Sunday, September 16, 2012

New poll + update on the Garchomp situation

Before moving on, let's have a look at the results for the last poll. As expected, a slight majority (108 out of 209) voted for the status quo, but the real shocker is that no less than 61 people want only Sand Veil Garchomp banned. Had I known this was going to be that popular, I would've divided this to ask whether these people would like to see Excadrill, Blaziken and Thundurus-I get the same treatment. You know, for coherency. A measly five voters want to get rid of Sand Veil altogether, and ten of both it and Snow Cloak, suggesting we don't get many Smogonites here... And finally, 25 want to allow Garchomp regardless of the ability.

Speaking of that, Smogon decided to make its move, and in a twist that can only be perceived as positive by most of us, the Council decided to let the players decide in an old-school suspect test. The general consensus is that Rough Skin Garchomp isn't close to being broken, so what they're doing is unbanning Garchomp on the suspect ladder - with both abilities. What this means is that we'll get to use Sand Veil Garchomp there, and see whether the continuation of the power creep that occured over the last year will make it less effective than when it was banned. The end result will be known in early October.

Now, on to the next poll: how much do you care about Mystery Dungeon 3?

10 comments:

  1. I voted for banning Sand Veil and Snow Cloak. I'm of the opinion Smogon needs to wise up and start treating ability+species as the subject matter for tiering and bans, not just Pokémon.

    There's too many anomalies - Speed Boost Blaziken is ridiculously overpowered and belongs in Ubers; Blaze Blaziken is UU-level and outclassed by Infernape. Sand Veil Garchomp is just that bit too haxy to be acceptable in OU; Rough Skin Garchomp is fine. Espeon, Gastrodon and a host of others are notable only for one ability of the two, but the fact tiering is based only on species and not ability means lower tiers miss out.

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    1. As long as it's something universal, and more importantly consistent (no unbanning Ho-Oh if it doesn't have Sacred Fire and Regenerator for example) it might not be a bad idea. Then again, multiplying the amount of things on a tier list by 2.5 in one fell swoop when the current amount is almost 700 isn't very appealing, either.

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  2. As far as this particular spin-off goes, I only ever played the DS version of the first game. While I did find it enjoyable and addicting, it felt to me like it was even more tedious than the main games. The fact that you absolutely HAVE TO complete most dungeons in one go also bothered me. Since I'm almost as much of a completionist as you are, it often took me way too much time to complete a single dungeon, so my progress was ridiculously slow. I didn't get really far into the main game, but I don't know... I understand why people would like these games and even I don't really think they are bad, but... to me it felt like some kind of element was missing.

    But maybe it's simply because it was the very first game of this series and that now I would get hooked by one of the more recent entries.

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    1. Urgh... I meant that I didn't get far in the *main storyline.

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    2. The thing that makes MD2 stand out as such a masterpiece is that it took many of the things that made the first game tedious, and just threw them out. No more Friend Areas. The ability to enter a dungeon with four Pokémon. The ability to recruit a limitless number of Pokémon on a single runthrough of a dungeon. And so on.

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    3. Oh wow, I admit that's actually very impressive. You don't often see so much improvement in a single sequel.

      However, there are still many other games I'm planning to buy and a single summer of work isn't enough for me to afford to get careless with my money. I already wasted some on NSMB 2 like an idiot... I'll buy Pokemon White 2, the 3DS Fire Emblem game that should probably be coming out next year and then I'll start saving for a Wii U and Monster Hunter Tri Ultimate. So there's no room in my planning to try to make up for that bad first impression, sadly. :P

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  3. I said this before and I'll say it again - we should have different tiers for regular and DW abilities.

    As for MD3, YES PLZ

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    1. I disagree on that, there's no correlation between being a DW ability and being a better ability. Thomas Winwood's idea (in a comment above) at least makes more logical sense.

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  4. I've been waiting for MD3 ever since Gen V started, so it's about damn time. Though I'm not THAT excited about it. And I really hope it's released next year and not this year, as I've still got Black 2, the Wii U, Pikmin 3 and NSMB U to get, and I really don't want to miss out on any of them.

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  5. Although I'm looking forward to the next Mystery Dungeon games, one thing that has been revealed that I HATE is that the quiz is gone and the starter is based on a picture of you taken with the 3DS cameras.

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