I believe at its most basic and fundamental level that there should be no pokémon in OU (or UU) that 50% or more of the qualified, experienced population feel is too strong for that tier. That's my definition of "broken", and everything else is not. Also, by the same token, over 30% of the population can deal with Skymin according to the Stage 3-1 vote—why wouldn't the same apply here?
Let's put it this way.
Given a metagame with a set of Pokemon, there may be a Pokemon that may be broken. We don't know quite yet how to explain broken in a precise definition, so we look at the signs of something being broken. We can't tell you why something is broken, although we can give you symptoms (Portraits of Uber) that may tell you why something is considered broken.
One of the ways we get around this problem of inherent brokenness was to use this voting scheme. In fact, that's precisely the only reason why we have this system currently, because we acknowledge the fact that we don't have a completely objective definition of broken. One of the signs that we look at, of course, is to let "experienced" and skilled players vote, and let them think for themselves if it is broken depending on whatever definition of Uber they have.
Do you see the problem yet? The problem is that your definition of "broken" is something that is CORRELATED with Broken, rather than actually broken. Correlation in no way implies causation, although very, very, strong correlation may give us a pretty good picture of what is going on.
Your definition of broken is similar to going around, getting a bunch of people who read newspapers and keep up with the news (news without any information about economy, just for this example), asking them how they feel about the economy, and declaring a recession if more than 50% of the people believe that the economy is doing badly, despite the fact that they have little idea on what is really going on. 50%, in this case, is far too weak. When the percentage goes higher and higher, that's when we can use this popular polling method to ensure that we have a recession on our hands, just like we need a much stronger correlation to determine if something is broken or not.
In essence, I believe your definition of broken is far too weak to accurately depict the metagame. The differences between our viewpoints is that your definition of uber comes directly only from opinions, and mine comes from the Pokemon
actually being broken. I have highlighted other flaws of using purely opinions of other users as the DEFINITION of broken, and these flaws make it more likely that we need a much stronger correlation before we can completely decide in one way or another. I will not repeat the arguments here, as you're most likely familiar with it by now.
But are we really, though, supposed to subject the majority of our community to an uber pokemon for five, six, seven months, waiting for another YacheChomp to be discovered?
Again, it's not actually uber. Just because 50%+1 people think something is uber does not make the pokemon inherently uber, so let's not use these terms to try and bolster your argument.
At this point, it "may be" uber, and just needs a nail in the coffin either way. If the Pokemon is ACTUALLY uber, then we won't need five, six, seven months, as more people will find that you can't deal with it, or someone finds a more devastating way to utilize it. If the Pokemon isn't actually uber, then what happens? then people find ways to deal with it, and less and less people will think it's uber and we'll be all happy.
I'm confident in the unpredictability of the metagame, and how *this* implies that, without movepool changes, there is no saying how much more or less uber a pokemon will be half a year down the road.
Yes, but what is more likely to be less uber - a Pokemon voted 70% uber, or a Pokemon voted 50%+1 uber, half a year down the road? You can bet that the 50%+1 uber Pokemon will more likely be "less uber", as the 70% uber pokemon has strong evidence letting us believe it is broken even under that short timespan.
And at what point would we even Suspect test it again? Would there also have to be some supermajority of qualified voters that you're willing to listen to when they say it might be time to make Garchomp a Suspect again, as though such a statement wouldn't come with immediate merit (as it would, forever)?
We have a lot of active, qualified players who are more than capable of letting people know - much like what happened when people discovered Deoxys S's dual screen set - people will come, and bring it up, and if this seems to be significant with no major disagreements, then we can decide it.
And if I'm not, "then what"? Stage 3-3? And what if Manaphy keeps getting alternating votes?
I don't think we should be using "what ifs" as an argument - although I would argue if anything continues to get alternative votes then it's a pretty good sign that the decision on manaphy is "ambiguous" and we should let it be OU.
Not a very good one, since by the very same token, Garchomp would be drawing attention away from special threats if someone actually does want to focus more on it, and this would open up the path for pokemon like Latias and Jirachi. Which "coincidentally" compliment each other about as well as any two physical or special attacking threats can, and would embody a phenomenon that these same astute players would have to notice is Garchomp's doing unless they're biased or something.
Which would mean it's worth testing again, at the very least, to test hypothesis such as these.
I was only referring to intelligent voters. If you really want to go down the list of 44 Uber Garchomp voters, question their reasoning, and liken any number of those reasons to random whining, while also questioning the reasoning of the 41 OU votes and not being able to find any problem with the reasoning for OU, you can do so. You should remember more than anyone else that shitty reasoning is not necessarily contained to one side.
sure thing. my PM box is open.
A supermajority would literally have made no difference with Garchomp, you could not be more wrong about this. Even if all nine of the remaining voters voted OU, it would have been 53% OU. This isn't a supermajority. If they had all voted uber, it would have been 56% uber. Still nowhere close to a supermajority. And we have virtually no reason to believe all nine of these people aren't more likely to vote 6-3 or 5-4 anyway, given the entire reason you guys are still letting "+2 Garchomp" troll you. (is this a reference to its 102 Base Speed? its two percentage points over an actual stalemate? a single swords dance?)
Remember - when we talk supermajority, we only talk supermajority in ONE DIRECTION - the direction for it being uber. So it would have 100% made a difference. Garchomp would still be OU under supermajority.
also very well done.
This is why I say "i dont care" when asked if I've come to a conclusion on what impact the abstainers and non-voters (accounts that weren't originally claimed) have on the final vote. In conjunction with the fact that 85 qualified voters is a very large number, I am not going to wait around for a few people to straggle in and finally post in a thread posted by an administrator, stickied by an administrator, referenced in an Announcement by another administrator, placed into the Topic of several channels on IRC, and /walled on the Shoddy Server they spent three months demonstrating they cared about the tiering of competitive pokemon on an alternate ladder.
Sure - but you still have to have to admit that the probability is quite significant that the 9 missing votes would have definitely made a difference in the tiering.