Ubers: Why not?

[Spenstar]

No, this is not a topic about Wynaut's usage in the Uber environment. Everything it can do, its evo can do better. I would like to bring up my experience with the uber ladder here and ask, why? Or, why not?

When I visit the uber latter most of the time, I am THE ONLY Uber battler there, and if I get lucky, there's one other person on the uber ladder that I face 2 or 3 times before closing the server. Why does this happen? I KNOW it is not as popular as OU and will never will be, but come on, am I missing something here or is Ubers THAT devoid of people willing to battle in a metagame that's all about power and usage thereof?

Every pokemon viable there is over-centralizing and has game-breaking power, so there is TONS of strategy and skill involved. You must tap into your team's power while stopping the power of your opponent cold. OU doesn't have that kind of strategy. Ubers has a different kind of strategy, not more, not less, but a different kind of it, than OU. It's just like UU except on the reverse side of the coin?

And so I ask, why don't people battle in ubers despite the above? And, why not battle in Ubers?

 

[ultimatellama]

Well, I guess for me it's lack of experience. I can totally see the appeal and of course there's strategy galore to be had I'm sure, but I'd be battling out of my comfort zone. Not that that's a bad thing, mind. Broadening horizons is always good and battling skills like prediction and such are only part based on knowledge of the metagame. I'm sure that they're transferrable to other tiers, and playing in Ubers would probably help my OU play.

I'm a WiFi player at heart and all my teams on that are OU, but if Ubers is a devoid of life as you say, I might have to make a team and come help you revitalise it.

 

[MegaKick]

Yes, unfortunatly, Ubers is that devoid of battlers. Fortunatly, bohangles, jibaku, and theorymon (the uber mods) are trying to raise popularity.
The main reason people don't move from OU to Ubers is twofold. One, the lack of battlers. If we get more battlers, it will grow exponetially because of this.
The second and main reason is because most people assume, without playing a single match, that there are only like 3 pokemo commonly used. After, the Uber list is shorter than OU right? Well, some OUs are actually viable. Shocking. There is much more variety in Ubers than OU. And when you consider the people who complain about centralization go play a match where it's nothing but mence, scizor, tyranitar, azelf, jirachi, gengar, gyrados, etc.... seems kinda silly.

 

[Spenstar]

Yes, unfortunatly, Ubers is that devoid of battlers. Fortunatly, bohangles, jibaku, and theorymon (the uber mods) are trying to raise popularity.
The main reason people don't move from OU to Ubers is twofold. One, the lack of battlers. If we get more battlers, it will grow exponetially because of this.
The second and main reason is because most people assume, without playing a single match, that there are only like 3 pokemo commonly used. After, the Uber list is shorter than OU right? Well, some OUs are actually viable. Shocking. There is much more variety in Ubers than OU. And when you consider the people who complain about centralization go play a match where it's nothing but mence, scizor, tyranitar, azelf, jirachi, gengar, gyrados, etc.... seems kinda silly.

Centralization happens no matter what, so you might as well balance it by playing in a metagame where everyone is over-centralizing, so, yeah.

And assumptions about a tier before you play it is for newbs.

Well, I guess for me it's lack of experience. I can totally see the appeal and of course there's strategy galore to be had I'm sure, but I'd be battling out of my comfort zone. Not that that's a bad thing, mind. Broadening horizons is always good and battling skills like prediction and such are only part based on knowledge of the metagame. I'm sure that they're transferrable to other tiers, and playing in Ubers would probably help my OU play.

I'm a WiFi player at heart and all my teams on that are OU, but if Ubers is a devoid of life as you say, I might have to make a team and come help you revitalise it.

If more people like you were around, Ubers would be a lot more popular and overall more fun. Interesting theory about Ubers strategy paying off in OU, I never thought of that.

Wifi lack of Uber teams I can understand because of the scarcity of ubers and therefore the difficulty to make a perfect one for your team. With shoddy, this problem is solved, and that's why I'm bringing the point up in the first place.

To tell you the truth, I hoped big time that Garchomp's promotion to Ubers would sell the environment more, but that didn't work. Maybe an Uber Lucario Evo or something like that could do it, or the legalization of Arceus...

 

[twash]

In my opinion, the problem is that people don't want to play a metagame where you have to wait a couple of minutes for a match, and even more if you want another match against somebody you haven't already played. When I ladder I normally make sure I have two or three decent teams that I want to test and work on, otherwise I'm just playing matches against the same people where team surprises and advantages that I am trying to test don't matter because I've played the person already so they know it sufficiently enough. This is even more annoying against players like Jibaku because the mind games are simply horrible when you have to think knowing that he knows my team while also thinking about what he might do because you know his team.

This is pretty much why I only play Ubers for tournaments now. I normally ladder to test teams for obvious weaknesses and on the Uber ladder it eventually becomes almost all mindskills and barely any team testing. I'm not saying "I hate mindgames", I'm just saying that it sucks because I don't ladder for the mindgames to be honest.

 

[Spenstar]

So you don't play Ubers because others don't play Ubers huh? Enough answers like that and we may have something going on here...

 

[mtr]

Quite a few players complain that there's no middle ground in Ubers. Either you're a noob or a guy with 5 names on the leaderboard, and this is quite frustrating for the people who are somewhere between the two. When I play (the best I've done is only #29, and that was with a bog standard stall team), I can either own some poor inexperienced player who just threw a team together, or get totally rolled by Jibaku or Train Man. It gets kind of annoying.

 

[Acritter]

I don't play Ubers because I don't have an Uber team, and don't really have the time to even maintain my OU teams (my last new one was a 6-OU simple HO that still has a >50% winrate).

 

[Thorns]

maybe they're sick of beating theorymon when he's testing stuff xD

in all seriousness, people think there is a lack of players, creating an actual lack of players. it's a vicious cycle

 

[Rugaji]

I want to adjust to the Uber environment, but I lack team building in ubers and also there's just too little people in the uber ladder for me to wait and then battle them, I'm so impatient. I've been in progress of an uber team, but I struggle with them because they're just so powerful, all I think about is offense and synergy, instead of strategy..

 

[ginganinja]

Yeah will i love playing ubers (cracked 1500 when I was playing ubers a lot more often) but I eventually brancjhed out into all tiers cause I got bored waiting for matchs. Again I don't play ubers so much bcause their is no-one on. (Also shoddy access is limited at uni but whatever)

 

[locoghoul]

Maybe if we somehow created like a "time slot" where everybody can write down their "usual" laddering times then we could create at least 3 days a week where you will find more than 2 ppl laddering with you.

Quite a few players complain that there's no middle ground in Ubers. Either you're a noob or a guy with 5 names on the leaderboard, and this is quite frustrating for the people who are somewhere between the two. When I play (the best I've done is only #29, and that was with a bog standard stall team), I can either own some poor inexperienced player who just threw a team together, or get totally rolled by Jibaku or Train Man. It gets kind of annoying.

This is also true. But then again it's because of lack of players. I said it before on the thread I opened, a bigger base player will get a better and more enjoyable learning curve.

 

[ginganinja]

More uber warstory's?

lol

In all seriousness though its difficult to have a time slot that everyone can play on. For example I am in the Pacific therefore its pretty hard to match up to your guys timeslots. I guesss i don't like it so much because it does not work for me lol

Still its rather ironic that he are trying to get more people to play ubers when we are commenting in an Uber sub, sub forum. I think that perhapes some efforts need to be made to encourage or promote ubers outside the ubers sub forum.

Have a Nice Day!

 

[tripe]

Well, it seems that the metagame is too stagnant for most players. Their perception is that ubers takes no skill, where it's basically a well-boiled chess match. The ladder does take forever, and threads like the uber research thread do help, but not enough imo.

 

[Spenstar]

We could try to advertise it a bit. Post more uber warstories! Even mediocre ones will help the cause. Discussing uber metagame stuff and who might get exiled to OU. Maybe even a whole thing about Garchomp's crazy ride from OU to Ubers! (and back again possibly)

 

[Stallion]

I used to enjoy ubers a lot, and even got on the leaderboard back in the day. But yeah pretty much what others said, waiting for matches isn't fun >.<

 

[FlareBlitz]

I think the best way to increase activity on the Ubers ladder is with nightly tournaments with (hopefully) some sort of incentive. Have a mod make a /wall post about an Ubers tourney every day for a week or so and people are bound to at least try and make/test some teams. The better players should take this time to experiment with some odder teams as well, so beginners aren't completely steamrolled.

 

[Alan]

I recently got into ubers because I realized the potential fun in using broken mons (and OU/UU sucks and nobody plays NU so I kinda ran out of options lol). Basically, a lot of people say they dont play for these reasons:

1. "lol ubers all you have to do is use broken pokemon, no skill" when actually, the broken pokemon make it harder imo because everything either hits so much harder or takes hits so much better (there are some in the middle like mew and manaphy and deoxys-s). Its got a pretty bad rep somehow. I blame Theorymon's testing of gimmick sets.

2. Nobody is on the ladder. Waiting for matches sucks. Been said over and over again.

3. People like the other metagames more. Nothing we can really do about that except hope they start to dislike them or get their favorite pokemon banned! (lol)

I like it though. I see some sets and stuff I would never even think of using, but I mostly use bog standard sets. Ironically, the tier with the most broken pokemon is probably the most balanced metagame. Both stall teams AND offense teams can survive in harmony. I can't think of another tier where this can happen. Also, I like seeing pokemon from the lower tiers like Toxicroak, Quaggy and other stuff.

 

[mtr]

How can you blame Theorymon? His teams have put Pokemon like Wobbuffet and Kingdra into the Ubers OU (considered to be the top 25 Pokemon used in Ubers), and he writes some of the most enjoyable and informative analyses for the tier.

Honestly, though, Ubers is a quirky place where little is as it seems. The Pokemon are so versatile in terms of their sets that anything can happen. For example, Groudon is a good check to the popular BU Dialga, but it gets totally rolled by any other set.

Ubers players take to heart the principle that if a necessary niche on one's team can only be fulfilled by a particular Pokemon, then it should fill that niche regardless of the amount of support required. Using Ho-oh automatically obliges you to bring along Forretress and Groudon, but many players happily do it just because Ho-oh has a toolset that no other Pokemon has, and their team needs that toolset.

And many Pokemon that suffer in OU gain value in Ubers. If I'm not mistaken, Ninjask is ahead of Manaphy in terms of usage, and he doesn't have the "Noobjask" reputation that he holds in OU, because all the good Taunters are 2HKOed by Ninjask, lol. My Ninjask team gave me a lot of success and fun, though admittedly I laddered with it during an offensive phase of the metagame so I didn't have to worry about stall all that much.

 

[ginganinja]

Yeah I also Like how that fact that Ubers is far more offensivly orientated that OU, sure, stall is seen in Ubers however more often than not I see offenisve teams rather than stall.

Hmm I am seriously considering spending time warstoying some of my uber battles if it will help promote uber activity, I have a whole folder full of them but I never have the guts to post one lol

 

[mtr]

Well, I'm no warstory expert, but if they fulfill these criteria:

1) No serious misplays, both players were skilled
2) Both players had competent teams
3) Team matchup was relatively even (no counterteaming)
4) Some good predictions occurred
5) No extremely one-sided hax (like a Jirachi Iron-heading a Skarm to death)

Then I'm guessing we'd love to see them.

 

[shrang]

Ninjask is ahead of Manaphy in terms of usage

*rages*

Lol anyway, I totally agree that you definitely cannot blame Theorymon. He's only making the tier more enjoyable by putting forward different ideas to make the tier more diverse.

 

[ginganinja]

@mtr
maybe Ill post one then and see how it goes....
I'll make sure to add percentages and everything though!

Anyway I don't think that Theorymon can be blamed for the lack of uber players. after all there are people with terriable OU teams but we notice them less due to the large volume of OU players battling in the OU ladder. Plus without theorymon I wiould not have these great ideas to start testing Infernape, Heatran etc.

I am not sure if their needs to me an Ubers in OU tournament or something to drum up support for uber players. Actually I feel like I am graspng at straws here as I have no idea how to fix this problem as even with research week, only people who visit the ubers subforum will see this. However people who visit the ubers sub forum are often uber players or people interested in playing ubers anyway. More (solely uber) Tournaments?

 

[mtr]

We need to be more public about spreading Ubers information. Perhaps encourage more (good) RMTs and warstories, as right now most Ubers players are quite reserved. These would show prospective players the nature of the Ubers metagame, and generate interest.

More tournaments would also be cool, but the only players who would join are those who already play.

Maybe get Colin or Doug to advertise Ubers on the login page?

 

[Turai]

First I'd like to give a shout out to Genny as his Parasect RMT and Warstory was two of the reasons I even tried Ubers to begin with (the other was that I wanted to try Garchomp since I got into shoddy after he was banned).

I think the Research Week is a good iniative but I think it needs to be advertised about outside of the Uber subforum as well.

It would be nice if some of the results got some coverage from the smog as well.

The tournament idea seems like a nice idea as well.

Sadly the only way to help I can think of would be to try and get my team rated but Im not the most skilled at writing intressting stuff.