The Gliscor In A Coal Mine

Gunna talk about Smogon here. Oh, you don’t know Smogon?

Weeeeell, deep breath.

Smogon is a Pokemon fangame played with the basic components of the videogame series Pokemon, which is itself, made by Game Freak and distributed by Nintendo, which you’ll probably recognise as one of the largest privately held companies in the world. Smogon, by contrast, are a forum and some emulators and a surprisingly dense little bubble of Youtube content.

‘Smogon’ in this context refers to a bunch of related games, that form a single fandom game, a folk game. They have, in the terminology I’m fond of using, made a game out of another game, which is a super cool practice I actively encourage. It’s how we get great things like, for example, the entire Legacy subgenre of games, from its dizzying heights of Pandemic Legacy Season 1 to the shocking lows of Pandemic Legacy Any Other Seasons. I like Smogon as a thing to observe through some sort of astrolabe or other technical device. I have no particular interest in engaging with the game itself, as they play it.

I don’t want to get into a play space with these people.

Not because they’re bad or anything, though they are overwhelmingly split between the still-thinks-he’s-on-4chan shithead vs autistic trans girl social binary of internet niches and you’re never sure what side that coin is landing on when you flip it. I don’t want to partake of Smogon because the game they’re playing looks unpleasant to me to play, and because part of Being Into Smogon means looking around at the game Smogon has made and thinking: Yeah, this works. This is a good system.

The current news out of Smogon, such as it is, is that in their OU format (short for ‘overused’), just banned the Pokemon Gliscor. Gliscor is redacted information that doesn’t matter, because you don’t need to know what Gliscor is to come to understand the problem that Gliscor highlights, and the lesson you can learn about making games and control over those games.

Smogon’s banning policy reflects a truth I espouse as a game designer: Players are great at identifying problems and terrible at solving them.

Pokemon as it’s balanced and released and supported and played by GameFreak is, competitively balanced for 2v2, 4-of-6 teams, with information openly available to players through previews. This has some odd knock-on effects, like poor Zoroark kinda got pooched when they make this information public, but whatever, there are more Pokemon than that that aren’t really for playing. This is a kind of game I think of as a ‘pool game’ – the game is built ostensibly around a pool of potential pieces, and you choose which pieces you use and how. Magic: The Gathering is a pool game, Pokemon is a pool game, and even games like Dominion are pool games, because the game pieces that are in the game at the start of each contest are determined by choices outside the game.

In the official tournament context, when it comes to limiting access to Pokemon, there are ‘mythical’ pokemon where you can only have one (or two, depending on the regulation) from that category on your team. The game is broadly speaking open, where almost anything in that pool is available for use. Now, it’s hard to dig into this for hard numbers, because the pool has a lot of stuff in it that isn’t really expected to be played competitively. There are Pokemon who exist for, most likely, their place in a single-player RPG experience, like most first and second form evolutions, and some that exist as more world content. Think Unown and male Combee. Of the pool available, that means you’re looking a pool of, like, around 1,021 Pokemon, you can’t act as if all of those are going to find a place in a competitive head-to-head environment.

The stat site Pikalytics gives us numbers of about 310 Pokemon that showed up at all, and in that space, 37 Pokemon were not allowed. Some of them weren’t allowed because there’s no way to access them, but Game Freak get to make those choices and Smogon doesn’t. Now, that 310 number is a really broad net, and it’s just the stats from one tournament with over 700 players. In that space, two or three people bringing along something for a laff are going to make it show up. And if we say, limit ourselves to anything that had at least 5 people bring it (so, a representation of .71%), that gives us a list of 75 Pokemon that showed up in the tournament. And the stats aren’t telling the whole story just like that — after all, two of the most common Pokemon, Iron Hands and Flutter Mane, were played on 50% of teams.

That’s the metagame for an official tournament, broadly speaking; the full pool is somewhere around 310 Pokemon, but the core of the pool is much smaller. And importantly, when I say there are ’37 Pokemon that were not allowed,’ these are Pokemon who are very specifically set aside by the game experience and with related traits indicating that they are not for typical tournament play. You never could play with them in this format, they are not appearing and disappearing based on feedback.

Smogon doesn’t have tournament-to-tournament kind of environment like this; they instead have a tiered tournament system which cares about usage and then cultivates that usage. What his means is that the Pokemon are divided into groupings described by, well, how often they’re used. That means the main, core space, at least according to the Smogon people I spoke to about it, is ‘OU,’ for Overused. Overused is a 1v1 format. At the moment, there are 31 Pokemon legal in Overused. You can use Pokemon from a lower tier in this tier, but it generally works out badly, because those Pokemon are not strong enough for this tier. There are 19 other Pokemon that were in this tier, but have been banned out of it, sent ‘up’ a tier to the category of ‘Ubers’ for being, well, too good. Ubers, for context, has about sixty two Pokemon in it.

That is, Smogon centralises its design space around 31 Pokemon, and only after kicking 19 of them out.

In the announcement banning Gliscor from their format, there were people calling for bans to Sneasler, Samurott-Hisui and Gholdengo. That would bring it up to 22/29, which feels unpleasantly close to half the format being banned. Even at 19/31, that’s essentially 2/5th of the format banned. And when you dig into this situation, you wind up chasing details that can’t address the whole problem:

Gliscor was too powerful at setting hazards and being hard to kill.”

“Well, why was it hard to kill?”

“Because it could heal from lots of small hits.”

“Well why not hit it very hard with a big hit, since it has a 4x weakness?”

“Well nothing in the tier can hit it hard enough.”

“Well, why don’t you bring up something from a lower tier that could do that?”

“Well nothing in that tier is good enough.”

“Well why aren’t there good ice types in this tier?”

“Well we banned the one that hits really hard.”

“Why did you do that?”

“It was too good at hitting things very hard.

And like, this whole conversation is is continuing to diagnose problem after problem after problem, but never finding anything that solves those problems. Because Gliscor being banned resulted in people talking about how now, there were more problems that had to be fixed.

A lot of this is the peculiarities of what Smogon does and doesn’t allow. For example, hazards are so important because everything in Smogon is expected to swap out constantly, and hazards make that hard to endure over time, meaning that hazards pull the game towards an end state. This swapping out constantly makes some statuses pointless (like confuse) and a lot of setup moves pointless too. It means that multiple sequences of turns can happen where players don’t attack one another because they’re just swapping back and forth to jockey into position. There are whole move types that are banned (baton pass and evasion boosters), because if you didn’t, people would use them. They had to institute a 1,000 turn timer on games because some tournament games ran that far without anyone actually winning the game.

What if those 19 Pokemon were just left as it is? You got rid of the Evasion rules and the banned moves and just let the game settle, as it is, on what people can do, in that space, and see how it works. I’m told it becomes a pretty simple game where everyone does the same thing of trying to get an angry fish into play with baton pass and kill your opponent. This is apparently a bad thing, where by banning a bunch of strategies the format is instead facing a situation where the’re almost halfway through banning the entire tier, to try and capture a way the game ‘should’ be. It seems to me the point of a usage-based tiering system means that if one tier sucks, everyone leaves that tier and recognises that the Pokemon in that space push a style most of the people there don’t like, and instead they go on to play in other tiers, like Underused. The best stuff gets pressurised out of it, pushed up and out into that rarified atmosphere by the math and social pressure of the natural churn of the system, right?

Right?

But they don’t.

They want to play OU.

And they want OU to be the ‘main’ format.

There are two competing challenges here, for me. The first is that Smogon can’t actually add anything to the game. They see their place as having to exclude things. I get this problem, kinda because ostensibly, they want their version of the game to be a thing you can play ‘on hardware’ rather than through their emulator. This ‘on hardware’ play therefore can’t actually add anything or overlay new rules, like, for example, adjusting the stats of Pokemon, or instituting score-based team building or even elimination drafts. And you don’t get to go ‘hey, that’s really obnoxious or hard to do,’ because Smogon’s ruleset is not easily processed or parsed, and it is not welcoming.

The second thing is that Smogon’s process for changing the game is their idea of democratic. It’s voted on by experts who can identify the problems and supposedly make good choices going forward. This means these people need to be socially active and engaged in the forum place and capable of earning respect within the competitive and social environment that represents which, let me tell you, that’s a worrying place.

And the thing is, this is all being done with an assumption that they’re trying to carve away what’s ‘wrong’ with the format to find the right version of it. On the one hand, yeah, that’s cool, they’re making a game out of another game. On the other hand…

Says who?

They use terms like ‘noncompetitive’ and ‘unskilled’ to refer to when a strategy can present a player with an abrupt choice and if they choose wrong they’re at a disadvantage, as if games with sharp swings aren’t competitive games that require skill. The language has the familiar structure of designers discussing problems with games but without the fundamental idea of being able to actually change it. Much like Smash players who try to remove variance from a game built around it, Smogon is trying to take something designed to get out of hand with crits and failure chances and make it fit something else.

Famously, new ideas and new mechanics get introduced and Smogon tries to route around them, to preserve the way things were in earlier generations rather than adjust to what the new generation is doing. Back in Generation 8 of Pokemon, Smogon just straight up banned Dynamax entirely; a mechanic that meant any pokemon could have a big bulky tank mode for a short period of time and punch through protects. That meant they played the entire format without access to a mechanic the main game was balanced around. Anyone who played Smogon exclusively through all the years of Generation 8 is someone who has no idea what a core mechanic of that game does to the game based on their play experience.

When Gliscor went, in that same announcement, people were bringing up, again, that they need to ban Terastallize, for the whole duration of the generation. Because the current format and game’s defining special rule is something they want to ignore, which just further builds on the idea that they don’t want Scarlet Violet OU. They don’t want the Pokemon that would bubble to the top of those usage stats so they could select where else they’d rather play. The only tool is shrinking the game… and it just so happens that it means that each generation kind of slowly but surely winds up looking a lot like the previous ones. They don’t want this ‘Pokemon’ game interfering with their game. And they don’t want to take measures to address these problems,because whatever they’re aiming at, it has to be socially agreed upon, voted upon, enforced by bans only, and only validated by vibes.

It’s all said with the selfseriousness of people sitting on the sofa glaring at the TV that they know what the game ‘should’ be and not considering what the game is. Which is fair! They’re making up their own game out of this other game, after all, and that game could kick ass! It doesn’t look like it, it looks like a rat’s nest of rules corner cases, with a stone-faced defensiveness that suggests newcomers have to Get Good and Do The Readings, and if you’re not involved, you should not dare comment on their game. Any opinion about their game must show due deference, even if it’s just recognising that it exists. An absence of praise is a presence of violence.

It’s very funny when they complain about Gamefreak’s decisions, mind you. Gamefreak’s game is one of the most successful multimedia franchises in the world and Smogon is a forum for a few hundred very sweaty dorks. Like, yeah, I don’t think Gamefreak are thinking about you when they make their choices about how to continue ongoing engagement with their multinational game empire. Which isn’t to say their game is better, the game you play is the game you want to play, but acting as if ‘Gamefreak doesn’t know what they’re doing’ – they do. They aren’t caring about you and the way you play the game, and haven’t for like… fifteen years? Your game isn’t unbalanced because Gamefreak are stupid, your game is unbalanced because you’re playing in the space Gamefreak is explicitly not balancing.

But okay, let’s look at what I said up top: Players are great at identifying problems and terrible at solving them.

These players are able to identify the problems they’re having. They don’t want to play doubles, and the singles game is balanced around a kind of play they don’t like. And when you’re dealing with playtesting of your own game, you need to be able to listen to this kind of thing and accept it as entirely neutral and entirely correct feedback. Players might lie to you about how they feel but you should always trust it anyway. They have identified a problem.

As it stands, right now, Smogon’s only tool they consider acceptable for changing this game is to take things away from it, and for the process of doing those changes being entirely social, and ostensibly democratic, with a real ‘well, if you didn’t vote, you don’t matter’ kind of approach to that.

And this is what you get.

Gliscor was used in somewhere between five and one teams in the Pikalytics, by the way.