Here you may pitch your ideas for hilarious film/album/song titles based on the evils of gen 5 OU and the travails suffered by its survivors; the more overdramatic, the better
The "We won't take tiering action cause XY is coming out" gives the same vibe as: "The nuclear power plant is going critical, but we won't do anything cause we won't live to see the consequences of our actions."
BW Uber and RU are just fantastic tiers and easily some of my favorites of all time, I personally invite anyone who never tried these meta to give them a go, they are worth it (even if RU has a tendency to get messy with Hustle Durant endgames, it's still a great metagame)
That combination was ridiculous on any team, but I especially associate it with the Lavos Spawn sun team that was so popular & stl is listed as an RMT that captures that era of B2W2
This story of dropping an uber into a broken OU reminded me a bit of early gen 4 UU, even though it was a bit different when you look more closely at it. Back at the beginning of gen 4, tiering wasn't done in the same way as it's been done for most of gen 4 and onwards. Instead, it followed something that was similar to gen 3. And the UU of gen 4 was made simply by importing the UU list from gen 3, and then theorymoning and quessing what gen 4 pokemon would be of a similar strength level. This was recognized as a poor way of doing it though, and it was recognized that there could be a higher power metagame that was balanced. So how they initially tried to solve it was to drop a few non-OU pokemon down into UU at a time, causing chaos and imbalance. I remember Crobat being one of the really controversial pokemon, and I think Pinsir may also have been a big deal, and I think Weezing was added to UU in this way. Eventually the whole UU tier was just scrapped and made from scratch, using the methods that we use today.
I think the closest thing we had to this type of meta is week 1 of Pokemon Home in gen 9 where the council decided to throw in a bunch of very not okay mons into OU including the already suspected Chien Pao. The difference being that they fished all these guys out of the tier in like two weeks and Base Zamzenta is a pretty healthy addition to the meta.
@@OshawottLuke Youll be pleased to hear that his exterior is just as enticing as his eloquence if not moreso dudes like 6'4 and resembles a more chiseled Daniel radcliffe
i read the tittle, thought "its gen 5 genescect OU, right?" and then i saw the thumbnail crazy times, i was 10 and stupid at the time, may god forgive me for i have defended this shit
"How can the metagame be unbalanced when top players win consistently?" I think a lot about Smash 4. It was a famously high-variance game, and yet it also featured the most dominant player in perhaps all of smash bros, winning 56 consecutive tournaments at the highest level. High variance and lack of balance are not enough to overcome raw skill.
gamefreak messed up by introducing so much broken shit and bringing far too many overpowered legendaries. Its by far the worst powercreep i've ever seen in my 10+ yrs of playing online.
Great video BKC, I occasionally watch your stuff but seldom comment since I haven't played mons in literal years but I think this one dug up just enough trauma that I felt I had to - I used to go by Honus/VN. around that time - hopefully you still remember me haha. This metagame truly was the worst and I think you laid out all of the reasons that it sucked better than I ever could. The Kyurem-B unban in particular was hilarious, because, like you said, it absolutely wasn't the most broken thing compared to its colleagues, but there was just no good reason to do so, and it basically destroyed any illusions people might have about running balance or semi-stall in that metagame. There was a funny bit of irony in that Smogon made the decision on the back of Pokemon Online unbanning it, only for the Smogon BW2 OU ladder to die out outside of suspect tests because the old regulars and tournament players hated playing it so much, so you had to go to the Pokemon Online server for better quality BW2 OU games (because PO still had a growing playerbase that was starting to produce its own solid players, and didn't mind the very offensive metagame, plus the old tour players who would switch over to PO because they had worked out the same thing). I think the worst thing about the tier is that there was so much bullshit that every 'ban' was just an incremental victory in an unwinnable war; Sisyphus rolling the boulder 1m further up the hill but still going nowhere. You go from Genesect being a general force of nature, to Tornadus-T having no counterplay, to Landorus-I having no true counters, to the Keldeo/Latios hegemony where you're dropping something after every correct double switch and the battle comes down to who burns their Scalds and who lands their Hydro Pumps. In hindsight I'm glad it pushed me out of just playing stall teams and got me to experiment with offensive stuff, but you weren't really team building either because everything was so centralized since the top threats were just in a different class compared to the rest. The biggest problem to me, which you spoke on as well, was that by BW2, the people making the tiering decisions were kind of "Old Guard" forum members from Gen 4, and most of them didn't actually play the game very often as far as laddering/tournaments go. As a result, they were just kind of ad-libbing based on accepted 'tiering theory' most of the time; the Smogon version of a young, firebrand politician that wants to change the world in their youth, but just devolves into another corrupt cog in the machine when they've gotten older and tenured. I remember Aldaron in particular caught a lot of heat because he was making posts like that despite not being nearly as active as a player in BW2 OU as he was in Gen 4. There was also kind of a brainworm among a lot of people (many of which were decision makers) at the time where 2 very different trains of thought basically arrived at the same, ultimately harmful conclusion of maintaining a very conservative approach to actually banning things. There was the crowd who would tell anyone complaining about X mon to just "man up and play around it" and effectively pull themselves up by their bootstraps and just sort of deal with the shitstorm by gitting gud, plus the crowd that thought it would hurt Smogon's image too much if the tiering leadership went Defcon-5 and just started suspecting all the big meta cancers at once; lest some clickbait youtuber make a video about how the Smogon Nazis want to ban everything. Of course, the actual players of the tier were in a constant state of dying wojak-ism where we were begging for any breadcrumb we could get in the form of a suspect test, and of course we'd show up to vote it in in hopes that it'd make the tier better (lol). Things seem to have gotten better (and hopefully stayed this way) in terms of tiering leadership, with guys like Finchinator, who play the tiers they lead A LOT and as a result, care about them A LOT, and that there's been more of a focus on creating a metagame that's healthy and enjoyable to play even if you have to start purging things en masse to do it. I guess in many ways BW2 OU was kind of a watershed moment in Pokemon Tiering History™because it represented an actual schism between the old theory-oriented conservative philosophy, and the newer, more liberal and player-oriented one. It's a shame things had to end up this way because, like you said, BW1 was a lot of fun to play, and we had a good thing going for a while. Yeah, there were big threats, but most of them could be played around, and there was a lot of room for innovation and experimentation (every couple of months you'd see some big new team take the world by storm until it got put in the RMT Archive as a piece of history, so forth and so on). And then shit just sort of hit the fan and nobody really took the initiative to deal with it, and the people who wanted to dealt with didn't really have enough power to do so outside of their measly tiering vote after suffering through 50-60 games of the Trail of Tears that was 2012-era BW2 OU.
Gen 5 was my first gen playing on simulators like PO, and I truly had no idea what I was doing back in the day, but I do remember it feeling like absolute chaos and I just ended up lurking in UU and RU for most of the generation I see people like blunder talk about it kind of nostalgically and I always wondered if it just came down to me being a bad player at the time (and it in fact probably was me just being bad mainly lol), but its nice to know it wasn't all just in my head
We were all young and had no frame of reference for what was balanced or not tbh. It's like when you're 30 and remember when you were 14 and you got your legs broken in basketball and then somehow scraped the skin of your entire left leg on the pavement, yeah it was painful back then but you still remember it fondly as a core memory.
@@eyecontrol4900 Gen 9 gives it a good run for it's money, and just like with Gen 5, the tier is not being handled properly, though somewhat differently. In gen 5 Rain was never banned despite how broken it was because of "current gen blindness" and the tier has suffered from it ever since, and the same is happening with Tera, and as a result the same symptoms keep on popping up every once in a while and so something new is banned, because the underlying illness is left untreated (both gens would still need a ton of bans even if those changes were applied regardless, but the tiers would he way more sane and balanced
@@sephikong8323 ah ok, i havnt played gen9 but i've heard its pretty bad. Problem with gen5 was smogon listened to too many casuals who scream "sMoGon bAn eVerYtHing". The fact Latios,Keldeo and Terrakion are still in OU is absurd. In general Sand > HO, HO > Rain and Rain > Sand. Gamefreak have never cared about balance for singles, only vcg/doubles. Gen6-8 are way more stable than the chaos of bw2 ou.
the worst meta game that i witnessed was the gen 8 clef wish protect meta before we got more dlc. if the ones i’ve watched, gen 7 is my least favorite to watch. i remember getting so bored of watching the tapus, pex, lando, tran and clef on every team.
I would argue in retrospective that the biggest perpetrators as to why pre dlc gen 8 OU was such a abomination were actually Dracovish & Kyurem, they just forced certain very few mons on every team and absolutely smashed with little support and effort anyways
@@anna_medeiawhile your statements are true, i think for me the biggest perpetrator was clef (and co.) getting the teleport buff and how insane it made the game to play when every single team had a -8 priority u-turn on a fat piece of shit mon that you cant kill. seeing slowking or clef teleport into urshifu, weavile or melmetal for the 50th time with no drawback thanks to boots was just so fucking boring.
@@anna_medeiadraco got banned during the clef mega and made it worse. 50% clef usage. unaware boots and wish port. was truly awful. kyreum was yet to be discovered and was still hanging out in UU/RU
@@selearth3123You also cannot forget everyone getting passive recovery with rillaboom's grassy surge and slow twins regenerator pivoting. Balance vs balance matchups were disgusting in this period, I took time off from the metagame for more than a year lol.
Also people do not remember pre Zygarde ban Gen 7 OU, whose ban exorcised a million demons from the metagame amd made it into my favorite current gen of all time during its tenure.
Probably banded or life orb with super power to stop ferrothorn and kyrum which opens up potential banded water falls and aqua jet spam in rain (thought mighta been belly + jet but still not possible in gen 5)
looking back on it, if the behavior aldaron displayed as a council member happened today from someone like finch, ausma, etc, the community would be marching with pitchforks. clearly they were back in the day, but i feel like it would have been a whole lot worse today. imagine current gen 9 if council members told the community to "just relax" or "stop bitching/stop moaning/stop whining" and didn't ban chi yu, chien pao, last respects, etc instead of being banned in a matter of hours or days like it did. times have certainly changed.
BW OU is objectively the worst metagame and the funniest metagame is the same time. What business did Lando-I, Genesect, Deo-D, and friends have in the tier💀
As someone who started playing during gen 7 the team in the video looked like an Ubers team, told me all that I needed to know. Very clear that someone didn't care enough to help clean up the mess.
Smogon council listened to far too many casuals and verlisify fans at the time, and thought "we better not ban too many things or else people will hate us for it". Its not their fault that gamefreak introduced so much broken shit into the games like Keldo, Terrakion, Genie forms and Genesect.
@@eyecontrol4900 So its the council's fault??? Their job is to quite literally regulate the metagame lmao. GF will not optimize things for singles, thats the entire point of Smogon. If they arent doing their job then what is the council there for. This is 100 percent on them, GF will release broken shit regardless and that hasnt stopped councils from doing what needs to be done
@@tailsman2000 BKC has mentioned multiple times in the past that the council should've banned more stuff to make the tier better. The fact that Keldeo and Latios are even allowed in gen5 ou still, shows how unbalanced shit is. Fuck verlisify and his toxic fanbase.
Seeing haunter's name come up, immediately hit by a wave of awful memories Dude was an awful council member, staff member, and a deplorable person in general
Do you know pokemmo? It have a pretty Interesting ou meta of a gen 5 without legendaries and some move changes, maybe you would like search about this version of gen 5
mostly stopped playing competitively after playing obsessively in gen 4, largely on account of just how awful gen 5 ou felt at multiple stages of its evolution. watching vods of current gen 5 ou makes it look like there's at least something there but good lord
Seeing this video really shows that pokemon doesn’t change, Gen 9 OU is the new Gen 5 OU, pure offense with broken mons being replaced by broken tera for the offensive engine
Got back into Pokémon again back in gen 6 days this time competitively and going back and playing the old gens OUs and man Gen 5 OU just isn’t fun at all. Absolutely love Gen 3 and 4 OU to death and loved early Gen 6 OU (became an NU player later on Bc it got a bit stale for me) but man Gen 5 OU is just so bad. I hated it everytime I played it.
For the record, my favorite tier ever was Early Gen 7 UU, before a bunch of stuff dropped and Mega Absol became unviable. It was such a fun time. I ran a Mega Absol anti-lead that fucked with so many people, and also just outright killed tier king Scizor anytime people tried to stay in on it. It was so much fun.
damn the old smogon leaders were not only wrong in their handling of the metagame, but horribly rude in doing so and were completely and blatantly careless to the wishes of their community. thank god for finch
My least favorite meta is probably Gen VIII Crown Tundra. It just was so stale feeling the entire time. It was close between it and the Isle of Armor which was also boring as sin. Obviously BW2 was a hot mess, but it was a fun hot mess at least once Torn T was gone. Were Deo D, Dugtrio, and Lando I dumb? Sure, but I had a fun time in it.
honestly as someone that came to the scene in gen 6, hearing all this historic context on how tiering was handled right before makes me understand much more the tiering decisions that were made rightafter, although I was pretty against them at the moment they seem much more reasonable that whatever was going on before
Bestie how did you manage to skip two of the most fun gens and come back for the most boring gen of all time. im a gen 1/2 hater and even those gens are more interesting and fun to me than gen 8 teleport boots spam was.
This is such a shame. Gen 5 could have had so many cool new options shining through if it wasn't for the allowance of all the broken shit to be used and the people in charge not giving a frick.
Video idea: What if items such as the griseous orb or Arceus' plates functioned the same as the Gracidea, e.g. were key items that one applied to the corresponding Pokémons to change their form? How would e.g. DPP Ubers and other formats change if stuff like Giratina-O had a free item slot?
Gira-O already is a defining mon of DPP Ubers, giving it lefties recovery or an offensive item more powerful than griseous orb would add in so much flexibility it might just become the best mon in the tier and a must to any team that isn't hard HO or some wacky Gira-A stall that abuses pressure to make up for spikes vulnerability
Younger me quit competitive pokemon around this time and wasn't having fun. I wasn't smart enough to know why at the time. This video has provided great clarity and fulfilment to my life
Oh hey, another connection to real life: "We can't test Drizzle; XY comes out in 10 months!" "We can't make a new, fair electoral map; the primary is a few months away!"
I think my least favorite meta was early gen 7 OU, honestly I didn't know it outside of retrospect because that's when I first started trying to teambuild for OU. I remember mega lucario being a huge issue with its physical and special sets having wildly different counters and checks and not knowing which it would be. Genesext was also such a problem. I did enjoy running defensive wisp talonflame back when Gale Wings was good. But i do sure remember pre dynamax ban gen 8. I dont think i even bothered playing until the mechanic was banned.
Honestly I don’t know how the messed up so badly early on Just take the ban list you already have put all the new legendarys and mythicals on it and work down from there no need to let mons that we’re good in Ubers in with a red carpet
Well gawrsh BKC, that gives me a video idea. If top players always being on and getting to the top of the ladder isn't a measure of competitiveness, what is? Provided of course, those people aren't just the only ones playing for extensive amounts of time, grinding out so long that some RNG-aspect of the meta turns into their favour (and perhaps other not very competitive things I can't think of). -Because if it isn't I'm not sure why that one cloutchaser was wrong about "Smogon rules are [not] competitive!". As loathe I am to make note of them-
Tbh I think Dracovish meta in gen 8 was the worst meta of all time. It was right around that time that Wish Teleport spam started to pick up too. I still don't understand to this day why the Dracovish ban was so slow to happen.
I don't want to sound mean (and you probably won't read this), but I think you'd really benefit from following a script... The topic is interesting and you're very knowledgeable, but you ramble a lot and take a long time to make your points.
That post where one of the Council members was basically throwing the player base under the bus with vitriol is a sadly all too common attitude in all kinds of communities. It usually doesn't end well for those people.
some constructive criticism: you might want to work on creating a script or at least an outline when making a video like this. it took 11+ minutes before the video actually defined the specific metagame you were discussing, and the 10 preceding minutes were full of a lot of rambling, tangents about other metagames, and unnecessary qualifiers when i would have appreciated a concise explanation of what the problem was (the generation, format, primary problematic pokemon/ability/move combinations, and tiering decisions that created/failed to address the problem). i never played either BW/BW2 metagames, so i had a lot of trouble following the first 3rd of the video as i simply did not have the context necessary to understand what you were talking about.
Here you may pitch your ideas for hilarious film/album/song titles based on the evils of gen 5 OU and the travails suffered by its survivors; the more overdramatic, the better
Nobody Cares (About You) [OU Playerbase Diss feat. Aldaron]
Okay I Believe You, But My Specs Keldeo Don't
Bring the Sun (Swans cover)
Evil Dead BW2
Why Don't You Play in Hell? (It Would Be Preferable to BW2 OU) directed by Sion Sono
Was that period of gen 5 OU terrible? Yes. Was it hilarious? Also yes
no it wasnt
peak metagame for the absurdity factor
@@Yell0wCheese
And in the end do things like “balance” and “fun” matter? No being dumb is what really matters
@@thepunisher6674 finishing games in 12 turns go brrrr
So true
The "We won't take tiering action cause XY is coming out" gives the same vibe as:
"The nuclear power plant is going critical, but we won't do anything cause we won't live to see the consequences of our actions."
BKC the type of guy to take five loaves of bread and two fish, and feed the multitude
He doesn't turn water to wine, he turns rain to whine (respectfully)
BKC the type of guy to part the Red Sea
Bkc the type of guy to revive a mummy for the funnies
@@gnomefrompinkerton you have a based pfp as well
Lmaoooo
Conclusion: If you want to play BW, play a non-OU tier.
BW Uber and RU are just fantastic tiers and easily some of my favorites of all time, I personally invite anyone who never tried these meta to give them a go, they are worth it (even if RU has a tendency to get messy with Hustle Durant endgames, it's still a great metagame)
Counterpoint: Manual Rain Dance is funny af if it works
@@sephikong8323Hustle Durant endgames are my dream fuel. I just love Durant as a mon it’s a goofy, sometimes blind, highly aggressive steel ant
BW UU is so good. Also LC and ZU are great imo. Very balanced and diverse tiers
Ever since I was 8 I’ve been saying The worst metagame of all time
thank you bee empress
your comments are my favourite things about these videos
Oneyplays
wait it's not even the same person every time who makes these comments??
Am I crazy or does bkc sound remarkably like Ben Schwartz
How many of the current "OU by technicality" Pokemon do you think could be realistically integrated into DPP UU without ruining the metagame?
Great idea for a vid
@Flamelord325 Agreed, I think Dusknoir would have a niche like it did pre-Rotom Appliances but it wouldn’t be that definitive.
Dugtrio on it's way to tumble through the tiers as soon as the floodgates are opened now that it doesn't have Arena Trap
all of them.
There are a bunch that could totally drop without problems in gen 5
love how one of the few things that wasn't corrupted from the replay was "lol, what a choke" 16:19. Only the trash talking survives the test of time
Funny how they ended up losing the game too
I swear that seeing Dugtrio + Genesect on team preview is making me hear ominous boss music
That combination was ridiculous on any team, but I especially associate it with the Lavos Spawn sun team that was so popular & stl is listed as an RMT that captures that era of B2W2
I just about threw up in my mouth when I saw that first team preview. Good lord I never want to see dugtrio/genesect ever again.
I’m about ten years too late, but what made Genesect have such insane synergy with Dugtrio? Was it purely the Scarf U-Turns? Was it really that bad?
@@RiiftApart dug traps and removes genesect's few checks (heatran primarily).
You tried your absolute hardest to make it look like Ubers in the thumbnail and I actually fell for it for a sec
It's a damning statement that even with all of those insane broken mons on the cover you didn't have enough room for Shaymin Sky
A top 10 worst metagame list must include Gen 8 Pure Hackmons and Gen 9 Natdex AG. The pure degeneracy of those tiers cannot be beaten.
gen 9 natdex AG is the revival cats thing right
@@frozenfeet4534yep
Yes
What exactly was wrong with Gen 8 PH?
Eternamax could be EV'd to be immune to either physical or special attacks
This story of dropping an uber into a broken OU reminded me a bit of early gen 4 UU, even though it was a bit different when you look more closely at it.
Back at the beginning of gen 4, tiering wasn't done in the same way as it's been done for most of gen 4 and onwards. Instead, it followed something that was similar to gen 3. And the UU of gen 4 was made simply by importing the UU list from gen 3, and then theorymoning and quessing what gen 4 pokemon would be of a similar strength level.
This was recognized as a poor way of doing it though, and it was recognized that there could be a higher power metagame that was balanced. So how they initially tried to solve it was to drop a few non-OU pokemon down into UU at a time, causing chaos and imbalance. I remember Crobat being one of the really controversial pokemon, and I think Pinsir may also have been a big deal, and I think Weezing was added to UU in this way.
Eventually the whole UU tier was just scrapped and made from scratch, using the methods that we use today.
Lead Tornadus u-turns into dugtrio
you cry.
I already see black and white OU on the thumbnail
I couldn't help but laugh it's fun seeing how open you were about it.
I think the closest thing we had to this type of meta is week 1 of Pokemon Home in gen 9 where the council decided to throw in a bunch of very not okay mons into OU including the already suspected Chien Pao. The difference being that they fished all these guys out of the tier in like two weeks and Base Zamzenta is a pretty healthy addition to the meta.
I'll argue that early gen 7 was like this with the broken UBs, Genesect, and other shit running around.
Gen 8 crown tundra was the same.
I got an anxietty attack just by looking at those teams
the old man is yelling at the cloud again, will he ever stop? we may never know!
maybe if the cloud didn't give 100% accurate thunders and hurricanes and turn scald into hydro pump
@@BKCplaysPokemon I meant cloud as in gen 5 as a whole LOL, but yeah, that too!
Bkc not even 2 mins in: "everything about competetive pokemon is a microcosm of real life"
This gonna be a good one
I’m disappointed that this rant wasn’t 2 hours long with 3 bathroom breaks
Put a trigger warning before you say G*n 5 OU,please
apologies for my insensitivity
@@BKCplaysPokemon Apology as much accepted as I would accept it if Aldaron apologized for having dumb ideas
BKC has anybody told you you have such an eloquent way of phrasing things and just have a really impressive vocabulary?
I swear he's so attractive. I don't even know how he looks but the way he expresses himself is so hot.
@@OshawottLuke yk... I kinda get it
all of these mfs be acting up in the comments 💀
@@OshawottLuke Youll be pleased to hear that his exterior is just as enticing as his eloquence if not moreso dudes like 6'4 and resembles a more chiseled Daniel radcliffe
@@OshawottLuke Glad I'm not the only one who thinks that
i read the tittle, thought "its gen 5 genescect OU, right?" and then i saw the thumbnail
crazy times, i was 10 and stupid at the time, may god forgive me for i have defended this shit
"How can the metagame be unbalanced when top players win consistently?"
I think a lot about Smash 4. It was a famously high-variance game, and yet it also featured the most dominant player in perhaps all of smash bros, winning 56 consecutive tournaments at the highest level. High variance and lack of balance are not enough to overcome raw skill.
Now all we need is the scald video.
1:30 man forgets he literally made a vid with that title already
YES THE GEN 5 SLANDER EPIC IS FINALLY HERE!
It is pretty wild just how short Gen 5 was overall and yet it made such a big splash for ridiculous power creep and horrible balancing
Gen 5 was so short because it bombed financially so they had to move quickly to Gen 6.
gamefreak messed up by introducing so much broken shit and bringing far too many overpowered legendaries. Its by far the worst powercreep i've ever seen in my 10+ yrs of playing online.
Great video BKC, I occasionally watch your stuff but seldom comment since I haven't played mons in literal years but I think this one dug up just enough trauma that I felt I had to - I used to go by Honus/VN. around that time - hopefully you still remember me haha. This metagame truly was the worst and I think you laid out all of the reasons that it sucked better than I ever could. The Kyurem-B unban in particular was hilarious, because, like you said, it absolutely wasn't the most broken thing compared to its colleagues, but there was just no good reason to do so, and it basically destroyed any illusions people might have about running balance or semi-stall in that metagame. There was a funny bit of irony in that Smogon made the decision on the back of Pokemon Online unbanning it, only for the Smogon BW2 OU ladder to die out outside of suspect tests because the old regulars and tournament players hated playing it so much, so you had to go to the Pokemon Online server for better quality BW2 OU games (because PO still had a growing playerbase that was starting to produce its own solid players, and didn't mind the very offensive metagame, plus the old tour players who would switch over to PO because they had worked out the same thing). I think the worst thing about the tier is that there was so much bullshit that every 'ban' was just an incremental victory in an unwinnable war; Sisyphus rolling the boulder 1m further up the hill but still going nowhere. You go from Genesect being a general force of nature, to Tornadus-T having no counterplay, to Landorus-I having no true counters, to the Keldeo/Latios hegemony where you're dropping something after every correct double switch and the battle comes down to who burns their Scalds and who lands their Hydro Pumps. In hindsight I'm glad it pushed me out of just playing stall teams and got me to experiment with offensive stuff, but you weren't really team building either because everything was so centralized since the top threats were just in a different class compared to the rest.
The biggest problem to me, which you spoke on as well, was that by BW2, the people making the tiering decisions were kind of "Old Guard" forum members from Gen 4, and most of them didn't actually play the game very often as far as laddering/tournaments go. As a result, they were just kind of ad-libbing based on accepted 'tiering theory' most of the time; the Smogon version of a young, firebrand politician that wants to change the world in their youth, but just devolves into another corrupt cog in the machine when they've gotten older and tenured. I remember Aldaron in particular caught a lot of heat because he was making posts like that despite not being nearly as active as a player in BW2 OU as he was in Gen 4. There was also kind of a brainworm among a lot of people (many of which were decision makers) at the time where 2 very different trains of thought basically arrived at the same, ultimately harmful conclusion of maintaining a very conservative approach to actually banning things. There was the crowd who would tell anyone complaining about X mon to just "man up and play around it" and effectively pull themselves up by their bootstraps and just sort of deal with the shitstorm by gitting gud, plus the crowd that thought it would hurt Smogon's image too much if the tiering leadership went Defcon-5 and just started suspecting all the big meta cancers at once; lest some clickbait youtuber make a video about how the Smogon Nazis want to ban everything. Of course, the actual players of the tier were in a constant state of dying wojak-ism where we were begging for any breadcrumb we could get in the form of a suspect test, and of course we'd show up to vote it in in hopes that it'd make the tier better (lol). Things seem to have gotten better (and hopefully stayed this way) in terms of tiering leadership, with guys like Finchinator, who play the tiers they lead A LOT and as a result, care about them A LOT, and that there's been more of a focus on creating a metagame that's healthy and enjoyable to play even if you have to start purging things en masse to do it. I guess in many ways BW2 OU was kind of a watershed moment in Pokemon Tiering History™because it represented an actual schism between the old theory-oriented conservative philosophy, and the newer, more liberal and player-oriented one.
It's a shame things had to end up this way because, like you said, BW1 was a lot of fun to play, and we had a good thing going for a while. Yeah, there were big threats, but most of them could be played around, and there was a lot of room for innovation and experimentation (every couple of months you'd see some big new team take the world by storm until it got put in the RMT Archive as a piece of history, so forth and so on). And then shit just sort of hit the fan and nobody really took the initiative to deal with it, and the people who wanted to dealt with didn't really have enough power to do so outside of their measly tiering vote after suffering through 50-60 games of the Trail of Tears that was 2012-era BW2 OU.
Metagame so bad I quit playing competitive mons
Gen 5 was my first gen playing on simulators like PO, and I truly had no idea what I was doing back in the day, but I do remember it feeling like absolute chaos and I just ended up lurking in UU and RU for most of the generation
I see people like blunder talk about it kind of nostalgically and I always wondered if it just came down to me being a bad player at the time (and it in fact probably was me just being bad mainly lol), but its nice to know it wasn't all just in my head
We were all young and had no frame of reference for what was balanced or not tbh.
It's like when you're 30 and remember when you were 14 and you got your legs broken in basketball and then somehow scraped the skin of your entire left leg on the pavement, yeah it was painful back then but you still remember it fondly as a core memory.
@@gamereviewerbr I was young and BW still made me quit competitive Pokemon lol because it was such an obvious step back from DPP
it was the worst powercreep we've ever seen. Gen6 and 7 ou are far better to revisit than the coinflip rock-paper-scissors metagame of gen5
@@eyecontrol4900 Gen 9 gives it a good run for it's money, and just like with Gen 5, the tier is not being handled properly, though somewhat differently. In gen 5 Rain was never banned despite how broken it was because of "current gen blindness" and the tier has suffered from it ever since, and the same is happening with Tera, and as a result the same symptoms keep on popping up every once in a while and so something new is banned, because the underlying illness is left untreated (both gens would still need a ton of bans even if those changes were applied regardless, but the tiers would he way more sane and balanced
@@sephikong8323 ah ok, i havnt played gen9 but i've heard its pretty bad. Problem with gen5 was smogon listened to too many casuals who scream "sMoGon bAn eVerYtHing". The fact Latios,Keldeo and Terrakion are still in OU is absurd. In general Sand > HO, HO > Rain and Rain > Sand. Gamefreak have never cared about balance for singles, only vcg/doubles. Gen6-8 are way more stable than the chaos of bw2 ou.
the worst meta game that i witnessed was the gen 8 clef wish protect meta before we got more dlc.
if the ones i’ve watched, gen 7 is my least favorite to watch. i remember getting so bored of watching the tapus, pex, lando, tran and clef on every team.
I would argue in retrospective that the biggest perpetrators as to why pre dlc gen 8 OU was such a abomination were actually Dracovish & Kyurem, they just forced certain very few mons on every team and absolutely smashed with little support and effort anyways
@@anna_medeiawhile your statements are true, i think for me the biggest perpetrator was clef (and co.) getting the teleport buff and how insane it made the game to play when every single team had a -8 priority u-turn on a fat piece of shit mon that you cant kill. seeing slowking or clef teleport into urshifu, weavile or melmetal for the 50th time with no drawback thanks to boots was just so fucking boring.
@@anna_medeiadraco got banned during the clef mega and made it worse. 50% clef usage. unaware boots and wish port. was truly awful. kyreum was yet to be discovered and was still hanging out in UU/RU
@@selearth3123You also cannot forget everyone getting passive recovery with rillaboom's grassy surge and slow twins regenerator pivoting. Balance vs balance matchups were disgusting in this period, I took time off from the metagame for more than a year lol.
Also people do not remember pre Zygarde ban Gen 7 OU, whose ban exorcised a million demons from the metagame amd made it into my favorite current gen of all time during its tenure.
"Everything about competetive pokemon is a microcosm of real life" 😂😂
what azumarilll doing
Bro thinks he on the team
Probably banded or life orb with super power to stop ferrothorn and kyrum which opens up potential banded water falls and aqua jet spam in rain (thought mighta been belly + jet but still not possible in gen 5)
looking back on it, if the behavior aldaron displayed as a council member happened today from someone like finch, ausma, etc, the community would be marching with pitchforks. clearly they were back in the day, but i feel like it would have been a whole lot worse today. imagine current gen 9 if council members told the community to "just relax" or "stop bitching/stop moaning/stop whining" and didn't ban chi yu, chien pao, last respects, etc instead of being banned in a matter of hours or days like it did. times have certainly changed.
BW OU is objectively the worst metagame and the funniest metagame is the same time. What business did Lando-I, Genesect, Deo-D, and friends have in the tier💀
As someone who started playing during gen 7 the team in the video looked like an Ubers team, told me all that I needed to know. Very clear that someone didn't care enough to help clean up the mess.
Smogon council listened to far too many casuals and verlisify fans at the time, and thought "we better not ban too many things or else people will hate us for it". Its not their fault that gamefreak introduced so much broken shit into the games like Keldo, Terrakion, Genie forms and Genesect.
@@eyecontrol4900 So its the council's fault??? Their job is to quite literally regulate the metagame lmao. GF will not optimize things for singles, thats the entire point of Smogon. If they arent doing their job then what is the council there for. This is 100 percent on them, GF will release broken shit regardless and that hasnt stopped councils from doing what needs to be done
@@tailsman2000 BKC has mentioned multiple times in the past that the council should've banned more stuff to make the tier better. The fact that Keldeo and Latios are even allowed in gen5 ou still, shows how unbalanced shit is. Fuck verlisify and his toxic fanbase.
14 minutes before he plays the replay, this is why i watch bkc
Oh, please tell me this is the juicy gen 5 slander I've been waiting for!!
Seeing haunter's name come up, immediately hit by a wave of awful memories
Dude was an awful council member, staff member, and a deplorable person in general
what all he do?
Do you know pokemmo? It have a pretty Interesting ou meta of a gen 5 without legendaries and some move changes, maybe you would like search about this version of gen 5
You dropped this at the perfect time, i just binged your old gen 5 vids.
mostly stopped playing competitively after playing obsessively in gen 4, largely on account of just how awful gen 5 ou felt at multiple stages of its evolution. watching vods of current gen 5 ou makes it look like there's at least something there but good lord
I'm starting to consider a Genesect suspect test.
Yeah, Expert Belt and Scarf kinda go crazy, ngl.
Seeing this video really shows that pokemon doesn’t change, Gen 9 OU is the new Gen 5 OU, pure offense with broken mons being replaced by broken tera for the offensive engine
Tbf it did change. Early gen 6 was super fun and overall that meta is still very balanced.
I played during this meta. Pushed me to play UU instead. Sooooo bad.
Got back into Pokémon again back in gen 6 days this time competitively and going back and playing the old gens OUs and man Gen 5 OU just isn’t fun at all. Absolutely love Gen 3 and 4 OU to death and loved early Gen 6 OU (became an NU player later on Bc it got a bit stale for me) but man Gen 5 OU is just so bad. I hated it everytime I played it.
For the record, my favorite tier ever was Early Gen 7 UU, before a bunch of stuff dropped and Mega Absol became unviable. It was such a fun time. I ran a Mega Absol anti-lead that fucked with so many people, and also just outright killed tier king Scizor anytime people tried to stay in on it. It was so much fun.
It’s honestly embarrasing how every tier in BW is leagues above OU. Sad stuff.
damn the old smogon leaders were not only wrong in their handling of the metagame, but horribly rude in doing so and were completely and blatantly careless to the wishes of their community. thank god for finch
This is the only gen where it was like that.
Wasn't PO available during 3rd gen too? I genuinely remember playing it with a friend before 4th gen was even around
No Pokemon Online got released in 2010 shortly before Black & Whites release in Japan
you're maybe thinking of NetBattle which was a different simulator
@@DJFracusI think I heard of shoddy battle back then. Used it a few times for platinum when I first found out about evs and Ivs when I was 15
anything goes was an amazing tier for gen 7/8 until calyrex
I hate that sock monkey on a horse. Calyrex ice didn't get limelight because of it
BKC gen 7 OU analysis when?
My least favorite meta is probably Gen VIII Crown Tundra. It just was so stale feeling the entire time. It was close between it and the Isle of Armor which was also boring as sin.
Obviously BW2 was a hot mess, but it was a fun hot mess at least once Torn T was gone. Were Deo D, Dugtrio, and Lando I dumb? Sure, but I had a fun time in it.
i agree gen 8 crown tundra and isle or armor were boring asf
closely followed by post-home SV OU when Regieleki, Zama-C and Chien-Pao were legal
Longing for the return of Deoxys to OU.
Some people just want to see the world burn
Please make the video about how competitive pokemon teaches you about real life, I sense it could be your opus
Wish there was a guide to get into gen 4 uu
For some reason, I thought it was BW Ubers in the thumbnail. Boutta say...
Same
Do not compare BW Ubers to the disaster that is BW OU.
honestly as someone that came to the scene in gen 6, hearing all this historic context on how tiering was handled right before makes me understand much more the tiering decisions that were made rightafter, although I was pretty against them at the moment they seem much more reasonable that whatever was going on before
Gen 5 OU is when I took my break from pokemon as a whole and I only returned with the sword and shield hype.
What hype? All I remember from back then were negative things
Bestie how did you manage to skip two of the most fun gens and come back for the most boring gen of all time. im a gen 1/2 hater and even those gens are more interesting and fun to me than gen 8 teleport boots spam was.
Po the birth place of Blunder 🤣 Goat !
This is such a shame. Gen 5 could have had so many cool new options shining through if it wasn't for the allowance of all the broken shit to be used and the people in charge not giving a frick.
Video idea: What if items such as the griseous orb or Arceus' plates functioned the same as the Gracidea, e.g. were key items that one applied to the corresponding Pokémons to change their form? How would e.g. DPP Ubers and other formats change if stuff like Giratina-O had a free item slot?
Gira-O already is a defining mon of DPP Ubers, giving it lefties recovery or an offensive item more powerful than griseous orb would add in so much flexibility it might just become the best mon in the tier and a must to any team that isn't hard HO or some wacky Gira-A stall that abuses pressure to make up for spikes vulnerability
Oh i wish you made a podcast and just uploaded your videos.
“Outright malignant”
Idk what that means, and I refuse to google it.
How about a video on what ADV OU would look like without Hidden Power?
BKC play 350 cup it's like LC and Ubers combined
IMO the worst metagame was gen 8 OU post dlc 1 when all teams got Urshifu clefable fucking rege core and a cinderace/zeraora/dragapult
Younger me quit competitive pokemon around this time and wasn't having fun. I wasn't smart enough to know why at the time. This video has provided great clarity and fulfilment to my life
“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Oh hey, another connection to real life:
"We can't test Drizzle; XY comes out in 10 months!"
"We can't make a new, fair electoral map; the primary is a few months away!"
Did ana de armas like bw2ou?
Another banging video about my favourite generation and metagame ❤❤
I think my least favorite meta was early gen 7 OU, honestly I didn't know it outside of retrospect because that's when I first started trying to teambuild for OU. I remember mega lucario being a huge issue with its physical and special sets having wildly different counters and checks and not knowing which it would be. Genesext was also such a problem. I did enjoy running defensive wisp talonflame back when Gale Wings was good.
But i do sure remember pre dynamax ban gen 8. I dont think i even bothered playing until the mechanic was banned.
Honestly I don’t know how the messed up so badly early on
Just take the ban list you already have put all the new legendarys and mythicals on it and work down from there no need to let mons that we’re good in Ubers in with a red carpet
I had some great times playing gen 5 OU on PO
Well gawrsh BKC, that gives me a video idea. If top players always being on and getting to the top of the ladder isn't a measure of competitiveness, what is?
Provided of course, those people aren't just the only ones playing for extensive amounts of time, grinding out so long that some RNG-aspect of the meta turns into their favour (and perhaps other not very competitive things I can't think of).
-Because if it isn't I'm not sure why that one cloutchaser was wrong about "Smogon rules are [not] competitive!". As loathe I am to make note of them-
Waiting for the BW ubers video so we can get a perspective of how "broken checks broken" made the gen playable
th-cam.com/video/KXQ93cZTSZQ/w-d-xo.html
Thankfully these dark times are behind us now.
Video starts at 5:20
sounds like a fun and balanced metagame to me :)
Go off king
I’ve no issue with the tiering decisions made during the gen 5 era
2:59 lole
heya
Yay, opinions!
just skip halfway in and he still wont have started the actual video
I love gen 6 and 7 uu
gen 1 ag
Bw ou is so freaking awesome
Getting +171 for winning is crazy wtf
Tbh I think Dracovish meta in gen 8 was the worst meta of all time. It was right around that time that Wish Teleport spam started to pick up too. I still don't understand to this day why the Dracovish ban was so slow to happen.
Is gen 5 in hindsight a travesty and a mess? Yeah. Was it fun as hell and do I yearn for that experience again? Also yes.
I don't want to sound mean (and you probably won't read this), but I think you'd really benefit from following a script... The topic is interesting and you're very knowledgeable, but you ramble a lot and take a long time to make your points.
head on over to False Swipe Gaming for shit like that. BKC is like an alligator perfect in every way no need to evolve
It never gets old
That post where one of the Council members was basically throwing the player base under the bus with vitriol is a sadly all too common attitude in all kinds of communities.
It usually doesn't end well for those people.
some constructive criticism: you might want to work on creating a script or at least an outline when making a video like this. it took 11+ minutes before the video actually defined the specific metagame you were discussing, and the 10 preceding minutes were full of a lot of rambling, tangents about other metagames, and unnecessary qualifiers when i would have appreciated a concise explanation of what the problem was (the generation, format, primary problematic pokemon/ability/move combinations, and tiering decisions that created/failed to address the problem). i never played either BW/BW2 metagames, so i had a lot of trouble following the first 3rd of the video as i simply did not have the context necessary to understand what you were talking about.
thanks, but I will never use a script for one of these. it's been suggested many times but I don't really mind if I ramble all over the place!
2013 Gen 5 ou is objectively the funniest shitshow of all time
That period was actually end of 2012, 2013 was Lando-I goes stupid and so on but not nearly as apocalyptic as that metagame.
@@anna_medeia thats true, i just got into showdown/gen 5 ou in early 2013 so thats when i remembered all the broken threats running around.
You know I wonder what's the most mid metagame of all time? You know a metagame that isn't awful but isn't great either, its just kinda there.
monthly gen 5 hate video!!!!