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

I've also noticed this. A lot of the "veterans" and guys who generally provide interesting, creative and solid viable teams, myself included, haven't really been posting lately. I can't remember the last team posted that got say three or four votes.

In fact, the last team to even get a single vote was Pika's, which was posted almost a week ago.

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I think that can be attributed greatly to the fact that a lot of us have A. Not had much time, B. Given up on battling in Gen 6, or C. Not had many successful teams (me), or D. Getting used to the tiers.

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I can get started on this now if anything. Hide all the old posts.

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The Battle Subway should just be completely revamped.
Voting on teams should be instead done with a rating system for everyone to drop their opnions without having to make a drawn out answer to a question and get feedback faster. Basically, instead of the classic vote button there's an option to rate the team out of a scale of 0-some number.
The alternative option could just be to convert into a traditional forum.

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Pokemaster was supposed to remake the Battle Subway into a forum to make rating easier, but he's busy with life and all. That was the ultimate solution towards the unanswered problem we have. And while I agree with that rating system, but voting is not exactly the issue here. The BS is basically dead now, but it can be fixed.

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WOAH, don't start ANYTHING YET.

If we are going to hide bad teams we might as well hide the top teams too.

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Also banned strategies aren't limited to Wifi.

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I disagree with the idea to hide top teams, as these teams provide an example of how users should format their team and portray them to the people who are looking at them.

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Those teams clearly can't be rated. Bad teams can.

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Physical Alakazam is completely viable! (In attack swap)

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I also disagree with the (unanswered) top team posts on the grounds that very view of them actually have any notable views for how long they've been around. If a good team has been up for two years but only with 100 views, it means nobody is actually looking at it. That's even more the case when many of those are from older competitive generations that have since been outdated. There's not much reason to keep the unanswered posts for examples if nobody is even looking at them. Better to have fewer unanswered posts and draw more attention to more recent content to ensure that it gets answered and improved. just because nobody replied necessarily doesn't mean the team didn't need improvements. Most of them just get unanswered out of lack of interest.

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Part of the problem is we get new users who have little to no experience in competitive battling, and they either post an in-game team or a team that's competitively not viable.

No one reads the rules either, so. *shrug*

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I agree.
Since I rate a lot of team and want to reach the 1000 points for editing bad questions into readable questions, for the least, I find most of the team either good to go, or needing to restart from A to Z. We cannot let Battle Subway section dive like that.

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If we go on a mass hiding spree and hide everything old with no answer, would that even do anything besides hiding a bunch of questions? We still need people who know what they are doing to answer the questions that remain, and that won't be happening even if we do this.

All of this sounds good, yes, but it will do nothing if we were to put it into practice.

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I'd really like PM's input on this as I believe he mentioned changing the RMT into more of a forum based section. And also potentially with the introduction of the forums we can archive older better teams with say 3 or more votes (random number), so that people can go back and look at them. It's similar to how SMogon does it, and it would result in the Battle Subway having a large amount of cleaner, newer content, easier to read teams and formats, good inspiration, and good examples. If as a new user I come in and look at a bad team (as seen in the example I had above) and I'm lazy and don't bother with the rules, I'm likely to post my team in a similar fashion. That said some users such as Blitz managed to learn from their mistakes and have become great RMT'ers on the site, but the Battle Subway is still a mess with large amount of unanswered posts, with little inspiration for people to answer them because they look like, and are, crap.

TL;DR
&Psychic x: He was talking about the Forum being beneficial, wanting PM's input, and how users are just posting bad teams because that's all they see in the BS

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"That said some users such as Blitz managed to learn from their mistakes and have become great RMT'ers on the site"
lol thx for the mention ◕‿◕
But seriously, you are right.

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Can someone just flat out state the problem

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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.