CAP 4 was terrible from a topic leadership perspective.
That's a blunt statement, I know. I expect we'll talk a lot about whether I am making a reasonable overall assessment. But I want to lead off with that statement to be clear as to what triggered this PR thread.
I have had nagging concerns about topic leadership in CAP for quite some time, ever since we implemented the so-called "Strong TL Model" after DP CAP 8. Over time, there has been a disturbing undercurrent that has developed in CAP, where instead of the Topic Leader being expected to serve the community, the community is now expected to serve the Topic Leader. Most Topic Leaders have been very good and have not abused our trust in them, but I have been worried for a while that the project dynamics around Topic Leadership have been moving in a bad direction. BW CAP 4 brought all my concerns to a head, and myself and other moderators all noticed the problems and reacted to it to different degrees. As a consequence of that, I want to propose some radical changes to how we handle topic leadership, including possibly abolishing the position of Topic Leader entirely.
About this Policy Review
This is another very, very long PR post, because it's basically three long topics in a single post.
Clearly I am not happy with Bugmaniacbob and what he did as Topic Leader for CAP 4. Many other people share my dissatisfaction, and in some cases, outrage. I have had many discussions with CAP moderators during CAP 4, after CAP 4, and while writing this Policy Review. I know without a doubt that I am not alone amongst CAP leadership in feeling that Bugmaniacbob did a lousy job at leading the project, and I have cross-referenced my recollections with others to ensure I am not misrepresenting events. I will not be referring to any other moderators by name in this post, although I will often use phrases like "other moderators" in my retelling, when describing actions or conversations involving other CAP mods. Be aware that every moderator was not involved in every aspect of CAP 4, and there may be some mods that have very little awareness of what I will be describing here. I am intentionally leaving out individual mods' names, so they can represent themselves in this thread, even if their opinions and recollections contradict my own.
The problem, in a nutshell, was that Bugmaniacbob railroaded and manhandled CAP 4. Bob didn't follow the basic principle that we build a pokemon as a community. He regarded Topic Leader as a position that allowed him to create a pokemon that he wanted, according to his particular preferences and desires. In many cases, he bent the project process to his will, he ignored past precedents for Topic Leader behavior and influence, and in some cases, he outright manipulated polls to get what he personally wanted, even when he knew that the community majority did not agree with his actions, and even in the face of CAP moderator warnings. By the end of CAP 4, Bob was in full-on self-glorification mode, and he treated CAP 4 as if it was his personal creation. Bugmaniacbob completely lost the entire point of CAP by making it about HIM, not the community.
In retrospect, the reason Bob's Topic Leadership was so frustrating and difficult for me and other mods to grapple with, was because it was a problem that progressively grew over time. Bob started out CAP 4 terrifically and seemed to be doing a great job. Then a few minor issues surfaced that looked biased, possibly a little suspicious, but we brushed it off. A few later actions by Bob were fairly obviously unethical, but not against the rules, so we decided to let it go, but planned to tighten up the rules before the next CAP. By the middle of CAP 4 we were all certain that BMB was operating on his own personal agenda and was imposing his personal preferences on every step, even if that required him to manipulate polls and processes to suit his tastes. By the end of the project, Bob was openly flaunting his disregard for the CAP process and principles, and the mods stepped in and intervened to prevent further embarrassment. In the aftermath, we were left wondering how the hell we let things get so far off track, and questioned ourselves if we should have acted earlier to prevent it.
CAP 4: Behind-The-Scenes
To bring everyone up to speed, I guess the best place to start is at the beginning...
When CAP 4 started and I saw how BMB handled the first Concept discussion, I was giddy with excitement over the amazing amount of work and attention to detail he paid to every post and argument in the submission thread. I even chatted privately with one of the CAP mods during that first thread and I said, "I think Bob may be the best TL we have ever had in CAP."
When the typing poll came out, several of us raised our eyebrows because the typing slate appeared to be "stacked". That is what I call a slate that has been constructed by the TL to bias the community to pick something the TL personally favors, but is presented to the community as if it is an objective representative sampling of viable options that represent the intelligent community consensus. We have had issues with some stacked polls in past CAPs, but as long as it isn't too blatant, we don't worry about it too much.
When you give one person (the TL) total control over a slate, and ask them to sift through all the suggestions and evaluate all the community arguments -- it is inevitable that the TL is going to have some degree of subjective bias that influences their choice of options for the slate. Of course we expect all CAP leaders to be objective and act in the best interests of the community. But we understand that TL's are only human and are going to have personal leanings that impact their decisions, as long as they are acting in good faith and in general accordance with project goals.
The typing poll only had three legitimate options on it, and two of those typings were Bug types. It also had the odd inclusion of a fourth typing, Grass/Flying, which was never really discussed in the typing discussion and obviously had no prayer of being selected. I found it a little odd that the majority of viable options were Bug type, but I could easily pass that off since Bug typings were heavily discussed in the thread, and I think the community majority was probably rooting for a Bug typing anyway. But the slate was small to begin with, and the inclusion of Grass/Flying stood out almost as if Bob was intentionally including a fourth option for appearances sake, but he didn't want to include anything else that might actually get votes. While this may be harmless, it's a clear warning sign of a "stacked" slate, and it is NOT something we encourage from our Topic Leaders.
So when I saw the slate I immediately wondered, "Is Bob trying to ensure a win for a Bug type? You gotta be kidding me...", knowing of course that Bob is a bug enthusiast in real life, and his Smogon specialty is analysis writing for Bug-type pokemon. But my reaction was mild annoyance, if anything, and I didn't say anything to anyone else. After speaking to other mods much later, when things got worse -- they all brought up the same question, "Did you think anything was wrong with that first Typing slate? I thought it was suspicious, but I didn't want to say anything."
So the Typing slate was probably stacked a bit, but I figured he was a new TL, and new to forum leadership of any kind, and he was just establishing himself and his direction. It happens on many CAPs where TL's come out of the gate with a head of steam and make some leadership mistakes that are mostly a result of over-enthusiasm, not poor leadership skills. So I brushed off my concern over the typing poll -- heck I wanted a Bug typing too, and everyone else seemed to be on the same bandwagon.
The ability step was really the tipping point for Bob and his leadership of CAP 4. That's where I think he first started making moves to ensure he got what he wanted out of CAP 4. It's no secret that Bob did not want Weak Armor on CAP 4. He argued against Weak Armor on IRC and in the first ability and discussion thread, but he relented to community consensus and slated it anyway, like an objective Topic Leader should. My suspicion is that he figured his arguments against it would be sufficient to keep it from winning. But Weak Armor won pretty handily, despite his disapproval.
I think that was the point where everything changed for BMB. From then on, I think BMB made a conscious effort to ensure that no future decision would go against him on CAP 4. He started leaning hard on ability discussions and clearly vocalizing what options he favored in the very first post (more on that technique later). And the third ability was a joke in terms of fairness and objectivity. Despite the fact that many options were debated heavily in the third ability discussion, BMB created the poll with only two options -- No Guard (which was the option he had been favoring and arguing strongly for from the very beginning of the first ability thread) and No Ability. I saw it as a kind of "temper tantrum slate" -- pretty much Bob's way of saying, "Either pick my favorite option or you get nothing!". Once again, numerous other mods had the same read as I did, that Bob was turning the corner and trying to strong-arm the community.
Although I didn't like seeing how he handled the last ability poll, the stat spread step was the first step where I seriously considered if Bob was actually breaking rules as Topic Leader. First off, in the Stat Limits Discussion he decided on his own to not respect the limit ranges established in the CAP Process Guide. He felt the limits in the rules were "too lax" (whatever that means) and he unilaterally made up his own narrower limits. Bob didn't consult anyone else about his on-the-fly rules change, he just did it on his own and posted it as gospel for all stat spread submitters to follow. And why would he create such narrow restrictions? Because he knew exactly what stat spread he wanted and he didn't want to give anyone leeway to get too far away from exactly what he wanted. Then in the first post of the stat submission thread, he made the curious decision to openly post his own working spread. It was a clear statement to the field of submitters saying, "Match this if you want to be slated".
Bob also was very open that he wanted a 600 BST spread, and he stacked the slate with 600 BST submissions. This was when I started seriously questioning whether Bob's motivations on the CAP 4 project were driven by competitive bias or by some hidden fan agenda. In the stat threads, he initially described 600 BST as being "pleasing to the eye" or something along those lines and indicated he preferred it. But then later he started mentioning that it would be cool if CAP made a "pseudo-legendary pokemon".
I immediately reacted when I saw Bob establish that CAP 4 would be a "pseudo-legend" for a couple of reasons. First off, any time you start throwing the word "legendary" around, you bring connotations of ubers and all that, and the last thing CAP needs is to give even MORE influence to make overpowered Pokemon. On top of that, Bob was taking a very analytical competitive step (stats) with math formulas, BSR calculators and all that -- and injecting a fanboy concept like "legendary status" in the mix, as if it had any relevance. Then when he only slated "legendary spreads", it was clear this legendary thing was VERY relevant to Bob for some odd reason. I bristled because it is NOT within the Topic Leader's authority to arbitrarily establish a flavor mandate that we make a "pseudo-legend", just because the Topic Leader desires it. Sure, if a 600 BST spread just *happens to win* on a CAP, I think it makes sense for all of us to acknowledge that Pokemon canon has special significance on that BST number. But that is NOT what Bob did at all.
Remember that on the CAP project -- BST is almost completely irrelevant competitively. We use BSR to measure competitiveness of a spread, because BST is meaningless as a measure of stat power. On some past CAPs, we even banned listing the BST on the spread poll, specifically because we didn't want a meaningless number influencing voters. Bob not only considered BST relevant as a measurement, but he MANDATED an EXACT BST number as a condition of every submission on the slate. Technically, BMB did allow one 580 BST spread, which is also a well-known "legendary" BST in Pokemon lore, and that one spread had no prayer in the polls and predictably finished in dead last place in the poll. So this is where all the warning bells really started going off for me, because it was clear that our Topic Leader had some hidden fan agenda that was driving his direction of our competitive steps.
When I realized what Bob was doing, I was upset, but I rolled my eyes more than anything else. I lost some respect for Bob at that point, because I would not have predicted that Bob would really use the stage of Topic Leader for such a selfish goal. But I've been doing Create-A-Pokemon for a long time, so when it comes to users manipulating aspects of the CAP project for personal reasons, nothing surprises me any more. I just didn't expect to see that kind of thing from a Topic Leader, because it had never happened before. But even though I knew something was up, and I didn't like what Bob was doing, I still came to the conclusion that BMB was just "very biased" and was "heavily influencing" our decisions. But I didn't feel like he was explicitly controlling the project in a community-damaging way.
Then Bob made a huge leap that put all doubts to rest in my mind and raised concerns with every mod and even members of the CAP community at large -- Bob began blatantly imposing his subjective interpretation on CAP flavor steps and he outright manipulated flavor polls.
On the name poll, Bob openly disregarded the options favored by the community and made a slate of obscure options that appealed to his personal scientific tastes, AND he openly admitted that his personal tastes differed significantly from the community at large. He openly admitted to not slating the name that he KNEW was favored by the community at large, precisely BECAUSE he knew it would win and he didn't want to see that name permanently affixed on HIS CAP PROJECT.
This is really when we realized that Bob wasn't just capitalizing on opportunities to indulge his personal goals when the community gave him a chance, or taking liberties with TL power on a few steps and slates. BMB had openly taken the stance that HE OWNED THIS POKEMON. It wasn't "ours", the collective property of the CAP community of hundreds that all work to build the pokemon. It was Bugmanicbob's pokemon and he wanted to GUARANTEE we ended up with a creation where he personally favored every aspect of it.
Even on a flavor step that had no impact whatsoever on the competitive viability of the pokemon, and even in the face of a big divergence of his personal opinion from that of the rest of the community -- Bob openly chose to ignore the community, and he shoved a slate of mostly obscure science references down our throat and said, "Choose from my favorites". In the first name poll thread, where many CAP posters objected to how Bob handled the slate, you know what Bob did? He laughed. In fact, he openly admits that he still laughs when he reads the thread where the CAP community calls him out for abusing his position.
When that name step happened, even though it was just a flavor step, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Bob felt entitled to impose his selfish desires on the project, and that he had probably been doing it from the very beginning of the project.
Bob is very lucky that the favored name submission that he refused to slate in that travesty of a name poll was my personal submission. Because if it had been anyone else's submission, I would have stepped in and forced him to re-slate the poll. Some other CAP mods suggested doing it themselves, and I didn't want that to happen.
For one, I really don't like public leadership drama in the middle of an ongoing CAP. It's bad for the CAP community to have open power struggles in the middle of a CAP. It confuses new project participants and it makes the project look bad in general. So I overwhelmingly prefer to stifle any leadership or policy troubles during a CAP project and save it all for Policy Review between CAP projects.
I also didn't want a re-slate clouded with entitlement issues. If that name poll would have been re-slated, it would be questionable as to whether it was being re-slated because it was unfair, or whether "Doug, the all-powerful admin, got pissed off that his option didn't make the poll and he's throwing his weight around to get his way." I questioned myself if I was truly mad as a result of what I believed to be a breach of authority by Bob, or whether I was just pissed over Bob snubbing my submission. I've had submissions not slated in the past, and it didn't bother me in the slightest. I also happen to have won several name competitions and other polls in the past, so it's not like I was pissed over missing out on a chance to win.
No, I was torqued that Bob seemed to think it was his right to shove crap down everyone's throat and then laugh when we said we didn't like it. When other CAP mods came to the exact same conclusion as I did, I knew it wasn't just a petty personal gripe on my part. But, like I said, we really didn't want any drama, so we did nothing at that point to curb BMB's increasingly subjective control over every aspect of what was supposed to be a community project.
We had to kick it up a notch on the Movepool steps. We gave Bob a stern "warning" when he indicated that he would use his personal preferences for movepool flavor as a criteria for slating movepools. That is completely unacceptable, and we warned Bob that if we had any reason to believe that he was imposing his flavor preferences on what is clearly a competitive step for CAP, that the CAP mods would force him to re-slate. By the way, that was the first time in CAP history that moderators have ever had to step in and issue such a warning to an active CAP Topic Leader.
Then, to top it all off, we had that ridiculous Pokedex thread. Bob decided he didn't give a shit about Pokedex entries, and he literally made a mockery of that step in front of the entire CAP community.
Don't get me wrong, I've never been a fan of Pokedex entries either, because they add absolutely nothing to the competitive pokemon, and they are not required to implement the pokemon on the simulator. But I know that many members of the community like to participate in Pokedex entries, and in the past, the Pokedex step was a convenient time-filler for the community while we did the programming to implement our newly finished CAP on the battle simulator immediately after the Sprite thread completes. So even though I usually don't actively participate in Pokedex submission threads, I acknowledge that it does serve a functional purpose in the CAP process, and flavor fans tend to really enjoy it.
Well, Bob doesn't exactly see it that way. He thinks Pokedex entries are stupid and a waste of time. And in typical fashion for BMB's leadership style throughout CAP4, he was perfectly comfortable taking his odd opinion that was not shared by the community at large, and tried to force it to be the opinion of the community at large. He wanted Pokedex entries that were jokes and mocked the game of Pokemon. When the community refused to play his ego-stroking game, and they wouldn't submit options that made a joke out of that step of the process, Bob openly instructed everyone that they either make him laugh or they wouldn't be slated. This was his final stroke of "My opinion is your opinion, because this is my pokemon, not yours" as the all-powerful Topic Leader of CAP 4. A few users then posted in the thread and directly accused Bob of abusing his position as TL.
At that point, me and other mods had enough of Bob's shit. We weren't going to let him close out the CAP project by force-feeding his retarded outlier opinion on everyone else, and at the same time make a literal joke out of the project. So we sent Bob a PM and told him under no uncertain terms that he needed to reverse field in the Pokedex thread and make a fair slate of dex entries from the good submissions willingly provided by the community. So guess what Bob did, since we had the gall to ask him to stop abusing his position? He refused to finish the thread as Topic Leader. He made a pompous whiny post that it was beneath him to sully himself with drama over a stupid Pokedex thread, and he made the mods choose a slate and complete the step. Classy move from our intrepid Topic Leader.
CAP 4: The Aftermath
Of course we can't prove it, but it was apparent to me and others that Bob came into CAP 4 with a desire to make it his personal love letter to the Bug pokemon type. I contend that this is the main reason that CAP 4 never really centered in on any cohesive approach to the concept of Risk. During the project, there was not much focus or direction from Bob as to how he interpreted "Risk", and yet he always had very strong opinions about what he wanted on the polls. Even when people made comments lamenting the lack of clear goals in terms of defining "risk" for the project, it did not seem to have much effect on the direction of the project as it was unfolding. We were collectively pursuing Bob's personal agenda, and not the stated concept that was supposed to be our guide.
Don't get me wrong, ultimately the community did vote in everything that ended up on the pokemon. But instead of creating a clear definition of risk, Bob was pushing stuff like Illusion and No Guard (which are public relations problems), dictating a perfect 600 BST stat spread (nothing screams "risk" like an uber stat spread, right?), and pushing for this to be a "pseudo-legend" (Huh? Why?). And now in retrospect after looking at the completed product, it's very hard for anyone to decipher how it represents "Risk" at all. So, despite the fact that Risk was supposed to be the "concept" driving CAP, it is obvious that the primary concept driving CAP 4 was Bob's obsession with making what he now calls "the greatest Bug-type of them all".
Bugmaniacbob wanted to make an awesome Bug pokemon from the minute he was selected to be Topic Leader. And, as you can now see, we ended up with a 600 BST Legendary Bug pokemon with no defined threats or counters, a perfectly balanced stat spread, two game-defining Abilities, perfect coverage, and all the best boosting moves in the game. The 600 BST pseudo-legendary status is a distinction never given to a pokemon in CAP history. I find it hard to believe it was coincidental that unprecedented heights and gifts were given to a Bug pokemon and it all just so happened to fall on the project that was led by a Topic Leader named Bugmaniacbob who is an insect enthusiast in real life and obsessed with Bug-Type pokemon in the game and he has promoted and analyzed Bug pokemon across Smogon for his entire career. BMB wanted to make CAP 4 to be his personal trophy; his tribute to the pokemon type that he personally adores. And any time the CAP community veered from his personal wish-list for CAP 4, even on non-competitive steps, he used his position as TL to force his desires on the community.
That is the antithesis of what the CAP project is all about.
I am not saying BMB intentionally broke any rules. Quite the contrary. I think Bob stretched every implication of TL power to the absolute limit, without actually breaking any written rules. BMB acted within the defined boundaries of topic leadership that have been in place to date. But, he refused to acknowledge or follow what I previously considered to be "community principles" that have been observed by every previous TL I can recall. Those principles are hard to define in clear-cut terms, and mostly rely on adherence to the general idea of putting community interests before personal goals. Those principles have been so consistently observed in the past, that I never really thought we would ever need to enumerate specific rules to keep a Topic Leader from abusing their position. If someone else would have previously proposed we impose more defined rules on Topic Leaders, I probably would have rejected them with the comment, "If we have to stipulate this kind of thing to protect us from the TL, then the CAP project has much bigger problems to worry about." And that's exactly why I'm bringing up this PR thread. I think BMB's topic leadership has shown that we have bigger problems to worry about.
I do not think that Bob had malicious intent. Bob was trying to lead CAP4 to the best of his ability, and he is very smart and hard working. But his topic leadership was a disaster in terms of promoting the goals of Create-A-Pokemon and encouraging a good community project. I think this has to do with some fundamental flaws in how we have set up the position of Topic Leader -- flaws which became incredibly magnified by BMB's personal leadership style and the massive amount of effort he was willing to expend to make the project go in the direction he desired.
When Bob got negative feedback from others, I think his personality is such that he really didn't care much about what anyone else thought about his leadership or direction. I have no doubt he *heard* opinions contrary to his own, but I don't think he *listened* much at all. And when he started pouring his considerable work effort into the project, that was just gasoline on the fire. The more work he put into the project, the more he felt entitled to get his way on everything. It was like the pilot of a plane in a nosedive, who was accelerating as much as possible, even though the plane was headed straight towards the ground. And, like that plane, CAP 4 crashed and burned, from the perspective of it being a "community endeavor".
For anyone who may be misinterpreting my assessment of the failure of CAP4 leadership -- I am not making a comment on the pokemon as a competitive creation. I don't care too much if CAP4 is a good competitive pokemon or not. For all I know, BMB made a very good pokemon. We'll probably have great fun battling with it. Or maybe Bob made a terrible pokemon. I really don't know.
The problem is that BMB drove this thing to serve his own selfish indulgence. I said earlier that I didn't think Bob was being malicious, but I do think he was incredibly selfish. Being selfish is not against the rules of CAP, and there is no way we can make a rule against it. But it isn't admirable, and it isn't something we should applaud or condone.
What is shocking to me, and a big reason I don't think Bob had malicious intent, is that Bob was so incredibly open about the selfish things he was doing! I'm not just referring to "open" in terms of interpreting his actions -- Bob flat out admits it himself, and doesn't have any remorse about it. He actually takes pride in it! Look no further than what Bob said in his own Final Product thread:
That Final Product thread was actually the final straw for us mods and arguably the most telling evidence that Bob had gone off the deep end in considering CAP4 to be his personal accomplishment and complete disregard for the CAP community. I am still shocked that Bob had the audacity to put his 2K post in the CAP 4 Final Product thread.
Some of you may not know this (but I am quite sure Bob does), but the Final Product thread is the only thread of a completed CAP that permanently remains in the main CAP forum to serve as a public reference thread for posterity. All the other threads for a given CAP are moved to the Archive subforum shortly after they are closed. Normally the Final Product thread is an opportunity for the Topic Leader to summarize the project, pass out some congrats to the community for a good effort, and then list out the final reference data for our pokemon creation. So what did Bob choose to do in the CAP 4 Final Product thread? He made a 14,000 word testament to his personal rise in Smogon, describing his entire history in the community, culminating with his crowning achievement of delivering to us the most amazing pokemon creation CAP has ever made.
Even if you were touched by Bob's triumphant self-congratulatory tale of "poor little fanboy rises to e-fame in Smogon" -- did he really need to embed all that personal bullshit in the ONE thread that will live forever in the CAP forum supposedly as a "reference thread" for the project? Of course not. He did it because he selfishly thinks HE is somehow THE MOST IMPORTANT aspect of CAP 4, and not the effort of the CAP community at large.
A CAP mod had linked the Final Product thread from the front page news post announcing CAP 4, like we always do. But the mod really didn't think it was appropriate to force innocent newcomers to wade through 14,000 words and numerous bad artworks of grandstanding that had nothing to do with CAP 4 by our self-obsessed Topic Leader. So the mod created jump links at the top of the post, and linked to the jump that went straight to the actual CAP 4 final product information. Bob is not one to have the limelight stolen in his moment of glory, so he removed the jump links and posted in bold letters "READ THE ENTIRE POST, DON'T BE LAZY". The jump links have been restored, and Bob has been told he will be infracted if he edits it again in the future.
Bob just doesn't get it, and he probably never will get it. Bob literally has no clue that what he did throughout CAP 4 was selfish to the point of being offensive and was a contradiction to CAP community principles. Even in the face of community accusations of power abuse, in the face of the mods giving him direct warnings, and then later the mods outright intervening in his project, and threatening to infract him for his actions -- and yet Bob still reflects glowingly on his leadership of CAP 4 and he is proud of everything he did.
Well Bob, at least you are happy with yourself. Good for you.
So what is the job of the Topic Leader, and how does that differ from what BMB did on CAP 4?
The Topic Leader's job is to, well,... LEAD TOPICS. We do not call the position "Master Pokemon Designer" or "Smartest Person When It Comes To Building A Pokemon" or "Person Who Gets To Make His Personal Pet Pokemon This Time Around". Yes, we ask the topic leaders to do many things -- but first and foremost their job is to promote great discussions on every step of the project. That has always been the job, and that is the reason I changed the name of the position from "Mini-Mod" (which is what we called Cooper and Hyra on DP CAP 1 and 2) to "Topic Leader". As I have stated many times in many different ways, the purpose of CAP is not to build pokemon. The purpose is to provide a foundation for great discussions about competitive pokemon. The Topic Leader's job is to lead those discussions by encouraging good posts and submissions, by keeping discussion focused in a good direction, and to keep things moving along in a productive way.
In order to focus community discussion, the Topic Leader needs a clear direction. But having a "clear direction" is very different from forcing a "clear intended outcome". I have no doubt that just about every Topic Leader gets an idea in their head of how a pokemon will turn out the minute a concept is selected. The big test is how the Topic Leader adjusts their vision as a result of what the community gives them.
Prior to CAP4, it has been a fundamental dilemma for every previous Topic Leader. They come out of the gate with a great idea of how things will work out, and then the community starts pushing for something different than the exact picture the TL has in their head. And inevitably, the community throws a curve ball in terms of voting, that makes the Topic Leader rethink their entire approach. It happens every single time.
I know because I am often the one that has to bolster the TL as they agonize over slating an option, or when they are reeling over a poll outcome that they were hoping against. They struggle to figure out how to cope with wrangling a community with diverse opinions. In those cases, I usually have to remind them to not get so attached to their idea of the pokemon. That attachment actually works against an effective TL.
When a TL gets dead set on an outcome, it can't end well. Either the TL gets dejected, or the community gets shafted. The answer is to NOT get so attached to the pokemon. They need to focus on having a vibrant community process. Topic Leaders need to pride themselves not on their ability to predict future outcomes, or worse, manipulate outcomes -- they need to pride themselves on their ability to adapt midstream, the ability to synthesize new ideas and directions, and keep the project engaging and focused. Some past TL's have been better at it than others. But every TL, except BMB, have had to grapple with a community making unexpected decisions that the TL doesn't like.
Bob didn't do that. Bob changed the dynamic and effectively guaranteed he would never have to deal with any decisions not favored by him. Although BMB started out CAP4 great, when the community started picking options he didn't like, he changed his approach. After that, Bob walked into almost every step of the CAP process with a clear idea of what he wanted slated at the end. In most cases, he posted his favorites in the very first post of the thread and made it clear the things he liked. Bob didn't just note the "general direction" he wanted the community to explore -- he listed and described exactly what he wanted.
Let me clue you in on a not-so-secret secret about controlling CAP outcomes -- post first. This is straight from the playbook developed by Deck Knight during his famous "hijacking" of CAP 8 (which I'll cover more later). The tactic is for an influential CAP member to get out in front of the discussion with a specific proposal and everyone else tends to discuss the pros and cons of what is presented first. Basically, you are planting the seed and then everyone else nurtures and grows it throughout the discussion. By the end, the TL has no choice but to slate the option, and the community is basically wired to vote for it because it was mentioned so much in the discussion. New CAP members probably don't know about this tactic, but savvy CAP veterans do. Heck, Deck Knight even wrote a Smog article to describe this CAP manipulation strategy.
For regular members, "hijacking" was somewhat effective in the early days of CAP. But with the advent of the Strong TL model, it's not nearly as effective a tactic for regular posters, because the Topic Leader is supposed to set the tone of each thread at the beginning. Note that I said "tone", not "slate". Bob didn't just set the tone, he practically dictated the slate from the outset. Bob regularly gave very specific guidelines for submissions at the beginning of submission threads, and listed his specific preferred options in other threads.
This is not illegal by any means, and it might even be good leadership in some cases, depending on the situation. Remember, the job of the TL at the beginning of the thread, is to frame the discussion. The goal is to focus the community at the beginning, so the discussion doesn't wander all over the place. But the Topic Leader isn't supposed to have a slate in mind, they are supposed to be asking the community to suggest a slate that meets certain characteristics. I realize this is a very gray distinction, and I can't definitively tell you whether any particular style of Topic Leader posting is good or bad. But after looking back on much of CAP 4, it sure doesn't look like Bob was simply "framing the discussion". He was telegraphing exactly what he wanted on the slate before he had heard a single word from anyone in the community.
Shortly after CAP 4 got underway, during discussions BMB really didn't engage anyone in big disputes, nor did he spend much time trying to convince anyone of what he wanted. But he did an amazing job of giving the appearance that he was listening to everyone. He kept helpful charts, he posted running slates, he kept lists of all submissions, and he updated them dutifully with every post. I think most people interpreted this as a sign that Bob was considering everything very carefully. But he wasn't. Every project step ended up with a slate of options that fit almost exactly with the opinions Bob was endorsing personally at the beginning of the step. If Bob was listening to dissenting opinions, they sure weren't having any meaningful effect on the project!
But because of all the attention to detail BMB paid to every post, it gave the general impression that he was leading the discussions and assimilating the best direction for the project from the highest quality arguments and submissions from CAP participants. But he was doing nothing of the kind. Bob was hearing exactly what he wanted to hear. He was picking and choosing the things that he personally favored, and in most cases he favored those things before he even opened the discussion to the public.
Then by posting running slates, he ensured his favored options appeared regularly throughout the discussion and were discussed heavily. And just like textbook "CAP hijacking", you can significantly influence community opinion and voting in this way.
And no one really ever called him on it! I think most people were so impressed that he was doing all the busy work of collecting data from every thread, that they never bothered to realize that Bob was stacking almost every slate. Or maybe some people did notice, but they figured it was his right to do so, since he was the TL, so they kept quiet. I really don't know. Bugmaniacbob literally did whatever he wanted on CAP 4, and in most cases, the community didn't say a thing about it.
If Bob would have kept to the competitive threads for controlling slates to suit his personal tastes -- he probably would never have gotten on any moderators radar. Like I said, he was doing all the things we ask TL's to do. He was posting actively in every thread and people were mostly happy with the job he was doing. Almost every CAP has points where users bitch about the TL's choices, users complaining that the pokemon is going to be "broken", and users feeling like in one step or another that the TL was "unfair". So any complaints we see over slates or polls are typically ignored as background noise. Any problems with CAP 4 were likely to be passed off by CAP moderators as business-as-usual for a CAP project. But Bob got greedy and stupidly decided to lord his opinions over flavor too.
Keep in mind that Topic Leaders are chosen based on on their ability to lead competitive steps. We never, repeat NEVER, care two shits what the Topic Leader thinks about flavor. There is NO ONE that can do flavor any better than anyone else, so ultimately the only criteria for flavor of a CAP is community popularity. On the art steps, even though the process guide still technically says that the Topic Leader chooses the slate -- we expect the TL to slate every legal submission. On name slates, the TL is supposed to slate the most popular options, and the same goes for Pokedex entries. Movepool flavor is always completely up to the movepool submitter, and the TL is supposed to slate based on popularity and competitive concerns. These are long traditions on flavor steps and they rarely vary. We have had Topic Leaders slightly infringe on these expectations sometimes in the past, but nothing major. BMB came right out and openly admitted that he knew what he wanted out of names, move flavor, and dex entries -- and he ran the flavor steps like a total dictator with him issuing submission requirements verbatim and then slating options based on his personal whims.
When he pulled that nonsense, we knew without a doubt that BMB had taken the concept of CAP4 being "his project" to an unprecedented level. We started looking back at everything he had done on previous steps, and we started watching him more closely for everything he did after that. It became very clear that Bob was railroading the project on a course not driven by the concept or community principles, and there was nothing we could do about it without making a very big, very public mess of CAP 4. The community wasn't complaining much, and Bob wasn't breaking any rules, so there was no reason to make a big stink and intervene.
Bugmaniacbob obviously just "didn't get it" when it comes to some basic principles of the CAP project. He was shining a bright light on how the position of Topic Leader has become a twisted caricature of what it was supposed to be, but he wasn't damaging anything other than his own credibility with me and other CAP mods. We decided to just ride out CAP 4, and ensure that BMB's obviously misguided outlook on Create-A-Pokemon couldn't do any more damage to other areas of the project. So we shut down his PR threads, we revoked his access to CAP site content, we stopped trusting him as a leader in CAP, and we hunkered down as moderators and just waited for CAP 4 to end.
We waited for Policy Review, and now we need to take a hard look at the position of Topic Leader and put in some new policies. At a minimum, to prevent another CAP 4 happening again in the future. But possibly to put us on a better path to support the Create-A-Pokemon mission and principles. With that in mind, let's look at the history of Topic Leadership policy up until now, to help guide a path forward.
CAP Topic Leadership History
On the first several CAP projects, most topic leaders tended to be mostly an "administrative assistant" for the project, rather than a strong leader. Some TL's had bolder leadership styles than others, but all of them kinda collected feedback from everyone in each thread and administered polls. They did the bookkeeping for the project, pretty much. There were definitely leadership aspects to being a TL, in that the TL selected certain slates and made other decisions. But even on those slate selections, the TL was really just counting feedback and slating the options that seemed to be favored by the community.
For the first CAP project (Syclant), we had no official project structure. We had Cooper who was the "mini-mod" that organized and led all the CAP project threads, During CAP 1, vocal community members stepped up and argued for certain aspects over others. Although it was very messy and we never formally stated any specific goal or concept, through the discussions, a general concept sorta emerged. Many people wanted to emulate Infernape, with different typing, because Infernape was a metagame favorite by being a glass-cannon with mixed attacking stats, great coverage moves, and the ability to boost and set up. There was also a camp that wanted to deal with Garchomp, who was easily the most hated Pokemon in OU. So we ended up with a great mixed attacking capability, weak defenses, the ability to outspeed everything that reasonably threatened it, resistance to Earthquake, and the ability to blow completely through Yache Garchomp with STAB Ice attacks. Don't argue with me on whether CAP 1 achieved the "concept" or not, because a concept didn't exist. I'm just filling you in on the general tenor of conversations in CAP 1, in case you've ever wondered how we ended up with Syclant.
For CAP 2 Revenankh, Hyra was hand-picked by Cooper to organize CAP threads. Once again, vocal community discussion participants shaped the direction of the project. On that project we centered on making a good Bulk-Up user that could take advantage of Ghost/Fighting typing. Ghost/Fighting was selected because it could hit every typing in the metagame unresisted. The metagame was full of special Calm Minders, but no Pokemon at that time could really utilize Bulk Up nearly as effectively on the physical side of the game. So we quickly focused in on making Revenankh a Bulk Up abuser. We also were fascinated to explore if ShedRest (Shed Skin with Rest) would be preferable to LockLight (Air Lock with Moonlight). So this was the first time CAP really "experimented with the metagame" in terms of intentionally putting competitive options on a CAP expressly for the purpose of seeing which would be better in playtesting (BTW, ShedRest dominated by a mile). Revenankh was beautiful in its simplicity and power. The standard Revenankh set with Bulk Up/Hammer Arm/Shadow Sneak/Rest is probably the most dominant and overused single set in CAP history, but was never accused of being overpowered. In retrospect, I can easily argue that Revenankh was one of the most focused CAP projects we have ever executed from a concept perspective -- and we didn't even HAVE a formal concept step, and there was no such thing as a Topic Leader!
Then CAP 3 came around, and it rocked CAP from a leadership perspective.
The CAP project had been formally organized at that point, and Gothic Togekiss was selected to be Topic Leader by a TL Selection Committee of Cooper, Hyra, me, and a couple other members proposed by Cooper and Hyra, iirc. Gothic Togekiss was respected within the CAP community and he had been active from the very beginning with Syclant. Shortly after the typing of Grass/Fire was chosen, the direction of the project unraveled completely. Some members of the community wanted to make a big offensive sweeper, but vocal members like Aldaron and Mekkah were arguing for a much more subtle pokemon that leveraged big defenses and could wear down opponents with a SubSeed strategy. The controversy came to a boiling point when it was proposed to make Pyroak a user of an auto-Sun weather ability (either Drought or a custom ability with non-permanent Sun). Auto-weather was considered by many to be off-limits because it was the defining characteristic that separated the OU metagame from Ubers in the DP generation. The whole project was a shitstorm of fighting and difficulty. People were constantly poll-jumping to argue about later steps and we had no clue where we were going from one step to the next. I think we ended up learning a lot about competitive pokemon during the Pyroak project, but the process was a disaster.
After CAP 3, we implemented one of the most important policy changes in CAP history -- a formally selected Concept at the beginning of each CAP project. The idea was that a public formal Concept would eliminate the need to poll jump and it would serve as a compass for the project from start to finish.
From CAP 4 onward, the topic leaders we selected were generally big, well-known personalities on the project. Leaders like Sunday (CAP 4 Fidgit), Tennisace (CAP 5 Strategem), Darkie (CAP 6 Arghonaut), and Magmortified (CAP 7 Kitsunoh) -- these guys were all CAP moderators and/or Smogon staff. So people tended to listen to the TL, and the TL certainly had a lot of influence. But from a policy perspective, there was an implicit separation between the selected TL making a post as just a regular participant voicing their opinion on what we should do, and posts by that person when they were acting in an official capacity as Topic Leader of the project. Most of the "official acts" by the TL were still administrative in nature, and the TL's opinions in discussion threads were pretty much just like the opinions of any other influential member of the community. We now refer to that period of CAP as having a "Weak TL Model" because we did not expect or encourage the TL to strongly impose their opinions on the direction of a CAP project as an explicit function of their job as Topic Leader.
But we had a problem with the direction some CAPs took, mainly because community consensus tends to wander and encourages all sorts of bad voting behaviors. The biggest problem was that different voices in the community would be stronger during different steps, which made every step of the project twist the project in new directions. Even though we had been overtly selecting a Concept for every CAP since DP CAP 4 (Fidgit), those early projects still lacked truly cohesive direction from step to step along the way. People that were interested and knowledgeable about stat spreads would participate heavily in the stat threads, for example. If the vocal participants in those threads collectively interpreted that a bulky defensive mon was required for the concept, they would put all their influence behind bulky spreads. Then later in the project, the vocal movepool aficionados might be a different group of participants from those that argued heavily in the earlier stat spreads. And if those movepool experts had interpreted the best way to achieve the concept was a swift attacker, they would give the pokemon the movepool of a fast sweeper. So at the end of many CAP projects we would end up with a "Frankenstein's Monster" to a certain extent, where every part of the pokemon was built for a different purpose.
It all came to a head on CAP 8 with the building of Cyclohm.
I feel bad for Cyberzero (the CAP 8 TL) on that one because he was a very nice guy who worked hard on the project, and yet his leadership on that project will forever be remembered as the project that was so bad that we redefined the role of Topic Leader when it was done. Cyberzero honestly was not to blame for the lack of direction on that CAP. Cyberzero was the innocent fall guy for a host of problems, including blatant manipulation of voter opinion by some of the most influential members of the project.
Deck Knight has openly admitted that he "hijacked" CAP 8 to get his personal vision fulfilled, even though his concept lost in the Concept stage. The winning concept for CAP 8 was Elevator Music's "Neglected Ability", although DK's concept of "Paralysis Abusing Tank" fared decently in the concept polls. EM and others pretty openly favored Shield Dust as the preferred "neglected ability", and many people wanted the pokemon to have an offensive build. With Dragon typing, you can imagine the push for that sort of thing. Deck Knight saw an opportunity to use the broad non-specific concept as a way to get his original "para-abusing tank" concept fulfilled anyway. DK used his considerable influence to shift community opinion in a direction he favored. And at that time, it was not Cyberzero's job to lead direction in any particular way, or to try and stop DK from pushing his own agenda. With different interpretations as to how the concept should be fulfilled, there was a big "influence battle" during CAP 8 in almost every thread, with Deck Knight leading the way using the "hijacking tactics" I mentioned earlier. Previous CAP's always had their fair share of arguing, but CAP 8 was different.
There were campaigns and directions organized behind the scenes of CAP 8 to sway certain polls along a few distinct conceptual lines. I didn't like the way it went down, but I had a certain level of respect for DK for pulling it off in the end. After all, he didn't cheat or force anything. Deck Knight was not a CAP mod or even a CAP server mod at the time. He was just a very effective communicator and he led by convincing the community of the merits of his ideas -- and he took advantage of the mechanics of the CAP discussion process (ie. "hijacking"), but even that was kinda clever, I must admit. Through the whole project, Cyberzero just assessed overall community opinions and set up polls, and if those polls included a bunch of divergent options and interpretations on the concept, so be it. In the end, Cyclohm was as a bit of a jumbled mess and it felt like a mob brawl, but Deck Knight's "para-tank" hidden agenda won out a bit more than the rest. Deck personally won both the Stats and the Movepool steps, and he impacted almost every discussion, creating a vague semblance of competitive cohesion, even if it required subterfuge to get there.
The community as a whole was very frustrated after CAP 8. But it really wasn't Cyberzero's fault at all. And it really wasn't Deck Knight's fault, or the fault of any of the people arguing and influencing votes and polls. It was the project's fault for not having a better process that encouraged better, more focused discussions.
So after CAP 8 we implemented a bold new policy for Topic Leadership, what is now called "The Strong TL Model", which is the topic leadership model that still exists today in the Create-A-Pokemon process. The basic gist of the strong TL model is that we encourage the Topic Leader to take an active role in guiding community opinion. We ask the Topic Leader to not just sit back and make slates of the options mentioned the most in competitive threads. We ask the TL to assess the quality of community arguments as they relate to the chosen Concept, and to encourage people to come up with creative ways to solve competitive problems. When the community wanders from the chosen path, we put it on the TL to corral the herd and keep us in line. We want the TL to not just hear opinions, but to motivate discussion and debate. We ask the TL to use their position and power as a mechanism to drive a better community effort and increase project focus.
The very next project was CAP 9 Colossoil, and Plus was our first "strong" Topic Leader. And, my goodness, was he strong. Too strong, in my opinion. I cringed at how Plus handled some of those threads in CAP 9. Some of that was because Plus was a brash personality with a rude "I don't give a fuck" attitude most of the time anyway. So selecting him as TL and asking him to be "strong"? -- let's just say that we didn't have to ask him twice. He took the reins and ran with it, and did not hesitate to tell project participants to fuck off if they disagreed with him. I didn't really approve of some of his actions, but at the time I figured Plus was probably just overreacting a bit to previous wandering projects, and was maybe trying a little too hard to be the strong leader we all said we wanted on the project. So I kept my reservations to myself. And since Plus was popular on the CAP server amongst hardcore CAP battlers, it's not like Plus didn't represent the opinions of a big influential chunk of the community. Plus was a loud dominating jerk at times, but I always felt like he was trying to act as the champion for the CAP server battling community, and Colossoil was very much a product of that group's overall influence, not Plus going off and making his own personal pokemon.
CAP 10 Krillowatt was a watershed project from a CAP process change perspective. It was lead by Beej, who was a CAP server mod and well-liked by everyone on the project. The concept was "Utility Counter" which had many interpretations and was intended to produce a very diverse pokemon in the end. That project struggled from the outset with difficulty over ability selection, because Multitype was put on the table. After backroom consultations with the mods and the PRC, Beej wisely decided to pull Multitype off the table. But then Magic Guard came in and Krillowatt's movepool was statistically the all-time most powerful in CAP history. So, immediately following CAP 10, some big process changes were imposed to limit overall CAP power. As a Topic Leader, opinions probably vary as to whether Beej was responsible for the problems with Krillowatt or whether he should be praised for preventing it from being worse than it was. But as a Topic Leader, Beej did a good job assimilating input from the community (like with the Multitype dilemma) but still pushed to keep the project on course with a very broad concept.
On CAP 11, topic leadership took an interesting twist. The selected TL (Fuzznip) stepped down in mid-project and we had to ask Deck Knight to take over to finish the project. But that wasn't the interesting part. No matter who was in official capacity as the named Topic Leader, there is no doubt in my mind that Rising Dusk was the "leader" of that creation project. RD used high activity, cogent arguments, good writing, and competitive battling knowledge to shape every competitive discussion on that project. Although I won three polls on CAP 11 including concept, art, and name -- I will forever think of Voodoom as "Rising Dusk's project", and I think of it with respect. Rising Dusk led that project as regular member the way I wish Topic Leaders led every project from their official position! He pursued an innovative direction, he built community consensus without having any official power to control slates or poll outcomes, and the discussions that he engendered were some of the best in CAP history.
The weird thing is that over a year later on BW CAP 2 (Necturna), when Rising Dusk was the officially selected Topic Leader, I don't think Rising Dusk did as good a job with leading the community as he did on Voodoom. I'm not saying he did a bad job on Necturna. Necturna was an interesting project that had many great discussions and we learned a lot. But I felt like RD used his position as Topic Leader and mod as a bit of a crutch to take the easy way out on some project decisions. He didn't seem to work as hard at leading discussions. He seemed to have much more of a personal attachment to the outcome of polling decisions, instead of his previous enthusiasm for interesting debates about competitive battling. Maybe that was because RD was older in his Smogon career and he didn't have the same fire to prove himself like he did a year and a half earlier on Voodoom.
I can't say much bad about Rising Dusk as a community leader, because of the many people that have been involved in CAP leadership over the years, I feel that Rising Dusk "got it" more than just about anyone else with regards to the real underlying mission of CAP, and what it really means to have a "successful CAP project". I know RD got fed up with Smogon, CAP, and other things, and his involvement with CAP ended on a very sour note. But when he was on his game as a CAP leader, he was about as good as they come.
The two other BW CAP Topic Leaders, Reachzero (Tomohawk) and Deck Knight (Mollux) both did very nice jobs as Topic Leaders. Reachzero had so much knowledge of the game and as a Smogon Supermod was very experienced with the difficulties of leading community projects. He was the perfect choice for TL for the first CAP project in the wild new BW generation. And with Mollux, DK had not only been around CAP from the very beginning, but he also had to serve as TL for CAP 11 when Fuzznip quit. So CAP principles are infused in Deck's DNA. He knew when to push the community and when to sit back and take what the community gave him. Mollux had a tough concept to pull off, and I'm not sure we could have done it without Deck Knight at the helm.
Assessing CAP History
So in looking at CAP History, you can see a repeating pattern. A string of good projects, then one "disaster project" which prompts sweeping policy changes to re-align how we pursue a focused community direction. Previously, CAP 3 and CAP 8 were our "disasters", and formal Concepts and the Strong TL Model were our sweeping policy changes. Now we have a new "disaster" in BW CAP 4, and I think we need to consider some sweeping policy changes to get us back on track.
I very much feel that the progression of CAP Topic Leader policies has led us directly to the travesty of CAP 4 topic leadership. I didn't expect it to be thrown in our face so bluntly by BMB this time, with his selfish pursuit of making a legendary Bug pokemon. But I'm not entirely surprised that we finally ended up with a TL that pretty much looked the community straight in the face and said, in effect, "This is MY pokemon, not OUR pokemon."
Ever since the advent of the Strong TL Model, we have been steadily asking the Topic Leader to make more and more subjective decisions and take greater and greater ownership of the CAP project they lead. We have asked Topic Leaders to take previously long but completely democratic polling steps, and to use their subjective authority to streamline the process.
In the early days of Create-A-Pokemon, we used to start every CAP with an open Typing Poll with almost every Type available to choose in the first poll. And after the Primary Type was selected, we started all over again with every type, and through community votes we winnowed down to a single Secondary type. Now we ask the TL to make a big subjective assessment of a few valid dual typings and the community only chooses from that short selective list of options in a single typing poll. We did that to make the process shorter, which is a good thing. But we also did it to presumably protect the project from dumb community decisions. The implicit message to the TL is, "You are so much smarter than us, oh almighty TL. Please protect us from our own stupidity and use your wisdom to give us the gift of the One Good Typing Slate".
We took what used to be an objective list of Very Good Moves that were derived from statistical analysis, that were imposed on the project as firm rules for movepools to abide by. Now we have replaced it with a list of moves subjectively chosen by supposed Pokemon experts (whatever the fuck that means), and we have added all sorts of exceptions and subjective calls for the Topic Leader to determine if they want to observe the rules for their project or not. Once again, we have placed our trust in the subjective opinion of the TL, on the assumption that they know better than us what is best for the pokemon we are building.
We also put a lot of pressure on Topic Leaders to have a "successful project". No matter how many times we try to clarify what that means, at some level every TL fears their project will churn out a "bad" pokemon (whatever the fuck that means). Many of the noobs in the community bow down at the TL's feet. Other participants issue gloom and doom statements that the pokemon will be broken, or even worse -- it will (gasp!) get killed in OU play. We ask the Topic Leader to be our all-purpose Swiss army knife for preventing all negative outcomes for the project.
With this steady progression of TL power, the underlying belief was that Topic Leaders would still remain true to the project community goals and be altruistic in the use of their TL power. But with all that control and implicit hero worship going on -- it's inevitable that the Topic Leaders will go on a bit of a power trip. And it's unavoidable that they are going to associate their personal reputation with the pokemon we produce. The community places all these expectations on Topic Leaders and the Topic Leaders fall prey to the pressure. It was just a matter of time before we got burned by the power creep of Topic Leaders.
Sooner or later, a guy like Bugmaniacbob was bound to end up in the TL seat. His sense of ownership over the pokemon, combined with a willingness to ignore tradition and "soft rules", combined with a selfish goal, combined with a big work ethic to get his way, combined with almost unlimited TL power, combined with an entire community catering to his whims -- it led to a "perfect storm" of problems for the project's topic leadership on CAP 4.
So what do we do now?
Proposal: Get rid of the position of Topic Leader and replace it with a Topic Leadership Team.
I realize this would be a bold change that goes against all CAP history from the very beginning with Syclant. But I have long wondered if it really makes sense to put complete responsibility for a CAP project on one person's shoulders.
When I originally created the position of Topic Leader for DP CAP 3, my primary intention was to make it clear that I was not declaring myself the almighty leader of each pokemon creation (some people assumed I would) just because I was the guy in charge of the newly organized CAP project. I wanted a nice way to create a semblance of leadership hierarchy on CAP, because the only official leadership position we had was my role as forum moderator. The way I set up Topic Leaders to be selected was by a "TL Selection Committee" comprised of past Topic Leaders. So I was hoping that Topic Leaders would be a sort of leadership council for CAP, in addition to CAP server mods.
Well it didn't really work out that way, did it? Have any of you ever bothered to look at how many past Topic Leaders are still actively involved in CAP? Shockingly, astoundingly FEW! In fact, selecting someone as Topic Leader is usually not a step into further CAP leadership involvement. If you look at history, Topic Leader is almost always a death warrant on that leader's CAP career. Most people quit involvement with CAP COMPLETELY shortly after serving as TL, rather than getting further engaged. This has been a big red flag for me for a long time with CAP.
The responsibilities, work, and after-effects of Topic Leadership seems to drive our best and brightest CAP talents away from CAP and ends all future active involvement from them. It could be sheer coincidence. But it also could be some form of cause and effect. I can't pinpoint the reasons, but I have some guesses.
One possible explanation is that by the time a person amasses enough experience and clout in the community to get selected as Topic Leader, they are close to the end of their normal "Smogon lifespan" anyway. Also, there is the possible "burnout explanation". Topic Leader is a shitload of work, and when people are done with the job, they get burned out on Create-A-Pokemon altogether. Another factor may be the "Alexander the Great Syndrome", ie. "No more worlds to conquer". Many people spend their early CAP careers pining for the opportunity to lead a project and get their way when creating a pokemon. When a person finally climbs that mountain, and they actually get the reins and lead a project from start to finish, everything afterwards is kinda hollow by comparison.
I'm not sure exactly what are the reasons, if any. But it is an undeniable trend that being selected Topic Leader is usually the kiss of death for active CAP participation in the future. So we have not ended up with most Topic Leaders serving any real leadership function in CAP, other than the functional role they play during a given CAP.
And that functional role they play has now devolved to the point where Topic Leaders aren't really serving the community. Our latest TL used the position to take a personal victory lap around the project and indulged himself however he wished. And with each TL taking greater and greater liberties with their influence, they simply serve as an example to future Topic Leaders to do more of the same. If you add in the tendency for Topic Leaders to one-up everything that has come before, it's an ugly destructive spiral for Create-A-Pokemon.
The position of Topic Leader is not supposed to be like this. Yes, it is a prestigious position. But at its core, it is supposed to serve the functional role of LEADING TOPICS.
I think a possible better way to functionally lead topics during a given CAP, would be to spread the work of Topic Leadership across a team of people. The question is how to share the work and responsibilities across the different members of the Topic Leadership Team (TLT).
I don't think it would be a good idea to have every task or decision shared across the team and have team votes and all that. I have a feeling that would be a nightmare and wouldn't work. On the other hand, Smogon has a Tournament Director council, Tiering Councils, and all sorts of other small teams that work effectively to lead aspects of Smogon. So perhaps there is a way to make that work for CAP. My gut feeling is that it would be a mess. I suspect our process would get mired in communication delays between the TLT and possible infighting between TLT members.
We could assemble the TLT by each major step of the process, assigning each step of the process to be led by a single member of the TLT. Within that step, the individual TLT member would actually be a lot like the current Topic Leader, in terms of power and responsibility. But they would pass the TL mantle to another person for the next step. This has several huge benefits:
The Best Topic Leader would be listed on the Credits page for that CAP pokemon, in the slot where we currently list the Topic Leader. No, we should not list the entire TLT. This gives a meaningful carrot for all TLT members to work for. It also has a nice tie to CAP history and tradition of having a single person identified in the CAP dex for their leadership on a given CAP.
Wrap Up
I've presented a mountain of information in this Policy Review. I'll stop here, even though there are many details left to be determined if we choose to pursue this proposal. I'm sick of writing, and you are probably sick of reading by now. If not, I applaud your stamina!
Topic Leadership is one of the most important aspects of Create-A-Pokemon, so I could not cover this without a lot of explanation and detail. For everyone that has read the whole thing, I hope it is very clear that I have not considered this lightly. This is not a knee-jerk reaction to CAP 4, even though the train wreck of our most recent CAP did trigger this Policy Review. This has been building for a very long time, and there are many factors that have contributed to the problems we face today with Topic Leadership. It is time for us to deal with it head on.
That's a blunt statement, I know. I expect we'll talk a lot about whether I am making a reasonable overall assessment. But I want to lead off with that statement to be clear as to what triggered this PR thread.
I have had nagging concerns about topic leadership in CAP for quite some time, ever since we implemented the so-called "Strong TL Model" after DP CAP 8. Over time, there has been a disturbing undercurrent that has developed in CAP, where instead of the Topic Leader being expected to serve the community, the community is now expected to serve the Topic Leader. Most Topic Leaders have been very good and have not abused our trust in them, but I have been worried for a while that the project dynamics around Topic Leadership have been moving in a bad direction. BW CAP 4 brought all my concerns to a head, and myself and other moderators all noticed the problems and reacted to it to different degrees. As a consequence of that, I want to propose some radical changes to how we handle topic leadership, including possibly abolishing the position of Topic Leader entirely.
About this Policy Review
This is another very, very long PR post, because it's basically three long topics in a single post.
1) I cover CAP 4 in exacting detail. I'll present a lot of the behind-the-scenes discussions and thinking amongst myself and various CAP moderators, and I'll explain the problems with CAP 4 from a policy perspective.
2) I run through CAP history on Topic Leadership. Normally I wouldn't do this for a policy change. But, Topic Leadership is arguably the most important policy in CAP, and I want to try to give some of you newer members some historical perspective.
3) I propose a new Topic Leadership structure, and describe many of the pros and cons of the proposal.
CAP 4: Bugmaniacbob's Topic Leadership2) I run through CAP history on Topic Leadership. Normally I wouldn't do this for a policy change. But, Topic Leadership is arguably the most important policy in CAP, and I want to try to give some of you newer members some historical perspective.
3) I propose a new Topic Leadership structure, and describe many of the pros and cons of the proposal.
Clearly I am not happy with Bugmaniacbob and what he did as Topic Leader for CAP 4. Many other people share my dissatisfaction, and in some cases, outrage. I have had many discussions with CAP moderators during CAP 4, after CAP 4, and while writing this Policy Review. I know without a doubt that I am not alone amongst CAP leadership in feeling that Bugmaniacbob did a lousy job at leading the project, and I have cross-referenced my recollections with others to ensure I am not misrepresenting events. I will not be referring to any other moderators by name in this post, although I will often use phrases like "other moderators" in my retelling, when describing actions or conversations involving other CAP mods. Be aware that every moderator was not involved in every aspect of CAP 4, and there may be some mods that have very little awareness of what I will be describing here. I am intentionally leaving out individual mods' names, so they can represent themselves in this thread, even if their opinions and recollections contradict my own.
The problem, in a nutshell, was that Bugmaniacbob railroaded and manhandled CAP 4. Bob didn't follow the basic principle that we build a pokemon as a community. He regarded Topic Leader as a position that allowed him to create a pokemon that he wanted, according to his particular preferences and desires. In many cases, he bent the project process to his will, he ignored past precedents for Topic Leader behavior and influence, and in some cases, he outright manipulated polls to get what he personally wanted, even when he knew that the community majority did not agree with his actions, and even in the face of CAP moderator warnings. By the end of CAP 4, Bob was in full-on self-glorification mode, and he treated CAP 4 as if it was his personal creation. Bugmaniacbob completely lost the entire point of CAP by making it about HIM, not the community.
In retrospect, the reason Bob's Topic Leadership was so frustrating and difficult for me and other mods to grapple with, was because it was a problem that progressively grew over time. Bob started out CAP 4 terrifically and seemed to be doing a great job. Then a few minor issues surfaced that looked biased, possibly a little suspicious, but we brushed it off. A few later actions by Bob were fairly obviously unethical, but not against the rules, so we decided to let it go, but planned to tighten up the rules before the next CAP. By the middle of CAP 4 we were all certain that BMB was operating on his own personal agenda and was imposing his personal preferences on every step, even if that required him to manipulate polls and processes to suit his tastes. By the end of the project, Bob was openly flaunting his disregard for the CAP process and principles, and the mods stepped in and intervened to prevent further embarrassment. In the aftermath, we were left wondering how the hell we let things get so far off track, and questioned ourselves if we should have acted earlier to prevent it.
CAP 4: Behind-The-Scenes
To bring everyone up to speed, I guess the best place to start is at the beginning...
When CAP 4 started and I saw how BMB handled the first Concept discussion, I was giddy with excitement over the amazing amount of work and attention to detail he paid to every post and argument in the submission thread. I even chatted privately with one of the CAP mods during that first thread and I said, "I think Bob may be the best TL we have ever had in CAP."
When the typing poll came out, several of us raised our eyebrows because the typing slate appeared to be "stacked". That is what I call a slate that has been constructed by the TL to bias the community to pick something the TL personally favors, but is presented to the community as if it is an objective representative sampling of viable options that represent the intelligent community consensus. We have had issues with some stacked polls in past CAPs, but as long as it isn't too blatant, we don't worry about it too much.
When you give one person (the TL) total control over a slate, and ask them to sift through all the suggestions and evaluate all the community arguments -- it is inevitable that the TL is going to have some degree of subjective bias that influences their choice of options for the slate. Of course we expect all CAP leaders to be objective and act in the best interests of the community. But we understand that TL's are only human and are going to have personal leanings that impact their decisions, as long as they are acting in good faith and in general accordance with project goals.
The typing poll only had three legitimate options on it, and two of those typings were Bug types. It also had the odd inclusion of a fourth typing, Grass/Flying, which was never really discussed in the typing discussion and obviously had no prayer of being selected. I found it a little odd that the majority of viable options were Bug type, but I could easily pass that off since Bug typings were heavily discussed in the thread, and I think the community majority was probably rooting for a Bug typing anyway. But the slate was small to begin with, and the inclusion of Grass/Flying stood out almost as if Bob was intentionally including a fourth option for appearances sake, but he didn't want to include anything else that might actually get votes. While this may be harmless, it's a clear warning sign of a "stacked" slate, and it is NOT something we encourage from our Topic Leaders.
So when I saw the slate I immediately wondered, "Is Bob trying to ensure a win for a Bug type? You gotta be kidding me...", knowing of course that Bob is a bug enthusiast in real life, and his Smogon specialty is analysis writing for Bug-type pokemon. But my reaction was mild annoyance, if anything, and I didn't say anything to anyone else. After speaking to other mods much later, when things got worse -- they all brought up the same question, "Did you think anything was wrong with that first Typing slate? I thought it was suspicious, but I didn't want to say anything."
So the Typing slate was probably stacked a bit, but I figured he was a new TL, and new to forum leadership of any kind, and he was just establishing himself and his direction. It happens on many CAPs where TL's come out of the gate with a head of steam and make some leadership mistakes that are mostly a result of over-enthusiasm, not poor leadership skills. So I brushed off my concern over the typing poll -- heck I wanted a Bug typing too, and everyone else seemed to be on the same bandwagon.
The ability step was really the tipping point for Bob and his leadership of CAP 4. That's where I think he first started making moves to ensure he got what he wanted out of CAP 4. It's no secret that Bob did not want Weak Armor on CAP 4. He argued against Weak Armor on IRC and in the first ability and discussion thread, but he relented to community consensus and slated it anyway, like an objective Topic Leader should. My suspicion is that he figured his arguments against it would be sufficient to keep it from winning. But Weak Armor won pretty handily, despite his disapproval.
I think that was the point where everything changed for BMB. From then on, I think BMB made a conscious effort to ensure that no future decision would go against him on CAP 4. He started leaning hard on ability discussions and clearly vocalizing what options he favored in the very first post (more on that technique later). And the third ability was a joke in terms of fairness and objectivity. Despite the fact that many options were debated heavily in the third ability discussion, BMB created the poll with only two options -- No Guard (which was the option he had been favoring and arguing strongly for from the very beginning of the first ability thread) and No Ability. I saw it as a kind of "temper tantrum slate" -- pretty much Bob's way of saying, "Either pick my favorite option or you get nothing!". Once again, numerous other mods had the same read as I did, that Bob was turning the corner and trying to strong-arm the community.
Although I didn't like seeing how he handled the last ability poll, the stat spread step was the first step where I seriously considered if Bob was actually breaking rules as Topic Leader. First off, in the Stat Limits Discussion he decided on his own to not respect the limit ranges established in the CAP Process Guide. He felt the limits in the rules were "too lax" (whatever that means) and he unilaterally made up his own narrower limits. Bob didn't consult anyone else about his on-the-fly rules change, he just did it on his own and posted it as gospel for all stat spread submitters to follow. And why would he create such narrow restrictions? Because he knew exactly what stat spread he wanted and he didn't want to give anyone leeway to get too far away from exactly what he wanted. Then in the first post of the stat submission thread, he made the curious decision to openly post his own working spread. It was a clear statement to the field of submitters saying, "Match this if you want to be slated".
Bob also was very open that he wanted a 600 BST spread, and he stacked the slate with 600 BST submissions. This was when I started seriously questioning whether Bob's motivations on the CAP 4 project were driven by competitive bias or by some hidden fan agenda. In the stat threads, he initially described 600 BST as being "pleasing to the eye" or something along those lines and indicated he preferred it. But then later he started mentioning that it would be cool if CAP made a "pseudo-legendary pokemon".
I immediately reacted when I saw Bob establish that CAP 4 would be a "pseudo-legend" for a couple of reasons. First off, any time you start throwing the word "legendary" around, you bring connotations of ubers and all that, and the last thing CAP needs is to give even MORE influence to make overpowered Pokemon. On top of that, Bob was taking a very analytical competitive step (stats) with math formulas, BSR calculators and all that -- and injecting a fanboy concept like "legendary status" in the mix, as if it had any relevance. Then when he only slated "legendary spreads", it was clear this legendary thing was VERY relevant to Bob for some odd reason. I bristled because it is NOT within the Topic Leader's authority to arbitrarily establish a flavor mandate that we make a "pseudo-legend", just because the Topic Leader desires it. Sure, if a 600 BST spread just *happens to win* on a CAP, I think it makes sense for all of us to acknowledge that Pokemon canon has special significance on that BST number. But that is NOT what Bob did at all.
Remember that on the CAP project -- BST is almost completely irrelevant competitively. We use BSR to measure competitiveness of a spread, because BST is meaningless as a measure of stat power. On some past CAPs, we even banned listing the BST on the spread poll, specifically because we didn't want a meaningless number influencing voters. Bob not only considered BST relevant as a measurement, but he MANDATED an EXACT BST number as a condition of every submission on the slate. Technically, BMB did allow one 580 BST spread, which is also a well-known "legendary" BST in Pokemon lore, and that one spread had no prayer in the polls and predictably finished in dead last place in the poll. So this is where all the warning bells really started going off for me, because it was clear that our Topic Leader had some hidden fan agenda that was driving his direction of our competitive steps.
When I realized what Bob was doing, I was upset, but I rolled my eyes more than anything else. I lost some respect for Bob at that point, because I would not have predicted that Bob would really use the stage of Topic Leader for such a selfish goal. But I've been doing Create-A-Pokemon for a long time, so when it comes to users manipulating aspects of the CAP project for personal reasons, nothing surprises me any more. I just didn't expect to see that kind of thing from a Topic Leader, because it had never happened before. But even though I knew something was up, and I didn't like what Bob was doing, I still came to the conclusion that BMB was just "very biased" and was "heavily influencing" our decisions. But I didn't feel like he was explicitly controlling the project in a community-damaging way.
Then Bob made a huge leap that put all doubts to rest in my mind and raised concerns with every mod and even members of the CAP community at large -- Bob began blatantly imposing his subjective interpretation on CAP flavor steps and he outright manipulated flavor polls.
On the name poll, Bob openly disregarded the options favored by the community and made a slate of obscure options that appealed to his personal scientific tastes, AND he openly admitted that his personal tastes differed significantly from the community at large. He openly admitted to not slating the name that he KNEW was favored by the community at large, precisely BECAUSE he knew it would win and he didn't want to see that name permanently affixed on HIS CAP PROJECT.
This is really when we realized that Bob wasn't just capitalizing on opportunities to indulge his personal goals when the community gave him a chance, or taking liberties with TL power on a few steps and slates. BMB had openly taken the stance that HE OWNED THIS POKEMON. It wasn't "ours", the collective property of the CAP community of hundreds that all work to build the pokemon. It was Bugmanicbob's pokemon and he wanted to GUARANTEE we ended up with a creation where he personally favored every aspect of it.
Even on a flavor step that had no impact whatsoever on the competitive viability of the pokemon, and even in the face of a big divergence of his personal opinion from that of the rest of the community -- Bob openly chose to ignore the community, and he shoved a slate of mostly obscure science references down our throat and said, "Choose from my favorites". In the first name poll thread, where many CAP posters objected to how Bob handled the slate, you know what Bob did? He laughed. In fact, he openly admits that he still laughs when he reads the thread where the CAP community calls him out for abusing his position.
When that name step happened, even though it was just a flavor step, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Bob felt entitled to impose his selfish desires on the project, and that he had probably been doing it from the very beginning of the project.
Bob is very lucky that the favored name submission that he refused to slate in that travesty of a name poll was my personal submission. Because if it had been anyone else's submission, I would have stepped in and forced him to re-slate the poll. Some other CAP mods suggested doing it themselves, and I didn't want that to happen.
For one, I really don't like public leadership drama in the middle of an ongoing CAP. It's bad for the CAP community to have open power struggles in the middle of a CAP. It confuses new project participants and it makes the project look bad in general. So I overwhelmingly prefer to stifle any leadership or policy troubles during a CAP project and save it all for Policy Review between CAP projects.
I also didn't want a re-slate clouded with entitlement issues. If that name poll would have been re-slated, it would be questionable as to whether it was being re-slated because it was unfair, or whether "Doug, the all-powerful admin, got pissed off that his option didn't make the poll and he's throwing his weight around to get his way." I questioned myself if I was truly mad as a result of what I believed to be a breach of authority by Bob, or whether I was just pissed over Bob snubbing my submission. I've had submissions not slated in the past, and it didn't bother me in the slightest. I also happen to have won several name competitions and other polls in the past, so it's not like I was pissed over missing out on a chance to win.
No, I was torqued that Bob seemed to think it was his right to shove crap down everyone's throat and then laugh when we said we didn't like it. When other CAP mods came to the exact same conclusion as I did, I knew it wasn't just a petty personal gripe on my part. But, like I said, we really didn't want any drama, so we did nothing at that point to curb BMB's increasingly subjective control over every aspect of what was supposed to be a community project.
We had to kick it up a notch on the Movepool steps. We gave Bob a stern "warning" when he indicated that he would use his personal preferences for movepool flavor as a criteria for slating movepools. That is completely unacceptable, and we warned Bob that if we had any reason to believe that he was imposing his flavor preferences on what is clearly a competitive step for CAP, that the CAP mods would force him to re-slate. By the way, that was the first time in CAP history that moderators have ever had to step in and issue such a warning to an active CAP Topic Leader.
Then, to top it all off, we had that ridiculous Pokedex thread. Bob decided he didn't give a shit about Pokedex entries, and he literally made a mockery of that step in front of the entire CAP community.
Don't get me wrong, I've never been a fan of Pokedex entries either, because they add absolutely nothing to the competitive pokemon, and they are not required to implement the pokemon on the simulator. But I know that many members of the community like to participate in Pokedex entries, and in the past, the Pokedex step was a convenient time-filler for the community while we did the programming to implement our newly finished CAP on the battle simulator immediately after the Sprite thread completes. So even though I usually don't actively participate in Pokedex submission threads, I acknowledge that it does serve a functional purpose in the CAP process, and flavor fans tend to really enjoy it.
Well, Bob doesn't exactly see it that way. He thinks Pokedex entries are stupid and a waste of time. And in typical fashion for BMB's leadership style throughout CAP4, he was perfectly comfortable taking his odd opinion that was not shared by the community at large, and tried to force it to be the opinion of the community at large. He wanted Pokedex entries that were jokes and mocked the game of Pokemon. When the community refused to play his ego-stroking game, and they wouldn't submit options that made a joke out of that step of the process, Bob openly instructed everyone that they either make him laugh or they wouldn't be slated. This was his final stroke of "My opinion is your opinion, because this is my pokemon, not yours" as the all-powerful Topic Leader of CAP 4. A few users then posted in the thread and directly accused Bob of abusing his position as TL.
At that point, me and other mods had enough of Bob's shit. We weren't going to let him close out the CAP project by force-feeding his retarded outlier opinion on everyone else, and at the same time make a literal joke out of the project. So we sent Bob a PM and told him under no uncertain terms that he needed to reverse field in the Pokedex thread and make a fair slate of dex entries from the good submissions willingly provided by the community. So guess what Bob did, since we had the gall to ask him to stop abusing his position? He refused to finish the thread as Topic Leader. He made a pompous whiny post that it was beneath him to sully himself with drama over a stupid Pokedex thread, and he made the mods choose a slate and complete the step. Classy move from our intrepid Topic Leader.
CAP 4: The Aftermath
Of course we can't prove it, but it was apparent to me and others that Bob came into CAP 4 with a desire to make it his personal love letter to the Bug pokemon type. I contend that this is the main reason that CAP 4 never really centered in on any cohesive approach to the concept of Risk. During the project, there was not much focus or direction from Bob as to how he interpreted "Risk", and yet he always had very strong opinions about what he wanted on the polls. Even when people made comments lamenting the lack of clear goals in terms of defining "risk" for the project, it did not seem to have much effect on the direction of the project as it was unfolding. We were collectively pursuing Bob's personal agenda, and not the stated concept that was supposed to be our guide.
Don't get me wrong, ultimately the community did vote in everything that ended up on the pokemon. But instead of creating a clear definition of risk, Bob was pushing stuff like Illusion and No Guard (which are public relations problems), dictating a perfect 600 BST stat spread (nothing screams "risk" like an uber stat spread, right?), and pushing for this to be a "pseudo-legend" (Huh? Why?). And now in retrospect after looking at the completed product, it's very hard for anyone to decipher how it represents "Risk" at all. So, despite the fact that Risk was supposed to be the "concept" driving CAP, it is obvious that the primary concept driving CAP 4 was Bob's obsession with making what he now calls "the greatest Bug-type of them all".
Bugmaniacbob wanted to make an awesome Bug pokemon from the minute he was selected to be Topic Leader. And, as you can now see, we ended up with a 600 BST Legendary Bug pokemon with no defined threats or counters, a perfectly balanced stat spread, two game-defining Abilities, perfect coverage, and all the best boosting moves in the game. The 600 BST pseudo-legendary status is a distinction never given to a pokemon in CAP history. I find it hard to believe it was coincidental that unprecedented heights and gifts were given to a Bug pokemon and it all just so happened to fall on the project that was led by a Topic Leader named Bugmaniacbob who is an insect enthusiast in real life and obsessed with Bug-Type pokemon in the game and he has promoted and analyzed Bug pokemon across Smogon for his entire career. BMB wanted to make CAP 4 to be his personal trophy; his tribute to the pokemon type that he personally adores. And any time the CAP community veered from his personal wish-list for CAP 4, even on non-competitive steps, he used his position as TL to force his desires on the community.
That is the antithesis of what the CAP project is all about.
I am not saying BMB intentionally broke any rules. Quite the contrary. I think Bob stretched every implication of TL power to the absolute limit, without actually breaking any written rules. BMB acted within the defined boundaries of topic leadership that have been in place to date. But, he refused to acknowledge or follow what I previously considered to be "community principles" that have been observed by every previous TL I can recall. Those principles are hard to define in clear-cut terms, and mostly rely on adherence to the general idea of putting community interests before personal goals. Those principles have been so consistently observed in the past, that I never really thought we would ever need to enumerate specific rules to keep a Topic Leader from abusing their position. If someone else would have previously proposed we impose more defined rules on Topic Leaders, I probably would have rejected them with the comment, "If we have to stipulate this kind of thing to protect us from the TL, then the CAP project has much bigger problems to worry about." And that's exactly why I'm bringing up this PR thread. I think BMB's topic leadership has shown that we have bigger problems to worry about.
I do not think that Bob had malicious intent. Bob was trying to lead CAP4 to the best of his ability, and he is very smart and hard working. But his topic leadership was a disaster in terms of promoting the goals of Create-A-Pokemon and encouraging a good community project. I think this has to do with some fundamental flaws in how we have set up the position of Topic Leader -- flaws which became incredibly magnified by BMB's personal leadership style and the massive amount of effort he was willing to expend to make the project go in the direction he desired.
When Bob got negative feedback from others, I think his personality is such that he really didn't care much about what anyone else thought about his leadership or direction. I have no doubt he *heard* opinions contrary to his own, but I don't think he *listened* much at all. And when he started pouring his considerable work effort into the project, that was just gasoline on the fire. The more work he put into the project, the more he felt entitled to get his way on everything. It was like the pilot of a plane in a nosedive, who was accelerating as much as possible, even though the plane was headed straight towards the ground. And, like that plane, CAP 4 crashed and burned, from the perspective of it being a "community endeavor".
For anyone who may be misinterpreting my assessment of the failure of CAP4 leadership -- I am not making a comment on the pokemon as a competitive creation. I don't care too much if CAP4 is a good competitive pokemon or not. For all I know, BMB made a very good pokemon. We'll probably have great fun battling with it. Or maybe Bob made a terrible pokemon. I really don't know.
The problem is that BMB drove this thing to serve his own selfish indulgence. I said earlier that I didn't think Bob was being malicious, but I do think he was incredibly selfish. Being selfish is not against the rules of CAP, and there is no way we can make a rule against it. But it isn't admirable, and it isn't something we should applaud or condone.
What is shocking to me, and a big reason I don't think Bob had malicious intent, is that Bob was so incredibly open about the selfish things he was doing! I'm not just referring to "open" in terms of interpreting his actions -- Bob flat out admits it himself, and doesn't have any remorse about it. He actually takes pride in it! Look no further than what Bob said in his own Final Product thread:
In that post he went to great lengths describing everything he did, and how perfect it all turned out for him. He broke his arm patting himself on the back for creating what he describes literally as "a masterpiece"."Yes, I haven't always been the most scrupulous, and some of you may take issue with my planning ahead and in some cases manipulating opinions to favour the options I preferred"
That Final Product thread was actually the final straw for us mods and arguably the most telling evidence that Bob had gone off the deep end in considering CAP4 to be his personal accomplishment and complete disregard for the CAP community. I am still shocked that Bob had the audacity to put his 2K post in the CAP 4 Final Product thread.
Some of you may not know this (but I am quite sure Bob does), but the Final Product thread is the only thread of a completed CAP that permanently remains in the main CAP forum to serve as a public reference thread for posterity. All the other threads for a given CAP are moved to the Archive subforum shortly after they are closed. Normally the Final Product thread is an opportunity for the Topic Leader to summarize the project, pass out some congrats to the community for a good effort, and then list out the final reference data for our pokemon creation. So what did Bob choose to do in the CAP 4 Final Product thread? He made a 14,000 word testament to his personal rise in Smogon, describing his entire history in the community, culminating with his crowning achievement of delivering to us the most amazing pokemon creation CAP has ever made.
Even if you were touched by Bob's triumphant self-congratulatory tale of "poor little fanboy rises to e-fame in Smogon" -- did he really need to embed all that personal bullshit in the ONE thread that will live forever in the CAP forum supposedly as a "reference thread" for the project? Of course not. He did it because he selfishly thinks HE is somehow THE MOST IMPORTANT aspect of CAP 4, and not the effort of the CAP community at large.
A CAP mod had linked the Final Product thread from the front page news post announcing CAP 4, like we always do. But the mod really didn't think it was appropriate to force innocent newcomers to wade through 14,000 words and numerous bad artworks of grandstanding that had nothing to do with CAP 4 by our self-obsessed Topic Leader. So the mod created jump links at the top of the post, and linked to the jump that went straight to the actual CAP 4 final product information. Bob is not one to have the limelight stolen in his moment of glory, so he removed the jump links and posted in bold letters "READ THE ENTIRE POST, DON'T BE LAZY". The jump links have been restored, and Bob has been told he will be infracted if he edits it again in the future.
Bob just doesn't get it, and he probably never will get it. Bob literally has no clue that what he did throughout CAP 4 was selfish to the point of being offensive and was a contradiction to CAP community principles. Even in the face of community accusations of power abuse, in the face of the mods giving him direct warnings, and then later the mods outright intervening in his project, and threatening to infract him for his actions -- and yet Bob still reflects glowingly on his leadership of CAP 4 and he is proud of everything he did.
Well Bob, at least you are happy with yourself. Good for you.
So what is the job of the Topic Leader, and how does that differ from what BMB did on CAP 4?
The Topic Leader's job is to, well,... LEAD TOPICS. We do not call the position "Master Pokemon Designer" or "Smartest Person When It Comes To Building A Pokemon" or "Person Who Gets To Make His Personal Pet Pokemon This Time Around". Yes, we ask the topic leaders to do many things -- but first and foremost their job is to promote great discussions on every step of the project. That has always been the job, and that is the reason I changed the name of the position from "Mini-Mod" (which is what we called Cooper and Hyra on DP CAP 1 and 2) to "Topic Leader". As I have stated many times in many different ways, the purpose of CAP is not to build pokemon. The purpose is to provide a foundation for great discussions about competitive pokemon. The Topic Leader's job is to lead those discussions by encouraging good posts and submissions, by keeping discussion focused in a good direction, and to keep things moving along in a productive way.
In order to focus community discussion, the Topic Leader needs a clear direction. But having a "clear direction" is very different from forcing a "clear intended outcome". I have no doubt that just about every Topic Leader gets an idea in their head of how a pokemon will turn out the minute a concept is selected. The big test is how the Topic Leader adjusts their vision as a result of what the community gives them.
Prior to CAP4, it has been a fundamental dilemma for every previous Topic Leader. They come out of the gate with a great idea of how things will work out, and then the community starts pushing for something different than the exact picture the TL has in their head. And inevitably, the community throws a curve ball in terms of voting, that makes the Topic Leader rethink their entire approach. It happens every single time.
I know because I am often the one that has to bolster the TL as they agonize over slating an option, or when they are reeling over a poll outcome that they were hoping against. They struggle to figure out how to cope with wrangling a community with diverse opinions. In those cases, I usually have to remind them to not get so attached to their idea of the pokemon. That attachment actually works against an effective TL.
When a TL gets dead set on an outcome, it can't end well. Either the TL gets dejected, or the community gets shafted. The answer is to NOT get so attached to the pokemon. They need to focus on having a vibrant community process. Topic Leaders need to pride themselves not on their ability to predict future outcomes, or worse, manipulate outcomes -- they need to pride themselves on their ability to adapt midstream, the ability to synthesize new ideas and directions, and keep the project engaging and focused. Some past TL's have been better at it than others. But every TL, except BMB, have had to grapple with a community making unexpected decisions that the TL doesn't like.
Bob didn't do that. Bob changed the dynamic and effectively guaranteed he would never have to deal with any decisions not favored by him. Although BMB started out CAP4 great, when the community started picking options he didn't like, he changed his approach. After that, Bob walked into almost every step of the CAP process with a clear idea of what he wanted slated at the end. In most cases, he posted his favorites in the very first post of the thread and made it clear the things he liked. Bob didn't just note the "general direction" he wanted the community to explore -- he listed and described exactly what he wanted.
Let me clue you in on a not-so-secret secret about controlling CAP outcomes -- post first. This is straight from the playbook developed by Deck Knight during his famous "hijacking" of CAP 8 (which I'll cover more later). The tactic is for an influential CAP member to get out in front of the discussion with a specific proposal and everyone else tends to discuss the pros and cons of what is presented first. Basically, you are planting the seed and then everyone else nurtures and grows it throughout the discussion. By the end, the TL has no choice but to slate the option, and the community is basically wired to vote for it because it was mentioned so much in the discussion. New CAP members probably don't know about this tactic, but savvy CAP veterans do. Heck, Deck Knight even wrote a Smog article to describe this CAP manipulation strategy.
For regular members, "hijacking" was somewhat effective in the early days of CAP. But with the advent of the Strong TL model, it's not nearly as effective a tactic for regular posters, because the Topic Leader is supposed to set the tone of each thread at the beginning. Note that I said "tone", not "slate". Bob didn't just set the tone, he practically dictated the slate from the outset. Bob regularly gave very specific guidelines for submissions at the beginning of submission threads, and listed his specific preferred options in other threads.
This is not illegal by any means, and it might even be good leadership in some cases, depending on the situation. Remember, the job of the TL at the beginning of the thread, is to frame the discussion. The goal is to focus the community at the beginning, so the discussion doesn't wander all over the place. But the Topic Leader isn't supposed to have a slate in mind, they are supposed to be asking the community to suggest a slate that meets certain characteristics. I realize this is a very gray distinction, and I can't definitively tell you whether any particular style of Topic Leader posting is good or bad. But after looking back on much of CAP 4, it sure doesn't look like Bob was simply "framing the discussion". He was telegraphing exactly what he wanted on the slate before he had heard a single word from anyone in the community.
Shortly after CAP 4 got underway, during discussions BMB really didn't engage anyone in big disputes, nor did he spend much time trying to convince anyone of what he wanted. But he did an amazing job of giving the appearance that he was listening to everyone. He kept helpful charts, he posted running slates, he kept lists of all submissions, and he updated them dutifully with every post. I think most people interpreted this as a sign that Bob was considering everything very carefully. But he wasn't. Every project step ended up with a slate of options that fit almost exactly with the opinions Bob was endorsing personally at the beginning of the step. If Bob was listening to dissenting opinions, they sure weren't having any meaningful effect on the project!
But because of all the attention to detail BMB paid to every post, it gave the general impression that he was leading the discussions and assimilating the best direction for the project from the highest quality arguments and submissions from CAP participants. But he was doing nothing of the kind. Bob was hearing exactly what he wanted to hear. He was picking and choosing the things that he personally favored, and in most cases he favored those things before he even opened the discussion to the public.
Then by posting running slates, he ensured his favored options appeared regularly throughout the discussion and were discussed heavily. And just like textbook "CAP hijacking", you can significantly influence community opinion and voting in this way.
And no one really ever called him on it! I think most people were so impressed that he was doing all the busy work of collecting data from every thread, that they never bothered to realize that Bob was stacking almost every slate. Or maybe some people did notice, but they figured it was his right to do so, since he was the TL, so they kept quiet. I really don't know. Bugmaniacbob literally did whatever he wanted on CAP 4, and in most cases, the community didn't say a thing about it.
If Bob would have kept to the competitive threads for controlling slates to suit his personal tastes -- he probably would never have gotten on any moderators radar. Like I said, he was doing all the things we ask TL's to do. He was posting actively in every thread and people were mostly happy with the job he was doing. Almost every CAP has points where users bitch about the TL's choices, users complaining that the pokemon is going to be "broken", and users feeling like in one step or another that the TL was "unfair". So any complaints we see over slates or polls are typically ignored as background noise. Any problems with CAP 4 were likely to be passed off by CAP moderators as business-as-usual for a CAP project. But Bob got greedy and stupidly decided to lord his opinions over flavor too.
Keep in mind that Topic Leaders are chosen based on on their ability to lead competitive steps. We never, repeat NEVER, care two shits what the Topic Leader thinks about flavor. There is NO ONE that can do flavor any better than anyone else, so ultimately the only criteria for flavor of a CAP is community popularity. On the art steps, even though the process guide still technically says that the Topic Leader chooses the slate -- we expect the TL to slate every legal submission. On name slates, the TL is supposed to slate the most popular options, and the same goes for Pokedex entries. Movepool flavor is always completely up to the movepool submitter, and the TL is supposed to slate based on popularity and competitive concerns. These are long traditions on flavor steps and they rarely vary. We have had Topic Leaders slightly infringe on these expectations sometimes in the past, but nothing major. BMB came right out and openly admitted that he knew what he wanted out of names, move flavor, and dex entries -- and he ran the flavor steps like a total dictator with him issuing submission requirements verbatim and then slating options based on his personal whims.
When he pulled that nonsense, we knew without a doubt that BMB had taken the concept of CAP4 being "his project" to an unprecedented level. We started looking back at everything he had done on previous steps, and we started watching him more closely for everything he did after that. It became very clear that Bob was railroading the project on a course not driven by the concept or community principles, and there was nothing we could do about it without making a very big, very public mess of CAP 4. The community wasn't complaining much, and Bob wasn't breaking any rules, so there was no reason to make a big stink and intervene.
Bugmaniacbob obviously just "didn't get it" when it comes to some basic principles of the CAP project. He was shining a bright light on how the position of Topic Leader has become a twisted caricature of what it was supposed to be, but he wasn't damaging anything other than his own credibility with me and other CAP mods. We decided to just ride out CAP 4, and ensure that BMB's obviously misguided outlook on Create-A-Pokemon couldn't do any more damage to other areas of the project. So we shut down his PR threads, we revoked his access to CAP site content, we stopped trusting him as a leader in CAP, and we hunkered down as moderators and just waited for CAP 4 to end.
We waited for Policy Review, and now we need to take a hard look at the position of Topic Leader and put in some new policies. At a minimum, to prevent another CAP 4 happening again in the future. But possibly to put us on a better path to support the Create-A-Pokemon mission and principles. With that in mind, let's look at the history of Topic Leadership policy up until now, to help guide a path forward.
CAP Topic Leadership History
On the first several CAP projects, most topic leaders tended to be mostly an "administrative assistant" for the project, rather than a strong leader. Some TL's had bolder leadership styles than others, but all of them kinda collected feedback from everyone in each thread and administered polls. They did the bookkeeping for the project, pretty much. There were definitely leadership aspects to being a TL, in that the TL selected certain slates and made other decisions. But even on those slate selections, the TL was really just counting feedback and slating the options that seemed to be favored by the community.
For the first CAP project (Syclant), we had no official project structure. We had Cooper who was the "mini-mod" that organized and led all the CAP project threads, During CAP 1, vocal community members stepped up and argued for certain aspects over others. Although it was very messy and we never formally stated any specific goal or concept, through the discussions, a general concept sorta emerged. Many people wanted to emulate Infernape, with different typing, because Infernape was a metagame favorite by being a glass-cannon with mixed attacking stats, great coverage moves, and the ability to boost and set up. There was also a camp that wanted to deal with Garchomp, who was easily the most hated Pokemon in OU. So we ended up with a great mixed attacking capability, weak defenses, the ability to outspeed everything that reasonably threatened it, resistance to Earthquake, and the ability to blow completely through Yache Garchomp with STAB Ice attacks. Don't argue with me on whether CAP 1 achieved the "concept" or not, because a concept didn't exist. I'm just filling you in on the general tenor of conversations in CAP 1, in case you've ever wondered how we ended up with Syclant.
For CAP 2 Revenankh, Hyra was hand-picked by Cooper to organize CAP threads. Once again, vocal community discussion participants shaped the direction of the project. On that project we centered on making a good Bulk-Up user that could take advantage of Ghost/Fighting typing. Ghost/Fighting was selected because it could hit every typing in the metagame unresisted. The metagame was full of special Calm Minders, but no Pokemon at that time could really utilize Bulk Up nearly as effectively on the physical side of the game. So we quickly focused in on making Revenankh a Bulk Up abuser. We also were fascinated to explore if ShedRest (Shed Skin with Rest) would be preferable to LockLight (Air Lock with Moonlight). So this was the first time CAP really "experimented with the metagame" in terms of intentionally putting competitive options on a CAP expressly for the purpose of seeing which would be better in playtesting (BTW, ShedRest dominated by a mile). Revenankh was beautiful in its simplicity and power. The standard Revenankh set with Bulk Up/Hammer Arm/Shadow Sneak/Rest is probably the most dominant and overused single set in CAP history, but was never accused of being overpowered. In retrospect, I can easily argue that Revenankh was one of the most focused CAP projects we have ever executed from a concept perspective -- and we didn't even HAVE a formal concept step, and there was no such thing as a Topic Leader!
Then CAP 3 came around, and it rocked CAP from a leadership perspective.
The CAP project had been formally organized at that point, and Gothic Togekiss was selected to be Topic Leader by a TL Selection Committee of Cooper, Hyra, me, and a couple other members proposed by Cooper and Hyra, iirc. Gothic Togekiss was respected within the CAP community and he had been active from the very beginning with Syclant. Shortly after the typing of Grass/Fire was chosen, the direction of the project unraveled completely. Some members of the community wanted to make a big offensive sweeper, but vocal members like Aldaron and Mekkah were arguing for a much more subtle pokemon that leveraged big defenses and could wear down opponents with a SubSeed strategy. The controversy came to a boiling point when it was proposed to make Pyroak a user of an auto-Sun weather ability (either Drought or a custom ability with non-permanent Sun). Auto-weather was considered by many to be off-limits because it was the defining characteristic that separated the OU metagame from Ubers in the DP generation. The whole project was a shitstorm of fighting and difficulty. People were constantly poll-jumping to argue about later steps and we had no clue where we were going from one step to the next. I think we ended up learning a lot about competitive pokemon during the Pyroak project, but the process was a disaster.
After CAP 3, we implemented one of the most important policy changes in CAP history -- a formally selected Concept at the beginning of each CAP project. The idea was that a public formal Concept would eliminate the need to poll jump and it would serve as a compass for the project from start to finish.
From CAP 4 onward, the topic leaders we selected were generally big, well-known personalities on the project. Leaders like Sunday (CAP 4 Fidgit), Tennisace (CAP 5 Strategem), Darkie (CAP 6 Arghonaut), and Magmortified (CAP 7 Kitsunoh) -- these guys were all CAP moderators and/or Smogon staff. So people tended to listen to the TL, and the TL certainly had a lot of influence. But from a policy perspective, there was an implicit separation between the selected TL making a post as just a regular participant voicing their opinion on what we should do, and posts by that person when they were acting in an official capacity as Topic Leader of the project. Most of the "official acts" by the TL were still administrative in nature, and the TL's opinions in discussion threads were pretty much just like the opinions of any other influential member of the community. We now refer to that period of CAP as having a "Weak TL Model" because we did not expect or encourage the TL to strongly impose their opinions on the direction of a CAP project as an explicit function of their job as Topic Leader.
But we had a problem with the direction some CAPs took, mainly because community consensus tends to wander and encourages all sorts of bad voting behaviors. The biggest problem was that different voices in the community would be stronger during different steps, which made every step of the project twist the project in new directions. Even though we had been overtly selecting a Concept for every CAP since DP CAP 4 (Fidgit), those early projects still lacked truly cohesive direction from step to step along the way. People that were interested and knowledgeable about stat spreads would participate heavily in the stat threads, for example. If the vocal participants in those threads collectively interpreted that a bulky defensive mon was required for the concept, they would put all their influence behind bulky spreads. Then later in the project, the vocal movepool aficionados might be a different group of participants from those that argued heavily in the earlier stat spreads. And if those movepool experts had interpreted the best way to achieve the concept was a swift attacker, they would give the pokemon the movepool of a fast sweeper. So at the end of many CAP projects we would end up with a "Frankenstein's Monster" to a certain extent, where every part of the pokemon was built for a different purpose.
It all came to a head on CAP 8 with the building of Cyclohm.
I feel bad for Cyberzero (the CAP 8 TL) on that one because he was a very nice guy who worked hard on the project, and yet his leadership on that project will forever be remembered as the project that was so bad that we redefined the role of Topic Leader when it was done. Cyberzero honestly was not to blame for the lack of direction on that CAP. Cyberzero was the innocent fall guy for a host of problems, including blatant manipulation of voter opinion by some of the most influential members of the project.
Deck Knight has openly admitted that he "hijacked" CAP 8 to get his personal vision fulfilled, even though his concept lost in the Concept stage. The winning concept for CAP 8 was Elevator Music's "Neglected Ability", although DK's concept of "Paralysis Abusing Tank" fared decently in the concept polls. EM and others pretty openly favored Shield Dust as the preferred "neglected ability", and many people wanted the pokemon to have an offensive build. With Dragon typing, you can imagine the push for that sort of thing. Deck Knight saw an opportunity to use the broad non-specific concept as a way to get his original "para-abusing tank" concept fulfilled anyway. DK used his considerable influence to shift community opinion in a direction he favored. And at that time, it was not Cyberzero's job to lead direction in any particular way, or to try and stop DK from pushing his own agenda. With different interpretations as to how the concept should be fulfilled, there was a big "influence battle" during CAP 8 in almost every thread, with Deck Knight leading the way using the "hijacking tactics" I mentioned earlier. Previous CAP's always had their fair share of arguing, but CAP 8 was different.
There were campaigns and directions organized behind the scenes of CAP 8 to sway certain polls along a few distinct conceptual lines. I didn't like the way it went down, but I had a certain level of respect for DK for pulling it off in the end. After all, he didn't cheat or force anything. Deck Knight was not a CAP mod or even a CAP server mod at the time. He was just a very effective communicator and he led by convincing the community of the merits of his ideas -- and he took advantage of the mechanics of the CAP discussion process (ie. "hijacking"), but even that was kinda clever, I must admit. Through the whole project, Cyberzero just assessed overall community opinions and set up polls, and if those polls included a bunch of divergent options and interpretations on the concept, so be it. In the end, Cyclohm was as a bit of a jumbled mess and it felt like a mob brawl, but Deck Knight's "para-tank" hidden agenda won out a bit more than the rest. Deck personally won both the Stats and the Movepool steps, and he impacted almost every discussion, creating a vague semblance of competitive cohesion, even if it required subterfuge to get there.
The community as a whole was very frustrated after CAP 8. But it really wasn't Cyberzero's fault at all. And it really wasn't Deck Knight's fault, or the fault of any of the people arguing and influencing votes and polls. It was the project's fault for not having a better process that encouraged better, more focused discussions.
So after CAP 8 we implemented a bold new policy for Topic Leadership, what is now called "The Strong TL Model", which is the topic leadership model that still exists today in the Create-A-Pokemon process. The basic gist of the strong TL model is that we encourage the Topic Leader to take an active role in guiding community opinion. We ask the Topic Leader to not just sit back and make slates of the options mentioned the most in competitive threads. We ask the TL to assess the quality of community arguments as they relate to the chosen Concept, and to encourage people to come up with creative ways to solve competitive problems. When the community wanders from the chosen path, we put it on the TL to corral the herd and keep us in line. We want the TL to not just hear opinions, but to motivate discussion and debate. We ask the TL to use their position and power as a mechanism to drive a better community effort and increase project focus.
The very next project was CAP 9 Colossoil, and Plus was our first "strong" Topic Leader. And, my goodness, was he strong. Too strong, in my opinion. I cringed at how Plus handled some of those threads in CAP 9. Some of that was because Plus was a brash personality with a rude "I don't give a fuck" attitude most of the time anyway. So selecting him as TL and asking him to be "strong"? -- let's just say that we didn't have to ask him twice. He took the reins and ran with it, and did not hesitate to tell project participants to fuck off if they disagreed with him. I didn't really approve of some of his actions, but at the time I figured Plus was probably just overreacting a bit to previous wandering projects, and was maybe trying a little too hard to be the strong leader we all said we wanted on the project. So I kept my reservations to myself. And since Plus was popular on the CAP server amongst hardcore CAP battlers, it's not like Plus didn't represent the opinions of a big influential chunk of the community. Plus was a loud dominating jerk at times, but I always felt like he was trying to act as the champion for the CAP server battling community, and Colossoil was very much a product of that group's overall influence, not Plus going off and making his own personal pokemon.
CAP 10 Krillowatt was a watershed project from a CAP process change perspective. It was lead by Beej, who was a CAP server mod and well-liked by everyone on the project. The concept was "Utility Counter" which had many interpretations and was intended to produce a very diverse pokemon in the end. That project struggled from the outset with difficulty over ability selection, because Multitype was put on the table. After backroom consultations with the mods and the PRC, Beej wisely decided to pull Multitype off the table. But then Magic Guard came in and Krillowatt's movepool was statistically the all-time most powerful in CAP history. So, immediately following CAP 10, some big process changes were imposed to limit overall CAP power. As a Topic Leader, opinions probably vary as to whether Beej was responsible for the problems with Krillowatt or whether he should be praised for preventing it from being worse than it was. But as a Topic Leader, Beej did a good job assimilating input from the community (like with the Multitype dilemma) but still pushed to keep the project on course with a very broad concept.
On CAP 11, topic leadership took an interesting twist. The selected TL (Fuzznip) stepped down in mid-project and we had to ask Deck Knight to take over to finish the project. But that wasn't the interesting part. No matter who was in official capacity as the named Topic Leader, there is no doubt in my mind that Rising Dusk was the "leader" of that creation project. RD used high activity, cogent arguments, good writing, and competitive battling knowledge to shape every competitive discussion on that project. Although I won three polls on CAP 11 including concept, art, and name -- I will forever think of Voodoom as "Rising Dusk's project", and I think of it with respect. Rising Dusk led that project as regular member the way I wish Topic Leaders led every project from their official position! He pursued an innovative direction, he built community consensus without having any official power to control slates or poll outcomes, and the discussions that he engendered were some of the best in CAP history.
The weird thing is that over a year later on BW CAP 2 (Necturna), when Rising Dusk was the officially selected Topic Leader, I don't think Rising Dusk did as good a job with leading the community as he did on Voodoom. I'm not saying he did a bad job on Necturna. Necturna was an interesting project that had many great discussions and we learned a lot. But I felt like RD used his position as Topic Leader and mod as a bit of a crutch to take the easy way out on some project decisions. He didn't seem to work as hard at leading discussions. He seemed to have much more of a personal attachment to the outcome of polling decisions, instead of his previous enthusiasm for interesting debates about competitive battling. Maybe that was because RD was older in his Smogon career and he didn't have the same fire to prove himself like he did a year and a half earlier on Voodoom.
I can't say much bad about Rising Dusk as a community leader, because of the many people that have been involved in CAP leadership over the years, I feel that Rising Dusk "got it" more than just about anyone else with regards to the real underlying mission of CAP, and what it really means to have a "successful CAP project". I know RD got fed up with Smogon, CAP, and other things, and his involvement with CAP ended on a very sour note. But when he was on his game as a CAP leader, he was about as good as they come.
The two other BW CAP Topic Leaders, Reachzero (Tomohawk) and Deck Knight (Mollux) both did very nice jobs as Topic Leaders. Reachzero had so much knowledge of the game and as a Smogon Supermod was very experienced with the difficulties of leading community projects. He was the perfect choice for TL for the first CAP project in the wild new BW generation. And with Mollux, DK had not only been around CAP from the very beginning, but he also had to serve as TL for CAP 11 when Fuzznip quit. So CAP principles are infused in Deck's DNA. He knew when to push the community and when to sit back and take what the community gave him. Mollux had a tough concept to pull off, and I'm not sure we could have done it without Deck Knight at the helm.
Assessing CAP History
So in looking at CAP History, you can see a repeating pattern. A string of good projects, then one "disaster project" which prompts sweeping policy changes to re-align how we pursue a focused community direction. Previously, CAP 3 and CAP 8 were our "disasters", and formal Concepts and the Strong TL Model were our sweeping policy changes. Now we have a new "disaster" in BW CAP 4, and I think we need to consider some sweeping policy changes to get us back on track.
I very much feel that the progression of CAP Topic Leader policies has led us directly to the travesty of CAP 4 topic leadership. I didn't expect it to be thrown in our face so bluntly by BMB this time, with his selfish pursuit of making a legendary Bug pokemon. But I'm not entirely surprised that we finally ended up with a TL that pretty much looked the community straight in the face and said, in effect, "This is MY pokemon, not OUR pokemon."
Ever since the advent of the Strong TL Model, we have been steadily asking the Topic Leader to make more and more subjective decisions and take greater and greater ownership of the CAP project they lead. We have asked Topic Leaders to take previously long but completely democratic polling steps, and to use their subjective authority to streamline the process.
In the early days of Create-A-Pokemon, we used to start every CAP with an open Typing Poll with almost every Type available to choose in the first poll. And after the Primary Type was selected, we started all over again with every type, and through community votes we winnowed down to a single Secondary type. Now we ask the TL to make a big subjective assessment of a few valid dual typings and the community only chooses from that short selective list of options in a single typing poll. We did that to make the process shorter, which is a good thing. But we also did it to presumably protect the project from dumb community decisions. The implicit message to the TL is, "You are so much smarter than us, oh almighty TL. Please protect us from our own stupidity and use your wisdom to give us the gift of the One Good Typing Slate".
We took what used to be an objective list of Very Good Moves that were derived from statistical analysis, that were imposed on the project as firm rules for movepools to abide by. Now we have replaced it with a list of moves subjectively chosen by supposed Pokemon experts (whatever the fuck that means), and we have added all sorts of exceptions and subjective calls for the Topic Leader to determine if they want to observe the rules for their project or not. Once again, we have placed our trust in the subjective opinion of the TL, on the assumption that they know better than us what is best for the pokemon we are building.
We also put a lot of pressure on Topic Leaders to have a "successful project". No matter how many times we try to clarify what that means, at some level every TL fears their project will churn out a "bad" pokemon (whatever the fuck that means). Many of the noobs in the community bow down at the TL's feet. Other participants issue gloom and doom statements that the pokemon will be broken, or even worse -- it will (gasp!) get killed in OU play. We ask the Topic Leader to be our all-purpose Swiss army knife for preventing all negative outcomes for the project.
With this steady progression of TL power, the underlying belief was that Topic Leaders would still remain true to the project community goals and be altruistic in the use of their TL power. But with all that control and implicit hero worship going on -- it's inevitable that the Topic Leaders will go on a bit of a power trip. And it's unavoidable that they are going to associate their personal reputation with the pokemon we produce. The community places all these expectations on Topic Leaders and the Topic Leaders fall prey to the pressure. It was just a matter of time before we got burned by the power creep of Topic Leaders.
Sooner or later, a guy like Bugmaniacbob was bound to end up in the TL seat. His sense of ownership over the pokemon, combined with a willingness to ignore tradition and "soft rules", combined with a selfish goal, combined with a big work ethic to get his way, combined with almost unlimited TL power, combined with an entire community catering to his whims -- it led to a "perfect storm" of problems for the project's topic leadership on CAP 4.
So what do we do now?
Proposal: Get rid of the position of Topic Leader and replace it with a Topic Leadership Team.
I realize this would be a bold change that goes against all CAP history from the very beginning with Syclant. But I have long wondered if it really makes sense to put complete responsibility for a CAP project on one person's shoulders.
When I originally created the position of Topic Leader for DP CAP 3, my primary intention was to make it clear that I was not declaring myself the almighty leader of each pokemon creation (some people assumed I would) just because I was the guy in charge of the newly organized CAP project. I wanted a nice way to create a semblance of leadership hierarchy on CAP, because the only official leadership position we had was my role as forum moderator. The way I set up Topic Leaders to be selected was by a "TL Selection Committee" comprised of past Topic Leaders. So I was hoping that Topic Leaders would be a sort of leadership council for CAP, in addition to CAP server mods.
Well it didn't really work out that way, did it? Have any of you ever bothered to look at how many past Topic Leaders are still actively involved in CAP? Shockingly, astoundingly FEW! In fact, selecting someone as Topic Leader is usually not a step into further CAP leadership involvement. If you look at history, Topic Leader is almost always a death warrant on that leader's CAP career. Most people quit involvement with CAP COMPLETELY shortly after serving as TL, rather than getting further engaged. This has been a big red flag for me for a long time with CAP.
The responsibilities, work, and after-effects of Topic Leadership seems to drive our best and brightest CAP talents away from CAP and ends all future active involvement from them. It could be sheer coincidence. But it also could be some form of cause and effect. I can't pinpoint the reasons, but I have some guesses.
One possible explanation is that by the time a person amasses enough experience and clout in the community to get selected as Topic Leader, they are close to the end of their normal "Smogon lifespan" anyway. Also, there is the possible "burnout explanation". Topic Leader is a shitload of work, and when people are done with the job, they get burned out on Create-A-Pokemon altogether. Another factor may be the "Alexander the Great Syndrome", ie. "No more worlds to conquer". Many people spend their early CAP careers pining for the opportunity to lead a project and get their way when creating a pokemon. When a person finally climbs that mountain, and they actually get the reins and lead a project from start to finish, everything afterwards is kinda hollow by comparison.
I'm not sure exactly what are the reasons, if any. But it is an undeniable trend that being selected Topic Leader is usually the kiss of death for active CAP participation in the future. So we have not ended up with most Topic Leaders serving any real leadership function in CAP, other than the functional role they play during a given CAP.
And that functional role they play has now devolved to the point where Topic Leaders aren't really serving the community. Our latest TL used the position to take a personal victory lap around the project and indulged himself however he wished. And with each TL taking greater and greater liberties with their influence, they simply serve as an example to future Topic Leaders to do more of the same. If you add in the tendency for Topic Leaders to one-up everything that has come before, it's an ugly destructive spiral for Create-A-Pokemon.
The position of Topic Leader is not supposed to be like this. Yes, it is a prestigious position. But at its core, it is supposed to serve the functional role of LEADING TOPICS.
I think a possible better way to functionally lead topics during a given CAP, would be to spread the work of Topic Leadership across a team of people. The question is how to share the work and responsibilities across the different members of the Topic Leadership Team (TLT).
I don't think it would be a good idea to have every task or decision shared across the team and have team votes and all that. I have a feeling that would be a nightmare and wouldn't work. On the other hand, Smogon has a Tournament Director council, Tiering Councils, and all sorts of other small teams that work effectively to lead aspects of Smogon. So perhaps there is a way to make that work for CAP. My gut feeling is that it would be a mess. I suspect our process would get mired in communication delays between the TLT and possible infighting between TLT members.
We could assemble the TLT by each major step of the process, assigning each step of the process to be led by a single member of the TLT. Within that step, the individual TLT member would actually be a lot like the current Topic Leader, in terms of power and responsibility. But they would pass the TL mantle to another person for the next step. This has several huge benefits:
1) There could be a near-seamless transition from the current process to the new process, because each step of a CAP would still have a single "Topic Leader". Everyone would still defer to a topic leader for guiding discussion, making slates, and managing polls. I think we should reconsider how we ask each step to be led, because as I mentioned earlier, if we have a very active topic leader who wants to railroad a step, the current policy allows that to happen. But whatever changes we decide to make, it will be a seamless transition, even with a move to a TLT.
2) The workload and burnout issue becomes a non-factor. People don't need to block out two months from their schedule like current Topic Leaders. A TLT member would handle their step of the process for several days typically, and then pass the torch. With the current process, almost every TL is tired by the end of the project and those last few steps typically suffer because the TL doesn't actively manage the threads. With the TLT model, every step would have a fresh, enthusiastic topic leader ready to jump in and do the job.
3) The people we select to lead each step would be based on each person's unique qualifications for that step. We would ask a stat spread junkie to lead the stat spread steps, we ask a movepool enthusiast to lead movepool threads, etc. While some CAP participants are generalists that post actively in every thread, we also know that some people tend to participate more heavily in certain steps over others. By separating topic leadership, we can promote leaders uniquely suited to the job. Possibly we could establish qualifications like, "You must have placed in the Top 3 on a CAP movepool poll in order to be considered to be the Movepool Topic Leader for a CAP project." I'm not literally suggesting that qualification, but you get the idea.
4) We would sharply curb the tendency for people to feel like the CAP pokemon is their personal creation. It makes it a lot harder for the project to fall victim to selfish indulgence, because a single person simply can't control any more than a single aspect of the creation.
5) It absolves any one person from feeling like they will be "blamed" if the project doesn't meet everyone's expectations. People will still point fingers, I'm sure. But during the project, no one person will feel like they have a target on their back.
There will also be potential drawbacks.2) The workload and burnout issue becomes a non-factor. People don't need to block out two months from their schedule like current Topic Leaders. A TLT member would handle their step of the process for several days typically, and then pass the torch. With the current process, almost every TL is tired by the end of the project and those last few steps typically suffer because the TL doesn't actively manage the threads. With the TLT model, every step would have a fresh, enthusiastic topic leader ready to jump in and do the job.
3) The people we select to lead each step would be based on each person's unique qualifications for that step. We would ask a stat spread junkie to lead the stat spread steps, we ask a movepool enthusiast to lead movepool threads, etc. While some CAP participants are generalists that post actively in every thread, we also know that some people tend to participate more heavily in certain steps over others. By separating topic leadership, we can promote leaders uniquely suited to the job. Possibly we could establish qualifications like, "You must have placed in the Top 3 on a CAP movepool poll in order to be considered to be the Movepool Topic Leader for a CAP project." I'm not literally suggesting that qualification, but you get the idea.
4) We would sharply curb the tendency for people to feel like the CAP pokemon is their personal creation. It makes it a lot harder for the project to fall victim to selfish indulgence, because a single person simply can't control any more than a single aspect of the creation.
5) It absolves any one person from feeling like they will be "blamed" if the project doesn't meet everyone's expectations. People will still point fingers, I'm sure. But during the project, no one person will feel like they have a target on their back.
1) We will not have a single guiding vision throughout the project. After seeing 15 CAP projects unfold over the past five years -- I think the benefit of a single person's vision is way overrated. We achieved far more benefit when we started overtly picking a Concept, than we did by implementing the Strong TL Model. I don't think the Strong TL Model did much at all for making significantly more cohesive pokemon than we were getting before. Before we had the Strong TL Model, the TL's weren't really pushing the community with their "vision" anyway. The biggest driver of community focus is a good Concept, not a good TL. Yes, a good TL can keep us on path even with a messy Concept. But CAP history shows that most of the time, the community can and will follow a relatively defined path, with or without a single individual's guiding vision.
We may even get more consistent leadership with the TLT, because we won't have a drop-off in TL activity at the end of the project. My point is that current projects tend to lack the benefit of "consistent vision", because at the end of a CAP, the project tends to be a bit rudderless most of the time anyway after the TL is worn out and inactive. So this drawback may actually turn out to be a benefit.
2) People may not work as hard to prove themselves in CAP, because we have removed one of the most prestigious achievements in CAP (ie. the singular title of Topic Leader). Perhaps, but I don't think so. There are plenty of reasons to prove yourself in CAP. With a TLT, we arguably INCREASE the motivation for more people to prove themselves, because we make the reward of leading a CAP project much more accessible by creating multiple leadership positions. Yes, the reward is diluted quite a bit. But I think many more people will see a position on the TLT as being within their grasp.
At the end of the CAP project, we may want to create a poll for "Best Topic Leader". This dovetails with the "Best Discussion" Policy Review we had recently, but for different reasons. By having an implicit competition amongst the members of the TLT, we encourage all of them to do their best. This competition also will tend to limit the drive for leaders to indulge selfish goals, because they will hurt their chances to win in the end. Along those same lines, we could recommend that we use "Supporting the Concept" as a criteria for judging the best individual TL. This will discourage leaders to veer in weird directions with their sections of the project that isn't consistent with the Concept. If we don't think the community at large is the right audience to make this sort of judgement, we could restrict it to a smaller expert group. I'm open to suggestions on the best way to do it.We may even get more consistent leadership with the TLT, because we won't have a drop-off in TL activity at the end of the project. My point is that current projects tend to lack the benefit of "consistent vision", because at the end of a CAP, the project tends to be a bit rudderless most of the time anyway after the TL is worn out and inactive. So this drawback may actually turn out to be a benefit.
2) People may not work as hard to prove themselves in CAP, because we have removed one of the most prestigious achievements in CAP (ie. the singular title of Topic Leader). Perhaps, but I don't think so. There are plenty of reasons to prove yourself in CAP. With a TLT, we arguably INCREASE the motivation for more people to prove themselves, because we make the reward of leading a CAP project much more accessible by creating multiple leadership positions. Yes, the reward is diluted quite a bit. But I think many more people will see a position on the TLT as being within their grasp.
The Best Topic Leader would be listed on the Credits page for that CAP pokemon, in the slot where we currently list the Topic Leader. No, we should not list the entire TLT. This gives a meaningful carrot for all TLT members to work for. It also has a nice tie to CAP history and tradition of having a single person identified in the CAP dex for their leadership on a given CAP.
Wrap Up
I've presented a mountain of information in this Policy Review. I'll stop here, even though there are many details left to be determined if we choose to pursue this proposal. I'm sick of writing, and you are probably sick of reading by now. If not, I applaud your stamina!
Topic Leadership is one of the most important aspects of Create-A-Pokemon, so I could not cover this without a lot of explanation and detail. For everyone that has read the whole thing, I hope it is very clear that I have not considered this lightly. This is not a knee-jerk reaction to CAP 4, even though the train wreck of our most recent CAP did trigger this Policy Review. This has been building for a very long time, and there are many factors that have contributed to the problems we face today with Topic Leadership. It is time for us to deal with it head on.