Battle Stadium Singles blog — Series 8 statement (Special Edition)
Details: https://battle.pokemon-home.com/regulation/000000203/en
This was originally just a coda in the upcoming team write-up for Season 14, but as I thought more about what I wanted to say about the announced changes for ranked singles for the period of February-April, things got slightly out of hand, as they are wont to do.
So here goes nothing: Regarding the upcoming ruleset changes for Series 8, here is the perspective of someone with over 2600 games of ranked singles this generation so far, and who placed in the global top 100 in the Dragon King Cup:
To clarify, I am not opposed to periodic changes to the format, but what I find to be the hardest of hard pills to swallow this time around is the thoughtless and lazy nature of the changes in Series 8: the developers could have done so much more rather than just forcing upon us the Dragon King Cup format for what I fully expect to be three agonizing months of ranked.
What I also do not appreciate in the least is being shackled to VGC's schedule of format-changes and being thrown overboard like this — the banlist for Series 6 BSS being contaminated by VGC-statistics was bad enough (I'm sure VGC-players felt the same way about BSS-stuff on their banslits, no doubt). Don't get me wrong, I could very well be singing a different tune if BSS got the same level of organized play support as doubles does. In any case, I have tried to distil my reasoning for these objections in the three main points below:
1. Overcoming something from the restricted list, designated as a legendary (BST 600+), tends to be easier in doubles, where this format is rather enjoyable from what I can gather, than in a 1v1 setting.
Therefore, the expectation is that gameplay will be highly centralized around each team's legendary for most playstyles, as already experienced in Dragon King Cup and its preliminary practice tournaments. This also means that Ditto, an indicator species for how healthy a format is through inverse proportionality, is quite good, which means the format is anything but.
As flawed as Series 6's banlist was, removing Libero Cinderace, a force so overcentralizing pre-Crown Tundra that things like fat Gyarados became a mainstay check, with even things like Baby-Doll Eyes Luxray seeing play, was a teaching moment whose lessons of how to mix things up should have been taken to heart by the developers.
2. Three months is far too long for this format.
A month of this I can stomach; two months risks a seriously stagnant format; a full three months I see is starting to verge on compromising any kind of competitive integrity ranked singles has. I will certainly be playing less than usual, and content on this blog covering Series 8 will, as a result, be less-researched and lovingly crafted than for Series' 6 & 7 entries, but if the excess of time allotted to this ruleset somehow manages to eventually produce a good format, I do welcome being set straight.
3. Casual players will have problems obtaining pokemon.
Consider, for example, someone who is stuck on Shield-version with the disaster that is Zamazenta — the only reasonable way to get Rusted Sword to be able to run Zacian-Crowned, a major threat, outside rental teams is through a console-to-console trade with a duper. Is that something we should expect casual players to be able to arrange?
Another thing, arguably even more egregious, to note in this regard is the fact that the key item Reins of Unity for fused Calyrex-forms, being DLC-only, prevents people without the DLC from playing them outright, outside, again, using rental teams.
This is obviously a weak argument and certainly no excuse for anyone calling themselves a competitive player. Indeed, because of the Battle Ready symbol, Bank-HOME compatibility, the GTS, and ready access to injection through Discord and Twitch bots, you would think this would not be a big problem even for casual players. But because this is a children's game after all, the expectation here is that overall player numbers will hemorrhage as a result of decisions like this — recall that the second month of Series 6 (Seasons 10-11) saw the number of accounts in Master Ball Tier decline by almost 20k (from 90k to 70k). What will the third month of Series 8 look like?
Lastly, and so as not to come off just as a crusty old curmudgeon on this whole topic, I will briefly offer some constructive criticism in the form of a list of suggetions for changes they could have made for a truncated Series 8 BSS instead of rehashing the ruleset from a tournament that got a mixed response from singles players:
- No items: Rather boring, I admit, but several official competitions run with this ruleset in the past two generations provide proof of concept.
- No Dynamax: Alas, simply too good to be true even for a weekender. Have to force that generational gimmick, after all. Please surprise me on this, devs.
- Monotype: Every member of the team would have to share one single type. Unlikely, but 2018's Ultra Spooky Cup proves that even arbitrary rulesets like this have some precedent.
- Banlist: Actual game-balancing mid-generation is obviously off the table, so this is probably the most likely thing on this list. Something resembling Series 6 (two-month banlist), but competently implemented doesn't sound too bad.
And that about does it for this...whatever this was. Again, I genuinely hope we will, by April, all be celebrating our drinks and dancing the Egyptian bacchanals with how amazing the upcoming format ends up being.
- Tox
SW-0021-9848-8999
