportunities to redeem himself.
Our current tournament formats, particularly the individual tournaments, are not structured in a way that can tolerate a similar amount of variance. For example, check out the OST, which is billed as the biggest individual Pokemon tournament anywhere. The OST is an entirely bracket-based format where each round is just a Bo3. In a world where matchup is a larger factor (maybe you think that's this gen, maybe you should be imagining gen 8 right now), it's entirely possible that much worse players simply get good matchups in 2 games out of 3 and knock out deserving players in very early rounds. This might be tolerable on its own, except OST is only run once a year - so a good player who gets poor matchup once is just SOL until next year. This applies similarly to Smogon Tour playoffs (although the Smogon Tour point system is itself a good example of a way that we can hedge against these concerns) and as well to individual games in team tournaments like WCoP and SPL (although the fact that you win/lose as a team, with up to 10 matches played each week, also helps hedge against matchup/variance).
-------------------
Now, I'm not saying that we just can't run any tournaments like OST. But we're already seeing this concern manifest itself, where SPL/WCoP players lose interest because they can get screwed by matchup, and of course OST had plenty of matchup concerns this year (pokeaim/char-y?). We have limited resources - due to the complications of scheduling games over the internet and a limited amount of staff, we can't run the OST (or a similar high-profile tournament) every two weeks. I get that. And I don't have all the answers (I'm not a TD or heavily involved in the tourney community, so I'd like to hear from those people). So, I'd like to have a discussion - is there a way we can change our tournament structure to better accomodate what Pokemon is becoming? Do you disagree that how the metagame works is going to change as power creep continues? Did I type way too much? Discuss.