As I listen to this video, I can’t help but think that playing Gen 5 OU sounds like playing competitive rock paper scissors, except that paper has a 6.25% chance to haxx scissors out of a win.
Interesting timing for this video. Have a friend who just got into competitive Pokémon. He wanted to play gen 5 because that’s the game he played as a kid. He’s been learning about the game for a little while but yesterday I helped him build a gen 5 OU sand team. He shared some replays with me and I noticed pretty much every game was against rain so I adjusted his team to counter rain and then he went on a massive win streak with pretty basic knowledge of the game. Had to explain to him why his Pokémon did less damage after being burned today.
Yeah, rain teams are super common in gen 5. I swear in nearly 50% of my games there is a politoad + ferrothorn combo on the enemy team. With some combination of thunderus, latios, tentacruel, keldeo filling it out.
as someone who finally made a letterboxd account this year and has seriously been trying to do his homework on the classics, the bkc movie channel cannot come soon enough.
BKC movie channel is going to be great, considering I’m not a big movie guy but definitely looking to get into movies as a whole. Such a cool medium, and I’ve been lucky enough to (accidentally) watch a bunch of classics, so I’m quite excited for some new recommendations
Depends on what movies you like but here is my uncalled for opinion on some fantastic films in different genres. Oldboy - Korean revenge movie about a guy who tries to find the guy who imprisoned him. (do not watch the American version it is terrible) Marriage Story - Amazing romance/drama with empathetic characters that feel very real. The Lighthouse - Weird artsy black and white movie starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, about a guy who gets stranded on an island, very interpretable, artsy. A modern film that feels like a classic. It Follows - Good horror movie with a very unique premise. Prisoners - Detective / crime thriller with many interesting twists and turns. The Dirties - Meta indie film about a dont come to school scenario. Hot Fuzz - Funny and well paced comedy with fantastic editing and visual humor.
I agree with Cloyster. Using some sand teams I was struggling to break 1500. Recently I broke 1600 with a nevermeltice cloyster team… there’s less skill than just bullying poor team matchups
Dragmagged my way to break 1500 and then quit the tier, it’s just a mess and not really worth playing at all in its current state. Ladder is extremely unfun because depending on who you match into, it feels like a free win with just a tiny bit of game knowledge or an unavoidable loss unless they throw
@@KindaKaon yep gen 5 ou is terrible,you just encounter,latios,keldeo,thundurus-T,every single game,dragmag is such a skill-less playstyle but its so effective,and yes even with consistent sand teams you still lose to bad match ups or just straight up win with little effort.
I think this phrase of "having the right amount of variance" has it's root at the core of the game. After all this mixture of chess and poker we play called "Pokemon" has a big component of playing the odds and nobody will disagree with it. However the reason why people look for "the right amount" is precisely because what everybody wants is for the best players to win the most consistently. Because in this concoction of a game we've developed there's a third element in teambuilding/deckbuilding where variance is hugely important. Although of course every player tries to reduce variance as much as possible on his own gameplan (since everyone thinks they have the best strategy/tactics, they want it the most consistent), having variance in the metagame is necessary otherwise it turns either into centralization (which we'll never see in pokemon (althought it does make the better players more consistent)) or into match-up wars which introduces it's own out-of-the-game variance where the luck of the match-up is so important that there are formats where opponents ban certain decks of each other cause otherwise you can get into a position where the most important decision you take is the deck/team you take in to a game. With my limited BW OU experience I think that's what's happening there due to the offensive nature of the meta. Ofc going full 180 into the variance (I'm thinking gen 6 swagger) doesn't benefit the metagame either, but that's why you gotta find the compromise of "the right amount", or bite the bullet of centralization (at which point were better off remixing ubers into the default tier).
I personally am not totally sure what your movie channel will entail, but I’d assume movie length videos about Pokémon and more specifically older gens of Pokémon, I’m here for it.
I’d absolutely love to watch a movie channel hosted by you! after i finish my exams i wanna start watching more movies and reading more books, would be great to get some film recommendations from you / hearing you discuss movies in general
With regards to “the best player shouldn’t win every time.” That’s a complete absurdity when talking about tournaments and an online ladder, but games do this all the time to try to encourage players of a lower skill level to engage with the game. Pokemon was initially designed with this philosophy in mind, and it was part of why it was able to appeal to kids so much. It’s also the reason that smogon will *always* be tearing its hair out to do the equivalent of removing RNG from a card game
I'll probably check out your movie channel. You ramble at a level of detail that makes sense to me, so it should be interesting when applied to movie theory
I had a thought, how would palosand effect the gen 5 metagame if it was available at the time and water compaction actually gave an immunity. Unsure if it would replace jellicent on sand teams or rather be a niché due to lack of wisp as it would only have toxic for status spreading and overall rely on it's stabs and shore up, almost undoubtly would make having ones respective weather even more one sided in terms of sand vs rain matchups.
I wouldn't call it daunting (in the sense to learn it) since the structures are so centralized and established, but volatile is certainly applicable to it.
Question. If the issue with balance vs hyper offence is that you need ttar for rain and its useless in hyper offense, why not run a manual weather setter instead? Could something like sunny day ferrothirn better the hyper offence match up while still canceling out rain's bullshit?
The issue is that a) Ferrothorn has way more than 4 moves that it wants to use besides Sunny Day, and b) having a weather changing moves isn't effective long-term vs rain teams, who can repeatedly just switch one Pokemon in and bring back the rain. The reason why Sand Stream and Drizzle are as powerful as they are is because they don't have to waste a turn setting up the weather. Also, in this specific instance, Ferrothorn clicking Sunny Day is just letting your opponent get in more Scalds on it, or worse, Calm Minding with Reuniclus. Ferrothorn additionally doesnt necessarily improve your matchup into opposing hyper offense since they tend to bring sweepers Ferro struggles vs (Volcarona, Scizor, Dragonite, Breloom).
I dont play Bw ou, but i guess that a manual setter is not consistent enough to beat rain. While toed can come back to set up rain over and over, ferro would need to risk getting hit twice on rain if you dont want to sack anything. And that turn spent trying to set up sun could have been a turn used for a leech seed, knock off, hazard, Power Whip, etc. Some teams do rely on manual setters, but its more of a situational move to punsih Politoed sacks. Dragspam may run sunny day on magnezone for example, but if you run dragspam, then you are risking getting destroyed by Latios and Mamoswine.
@@tbolt__ You need to believe in the sunny magnezone. You can trap ferro(which nearly all rain teams run), set up sunny day, then biden blast with hp fire. Politoad comes in after, then you hit sunny day again, surviving a hit with defensive bulk ev's. They'll probably go thunderus after, and hit focus blast. In that case you either switch, if you have a counter to them clicking substitute, or you stay in, eat the blast and die, throw in your wallpuncher of choice, and sweep from there. By the time they get rain back up you should be setup to kill another 2-3 mons on their team, and by that point its normally gg. It's what I do on my drag-mag team atleast, which seems to win nearly every game I don't choke.
So I started maining tcg over the video games back in gen 8 for various reasons. I don't always keep up with what Smogon is doing nowadays (this usually consists of looking at Policy Review, rolling my eyes, and then leaving again), but sometimes your videos catch my eye. And I think it's interesting to try to relate the two games, even though they are very different types of game. (Very different personality types among the players too, I've found; someone like Grant Manley feels more like a Smogonite than a tcger but he's a tcger instead.) And I think there's something to be said for how, in tcg, there's a spectrum where you want some consistency but not too much or else people hate the format and call it solitaire. (ADP Zacian format of late SWSH.) Like there seems to be a level of variance where people are most comfortable and erring too severely either way makes people upset for one reason or another when they talk about formats. But there's something striking to me about the way philosophies vary between the two games. Both involve a lot of potential skill, metagame knowledge, etc, but also have a lot of luck and variance, though I think tcg is more overt about it. I feel like there's SOMETHING there to talk about, to dig into, but for the life of me I'm not sure how to vocalise it. But I do think having experience in both games has been eye-opening and now I find myself hearing stuff like this video and reflecting and really questioning a lot of what I would call like "settled doctrine" that Smogon just takes as a matter of fact when deciding policy. I don't think I can pop out a manifesto right here right now, (I wish I weren't such at a goddamn loss to explain what I'm feeling) but this video has been very thought-provoking. So thank you for that.
"it's boring if the better player always gets to win" sounds like a good way to drive off players who are good at the game. why get good when you can spin the roulette wheel every match and if you're lucky, guarantee a win barring an act of god?
Is banning Latios a reasonable proposal? I haven’t played the tier in a while but when I did Latios always felt so restrictive. Might allow hippo teams to thrive more
Latios is balanced with pursuit present for me. Keldeo is way more annoying personally, its counters all get destroyed by pursuit, not to mention sub cm can beat things like jellicent
Not in the tier's current state. It checks too many broken things. Possibly if Rain threats (or Rain itself, most likely not happening) get banned then yea, why not?
This kind of theing happens in the smash ultimate community, where the player base switches sides based on what top players say. Weve got a problem called steve Minecraft which is pretty polarizing and opinion on him and his possible ban changes every day
The variance argument in the end of the video completely boggles my mind. "There should be more variance in Pokémon because it's boring if the best players win all the time" How is this an argument of someone trying to make the game more competitive? If the best player wins all the time, then that's great, it means the game is truly competitive, just get good and you can overcome the best player. On another note, I think the problem in gen 5 mostly stems from the philosophy of how old gens are treated by Smogon. I understand trying to maintain the tiers in the state that they were in the end of the generation, but these tiers are still played to this day, we gotta balance them if we want them to be competitive. The ideal thing that I think can satisfy both sides is making some kind of legacy tiers, where everything is exactly as it was before the tier stopped being the current gen, and make a "modern tier", where you balance the game after it became and old gen and new developments were made. I think this would be great for BW OU especially because of how different a balanced BW OU would be from the traditional tier, since the most probable path for balance would be banning drought and drizzle
The problem is games without variance can become "solved" over time and feel samey. i've been a competitive fighting-game player for decades and a competitive board-game player for years, and i find board games more consistently enjoyable *because* of the randomness. Not in the "i can get lucky and beat the best!" sense, but in how differently you have to strategize when RNG is that important of a factor. Essentially, you have to build more flexible gameplans and be able to read the room & adapt on the fly to any set of circumstances (what cards are drawn, etc.). That said, i do hate when a major luck element occurs before you get to make any decisions at all. This happens with first-player advantage in a bunch of board games, for example. That i won't defend lol
@@joshthefunkdoc Pokemon is a game with a ton of variables and even older gens like RBY still aren't exactly solved, this is going to be even harder in the newer gens with how many extra variables there are, so I wouldn't be too worried about that
I haven't touched the tier since early 2013, but even I can see why you think rain is the problem (though I think it might extend to Latios as well). Tyranitar is a bad pokemon you are forced to use in order to stop toed without the 2 turn cost / speed requirement (manual weather moves). The easiest way to fix this is to remove the biggest piece that demands TTar be on your team and the answer to that is Politoed. Latios similarly demands TTar be on your team (especially with toed gone) though the other psychics look exploitable enough for the most part (I think there may be more to them that may break them with these meta changes though but I can't say for sure). I'm sure there is something I am missing with the Latios piece but everything about it is still kinda wild even all these years later. From what I see, these pieces demand that you run a Pokemon that is bad against the metagame as a whole to stop them. Many other threats have been banned because they demand you run a Pokemon that is bad against the metagame as a whole to stop them (see Blaziken). Is it as extreme as an example as Blaziken, no but these are clearly causing problems in a similar way just not to the same extent. I hope the BW OU people figure something out regardless. Even 10 years later, it is not too late.
The tldr is that latios is absolutely broken but if you ban latios, keldeo and thundt become even more broken and so many other dangerous mons become so much better, so in the end no one does anything
honestly the worst thing about ttar is that he can't do everything that you want him to do. that is something that happened also in dpp, but in bw the power creep just makes it 10x worse.
From a game design perspective, I can understand gems. They were a mistake, but I get their thought process. Even the idea of perma rain/sun outside of Groudon/Kyogre is understandable, its something like "heck, we alredy have sand and hail, why not give drizzle/drought to a non box legendary, it would be fun". However, i cant get how they came with something so busted like shell smash (and eventually Geomancy as well). Quiver Dance is alredy pretty dangerous and it only raises 1 of each stat, but doubling BOTH offensive stats while also doubling the speed with a minor drawback that doesnt come into play very often is absurd.
just last week i finally got bored of dpp ou so i decided to try bw ou for the first time. its been really fun so far but man, its stupid how matchup reliant the tier is. its not unwinnable but it shouldn't be that inconsistent
this is not exclusive to the pokemon competitive community. this widely seen in many other communities / discussions as well for example: politics of certain locations, sports fans, the league of legends community, a lot of scientific / medical fields especially related to eating and exercising. its not a specific community issue its people are often irrational and are often only concerned with saying to themselves and or other that they were correct even though the evidence clearly point in the opposite direction. ( and obviously there's plenty of people that seem to rarely ever think before they talk ) if you want to have intelligent discussion you have to have a degree of boundaries and restrictions for example smogon discussions threads often VERY clearly state in the post that YOU HAVE TO give reasoning to support your claim instead of simply stating you should do x or i believe y or else your comment will be deleted. discord servers can be a very healthy good options but keep in mind the dangers of a small tight knit community having the very real possibility of developing or outright intentionally making an inner circle of upper ranking member that proceed to over rule, ban, and generally under mine and disregard anything they dont like or want then devolving the community into an echo chamber. thank you for providing good healthy commentary BKC and please keep up the great work :)
BKC, could you do a video on weatherless stall in BW? I dont get the community's praise of rain stall, for me weatherless with magnezone feels way superior and carried me a lot.
I play gen 5 on the ladder p regularly (usually ranked 1400-1500). The reason I like the tier is that it is really unique and easy to pilot. I can load up a standard rain or sand team and not have to think to much about what I’m going to do. I will say I would not like to play it in tournament for the reasons you stated. But you can’t deny that it is a fun tier to just load up and spam whatever broken strategy
Why don’t ppl just set subs up on a protecting glisgor? I try running it on lots of let’s go mons and glisgor just seems like one of those mons you just sub on with starmie.
Yea it's all just shock value now. Just really disturbing scenes. Feel like Saw and a lesser extent Human Centipede began this trend. I hate it. Hereditary the only horror movie in recent years I've liked.
Boosting moves ruin gen 5 and that is just fact. There is so little you can do to stop a sweep in this gen and all the best sweepers only have one counter which is almost always extremely frail and prone to getting worn down by hazards.
The sentiment that it’s boring when the best players win every time so we need to introduce high variance is the dumbest, scrubbiest shit I’ve ever heard
Bo1 vs Bo3 I think is a largely irrelevant argument. The actual game, outside of the variance, isn't between two teams, it's between the two players and their gameplans, with the teams being simply tools. The more games you add, the less the gameplan matters, and in a way it just comes more down to the natural variance, when cookie cutter teams are what players are forced to bring. That's why some players like to take a break between multiple games in a best of series, so they can continue the "gameplan" against their opponent, which is what "competitive" pokemon is at its core.
@@pedroide23000 Gameplan makes use of information. Information that you have time to analyze before a battle, so has maximal effect in either a Bo1 or the first game of a BoX. Even if your opponent doesn't have any replays available, it's info that determines your gameplan, something like "safe", or maybe "abusive" to take advantage of potential inexperience. If you have time between the matches of a BoX, then you have an opportunity to gameplan based on the new info provided, but if done back to back, your subsequent matches kind of have to conform to a safe, oftentimes cookie cutter sort of approach to mitigate the different possibilities. Not always, but there is a definite tendency I see in these best ofs. Rare, will I see someone use something off the wall that was prepared in an elimination match in a BoX, but in a Bo1, these are much more common.
I think the argument is really more about "matchup fishing or cheese style" teambuilding vs "consistent" teambuilding. If the BO1 format got scrapped and Smogon moved over to a BO3, less people would run matchup fishes, or build a team knowing that it's weak to a certain metagame staple with the mentality of "I'll just hope they don't bring that thing that 6-0s my poorly constructed team". Also, for all the complaints about "hax", a BO3 gives each player a chance to "right those wrongs", so to speak. If I hax you in a BO1 format, I win, its over, you have to take your salty feelings about your supposed superior skill over me and accept that you lost. In a BO3, if I haxed you in game 1, then game 2 will be about me trying to deviate from the trajectory of game 1 because I would've lost without that key moment of hax, and game 2 for you will be about you trying to make sure you continue to control the tempo and bring us back to a position where bad odds is the only way for you to have lost. In a BO3 format, our gameplans actually matter way more than they would in a BO1. If you have a good plan, you can stick to it in games 2 and 3. If your plan sucks, you have to devise a new one based on information you learned in game 1, like my sets, my decision making, and what did/didn't work for you then. I think it's amazingly shortsighted to claim that switching from a BO1 to BO3 format would ever diminish anything about the nature of the game. I think that the way Smogon does BO3 is wrong. Switching between tiers, or between generations doesn't really express skill in anything except being around for longer than your opponent. It just makes tournaments more about being grandfathered into smogon culture, or having more time sunken into Showdown than your opponent. They could be a better gen 9 player than you, but you've been around since gen 5, so if this is a BO3, and you play other generations, you're gonna beat an otherwise better player because you know way more than them. If BO3 was limited to a single tier in a single generation, and with a single team, then tournaments would likely be way more satisfying to watch and participate in.
www.smogon.com/forums/threads/spl-xiv-replays.3714486/
www.smogon.com/forums/threads/allow-players-to-vote-on-bo3-vs-bo1-in-team-tours.3717195/#post-9526868
Hello, is there any chance I can see you team?
As I listen to this video, I can’t help but think that playing Gen 5 OU sounds like playing competitive rock paper scissors, except that paper has a 6.25% chance to haxx scissors out of a win.
Interesting timing for this video. Have a friend who just got into competitive Pokémon. He wanted to play gen 5 because that’s the game he played as a kid. He’s been learning about the game for a little while but yesterday I helped him build a gen 5 OU sand team. He shared some replays with me and I noticed pretty much every game was against rain so I adjusted his team to counter rain and then he went on a massive win streak with pretty basic knowledge of the game. Had to explain to him why his Pokémon did less damage after being burned today.
Yeah, rain teams are super common in gen 5. I swear in nearly 50% of my games there is a politoad + ferrothorn combo on the enemy team. With some combination of thunderus, latios, tentacruel, keldeo filling it out.
as someone who finally made a letterboxd account this year and has seriously been trying to do his homework on the classics, the bkc movie channel cannot come soon enough.
What's your@???
@@pitchkinker gich is my username on there! only got a few irls at the moment who are also pretty into movies so happy to have more film buds
They gotta try Finch at The Hague for a) supporting Bo1 and b) supporting Big Stall
BKC movie channel is going to be great, considering I’m not a big movie guy but definitely looking to get into movies as a whole. Such a cool medium, and I’ve been lucky enough to (accidentally) watch a bunch of classics, so I’m quite excited for some new recommendations
Depends on what movies you like but here is my uncalled for opinion on some fantastic films in different genres.
Oldboy - Korean revenge movie about a guy who tries to find the guy who imprisoned him. (do not watch the American version it is terrible)
Marriage Story - Amazing romance/drama with empathetic characters that feel very real.
The Lighthouse - Weird artsy black and white movie starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, about a guy who gets stranded on an island, very interpretable, artsy. A modern film that feels like a classic.
It Follows - Good horror movie with a very unique premise.
Prisoners - Detective / crime thriller with many interesting twists and turns.
The Dirties - Meta indie film about a dont come to school scenario.
Hot Fuzz - Funny and well paced comedy with fantastic editing and visual humor.
@@DantinozMC thanks - i've actually (fortunately) seen a couple of these but ill give the others a shot too
You should check out the cult classic, Hamilton 2
I agree with Cloyster. Using some sand teams I was struggling to break 1500. Recently I broke 1600 with a nevermeltice cloyster team… there’s less skill than just bullying poor team matchups
Dragmagged my way to break 1500 and then quit the tier, it’s just a mess and not really worth playing at all in its current state. Ladder is extremely unfun because depending on who you match into, it feels like a free win with just a tiny bit of game knowledge or an unavoidable loss unless they throw
@@KindaKaon yep gen 5 ou is terrible,you just encounter,latios,keldeo,thundurus-T,every single game,dragmag is such a skill-less playstyle but its so effective,and yes even with consistent sand teams you still lose to bad match ups or just straight up win with little effort.
Hello, is there any chance I can see you team?
I think this phrase of "having the right amount of variance" has it's root at the core of the game. After all this mixture of chess and poker we play called "Pokemon" has a big component of playing the odds and nobody will disagree with it. However the reason why people look for "the right amount" is precisely because what everybody wants is for the best players to win the most consistently.
Because in this concoction of a game we've developed there's a third element in teambuilding/deckbuilding where variance is hugely important. Although of course every player tries to reduce variance as much as possible on his own gameplan (since everyone thinks they have the best strategy/tactics, they want it the most consistent), having variance in the metagame is necessary otherwise it turns either into centralization (which we'll never see in pokemon (althought it does make the better players more consistent)) or into match-up wars which introduces it's own out-of-the-game variance where the luck of the match-up is so important that there are formats where opponents ban certain decks of each other cause otherwise you can get into a position where the most important decision you take is the deck/team you take in to a game. With my limited BW OU experience I think that's what's happening there due to the offensive nature of the meta.
Ofc going full 180 into the variance (I'm thinking gen 6 swagger) doesn't benefit the metagame either, but that's why you gotta find the compromise of "the right amount", or bite the bullet of centralization (at which point were better off remixing ubers into the default tier).
BKC was so eloquent at the start, really showed his photosynthesis skills
Variance is my favorite player. Glad they’re finally getting a spotlight. : )
"Just accept variance" coming from the guy that helped the removal of King's Rock in multiple tiers.
This video brings up some interesting questions that are overshadowed by how funny I found the joke at the start.
I personally am not totally sure what your movie channel will entail, but I’d assume movie length videos about Pokémon and more specifically older gens of Pokémon, I’m here for it.
Brother, that’s what this channel is already
@@ostint912Lmfao
BKC movie channel 😳? FIRE 🔥
"Triangle of Sadness, hey a movie reference!" Homie is hilarious lol
I’d absolutely love to watch a movie channel hosted by you!
after i finish my exams i wanna start watching more movies and reading more books, would be great to get some film recommendations from you / hearing you discuss movies in general
With regards to “the best player shouldn’t win every time.”
That’s a complete absurdity when talking about tournaments and an online ladder, but games do this all the time to try to encourage players of a lower skill level to engage with the game.
Pokemon was initially designed with this philosophy in mind, and it was part of why it was able to appeal to kids so much. It’s also the reason that smogon will *always* be tearing its hair out to do the equivalent of removing RNG from a card game
I'll probably check out your movie channel. You ramble at a level of detail that makes sense to me, so it should be interesting when applied to movie theory
Watching these battles I'm noticing a theme, Cloyster claps cheeks.
"HO beats sand and loses to rain" this makes me wanna run a Dragmag team with a Specs Swift Swim Kingdra
Lfg BKC!!!! Even the movie channel, you're spoiling us
TL;DR - Gen 5 OU is a game of rock/paper/scissors, and you _wish_ you could pick gun, but all you've got are rubber bullets.
As someone whose been trying to become a film bro in a similar light to trying to become a Pokémon showdowncel, I can’t get this film channel enough
I had a thought, how would palosand effect the gen 5 metagame if it was available at the time and water compaction actually gave an immunity.
Unsure if it would replace jellicent on sand teams or rather be a niché due to lack of wisp as it would only have toxic for status spreading and overall rely on it's stabs and shore up, almost undoubtly would make having ones respective weather even more one sided in terms of sand vs rain matchups.
Gen 5 OU has to be the most volatile and daunting OU meta game of all existing gens, at least imo.
I wouldn't call it daunting (in the sense to learn it) since the structures are so centralized and established, but volatile is certainly applicable to it.
Still is that way sadly
Question. If the issue with balance vs hyper offence is that you need ttar for rain and its useless in hyper offense, why not run a manual weather setter instead? Could something like sunny day ferrothirn better the hyper offence match up while still canceling out rain's bullshit?
The issue is that a) Ferrothorn has way more than 4 moves that it wants to use besides Sunny Day, and b) having a weather changing moves isn't effective long-term vs rain teams, who can repeatedly just switch one Pokemon in and bring back the rain. The reason why Sand Stream and Drizzle are as powerful as they are is because they don't have to waste a turn setting up the weather.
Also, in this specific instance, Ferrothorn clicking Sunny Day is just letting your opponent get in more Scalds on it, or worse, Calm Minding with Reuniclus. Ferrothorn additionally doesnt necessarily improve your matchup into opposing hyper offense since they tend to bring sweepers Ferro struggles vs (Volcarona, Scizor, Dragonite, Breloom).
I dont play Bw ou, but i guess that a manual setter is not consistent enough to beat rain. While toed can come back to set up rain over and over, ferro would need to risk getting hit twice on rain if you dont want to sack anything. And that turn spent trying to set up sun could have been a turn used for a leech seed, knock off, hazard, Power Whip, etc.
Some teams do rely on manual setters, but its more of a situational move to punsih Politoed sacks. Dragspam may run sunny day on magnezone for example, but if you run dragspam, then you are risking getting destroyed by Latios and Mamoswine.
@@tbolt__ You need to believe in the sunny magnezone. You can trap ferro(which nearly all rain teams run), set up sunny day, then biden blast with hp fire. Politoad comes in after, then you hit sunny day again, surviving a hit with defensive bulk ev's. They'll probably go thunderus after, and hit focus blast. In that case you either switch, if you have a counter to them clicking substitute, or you stay in, eat the blast and die, throw in your wallpuncher of choice, and sweep from there. By the time they get rain back up you should be setup to kill another 2-3 mons on their team, and by that point its normally gg.
It's what I do on my drag-mag team atleast, which seems to win nearly every game I don't choke.
How can you invest time in a tier thats handled with the mindset that "the best players winning is boring"
So I started maining tcg over the video games back in gen 8 for various reasons. I don't always keep up with what Smogon is doing nowadays (this usually consists of looking at Policy Review, rolling my eyes, and then leaving again), but sometimes your videos catch my eye.
And I think it's interesting to try to relate the two games, even though they are very different types of game. (Very different personality types among the players too, I've found; someone like Grant Manley feels more like a Smogonite than a tcger but he's a tcger instead.)
And I think there's something to be said for how, in tcg, there's a spectrum where you want some consistency but not too much or else people hate the format and call it solitaire. (ADP Zacian format of late SWSH.) Like there seems to be a level of variance where people are most comfortable and erring too severely either way makes people upset for one reason or another when they talk about formats.
But there's something striking to me about the way philosophies vary between the two games. Both involve a lot of potential skill, metagame knowledge, etc, but also have a lot of luck and variance, though I think tcg is more overt about it.
I feel like there's SOMETHING there to talk about, to dig into, but for the life of me I'm not sure how to vocalise it. But I do think having experience in both games has been eye-opening and now I find myself hearing stuff like this video and reflecting and really questioning a lot of what I would call like "settled doctrine" that Smogon just takes as a matter of fact when deciding policy.
I don't think I can pop out a manifesto right here right now, (I wish I weren't such at a goddamn loss to explain what I'm feeling) but this video has been very thought-provoking. So thank you for that.
People who want more variance to hide their skill issue need to ask themselves why they don't just play randbats
So it sounds like BW OU has been "solved" down to matchup RPS in a sense.
"it's boring if the better player always gets to win" sounds like a good way to drive off players who are good at the game. why get good when you can spin the roulette wheel every match and if you're lucky, guarantee a win barring an act of god?
This part of the video actually made me so sad
Is banning Latios a reasonable proposal? I haven’t played the tier in a while but when I did Latios always felt so restrictive. Might allow hippo teams to thrive more
Latios is balanced with pursuit present for me. Keldeo is way more annoying personally, its counters all get destroyed by pursuit, not to mention sub cm can beat things like jellicent
Not in the tier's current state. It checks too many broken things. Possibly if Rain threats (or Rain itself, most likely not happening) get banned then yea, why not?
This kind of theing happens in the smash ultimate community, where the player base switches sides based on what top players say. Weve got a problem called steve Minecraft which is pretty polarizing and opinion on him and his possible ban changes every day
The variance argument in the end of the video completely boggles my mind. "There should be more variance in Pokémon because it's boring if the best players win all the time" How is this an argument of someone trying to make the game more competitive? If the best player wins all the time, then that's great, it means the game is truly competitive, just get good and you can overcome the best player.
On another note, I think the problem in gen 5 mostly stems from the philosophy of how old gens are treated by Smogon. I understand trying to maintain the tiers in the state that they were in the end of the generation, but these tiers are still played to this day, we gotta balance them if we want them to be competitive. The ideal thing that I think can satisfy both sides is making some kind of legacy tiers, where everything is exactly as it was before the tier stopped being the current gen, and make a "modern tier", where you balance the game after it became and old gen and new developments were made. I think this would be great for BW OU especially because of how different a balanced BW OU would be from the traditional tier, since the most probable path for balance would be banning drought and drizzle
The problem is games without variance can become "solved" over time and feel samey. i've been a competitive fighting-game player for decades and a competitive board-game player for years, and i find board games more consistently enjoyable *because* of the randomness. Not in the "i can get lucky and beat the best!" sense, but in how differently you have to strategize when RNG is that important of a factor. Essentially, you have to build more flexible gameplans and be able to read the room & adapt on the fly to any set of circumstances (what cards are drawn, etc.).
That said, i do hate when a major luck element occurs before you get to make any decisions at all. This happens with first-player advantage in a bunch of board games, for example. That i won't defend lol
@@joshthefunkdoc Pokemon is a game with a ton of variables and even older gens like RBY still aren't exactly solved, this is going to be even harder in the newer gens with how many extra variables there are, so I wouldn't be too worried about that
I haven't touched the tier since early 2013, but even I can see why you think rain is the problem (though I think it might extend to Latios as well). Tyranitar is a bad pokemon you are forced to use in order to stop toed without the 2 turn cost / speed requirement (manual weather moves). The easiest way to fix this is to remove the biggest piece that demands TTar be on your team and the answer to that is Politoed. Latios similarly demands TTar be on your team (especially with toed gone) though the other psychics look exploitable enough for the most part (I think there may be more to them that may break them with these meta changes though but I can't say for sure). I'm sure there is something I am missing with the Latios piece but everything about it is still kinda wild even all these years later. From what I see, these pieces demand that you run a Pokemon that is bad against the metagame as a whole to stop them. Many other threats have been banned because they demand you run a Pokemon that is bad against the metagame as a whole to stop them (see Blaziken). Is it as extreme as an example as Blaziken, no but these are clearly causing problems in a similar way just not to the same extent. I hope the BW OU people figure something out regardless. Even 10 years later, it is not too late.
The tldr is that latios is absolutely broken but if you ban latios, keldeo and thundt become even more broken and so many other dangerous mons become so much better, so in the end no one does anything
honestly the worst thing about ttar is that he can't do everything that you want him to do.
that is something that happened also in dpp, but in bw the power creep just makes it 10x worse.
From a game design perspective, I can understand gems. They were a mistake, but I get their thought process. Even the idea of perma rain/sun outside of Groudon/Kyogre is understandable, its something like "heck, we alredy have sand and hail, why not give drizzle/drought to a non box legendary, it would be fun".
However, i cant get how they came with something so busted like shell smash (and eventually Geomancy as well). Quiver Dance is alredy pretty dangerous and it only raises 1 of each stat, but doubling BOTH offensive stats while also doubling the speed with a minor drawback that doesnt come into play very often is absurd.
You're based.
just last week i finally got bored of dpp ou so i decided to try bw ou for the first time.
its been really fun so far but man, its stupid how matchup reliant the tier is.
its not unwinnable but it shouldn't be that inconsistent
hope the movie videos are just 2 hours of you talking over a browser with the imdb top 250 open
Yo hold up, you're friends with blunder? Hell yeah. Agency. 🙏
this is not exclusive to the pokemon competitive community. this widely seen in many other communities / discussions as well for example:
politics of certain locations, sports fans, the league of legends community, a lot of scientific / medical fields especially related to eating and exercising.
its not a specific community issue its people are often irrational and are often only concerned with saying to themselves and or other that they were correct even though the evidence clearly point in the opposite direction.
( and obviously there's plenty of people that seem to rarely ever think before they talk )
if you want to have intelligent discussion you have to have a degree of boundaries and restrictions for example smogon discussions threads often VERY clearly state in the post that YOU HAVE TO give reasoning to support your claim instead of simply stating you should do x or i believe y or else your comment will be deleted.
discord servers can be a very healthy good options but keep in mind the dangers of a small tight knit community having the very real possibility of developing or outright intentionally making an inner circle of upper ranking member that proceed to over rule, ban, and generally under mine and disregard anything they dont like or want then devolving the community into an echo chamber.
thank you for providing good healthy commentary BKC and please keep up the great work :)
BKC, could you do a video on weatherless stall in BW? I dont get the community's praise of rain stall, for me weatherless with magnezone feels way superior and carried me a lot.
Do you have pokepaste for that team? I want to try it out.
^
I play gen 5 on the ladder p regularly (usually ranked 1400-1500). The reason I like the tier is that it is really unique and easy to pilot. I can load up a standard rain or sand team and not have to think to much about what I’m going to do. I will say I would not like to play it in tournament for the reasons you stated. But you can’t deny that it is a fun tier to just load up and spam whatever broken strategy
Why don’t ppl just set subs up on a protecting glisgor? I try running it on lots of let’s go mons and glisgor just seems like one of those mons you just sub on with starmie.
oooh, some more BKC rant about gen 5
rock paper scissors has been one of the world's most popular games for centuries, maybe we're just missing something
LATIOS SPEEDTIES WOOOOOO
Modern horror is mostly not true horror, it's scary with no psychological side like horror should have
Yea it's all just shock value now. Just really disturbing scenes. Feel like Saw and a lesser extent Human Centipede began this trend. I hate it. Hereditary the only horror movie in recent years I've liked.
Lmao can't wait for the CEO of big stall video xD
Boosting moves ruin gen 5 and that is just fact.
There is so little you can do to stop a sweep in this gen and all the best sweepers only have one counter which is almost always extremely frail and prone to getting worn down by hazards.
Horror movies/books are good when they're confessions of guilt and immorality by their creators instead of decadent self-referential works
Interesting video but the frame rate on your footage is atrocious.
My opinion on gen 5 ou has grown
Latios speed ties ❤❤❤
If you can teach me about movie the same way you teach me pokemon, then I'll be the most cultured kiddo on the block
19:50 what the fuck did lechonk do to this person?
The sentiment that it’s boring when the best players win every time so we need to introduce high variance is the dumbest, scrubbiest shit I’ve ever heard
I guess you can say the generations metagame is... **black and white**
Anyone got a TL;DR of this? Because im like wtf this guy talking about lol
Bo1 vs Bo3 I think is a largely irrelevant argument. The actual game, outside of the variance, isn't between two teams, it's between the two players and their gameplans, with the teams being simply tools.
The more games you add, the less the gameplan matters, and in a way it just comes more down to the natural variance, when cookie cutter teams are what players are forced to bring. That's why some players like to take a break between multiple games in a best of series, so they can continue the "gameplan" against their opponent, which is what "competitive" pokemon is at its core.
could you explain why the more ganes you add the less the gameplans matter
@@pedroide23000 Gameplan makes use of information. Information that you have time to analyze before a battle, so has maximal effect in either a Bo1 or the first game of a BoX. Even if your opponent doesn't have any replays available, it's info that determines your gameplan, something like "safe", or maybe "abusive" to take advantage of potential inexperience.
If you have time between the matches of a BoX, then you have an opportunity to gameplan based on the new info provided, but if done back to back, your subsequent matches kind of have to conform to a safe, oftentimes cookie cutter sort of approach to mitigate the different possibilities. Not always, but there is a definite tendency I see in these best ofs. Rare, will I see someone use something off the wall that was prepared in an elimination match in a BoX, but in a Bo1, these are much more common.
I think the argument is really more about "matchup fishing or cheese style" teambuilding vs "consistent" teambuilding. If the BO1 format got scrapped and Smogon moved over to a BO3, less people would run matchup fishes, or build a team knowing that it's weak to a certain metagame staple with the mentality of "I'll just hope they don't bring that thing that 6-0s my poorly constructed team". Also, for all the complaints about "hax", a BO3 gives each player a chance to "right those wrongs", so to speak.
If I hax you in a BO1 format, I win, its over, you have to take your salty feelings about your supposed superior skill over me and accept that you lost. In a BO3, if I haxed you in game 1, then game 2 will be about me trying to deviate from the trajectory of game 1 because I would've lost without that key moment of hax, and game 2 for you will be about you trying to make sure you continue to control the tempo and bring us back to a position where bad odds is the only way for you to have lost.
In a BO3 format, our gameplans actually matter way more than they would in a BO1. If you have a good plan, you can stick to it in games 2 and 3. If your plan sucks, you have to devise a new one based on information you learned in game 1, like my sets, my decision making, and what did/didn't work for you then. I think it's amazingly shortsighted to claim that switching from a BO1 to BO3 format would ever diminish anything about the nature of the game. I think that the way Smogon does BO3 is wrong. Switching between tiers, or between generations doesn't really express skill in anything except being around for longer than your opponent. It just makes tournaments more about being grandfathered into smogon culture, or having more time sunken into Showdown than your opponent. They could be a better gen 9 player than you, but you've been around since gen 5, so if this is a BO3, and you play other generations, you're gonna beat an otherwise better player because you know way more than them. If BO3 was limited to a single tier in a single generation, and with a single team, then tournaments would likely be way more satisfying to watch and participate in.
bo3 def makes a difference, the ci tour analyses shows this
you are such an academic