I think Species clause is a case of "let's test everything" gone too far. The second you remove the clause, you are changing the entire game and how it is played.
I have been maintaining that "how it is played" has perhaps been wrong the whole time. Again, if we are not willing to make that mental leap and question old standards regardless of our comfort level with them, then we are not being faithful to the spirit of the Suspect Test at its core.
1) The Team Building aspect, creating a Team based on the Metagame that will give me an edge over other players, and tweaking teams so that it can "deal" with every threat in the game.
2) The Battling aspect, where the team battles against another, and the ability to deal with imperfect information.
Species clause absolutely and utterly destroys 1. DPPt has a ridiculous amount of threats already, and now having the potential to deal with any threat twice? three times? it changes 1) as we know it and I don't think it's a direction we should be considering. I don't think species clause should be tested at all. Even if we tested, it'll take MANY months to get a REAL testing (if you think it's "obviously broken" after a week then you're simply playing the new game with the old mindset) to get any results, and I don't think it's worth destroying the team building aspect of Pokemon over it. If anyone sticks in a "what if it doesnt have a huge effect" then I believe that player has never, ever, played competitive pokemon seriously enough and doesn't know what they are talking about
1) as we know it might be based on a wrong metagame that should never have had Species Clause, regardless of how long it may take to test.
We already have a game with imperfect information, and I believe evasion and OHKO only adds more variability to the game, making this imperfect information game even more imperfect with no further tools to deal with such uncertainty, other than the specific opportunity cost of the player using evasion/ohko moves. Obviously, since there's a trade off involved here, I believe OHKO/Evasion should be tested to see how much this tradeoff is and if players are able to capitalize on the added variability created by OHKO/Evasion.
How can you say this and be unwilling to accept that there's an opportunity cost of using more than one of the same pokemon on a team?
1) Mark many random players in the months before the test. Get their statistics. Start the test, and see how the statistics of these random players changed. This should be from the best players, good players, mediocre players, etc, to see how it has changed. Obviously, there's the "if you play more you get better" effect, so weighing on that, you should be able to see the change in variance of win/loss or some other measure.
2) See how many people use OHKO/Evasion at the first month, and then the last month. If no one uses it, then it is not broken (opportunity cost of OHKo/Evasion is not worth it) and shouldn't be banned. If a significant number of players use it (some cutoff decided before hand, obviously it'll be arbitrary, but i'm sure we can work out a measure based on what type of players use it and then based on experiment 1) then it should be banned since the added variability is something we should never be going for.
I'd be more inclined to consider option 1 if only because not banning something because it isn't used as much is a faulty way of going about banning things. Ask Wobbuffet.
I don't want to test species clause. I agree with Tangerine on that point. Mostly, it just means we're playing an entirely different game from what we've hitherto been accustomed to playing. I'm sure there is a good chance that a game without species clause would work just fine... but that doesn't mean we should embrace it.
It doesn't mean that we should ignore the possibility that the different game that we have been playing all along has essentially not been Pokémon just because it's more covenient to do so.
I agree completely with phil, I don't understand how the metagame is broken or non-competitive at the moment that these clauses have to be added to fix them or make the metagame more competitive.
I thought we were talking about removing clauses?
Species Clause completely changes the metagame as we know it, and why introduce it now after many long months of testing? It requires someone to completely re-evaluate how you currently play the game, and how many counters/checks/answers are sufficient enough for a certain threat. The possibilities and combinations become almost endless, and it takes away from the little skill we have left in the game and makes it completely random and luck-based.
Besides my oft-repeated "maybe what we know has been wrong all along", how does having more possibilities and combinations inherently detract from skill? How can you state that with the utter certainty that is needed for us to correctly and fairly forego a Species Clause test?
Evasion Clause feels almost exactly like Species Clause, albeit a bit more fair. It still gives the user a chance to lose the final outcome if the opponent still hits through it, but it still will require players to change the current thoughts on checks, answers, counters, revenge killers, etc. With Pokemon like Gyarados or Salamence, Lucario or Scizor, Infernape or Swampert, etc., it is hard to be able to prepare for these Pokemon more than once while still being capable of handling any other Pokemon. With Double Team available to them, your "guaranteed counter" or reliable answer isn't so reliable anymore. A miss in the fast-paced metagame of today will be deadly to players. Not to mention, it creates a more luck centered metagame. A competitive game should strive to let the best player win, so why hinder this even more than it already is with evasion being able to totally change a game around.
No OHKO clause just rewards bad players. Why should we allow something that gives an automatic free kill? If it isn't adding much variety anyway (most of the Pokemon who learn it, will likely not be used), and is it isn't forming new counters (most of the Pokemon with sturdy are used enough, and OHKO wouldn't be common enough to make players feel like they need a new counter). I don't see why the metagame would be improved by adding this clause. It hardly promotes new strategy, diversity, or competitiveness, or any other thing you want to add. It is a gimmick that could hurt good players and help bad players in situations it shouldn't, which shouldn't happen in a competitive area.
In my humble opinion, this is mere theorymon, and very spotty theorymon at that. How can any of the threats you mentioned have room for Double Team in their movesets and still pose the same threat they currently do? And how are OHKOs a viable "automatic free kill" when they only hit 30% of the time, and are by your admission only available to pokemon that "will likely not be used"? Have you ever even played any competitive pokemon with OHKO and Evasion? I have, as I recounted in
this post in January. Since then, Stealth Rock has become even
more relevant as the most used move in competitve pokemon per moveset ("probably", I'm aware that EQ and TB are used more but most people don't run more than one SR user per team), cutting the viability of Lapras, Walrein and Dewgong, the expected best users of OHKO moves due to Sheer Cold's lack of immunities.
So while Walrein and Lapras may have new toys to play with in Pain Split and Block, respectively, no one can say with any certainty that these toys will make those pokemon any more viable than they already are. And besides Scizor, Rotom, a pokemon that singlehandedly stymies the use of all the other OHKO users by itself, was the most used pokemon in Standard last month (and yes, I am accounting for the use of the original Rotom, why shouldn't I), up from 14th in January.
What evidence do you have to support your suspicion that Evasion and OHKO users will have any marked impact on the game given the facts I just relayed, let alone to support that these clauses shouldn't be tested anyway?
Edit:
I also want to say that it seems like we are testing for the sake of testing. To be fair, I think we are done with dppt and we have tried our best to make the metagame as fair as possible and this is as good as it will likely get. There is no need to abolish clauses to add a new dimension to the game for no reason other than "good players won't use it/it won't be used often/it would be interesting". I think we should enjoy the metagame we have created, not to mention we should finish dealing with Manaphy, Latias, and possibly Salamence in the future.
To be fair, I think this is an incredibly lazy mentality. And I'll be honest—the attitude of many of you in this thread who have posted against testing Clauses is disappointing to me, as you are hardly trying to form valid arguments against testing them (excluding posters like Tay and Tangerine, who in my opinion have attempted to flesh out their arguments with viable thoughts and expound on their suggestions).
I think the difference there is that Garchomp isn't solely Sand Veil. It has other unique attributes. Double Team is 100% probability manipulation, as are OHKOs (other than things like Sturdy and Aura Sphere, I guess, but in those cases it has no effect). If Double Team was something like "Does some random, constant effect, and raises the user's evasion 1 stage", then it would have to be examined to see if that extra effect adds something competitively to offset the increased luck factor.
I'm aware of Garchomp's "other unique attributes". You didn't address the main point of the paragraph you quoted, which I will repaste: Many people would argue that Garchomp's Sand Veil enough was "of an effect" to give it the mere percentage points it needed to be voted uber two times in Stage 3. And again, you just said: "I don't feel they need to be tested for how powerful they are, as any effect is too much of an effect." Isn't Sand Veil enough of an effect to have pushed Garchomp over the uber edge, especially given how close both of its votes were?
And I don't know how many times I have to ask you to actually respond to more than one or two points in my responses to you, obi. You literally always do this when I respond to one of your posts in this forum—from the Fixing UU thread to the Stage three and beyond thread to the Using simple majorities for tiering votes thread, and it's very irratating. I don't know whether your repeated refusal to engage me in this forum when I take the time to address every one of your points is an indication of concession or apathy, but it would be good to know either way so I can decide whether to engage you in the future (look up any of the threads I just mentioned if you think I'm being unduly crass).