The Battle Subway is becoming really, really bad.

Question

I know we're not a competitive site, but the majority of teams on the Battle Subway are absolute crap. We also have a multitude of old teams that are unanswered, and obsolete. So I have two propositions (although I'm sure it'd be a bit better over Summer because more Mods and Editors are active then anyway)

1. Hide really old posts. Seriously, do we need to go back and read Gen 3 teams? These can be hidden, purely to get rid of them. DT has mentioned this before although it was never really expanded on.

2. Bad teams. I'm aware that we're not a competitive site, that doesn't excuse us for having no rules regarding completely crap teams. Teams should actually be rateable, I shouldn't look at a team and go "The only way to fix this is to smash his hard drive and get him to start again", I should be able to look at a team and go "Needs a check for Talonflame, and slight EV spread changes". That's really the only difference. Obviously to moderate this the moderators or editors would need a decent understanding of the metagame, Mew, Lenub, Mike, and a few others are such people. I don't expect this to be resolved immediately, and probably shouldn't be until Summer begins because of Activity fluctuations, but perhaps we could implement a Battle Subway Editor if possible, allowing someone with actual metagame knowledge to remove bad teams, hide obsolete teams, and generally keep it a much cleaner place.

Main things:

• Generally bad sets, not even remotely viable (such as Physical Alakazam)
• Bad formatting, formatting should generally follow the PS importable formats for easier testing and reading (example of format)
• Older teams that have become obsolete (Gen 3 teams, teams with banned strategies)
• Bad spelling and grammar leaves little incentive to answer
• DT made some good suggestions regarding a cleaner Battle Subway here

Bad Team example
Rateable Team example
Good Team example

Comments

Too many bad and unrate-able teams, makes the place look really bad an unprofessional, and not actually really helping anyone.

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I think one of the problems is that we don't have the guidance for building better teams like other sites do, either in written guides or in tutoring. To make a team on the RMT, you're expected to be already proficient at battling to do so, but that requirement is never overtly stated.

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You aren't necessarily required to be proficient in battling.

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We have this problem because I posted some teams :I

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I feel as if you are... otherwise you'd come up with stuff like special Conkeldurr, and you can't actually rate a team with Pokemon like that, because you'd need to rewrite the whole team.