Community opinions on "build my team" posts on Rate My Team

Question

Hey everyone! The RMT is my old man yelling at clouds topic, so I hope you'll indulge me :P

RMT in its current form is never going to be a serious alternative to Smogon forums or other competitive advice locations, so I think we need to give it more of an identifiable niche. To this point, I (cautiously) suggest allowing more open-ended "build my team posts".

What could the rules look like?
- Asker cannot request a team made completely from scratch. They must provide a Pokemon (or multiple) they want to build around and specify a format. Usual rules of "know the metagame" still apply.
- If we wanted to be nitpicky, we could require the OP's Pokemon have sets explained -- not just "build me a team around Gholdengo".
- Specifying a desired archetype is even nitpickier, but maybe necessary for Pokemon like Landorus-Therian or Vullaby that fulfil many niches in different teams.
- Answerers must provide all relevant details, including Pokemon, full sets, and explanations as usual.
- Anything else we can modify to make it a smoother process.

I think the RMT still has potential if we try to make it its own thing. I also think that allowing open-ended "team builds" is the easiest change to implement. At some point, we'll put out another poll to gather community opinions about other possible changes like allowing well-thought-out in-game teams.

Please give your thoughts! If people seem on board, we'll formalise and post the rules. We'd also love other suggestions on how to help RMT.

Here is an example of what a "Build My Team" post may look like. This is not necessarily the gold standard -- I didn't go particularly in-depth with my explanations and the team provided has a few flaws. It does, however, serve as a template for what could be expected.

Thanks for reading!

Comments

Very interesting.

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The idea might be a bit difficult to visualize; maybe you should put an example post, with example answers.

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@MangoBrick thanks for the idea. I'll have an example out soon.

Answer 1

You're the next in a long line of PokeBase mods who've tried to make something out of RMT. I wish you luck.

Here's the insight of the most recent person to try and fail, which you're welcome to take with a grain of salt.

RMT in its current form is never going to be a serious alternative to Smogon forums

Since we're invoking Smogon, why don't we compare what we've got to what they've got?

Here's their OU forum, other SV forum, and past gen forum. Certain RMT doomers might be surprised to find that Smogon is not exactly a utopia of high-quality teams filled with knowledgeable people giving elaborate top-down reviews of their fellow competitors' begetting. Plenty of "Replies: 0" and "this sucks, pls read ___ first" to be enjoyed there.

Sure, the organisation is better, the discussion is more lively, and high level players are more likely to post there. But still, I don't really care to use it any more than I care to use RMT. (And in RMT's defence, the red "0"s you see on every post disguise the fact that a majority of posts do receive comments.)

All of this is to say: the issue we're grappling with is just as much "there aren't many good Pokemon players and most of them don't care about rating teams from the 1400s" as it is "RMT kinda sucks".

I think we need to give it more of an identifiable niche. To this point, I (cautiously) suggest allowing more open-ended "build my team posts".

With the above in mind, you can probably see why I don't think this is going change anything.

Even if there was a demographic of people waiting for us to finally wave the magic wand that makes it all better, I doubt that demographic will want to read even more posts from people who obviously haven't used their team before, by definition this time.

But we can try if people want.

allowing well-thought-out in-game teams

Been there and done that! I used to be strongly in favour of giving this a go. Nowadays I have my reservations.

I just don't see a reality where we'll have a consistent stream of people making teams who genuinely care about being efficient (the only metric we can advise on), instead of just using Pokemon they like in their playthrough. Disentangling the "I like Chimecho, don't replace Chimecho" people from the rest is hard enough with competitive teams.

A lot of honest in-game team advice, such as "cull half this team because you don't actually need it", is likely to piss people off. I consider these problems unfixable. I rather we focus on having this flavour of content exist on PokeBase in some form. I may get around to this one day.

Comments

Hey, thanks for the response. To be quite honest, I'm not entirely sure what would actually "fix" the RMT (maybe nothing?). For now, I'm of the opinion that we should try new things every so often and see if any of them stick. This felt like the most rational thing to start with, even if it doesn't solve every problem -- and I guess time would tell if it solved *any* of them. :P

I agree that places like Smogon aren't the promised lands, but it does generally seem more professional than what we have here. Any way to attract more of that demographic to RMT would be nice, which is why I'm more than open for other ideas.

In regard to your last paragraph: I'd love to see more in-game optimisation content on PokeBase. That sounds like it'd be the closest we'd get to having "competitive" playthrough teams.

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I don’t think we can ever fix the “newb bad team.” Smogon even has issues with this; they just close things a bit quicker. The real thing we should try to fix is being able to answer the questions of those who have actual teams. No one here plays DOU and does RMT, meaning those who post RMTs for DOU or Regulation F won’t get RMTs. What we need is more people to play in more formats and do RMT. Like we should have people to volunteer to be a consistent OU rater or NatDex Rater.

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I play DOU for fun but if anyone wants, Ill spend most of my time there & not Randoms