All Gens Should we just call 1U-L OU when it's Smogon OU?

[Disaster Area]

I totally admit to being behind the curve on this and I expect to pretty much receive a collective 'duh' for this thread, I think it was some pointless stubbornness and highmindedness that made me not want to call a spade a spade.

When our 1U-L tier coincides or very closely coincides with Smogon's OU, should we just call it OU? The upside is that it's more straightforward for players coming over from Smogon to get involved, and it makes it clearer that PP's tiers are to coexist with Smogon's tiers, rather than compete (at least for tournament space on the forum). The only downside is that we then don't have control over the tiers and we have minor, usually quite technical differences.

What do people think?

Edit: also, when the PP 1U and Smogon OU concide, on the PP server we can call it OU for ease of using teams on both Smogon and PP servers, but on the forum the season forum name and forum prefix should say OU / 1U

 

[Enigami]

I think 1U-Ls that match Smogon's should be OU. In my opinion, they aren't PP tiers anyway and #U-L should be for legacy PP tiers like the RBY lower tiers when they get changed.

 

[Chrysalis]

The only downside is that we then don't have control over the tiers and we have minor, usually quite technical differences.

Not a downside. PO used to have vastly different tiers (MGross ban in ORAS) and still named them almost the same way (LU > RU). And the control issue is already mitigated by us having our own tiers. The 1U-L tiers serve solely to be consistent with the established oldgen playerbase, and for that reason, we should also call them by the name that the playerbase uses. I would even go as far as to say that PP would benefit from the name change, in the sense that we are taken more seriously as a community (no more "wtf is PP, they don't even have OU they have their own weird tiers").

 

[Disaster Area]

Not a downside. PO used to have vastly different tiers (MGross ban in ORAS) and still named them almost the same way (LU > RU). And the control issue is already mitigated by us having our own tiers. The 1U-L tiers serve solely to be consistent with the established oldgen playerbase, and for that reason, we should also call them by the name that the playerbase uses. I would even go as far as to say that PP would benefit from the name change, in the sense that we are taken more seriously as a community (no more "wtf is PP, they don't even have OU they have their own weird tiers").

Yea I mostly mention the downside just for being technically correct. There's one or two differences (e.g. we don't have freeze clause in GSC, we have stronger limitations on Baton Pass in HGSS) but they're either slightly different tiering philosophy (and so not really very relevant) or removing of cheese (which I think we can live with not having)

 

[FriendOfMrGolem120]

I think having different names can be useful in case the tiers actually differ from the smogon tiers. If the names are exactly the same, people would be less inclined to look up the differences which actually could be very important for tournament games - like having the Sleep-Perish-Trap Ban in Smogon's GSC OU and the Sleep-Trap Ban in GSC 1U-L on pp. If they would have been called the same at the start of the WCoPP, I would not have bothered looking up if there are any differences; I know that according to the rule list the WCoPP had the SPT Ban anyway by accident but that is another story. On a sidenote, right now the validator for Gen2 1U-L on the pokemon perfect server accepts Mean Look + Hypnosis as valid but not these two moves together with Perish Song, which could be a bit confusing.
That are the only drawbacks of calling the tiers "OU" I can think of right now.

If we rename them "OU" when the tiers are very similar to the ones of Smogon, it is a bit easier for new members of this site that usually play on Smogon to immediately see that they are almost the same tiers.
It would also be nice having the smogon tiers implemented on the pp server otherwise you have to relabel the teams from the ps main server everytime you want to play on pp.

All in all I think they should be called "OU" if they are 100% the same as the "OU" from smogon. If there are slight differences between the tiers, I am not sure what would be better since both solutions would have their ups and downs.
I personally would not mind either.

 

[Stockings]

Make adv 1ul adv ou and bring back bellypass ok thankyou x

 

[Cowboy Dan]

I think having different names can be useful in case the tiers actually differ from the smogon tiers. If the names are exactly the same, people would be less inclined to look up the differences which actually could be very important for tournament games - like having the Sleep-Perish-Trap Ban in Smogon's GSC OU and the Sleep-Trap Ban in GSC 1U-L on pp. If they would have been called the same at the start of the WCoPP, I would not have bothered looking up if there are any differences; I know that according to the rule list the WCoPP had the SPT Ban anyway by accident but that is another story. On a sidenote, right now the validator for Gen2 1U-L on the pokemon perfect server accepts Mean Look + Hypnosis as valid but not these two moves together with Perish Song, which could be a bit confusing.
That are the only drawbacks of calling the tiers "OU" I can think of right now.

Eh, idk if that's really a problem, it'd be pretty easy to include a reminder in the OP of any tour involving these tiers and if someone goes into a tour without reading the rules in the OP and breaks them, it's their own fault. As long as there's a clear policy for tour hosts on what to do in these situations, there's no room for complaints.

I definitely support changing the names to OU. 1U-L is kind of confusing and misleading, to me it implies they are old versions of the 1U tiers which they really aren't. They're smogon tiers. Also yeah makes it a lot easier for newer members to figure out what's going on.

 

[Ortheore]

I don't really have much to add other than to support this. Also I still like the idea of calling them "[gen] Classic"

 

[Heroic Troller]

OU UU etc>>>>>>>>1u 2u etc

The numbers are just so confusing and ugly too.... call everything as smogon while keeping your own ruleset thanks

 

[Ortheore]

OU UU etc>>>>>>>>1u 2u etc

The numbers are just so confusing and ugly too.... call everything as smogon while keeping your own ruleset thanks

I was going to say it's not really that complex but then I considered all the stuff with -P, -A, -B, etc, and I decided you're right. Even though the core of it is really simple (and vastly superior to smogon's naming conventions), there's all this niche functionality that clutters everything up and really muddies the waters. The worst thing is, I don't think we need that functionality. At the end of the day, we just need a tier and a ban list. We don't need to include Anything Goes in our tiering system, we don't need to have suffixes for a tier that is new (not to mention saying that it's in testing just delegitimises it, it's not as if any tier reaches a point where you say "righto, job's done team, let's pack it up and go home") and we don't need individual suffixes for the bajillion different variations on a ruleset people come up with. Let's just stick to xU and xP, a tier and its banlist.

Although idk why we roll with P as the suffix for our banlist...

That said, smogon's naming system is atrocious because it attempts to name tiers meaningfully and does an atrocious job of it- we're up to PU and FU which are officially meaningless, but to me sound like a childish attempt to be offensive, which I don't know, maybe represents the effectiveness of pokemon in this tier? It's honestly cringeworthy to me, worse than if they'd gone with something genuinely meaningless like XU. So yeah, their system is atrocious and handling the steady expansion of the pokedex, playerbase and tiering system, and even our needlessly complex system is leaps and bounds superior than that. We're not that far off seeing smogon name a tier #U lol.

 

[Disaster Area]

I was going to say it's not really that complex but then I considered all the stuff with -P, -A, -B, etc, and I decided you're right. Even though the core of it is really simple (and vastly superior to smogon's naming conventions), there's all this niche functionality that clutters everything up and really muddies the waters. The worst thing is, I don't think we need that functionality. At the end of the day, we just need a tier and a ban list. We don't need to include Anything Goes in our tiering system, we don't need to have suffixes for a tier that is new (not to mention saying that it's in testing just delegitimises it, it's not as if any tier reaches a point where you say "righto, job's done team, let's pack it up and go home") and we don't need individual suffixes for the bajillion different variations on a ruleset people come up with. Let's just stick to xU and xP, a tier and its banlist.

Although idk why we roll with P as the suffix for our banlist...

That said, smogon's naming system is atrocious because it attempts to name tiers meaningfully and does an atrocious job of it- we're up to PU and FU which are officially meaningless, but to me sound like a childish attempt to be offensive, which I don't know, maybe represents the effectiveness of pokemon in this tier? It's honestly cringeworthy to me, worse than if they'd gone with something genuinely meaningless like XU. So yeah, their system is atrocious and handling the steady expansion of the pokedex, playerbase and tiering system, and even our needlessly complex system is leaps and bounds superior than that. We're not that far off seeing smogon name a tier #U lol.

- Our tier's not based on usage, so we should use different names.
- Numbers are more intuitive than different names for every tier (as Eseque, who learnt PP's and Smogon's tier names simultaneously, can attest to).
- Our tiers are different to Smogon's some of the time so if we used the same names it would be confusing.
- P stands for Pre- the following tier and also stands for Primitive (it's the primitive version of a tier before it is balanced).
- People don't need to know about anything other than the P or U tiers. The other stuff exists but shouldn't be important to most people on here. There's a reason they're spoilered in the main tierlist.

If we're changing it, we're changing it to something better, not changing it to what Smogon has.

You could call them something like
Tier 1's banlist
Tier 1
Tier 2's banlist
Tier 2
and so on, I guess. But shorter names are nicer imo. What we have is basically a shorthand for this anyway.

 

[Heroic Troller]

Numberbs are easy only if you are into it, from the outside if you ask me what is rby 4u and or 5u i won't know, names have identity, numbers not.

 

[Disaster Area]

5U is the tier below 4U is the tier below 3U etc. is the easy way to think of it. 1U is the first proper tier and then 2U is the tier under it and then 3U is the tier under that and so on...

is it obvious that NU is below RU and above PU?

 

[Heroic Troller]

NU makes me think really fast about the poke, once you remember what pokemon=what tier you know the scale