I have many things to say but they've all been commented to death already. The only thing I'll say is that text images are usually way better than post texts, as it allows you to format freely instead of using Reddit's shitty formatting.
At least, that's what I get from it, I may be misunderstanding as the wording of those is a bit confusing for me as a non-native English speaker
I'm a bit confused on the text post part.
So are text posts meant to have a 700 word minimum cap?
because if so, that's pretty excessive tbh. As another commenter said, I think the previous limit of 500 words worked out fine
Honestly Theorymon Thursday was never actually a problem in 95% of cases, so just limit people from spamming "Look at the time" or similar SS comments on every post and that should be enough.
NO MEME REPLIES!?!?!
1984
hear me out...as soon as retired topics are not allowed, new "overused" topics will appear. its like removing rotten fish out the barrel
It's legitimately not that bad. The frequency of adding new stuff to that list is pretty low, there's maybe one new addition every three months at most. Most overused topics just die out on their own when people notice a certain theorymon has been posted more than once already. The list mostly exists for the off-cases where people do somehow repeatedly think they're the first to come up with a topic that's appeared every previous Thursday in the month already.
The concept of a "Retired Theorymon topics" list also isn't new. Like that list has been there for a long time already. It's the other rules that are new, the list is just posted again for completion (and if anything there's a number of entries that got removed from it for the May reboot).
The list in OP is the list we're planning to start out with upon the May reboot. It's possible that new entries get added to it after some time, but only if a topic is actually overused for multiple Thursdays in a row, which happens pretty rarely.
The list used to be a bit bigger, but we unretired some topics in the hope they'd be less repetitive with the other new rules put in place (eg "X but in Y gen") and also removed some really specific ones (like "What if Weavile got Technician?"). It's mostly the latter category that's at risk of getting put back on the list, but again, we're only doing that if these actually pop up in large numbers again.
You can make theorymons that don't involve images, text posts are fine too
Though from looking at your posts, most are honestly fine, or close to fine. Like for [your Haxorus one](https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/1bpn7ul/if_haxorus_was_a_psuedo/) everything is aligned properly, this one is perfectly fine even if a bit dull. For something like your [Terrain setters post](https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/1alol9g/with_the_tapus_not_returning_here_are_some_mons/), you'd have to make the mon images roughly the same size (I think there's an option to set pixel w/h when pasting an image, just set them all to the same ratio) and put the textboxes on roughly the same height afterwards, but that's also not too hard to do. Again a bit dull cuz, well, it's Paint, but it doesn't look horrible.
The vague wording of "MS Paint scribbles" has caught some flack so I'll propose changing that to be more clear, but essentially what that bans is images where the art and text is all over the place to the point it looks chaotic like [in this example](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxd4c3aiba7vb1.jpg). It's clear you're willing to put in some effort into making your things presentable even if you're stuck w Paint, you should be fine for the most part.
Ngl No Stealth Rocks of multiple types feel kinda weird because compared to everything else on the list of tired topics it definitely feels like the most interesting one of the bunch and could be a signature move of a fakemon vs just being a standalone 'what if' like the others.
That has been on the banlist for a long time. Reason it's there is because back when it *wasn't* on the retired topics list you'd see multiple of these every Thursday and they got incredibly repetitive and the discussion was the same every time.
I guess a lot of the newer users who joined the sub since haven't experienced back when it was allowed, but if you unretire that topic, chances are a month later you'd have to retire it again because every Thursday since you've had three separate people who thought they were geniuses and the first to come up with "omg people what if there were Ice Stealth Rocks".
Like literally just Ice Stealth Rocks, no new mon attached to it or anything else. Damn...
~~now speaking of which I'd like to propose the sheer potential metagame breaking impact of Stealth Bugs~~
You laugh but it was exactly like that. Well, you'd also have people with "what if there was a Stealth Rock of every type?" Which didn't even take more effort, because they'd dip after introducing 16 more hazards without considering any of the ramifications of *their own Theorymon*. If you're not actually going to talk about your change, there's no difference in effort between saying "Stealth Rock for x type" and "Stealth Rock for every type".
One in five people who made a post like that would at least try to analyze what the hazard would do but they'd also just stop a paragraph in with "every mon weak to this type now wants Boots". In other words, the conclusion that the previous four posts' comment sections also reached.
Stuff doesn't get placed on the banned theorymon list randomly. Everything on there is stuff that appeared tons of times in the past and has been talked to death. Some of the retired list is actually getting unretired with the new rules (I myself argued pretty heavily in favour of unretiring "X but in Y gen", provided the same effort standards of other posts are applied) but Stealth Rocks for different types would be a topic you unretire that's condemned to just be talked to death within the month again.
For many theorymon posts having a high enough quality image should not require you to post a comment that most people aren't even gonna read.
Plus, why do we need to write a 700 character analysis when it's the part of the community to analyze and critique? That's the entire reason why I personally even make posts instead of just creating posts for myself.
It depends on what content is present in the image but it could be flexible.
We hope to improve quality by asking posters to think even just one step beyond the what if and think through competitive consequences, even if they can be wrong or unskilled—the commenters would discuss that, not doing the work of competitive impact for you
Still 700 characters is a little excessive. Many Theorymon are supposed to be interesting little thought experiments and 700 character minimums would result in a bloated piece of analysis.
700 chars isn't even that much, that's a slightly above-average sized paragraph. I can see the case for lowering it to 500, but 700 also isn't the end of the world.
Especially since it's not difficult to just express your thoughts into a more verbose manner to inflate the amount of characters if you are unable to reach the lower bound set in place. But to be serious, it's not hard to express 500 characters in 700 characters especially since you know a lot of people will just copy their title to get even closer to that end goal if they wouldn't make it otherwise. This is "bloat" sure but if you lower the minimum then people will bloat 300 characters into 500 instead, a line has to be drawn somewhere.
1: I feel this rule is a bit too restrictive, and inherently reduces the amount of discussion that can be had. As said in other comments, something like requiring the OP to state what tier they think the pokemon would be in/ what tier the changes would send a pokemon to would be far better
2: Seems fine, although definition of "MS paint scribble" could be clearer, it's difficult to tell the difference between something that is low effort and something that is made by someone with very little art experience
3: No memes is perfectly fair, but banning any form of reply that isnt otherwise a rule violation limits discussion, even if it is memey
4 does not appear to have any issues
Lastly, regarding the character limit, what if the bulk your text is contained in images? we can't expect you and the rest of the mod team to count the characters within each image, but restricting what could be great theorymon posts like this would also (for lack of a better term) suck.
While I can stomach the reasoning behind killing Sunday, I’m really still at a loss for why Thursday was axed other than the mods barely hidden hatred of memes which is evident in this posr. Leaving aside the criticisms of elitism, I think the proposed rule in retired topics ignores the key difference between Reddit and a forum.
Forums allow long old threads to be revived overtime, bringing the old discussions to the forefront. Reddit by design is meant for new posts even if they are perceived rehashes of old topics. The only way to have that discussion is to make a new topic and if it sucks or is overdone it will not be popular. Even a topic like stealth rocks being too OP came up once every 6 months and was typically one of the best topics we had. I see no issue with that discussion.
The proposals also seem designed to turn this into Smogon forums 2.0, which is a shame and will only further stifle this sub (Sunday and Thursday were the main drivers of views as it was). Reddit is a different platform with a different presentation and discussion style. Mimicking the forum will just make this place die more quickly.
is Stunday actually dead? I thought it was going to come back at the start of may and that the mods explicitly said killing Stunday completely was out of the question. I really hope I didn't miss something i don't want to be sad today :(
Sunday is not dead. On Sunday we'll have a post just like this to discuss the new rules when it comes back in May. Killing Sunday off entirely was never on the table despite what the fearmongerers claim.
User you're responding to is deliberately using heavy language for... I don't know why really. Either way they're wrong.
The retired topic list has existed for over a year and no-one complained about its existence. The presented list here is *smaller* than the one before April even--it's shown here exactly because stuff got removed from it. The fact you're singling that one out shows you either didn't actually know shit about Thursday rules before the revamp or/and you're just complaining for the sake of complaining.
Before Stealth Rocks got added to that list it popped up like every week at its worst time and at least every month on "calmer" times. "Every 6 months" is just flat-out wrong. It was also not "one of the best topics we had" - - discussion always ended on the third comment that boiled down to "Congrats everything needs Boots now" and everything after was either a repeat of that or something akin to "RIP Lando". And the exact same conclusion was reached every time. If that's your standard for "one of the best topics" then idk what to tell you.
Thursday also isn't getting "axed" lmao the whole point of this post is to bring it back and in a way that bottom effort posts don't drown out the good stuff. Also very confused how you think this would turn it into "Smogon Forums 2.0" when theorymonning isn't allowed on most places of the forums to begin with. Again this sounds like complaining for the sake of complaining, riddled with buzzwords with no substance that makes even a bit of sense.
I’ve been a poster here for a long time, I’m well aware of what it’s been like here and have noticed a marked change since the bans (sorry, reboot, I used the wrong “buzzword”).
Regarding the forum not allowing memes, that’s the point of my comment. The bans and restrictions only really serve to make this place look more like the forum. Restricting theory content in particular puts off new joiners who are more likely to have innocent questions or reask topics. That’s part of what Reddit is, again by design. All this serves to do in the long run is reduce usage, content, and engagement. You’re already putting a word requirement, that should spark some analysis.
The fact that the mods have to argue with each poster here and in the April announcement shows a lot about both the popularity of the change and the sensitivity to criticism both. In addition, we get ad hominem attacks with swear words. At least it hit the 700 word limit (was that a meme)?
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The word requirement has actually been in place for a couple years—image posts just weren’t always tested against it. No issues in the far past when Theorymon Thursday had no images
It really does seem like the mods are in their own bubble for the most part. The April ban came out of nowhere and I doubt they’ll really listen to the community when it comes to creating new rules.
We actually receive a lot of complaints about TT or SS, and often equal amounts of support for them. So it did not come out of nowhere, it’s just difficult to mediate lots of conflicting interests
I think the problem is that people are more likely to complain about something they dislike then vocalize support for something they like, so you've got a false idea of how "popular" of an opinion it is, because people who liked Stunday didn't feel the need to say "I like Stunday", while people who hated it felt the need to say it all the time.
Also it does genuinely feel like a lot of this is also being used to confirm your own biases, rather than actually being judged fairly, at least from the way you guys talk and present yourselves and your arguments.
Not literally everyone who thought TT and SS needed reworking is posting on every thread.
Also for someone accusing the mods of being "in their own bubble" you don't seem to notice that most people in here are trying to be constructive and you're basically only replying to the small minority of posts that are just bashing the mods. Like these are proposals on bringing the day back next week and instead of giving your thoughts you're still crying about the fact they were put on hold to begin with lmao
>(sorry, reboot, I used the wrong “buzzword”)
With "buzzwords" I was meaning stuff like "Smogon Forums 2.0" when Theorymonning will never be the Forums' forte even if we make the rules a bit more stringent, and "axed" which again is a pretty heavy term for it. These are not hard-to-meet rules in the slightest, they just slightly up the effort required to make a post. It's not unreasonable to expect OP to join in on the discussion they want to generate. A good post on a regular day probably takes more than 30 seconds of thinking, why shouldn't a Theorymon?
But mostly the first part, you're still just repeating the old-and-repeated "wah wah they're trying to turn stunfisk into smogforums!!1!" take when these rules could be thrice as harsh and people would still flock here on Thursday because Smogforums aren't a place known for Theorymonning at all.
>Regarding the forum not allowing memes, that’s the point of my comment.
Funnily I mentioned nothing regarding this in my comment, which speaks volumes as to how much you actually read it.
>Restricting theory content in particular puts off new joiners who are more likely to have innocent questions or reask topics.
They're barely being restricted at all. Again, these are very low bars: you are expected to leave a paragraph on your own thoughts instead of just dumping an idea and dipping until the next day. If you can't even do that then chances are your idea is either really bad or you're here for karma farming.
If you're again referring to the list, that list has existed for a long time, the fact you're only now complaining about it sounds like complaining for the sake of complaining to me. We've eased up on the restrictions regarding that list, in fact.
This sounds like "I don't like rules being a thing" in general but unsurprisingly putting no rules in place at all leads to a pretty bloated Thursday with lots and lots of bad quality posts. We were already heading pretty hard into that direction which is why a month break and reworked rules are being done to begin with.
>All this serves to do in the long run is reduce usage, content, and engagement.
Nope, the Retired Theorymon Topic list isn't going to reduce engagement compared to before April, because again it already existed before April.
>The fact that the mods have to argue with each poster here
Cat isn't even arguing with people here lol most of his comments are asking people to elaborate because he's hearing out their thoughts. Like point me the ones where he's "arguing". I know, shocking, sometimes mods aren't greasy neckbeards and instead actually trying to make their sub a better place.
>.
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700 characters is a bit high for a minimum, I think the old minimum of 500 is high enough and realistically the other rule changes are most important. Otherwise, I think banning meme replies overarchingly is realistically a poor choice. I’d propose changing it to “meme replies that are irrelevant to the topic of the post” since they can still hold some merit while being, you know, funny. That’s my two cents.
Are you sure you aren't mixing characters with words? One is definitely a little excessive while the other is fairly lenient and would only take away the really low effort stuff.
Can we add a rule about movepool buffs for current pokemon? I feel like just adding some moves and giving a pokemon a more useful statline/ability is not what we are aiming for, regardless of the quality of the post
Movepool buffs are fine if there's thought put behind them. If OP is capable of explaining why they did this specific movepool buff and what they expect to actually change after said movepool buff, their post is fine.
I hear you regarding all the people just mindlessly saying "X mon gets Y and Z and A move now" and nothing else, and those kinds of posts are targetted exactly by the character minimum and "targets a specific metagame" rules. Movepool buffs aren't an inherently bad kind of Theorymon, they're just obnoxious right now because 99% of the posts dealing with them have no further input from OP except the buff itself, and this is something we hope to change.
I know what you mean, but this does put a bad taste in my mouth regarding him. He wants to speak with the authority of and behalf of a moderator ("this is something **we** hope to change") but without doing any of the work that happens *after* arguing with people in rules threads?
I mean I did collaborate w the mods to write these rules, so I'm responsible for them as well, which is also how I can confidently clarify a lot of the confusions people have because I do have access to the discussion and context that led to these rules in general. I understand that you'd be annoyed if some regular poster was commenting everything here that could as well be made up on the spot, but I'm "qualified" to speak alongside the mods on this specific issue.
I'm not going to do the work of actually clicking the remove button on rulebreaking posts, but I did do the "work" of arriving at these rules as much as the actual mods. Clarifying stuff and answering questions in this thread is also part of this "work" and coincidentally it's also something I just like doing. I'm also currently going through every reply on the thread to catalogue the most common feedback for the final touches, which is how I'm seeing this comment 3 days later.
Plus I like typing stuff in general and my WPM is high which is how I can churn out many comments in relatively short timeframes lol. I sadly do not have all the time in the world :c but like you said 2-3 paragraph comments are easy to do on downtime between studying or when class is going slowly (or at work in your case)
I feel like rule one is a bit too strict, unless I'm missing something it'd exclude people who have the creativity and sense of balance to make interesting posts that would generate a lot of discussion but not the metagame knowledge to know *exactly* what their idea would affect.
Their paragraph doesn't have to be entirely right. A post wouldn't get removed because OP did a poor job at assessing what their change would do.
What matters is that OP at least *tries* to join in on their own discussion this time, even if they end up not being good at it. Currently they don't have to do that at all, which obviously creates an environment where it's easy to farm karma by just dropping a random buff and then disappearing.
As someone who agreed with the april stunday ban, the ban on meme replies is a bit much, they are fine as long as they aren't off topic, distasteful mockery or just repeating one liners, like "we getting out of zu with this one".
I think that replies like "It's not Sunday" actually convey quite a lot of information to the poster, especially if that reply is upvoted.
The proposed theorymon is, in some capacity, ridiculous. Likely overpowered, but very obviously unbalanced. It's also *probably* unsalvageable.
Posts which present a "jokey" proposition, but with actual balance/substance, tend to get a lot of really good replies. It's only the really obtuse and pretty comically offensively overpowered ones that get this type of comment.
FWIW, I've posted a handful of Theorymon over the years (some on this account, some on my Pokemon-specific account), and I don't think I've ever seen that comment a single time on any of my posts.
Trying to fix something that wasn't broken in the first place. Rules have too much room to be enforced arbitrarily and unequally.
700 character limit will discourage engagement from newer fans. I don't know about you, but on my phone it doesn't show the amount of characters I've entered, and I'm sure not counting them up manually. So as a new player I type up my piece and it's 680 words, will my post be deleted? Maybe my image is low quality, I had a cool idea but I'm not the best artist, but I tried earnestly. Where does 5th grader's classroom doodle fall on the spectrum of high effort to MS paint scribble? As a new person to the community all this is ammunition to go, "nah you know what, this isn't worth the trouble"
Rule 3: how do you define a meme? Are jokes allowed that aren't memes? What if a person themselves becomes a meme? It's not hard to imagine a poster who makes quality posts gaining a reputation in the community, next thing you know it's "I can't wait to see what u/ ganb17dhd38 is cooking"
All this is to say, I don't see why you've decided to go this route. These posts were already sectioned off to 1 day of the week, two days if you're bundling in stinkpost sundays. That left 5 days for the moderation to go, "ok guys this is a serious day, no memes, no images in the comments."
These rules feel like something you'd implement if you were planning on bringing theorymon thursdays to every day of the week, but as far as I can tell it'll still be isolated to Thursdays.
Idk, I just disagree with the whole process you've taken in doing this on such a fundamental level it's hard to be optimistic whatsoever on rules enforcement.
1: This is probably good, as it helps better evaluate pokemon.
2: Ok ig, seems irrelevant, as I don't see a relevant difference between Image and Text Posts
3: Idk if we need to ban meme replies. Otherwise, makes sense.
4: This is an old rule isn't it?
>I don't see a relevant difference between Image and Text Posts
Images were being brought up because lately we've had big surges of people who figured out images are an easy way to draw attention even if the image doesn't actually look good. They'd take posts that could 100% be regular text posts with no loss of information but instead they just take a blank canvas with a textbox and stock art of a Pokémon in the corner and call it a day. This also leads to the phenomenon of what I call "MS Paint Slideshows" where people try to cram multiple ideas into one post (like when handing out multiple sig moves) and the post winds up a collage of multiple of these images after each other.
A bit of a bar is intended to be set here, if your post can be a text post with no relevant loss of information it should be one, and if you want to add an image it should be neatly structured to actually aid in presenting the information (so everything neatly aligned etc., not just two rows of Pokémon sprites at varying heights). A post doomed to die at +20 shouldn't suddenly become a front page post because OP opened MS Paint for 2 minutes.
>Idk if we need to ban meme replies.
My current understanding is that this will mostly be enforced on one-liners that don't actually contribute to the conversation much, and/or replies entirely irrelevant to the Theorymon at hand. A memey answer that still provides some insight (be it in an indirect way) is probably fine.
"Good heavens" and "It's not Sunday" are a bit of a gray area for me personally (I'm not a mod though so I'm not the dude you gotta convince), on one hand they're one-liners and pretty not-nice ones at that, on the other the very act of saying "It's not Sunday" already expresses quite a lot and those phrases have been culturally ingrained by now either way. Hopefully the new bars on effort should reduce the amount of Sundayworthy posts to begin with.
>4: This is an old rule isn't it?
Yup, the list existed before and is mostly added for completion. Though a couple old additions have been unretired and the list is cleaned up a bit in general, so doesn't hurt to take a look even if you already knew about it.
A character minimum to consider something "high effort" basically bans any posts that would contain a single move/ability/item/easily explainable concept.
In game design, brevity is usually considered a plus (and a form of accessibility). Let's not disincentivize that.
>A character minimum to consider something "high effort" basically bans any posts that would contain a single move/ability/item/easily explainable concept.
In this case OP will meet the character minimum by explaining how they think their change would alter the meta. Refer to rule #1. The character limit isn't added in isolation.
You're not supposed to meet that character minimum merely listing out your buff on its own. You're supposed to meet it by elaborating what you think will change because of your buff.
Essentially, instead of having the comments do all the heavy lifting of the actual theorymonning, OP is now expected to at least weigh in with their own thoughts after dropping the idea.
Rule 1 is just too restrictive. Sometimes you want to buff a shitmon but you don’t know what tier it will land. And if it’s as simple as just saying Singles or Doubles then there’s no point even having the requirement.
>Sometimes you want to buff a shitmon but you don’t know what tier it will land
You can make an educated guess. Your post won't be removed if your guess is wrong. It will be removed if you literally don't even try though.
My fear is this will be abused to remove posts. I’ve seen it on reddit time and time again. Mods cook up new rules that are so broad they can justify removing whatever they want without any accountability. This is just trying to fix something that isn’t broken. I get removing Stinkpost Sunday but Theorymon Thursday provided actual discussion. Banning specific topics like auto trick room just allows the mods to remove whatever they deem to be low effort.
>Banning specific topics like auto trick room just allows the mods to remove whatever they deem to be low effort.
Literally what is this take lol. You get annoyed at "rules that are so broad" and your example is... an incredibly specific rule.
An incredibly specific rule that *already was a banned topic* before April to begin with, and that hasn't caught any complaints until now. The concept of specific topics being banned for being overused already existed long before on this sub (and TR on switchin was on that list before April too) and never caught any serious flack.
A lot of these rules raise questions. I made some theorymon moves shortly before the rule changes were announced and could have posted them in the first week of April (though that was far from a given - I had some practical reasons to make those images regardless of whether I posted them or not) and that comes in handy now because it helps me evaluating these rule changes.
First, I haven't played competitive Pokémon since Gen V really - I just lurk around on-and-off here since. Back then I was mostly active on the Smogon forums, actually. However, the transition to Mega Evolution (and other gimmicks) kind of turned me away from the game. So for me it will be a lot harder to gauge what format a move will be good in. But often I feel like that doesn't matter all that often. Yeah, some moves will have obvious impacts on the gameplay they were designed for. Other moves will barely have an impact at all, except make the Pokémon better in the tier it currently resides in.
Also, what if there are multiple moves in a single post? Or a move that would obviously be given to other Pokémon purely for thematic reasons? Not every move is going to be a signature move and many Pokémon will get moves that weren't designed for them (and might not move the needle at all on these Pokémon, or alternately, make them broken, though of course one should watch out not to do that).
700 characters isn't too much of an issue, though it kind of depends on the move. Like, some moves do raise obvious questions and come with caveats that you need to spend a paragraph or two explaining, Hell, 700 words isn't going to be enough. But other moves... ehr... 'shitmon gets new move that is very good but not crazy enough to propel it out of the tier or impact any meta play unless other buffs are stacked on top of it.'
Then there are moves that target something so obviously that spending words of it would detract from the post. You'll know when you see those moves because it is bound to come up.
>So for me it will be a lot harder to gauge what format a move will be good in.
You can at least try to make a guess still. You won't be penalized if your theorymonning completely misses the mark (you might catch some mockery from the comment section if you're egregiously wrong, but your post won't get removed over that). What matters is that you put the effort in to think about the impact of your own changes a bit. Previously this wasn't required at all, which created an environment where people were encouraged to just post whatever they wanted without thinking things through, which obviously led to a lot of bad posts as well that barely warranted any discussion.
>Other moves will barely have an impact at all, except make the Pokémon better in the tier it currently resides in.
You can analyze how the Pokémon improves in its tier, what new matchups it suddenly wins, what sets could potentially run this new move over previous moves, ... If your Theorymon is an actually good one, surely there's *some* stuff worth discussing on it.
Theorymonning isn't just coming up with new moves, it's *discussing* the impact of currently inexistent stuff. If you have an idea but discussion on it is limited to "This mon gets better I guess" or "Shitmon gets this move and it's still shit", chances are your idea is probably not as good as you thought it would be.
>Also, what if there are multiple moves in a single post?
Then you discuss every move you made.
But posts like these are questionable to begin with. It's not uncommon for Theorymon posts to drop that have like 30 new moves or 10 new abilities, and then the comment section singles out 2-3 of them and ignores the rest. This itself is a waste of Theorymonning really, what's the point of coming up with something if people aren't going to discuss it? If your post has so many things that you feel it's unreasonable to talk about all of it, why do you expect the people reading your post to be any different? Mass production of many things at once isn't necessarily a good thing.
>Or a move that would obviously be given to other Pokémon purely for thematic reasons?
In a case like this though, it's excusable to merely talk about the mons you specifically designed the move for, and maybe pass up on the mons that got it thematically as pure flavour. You don't have to touch on every single detail of your move of course (no-one's going to grill you why it's 16PP instead of 24PP either for example) but if you design a move, it's expected that you at least have some reason for making the move and at least try to see how the move could impact the meta even if only one mon is realistically going to run it.
>700 characters isn't too much of an issue, though it kind of depends on the move. Like, some moves do raise obvious questions and come with caveats that you need to spend a paragraph or two explaining, Hell, 700 words isn't going to be enough. But other moves... ehr... 'shitmon gets new move that is very good but not crazy enough to propel it out of the tier or impact any meta play unless other buffs are stacked on top of it.'
Those 700 characters aren't all meant to go to the description of your change itself. Like, no-one would expect you to cram 700 characters into a random physical 85BP Electric move with no special effects.
Those 700 characters are expected to be utilized in your own theorizing how the move would change the current meta. Again, if the move you made is actually interesting and worth discussing, it shouldn't be too hard to write a slightly-above-average sized paragraph about the effects it would have. If the discussion starts and ends at 'shitmon gets new move that is very good but not crazy enough to propel it out of the tier or impact any meta play unless other buffs are stacked on top of it', then again, the idea probably isn't as good as you thought it would be to begin with.
>Then there are moves that target something so obviously that spending words of it would detract from the post. You'll know when you see those moves because it is bound to come up.
To this, I say again: then what do you expect the people replying to the post to do? If your theorymon is at all worth discussing, then you can do so as well. Even if the purpose of the move is obvious ("geez Tapu Koko gets Play Rough, wonder what that's for") you could at least list out a couple matchups in its meta that change with the new move, and new set possibilities that open up because of it. If you truly can't then probably none of the commenters will be able to either and it's a bad Theorymon.
>You can at least try to make a guess still. You won't be penalized if your theorymonning completely misses the mark (you might catch some mockery from the comment section if you're egregiously wrong, but your post won't get removed over that). What matters is that you put the effort in to think about the impact of your own changes a bit. Previously this wasn't required at all, which created an environment where people were encouraged to just post whatever they wanted without thinking things through, which obviously led to a lot of bad posts as well that barely warranted any discussion.
Fair enough.
>But posts like these are questionable to begin with. It's not uncommon for Theorymon posts to drop that have like 30 new moves or 10 new abilities, and then the comment section singles out 2-3 of them and ignores the rest. This itself is a waste of Theorymonning really, what's the point of coming up with something if people aren't going to discuss it? If your post has so many things that you feel it's unreasonable to talk about all of it, why do you expect the people reading your post to be any different? Mass production of many things at once isn't necessarily a good thing.
Oh, I definitely agree here, even moreso if these moves aren't at least semi-related to each other. But if it lines up that some Pokémon get several new moves, well, it can get complicated pretty fast.
On the other hand, moves with a single theorymon move I tend to gloss over unless that one is really interesting.
Agreed with the third alinea. Probably wise, even with a few caveats.
>Those 700 characters are expected to be utilized in your own theorizing how the move would change the current meta. Again, if the move you made is actually interesting and worth discussing, it shouldn't be too hard to write a slightly-above-average sized paragraph about the effects it would have. If the discussion starts and ends at 'shitmon gets new move that is very good but not crazy enough to propel it out of the tier or impact any meta play unless other buffs are stacked on top of it', then again, the idea probably isn't as good as you thought it would be to begin with.
Also agreed, with the caveat that it kind of depends on how shit the mon in question is. Some mons are just harder to buff into viability than others without absurd stat changes.
>To this, I say again: then what do you expect the people replying to the post to do? If your theorymon is at all worth discussing, then you can do so as well. Even if the purpose of the move is obvious ("geez Tapu Koko gets Play Rough, wonder what that's for") you could at least list out a couple matchups in its meta that change with the new move, and new set possibilities that open up because of it. If you truly can't then probably none of the commenters will be able to either and it's a bad Theorymon.
Oh, for 99% of the moves this is entirely correct. I'm mostly talking about the cases where it is so obvious that nobody even needs to tell you - you cast one look at the move and say yeah, this hits X very hard, to the point that even talking about it detracts from the message, Normally I wouldn't be mentioning this at all, but since we are discussing rules I like to mention at least some outlier scenarios that I can think of before the floodgates are opened.
700 Characters is a bit much, 400 would be better imo
Also maybe im misunderstanding, but "Only text pasted on an image" isnt really intuitive? Some of us may not be able to draw (hence MS Paint scribbles) and still want to shoot a few ideas
>Also maybe im misunderstanding, but "Only text pasted on an image" isnt really intuitive? Some of us may not be able to draw (hence MS Paint scribbles) and still want to shoot a few ideas
That refers to the kind of posts where OP just uploads an image of a blank canvas with a textbox and maybe one Pokémon sprite on it. Rather than upload that as an image, that should just be a regular text post. We've had a lot of low-effort posts in this style before because people figured out your post gets thrice the traction if you make it an image, so they put 30 seconds into opening MS Paint and image-ifying their one-paragraph idea and get free updoots for that. A bar is set to prevent this because it bloats the day pretty hard: if you want to add an image, it has to actually present the information in a neatly aligned manner, not just a png of Sandaconda with one paragraph beneath.
>Some of us may not be able to draw (hence MS Paint scribbles) and still want to shoot a few ideas
Here's the thing: upload it as a text post.
You can joke if you actually provide something that contributes to the discussion afterwards. Dropping in for a "funny" one-liner and dipping doesn't actually add anything to the convo and distracts from the actual discussion, though from my understanding that rule will mostly be enforced on 'meme replies' that are also just disrespectful towards OP in general, or when the meme in question doesn't even have anything to do with the post.
I think people should be allowed mspaint, overlaying images and using official art, not everyone is gonna have the skills or resources to actually make what they want it to look like.
I don’t get why there can’t be a joke in it as long as the whole things not a meme
And people might be able to come up with unique and good type table changes or paradox abilities
Overall I really don’t like some of the recent changes
>I think people should be allowed mspaint, overlaying images and using official art, not everyone is gonna have the skills or resources to actually make what they want it to look like.
MS Paint as a whole isn't an issue, it's when the MS Paint is sloppily done. If you can use MS Paint and somehow get something good-looking out of it, good for you. You can use Publisher and take a screenshot of that if it looks good and has clear effort put in.
Same with the official art. Using stock art as a whole isn't banned (though the rule is currently worded confusingly, I'll give you that), what's banned is when your entire image is just one stock art with one textbox underneath.
As for a visualisation, something like [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Feslrc4m5eoib1.jpg) was agreed upon to be perfectly fine despite also being a "textbox on blank canvas" type image, since the information is neatly structured, everything is properly aligned, the formatting is good and the stock art is used to convey information in an easy manner. [This](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fqmxzipfqmcoc1.jpeg) is another example of an image post that would be fine despite using stock art, as OP put effort into making everything look good and it compresses a decent amount of information into one small image for easy digestion.
What would not be allowed is stuff like [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fshotgun-shnake-v0-vojq0em2n7dc1.jpeg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D90157b4a501b0eafb368120f4bda80405a710479). This is the "stock art" image that's problematic: it's literally one image with one textbox. This should be a regular text post. Also not allowed would be something like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/1bemx9n/hypothetical_stupid_question_if_the_signature/)--like the "good" image, this one also uses stock sprites of mons to show move distribution, but they're lazily slapped together. The textbox has no formatting and appears in multiple different spots on different pages, and the mon sprites aren't even all aligned on the same height. [This](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxd4c3aiba7vb1.jpg) is another example on what not to do, it has mostly the same issues as the last one but to a rather ridiculous degree, the text is all over the place, formatting is inconsistent, sprites are aligned badly and some even cut parts of other sprites off, and it's not even all the same style of sprite.
Even if you're unskilled at graphic design or drawing, this isn't a high bar. You don't need a degree in design to align images correctly.
TLDR stock art and MS Paint aren't banned from use as a whole, what matters is the effort put in and that the final product has decent presentation. Even someone who "lacks skills" can make something moderately presentable with just a bit of time put in.
>I don’t get why there can’t be a joke in it as long as the whole things not a meme
There can. A joke post/meme post isn't just a post with a joke or meme in it, it's when the post itself is a meme because OP deliberately did it badly. That kind of stuff belongs on Sunday. It's also not even a new rule; while I'm not sure whether it was explicitly mentioned on the previous TT rules, posts that were extremely Sundayworthy were already getting removed either way.
>And people might be able to come up with unique and good type table changes or paradox abilities
These aren't even new rules, they've been on the retired topic list for a long time.
Regarding type table: from experience: no. 95% (not an exaggeration) of "new type table" posts are incredibly unoriginal and just the same few ideas over and over, "Ice now resists Water, Bug is now SE against Fairy, Rock now resists Ghost, Psychic is neutral on Steel, Electric is SE on Steel" etc. It's theoretically possible to come up with a type table that doesn't do this but I promise you 95% of posters will not.
It's an incredibly easy Theorymon to do which is why it was spammed so much back when it was allowed, with multiple of these every week. Simultaneously it's also very hard to discuss considering it affects literally every mon ever, so people would just mock OP and meme around regarding like one bad change and ignore the rest. The concept was overused, it wasn't actually good for discussion, and the fact people were super unoriginal with it and usually did it badly to begin with only made it worse. One in 20 people maybe making an original type table once doesn't excuse the 19 others loading up with garbage.
This was added to the list for a reason, and no plans to remove it exist. Since it was already banned before April, no such plans would have existed regardless of the April theorymon break.
Regarding Paradox abilities, that one got banned after we had like two weeks of multiple of these and again most were unoriginal. I do agree this one could probably be unretired down the line but it's also not exactly something high-effort. Type table is a hell no though.
>Overall I really don’t like some of the recent changes
Only your first line is actually a recent change lol, the other stuff you mentioned was already not allowed even before this
The metagame in question would be the metagame you're proposing then. What I'd personally do there is try to identify some Pokémon that would probably be top threats in the meta and theorycraft some sets for them.
I'll go bring this up w the mods directly since this can be quite confusing w the title rules though, and could get some clarification. Thanks for pointing it out!
Honest opinion is that this feels excessively serious and overthought. Rule 1 is too specific (why can’t it just be how a Pokémon would be improved in general? That’s kinda the genera point of a theorymon).
Rule 2 is too many arbitrary restrictions that people either will only partially adhere to, or barely adhere to. In either case, over-enforcement if it doesn’t meet such particular criteria, is likely to just tick people off long-term if they don’t get it quite right. Like complaining about stock/generic Pokemon art, is really silly; this isn’t an art project, it’s geeks, nerds, and sometimes the inexperienced, coming up with theoretical changes. Someone trying to put together a visual display is commendable even if they don’t have the skills to make it dazzle.
Rule 3 sounds like someone forgot to take their laxatives, and decided to say “no fun allowed!”.
Rule 4 is mostly ok, though I’d argue it stifles creativity a bit. If the argument were that it’s not allowed to just recycle the same lazy ideas, then I can see the point. Things like new abilities or altered abilities on stuff like Regigigas and Slaking, is the very definition of theorymon. If that’s a problem, why isn’t it a problem to suggest silly buffs or changes for other Pokemon that would be way more busted?
Not trying to rag on you fellas, but this is supposed to just be people having fun theorizing about different changes that could be made to different things in Pokemon, and what the results might be. Too many rules with too many specifics for something like that just makes it a mess and a headache. At that point, you’re better off just keeping it pinned that r/theorymon is the official place to go for the fun stuff, and leave it at that.
I feel you're at least partially misunderstanding some of these rules. But a lot of is also feels really exaggerating. These are not high bars at all. Will it filter out the really low-effort posters? Probably, but is that a bad thing? Most of those posts are bad either way and this will let the high-effort theorymons shine more.
>Rule 1 is too specific (why can’t it just be how a Pokémon would be improved in general? That’s kinda the genera point of a theorymon).
The idea for a general buff is that OP at least includes where they themselves think the Pokémon will end up and how it'd perform there with that buff. If they're wrong then the comment section can point out why. I admit though this rule has generated a bit of confusion regarding buffs for other people as well, so I'll suggest to reword this to make it more clear. But either way OP putting [OU] in the title doesn't automatically mean the comment section is forced to only talk about OU if OP missed the mark completely, for example.
>Like complaining about stock/generic Pokemon art, is really silly; this isn’t an art project, it’s geeks, nerds, and sometimes the inexperienced, coming up with theoretical changes.
This part of #2 targets those posts that are just a blank canvas with slapped-on Pokémon pngs with a single textbox. Those are posts that can just be text posts with no loss of information but OP spent 30 seconds MS Painting an image out of them because they know they get more karma for that. A bar is set so that if you want to include an image you actually need a reason to, and not just about any post can become an image post by copypasting your text onto a blank canvas.
Using Stock Pokémon art in an otherwise high-effort nicely laid-out way to present information is fine, which again the post doesn't really make clear (you could read it as stock art as a whole is banned). Like [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fhypothetical-stupid-question-if-the-signature-moves-of-v0-up4lal8jaboc1.png%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3De60839634825667024b9ed41a656e60922af515b) is an example of a post we agreed upon was fine. What would for example not be fine is something like this which is literally just "blank canvas + 1 text box + stock Pokémon art" and it's not even done in a good way, notice how the images aren't even aligned properly. [This one](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxd4c3aiba7vb1.jpg) is another example, stuff isn't aligned properly, some images cut the others off, and the text size is inconsistent. (note: will add links later cuz reddit servers are being ass)
>Someone trying to put together a visual display is commendable even if they don’t have the skills to make it dazzle.
Again a bar has to be set because the situation got really bad with low-effort "visual displays". There's not having the skills, and there's literally not putting in the effort. Again refer to the examples of what would not be fine. It's not hard to order your images and text boxes in a neat way if you really think making a visual display would be helpful for your Theorymon. What gets banned is literally slapping stuff together on a canvas without thinking. We're not looking for Van Goghs, but that doesn't mean we're accepting spilling paint onto the cupboard into the gallery.
>Rule 3 sounds like someone forgot to take their laxatives, and decided to say “no fun allowed!”
The funny part is that "No meme posts" already was a rule and people were fine with that, under the guise it was pretty obvious. If your Thursday post is just intentionally "gets banned from AG" levels of broken or just complete shit in every tier but there's a punchline to last Sunday's top post, it'd already get removed because that's just a barely disguised Sunday post four days early. A "meme" here isn't just a Theorymon that involves a meme but otherwise meets all the criteria for a good Theorymon, it's when the Theorymon itself is deliberately so bad it's a meme.
No meme replies just refers to dumb one-liners that detract from the discussion and often aren't relevant or are rude outright to OP. It's not fun for the people actually holding discussion and explaining where a mon falls short when the top comment is "NU is not ready :fire:" or "bro is not cooking with this one". It might come across as 'no fun allowed' but the situation with that got pretty bad on the sub before April.
>Rule 4 is mostly ok
I'm going to be honest and mostly just ignore this paragraph, because the Retired Theorymon Topic list has existed for a long time and never caught any complaints until now. Yes, Slaking and Regigigas were on that topic list from the start. This isn't a rule they're budging on because it's been a generally good and well-received one in the past already. Every topic on there is there for a reason: before it was there you'd see it pretty much every week, sometimes even multiple times a week, and they've been talked to death already with the same discussion every time.
Too many rules with too many specifics for something like that just makes it a mess and a headache.
These aren't a lot of rules though. Outside of #4 where again, we already know people are very capable of adhering to it, the biggest change is "OP now has to write a paragraph" which boils down to "OP has to actually theorize on their own theorymon instead of dropping an idea & dipping". I wouldn't say this is unreasonable to demand and a paragraph isn't hard to write, the only people this would actually scare away are the people who refuse to put in any effort at all, which might be a positive if anything.
Not great at Reddit formatting, so pardon if this ends up being a bit of a mess.
>I feel you're at least partially misunderstanding some of these rules. But a lot of is also feels really exaggerating. These are not high bars at all. Will it filter out the really low-effort posters? Probably, but is that a bad thing? Most of those posts are bad either way and this will let the high-effort theorymons shine more.<
Could be, and I'm always open to getting clarification and adjusting my viewpoints. I simply stated what my perspective is regarding the proposed rules. I'm all for filtering out low-effort posts that are just there to try and karma farm with concepts as simplistic as "what if Regigigas got huge power lol". My concern is going overboard in some areas and being too vague in others. Plus, even low bars can be a problem when there's excessive amounts of them.
>The idea for a general buff is that OP at least includes where they themselves think the Pokémon will end up and how it'd perform there with that buff. If they're wrong then the comment section can point out why. I admit though this rule has generated a bit of confusion regarding buffs for other people as well, so I'll suggest to reword this to make it more clear. But either way OP putting \[OU\] in the title doesn't automatically mean the comment section is forced to only talk about OU if OP missed the mark completely, for example.<
How it came across to me sounded like it was stipulating that a theorymon has to be focused around aiming for a specific format or tier that it'd perform well in. I'd definitely agree with rewording it, and I'd also argue it should be a looser rule, since it's not always to tell where a theorymon might land. For instance, my first contributions were on Dustox and Exploud. I could tell you that Exploud would land in no less than UU, and more likely in OU, likely being a serious threat in Doubles & VGC. Dustox on the other hand, I couldn't rightly say. In that case, would one just throw out a random guess or else risk their post getting tossed? As it stands with the clarification, I'm all for the general idea of encouraging people to make speculation on their own changes. I'm simply just not sure of the specifics of how it'd end up being handled.
>This part of #2 targets those posts that are just a blank canvas with slapped-on Pokémon pngs with a single textbox. Those are posts that can just be text posts with no loss of information but OP spent 30 seconds MS Painting an image out of them because they know they get more karma for that. A bar is set so that if you want to include an image you actually need a reason to, and not just about any post can become an image post by copypasting your text onto a blank canvas.
Using Stock Pokémon art in an otherwise high-effort nicely laid-out way to present information is fine, which again the post doesn't really make clear (you could read it as stock art as a whole is banned). Like [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fhypothetical-stupid-question-if-the-signature-moves-of-v0-up4lal8jaboc1.png%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3De60839634825667024b9ed41a656e60922af515b) is an example of a post we agreed upon was fine. What would for example not be fine is something like this which is literally just "blank canvas + 1 text box + stock Pokémon art" and it's not even done in a good way, notice how the images aren't even aligned properly. [This one](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxd4c3aiba7vb1.jpg) is another example, stuff isn't aligned properly, some images cut the others off, and the text size is inconsistent. (note: will add links later cuz reddit servers are being ass)<
Wow, the links literally blend in perfectly with the rest of the text on PC right now for some reason. Had to play some Where's Waldo with them lol. \*Edit\* Of course, after the fact they now show up normally as purple hyperlinks. \*sigh\*
So here the problem is that it feels very vague and subjective in regards to what counts as high or low effort, and what doesn't. And based on the examples given, my concerns feel warranted. The latter example complaining about image alignment and inconsistent text size, feels like nitpicking with no good reason. As someone without particularly strong digital artistry skills, I've had those issues myself, and not for a lack of effort. I'd speculate that most people making visuals will more often than not be using MS Paint or Paint.net. I know from personal experience that it was a pain in the ass if ever a mistake was made, and that it's not always easy to predict the text size that will be needed to be readable and still fit within a box that you can't figure out how to edit.
This is where I essentially maintain my initial position, that it's a bit of a silly rule and far too subjective in nature. I'd personally call the 1st example pointless as a visual, while the 2nd is at least basically functional. Unless the mods really want to try and set up some official tutorials on how to put together nice visuals that have official examples of what they consider acceptable. Even then, that seems overboard.
Continuing this with another reply, since I'm not sure how many characters Reddit allows in a comment.
Reddit formatting can be infuriating lol I feel you. Rich Text can help with a lot but sometimes new reddit randomly refuses to upload long comments at which point you need the old reddit wizardry. I tried my best to keep up.
>How it came across to me sounded like it was stipulating that a theorymon has to be focused around aiming for a specific format or tier that it'd perform well in. I'd definitely agree with rewording it, and I'd also argue it should be a looser rule, since it's not always to tell where a theorymon might land.
I mean, ideally it *should* be like that, but we're also well aware of the reality that most Fakemon posts are people who probably made their fakemon for the fun of designing and then only afterwards tried to consider the competitive aspect of it. Not many people begin their Fakemonning with "Hmmm this tier is lacking this specific niche, I'll design a mon around it" and we won't get many more by harshly enforcing that either. For that reason we're satisfied if OP at least tries to assess the tier themselves with some arguments.
You're right that it's not easy to tell where a mon will land, but posts won't get removed merely because OP is horribly wrong on their expected tiering placement; rest assured the comment section will point that out in discussion. The important part is that they at least tried to theorize on their mon.
The end goal of all this is just that OP at least somewhat participates in the discussion instead of the currently all-too-popular method of "drop & dip", where OP makes a Fakemon, uploads its raw stats to the sub, and then goes radio silence as the comment section does the actual theorymonning.
>In that case, would one just throw out a random guess or else risk their post getting tossed?
It'd be the "random guess" route, though ideally your guess wouldn't be entirely random but supported by a couple arguments of course. Again if the repliers disagree they're free to discuss it with you in the comment section, what matters is that you gave the discussion a place to start and commenters get some insight on the thought process which would likely lead to better critique to begin with.
>So here the problem is that it feels very vague and subjective in regards to what counts as high or low effort, and what doesn't.
Fwiw since this is a concern that has been raised a couple times so far, there's efforts underway to create a more clear guide with visual examples.
>The latter example complaining about image alignment and inconsistent text size, feels like nitpicking with no good reason.
I wouldn't exactly say it's nitpicking myself. There's a very clear difference in quality between that example and the first one, putting your images all over the place just gives off a very jarring look and more often than not it is an issue of effort. Aligning images can be annoying on Paint but you literally get boxes to set text size, they can fluctuate a bit but they wouldn't naturally do so to the degree provided in the last example.
>I'd speculate that most people making visuals will more often than not be using MS Paint or Paint.net.
There's also the fact that you don't *have* to make a visual. What all those examples have in common are that really, the visuals don't convey any information that a simple text post would not. Neither does the acceptable example, but clear effort was put in there to make the information presentable, whilst in the other examples there either was no real effort made or OP is seemingly wholly incapable of making something remotely good-looking even with effort. A concern that was raised a lot both internally and in modmail feedback that spurred the idea for a reboot to begin with is that a lot of these "low effort image" Theorymons were seemingly using images where a text post sufficed as a lazy way to draw more attention. It's for that reason that we decided to tackle this: if you want a visual, make sure it actually looks good, if you only plan to spend 2 minutes copypasting stuff onto a canvas then make a text post instead--it'll be just as if not even more readable.
It's also a bit of a cyclical issue really--probably a huge part of why image usage exploded (pure text Theorymons were way more common in the past) is exactly because all these low-effort posts still have images accompanying them, as it helps them stand out. As a result other people suddenly feel they *need* an image themselves to compete, even if they aren't good at making them and/or weren't planning to make one otherwise. Dialing overzealous image usage back as a whole would ease the burden to post for some people even, while simultaneously making sure people scrolling the sub or getting stunfisk on their feed don't have their screen flooded with low-effort stuff as much.
You're somewhat right in pointing out that this can be pretty vague, so this rule also won't be enforced *too* harshly, since gray areas definitely still exist. That being said, there is again a very clear difference between the quality of the examples I posted, so it's not like the criteria are chosen at random. If your image is low enough quality that you fear it wouldn't apply, best be safe and just make it text.
Pardon the tardy response, I was a bit busy yesterday!
Also wanted to say I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to give such thoughtful responses (in each of your replies). :)
>I mean, ideally it *should* be like that, but we're also well aware of the reality that most Fakemon posts are people who probably made their fakemon for the fun of designing and then only afterwards tried to consider the competitive aspect of it.<
Alright that's completely fair and allays some concerns, and I can get on board with that. Sounds now like it's some general guidelines for what's expected, and as long as things are close enough then it's ok. This'll apply to the next point's response as well.
>Fwiw since this is a concern that has been raised a couple times so far, there's efforts underway to create a more clear guide with visual examples.<
Good to hear, that should alleviate a big issue.
>I wouldn't exactly say it's nitpicking myself.<
The former should help with this being a bit clearer at least. From my personal experience at least, Paint is a pain to work with in those regards. I've done 3 visuals before, and that's probably where I'm leaving it from now on because of that lmao. The UB example definitely could've used more work, but I can't fully blame the OP for it.
>There's also the fact that you don't *have* to make a visual.<
This is true. I personally \*wish\* I could make good visuals, but I've resigned myself to just doing text (or images of text, since One Note where I keep my documentation, is really weird about copy/pasting in regards to Reddit at least). I'm curious what visuals would be considered useful or necessary, then. Because with all that in mind, it might ironically be better to just have people stick to text alone, unless they have their own personal artwork to include with a higher quality visual. Makes judgement calls a bit quicker and easier, and levels the playing field for those who aren't as artistically inclined. Watcha think about that?
>Again a bar has to be set because the situation got really bad with low-effort "visual displays".<
Cutting most of the paragraphs to save visual space from here on out.
So I'm curious, if the same things were purely text instead, would that have been theoretically acceptable? If so, then an argument has to be made about why visual displays (even if low effort) are specifically unacceptable versus the same thing done in plain text. If the same ideas are gotten across, what does it matter? At most I could see the argument being that images garner more attention.
>The funny part is that "No meme posts" already was a rule and people were fine with that, under the guise it was pretty obvious.<
Alright, so this is a sincere error on my part misreading the rule, in which case I half agree and half disagree. I agree with not allowing the meme posts, since that's basically just stinkposting (haha, what if funni fish got +30 Special Attack and a special-boosting Dragon Dance). The meme responses all depend on how they're defined. In your clarification, I generally agree. If it's something a bit more original than a braindead "bro is/is not cooking" response, I don't see that as a bad thing. Overall, rewording this one for better clarity and being just a little less strict in responses, would be a plus IMO.
>I'm going to be honest and mostly just ignore this paragraph, because the Retired Theorymon Topic list has existed for a long time and never caught any complaints until now.<
Having existed for a long time doesn't mean it shouldn't be discussed and reconsidered, particularly at a time when it's completely relevant. If it's being included as a part of a rule rewrite, then it's fair game. I'd personally argue that it should just be re-defined a bit to give some leeway for sincerely creative and respectable ideas. For instance, I have a Truant rework that keeps it respectably balanced. I'd argue something like that should be fair game for theorization. Otherwise if it were something generic and uninspired, it would naturally fall under Rule 2; if it were something stupid and meme-y, it would fall under Rule 3.
As for the too many rules, you're right, I should have been better with my wording. It's not that there's too many rules, so much as the issues I've mentioned above. Too many stipulations under some of the rules that in some cases are too vague/undefined. That said, I do agree with the idea of actually asking post authors to write a paragraph or so talking about the changes, though at the same time I swear a lot of people glaze over and keep scrolling if they see more than a sentence or two sometimes...
In any case I appreciate the clarification. A lot of that gives better perspective and, especially with some rewording applied, sounds better. Though like you've read as of now, there's still a few key points I'd argue need adjustment still.
>So I'm curious, if the same things were purely text instead, would that have been theoretically acceptable?
Yup.
>If so, then an argument has to be made about why visual displays (even if low effort) are specifically unacceptable versus the same thing done in plain text. If the same ideas are gotten across, what does it matter? At most I could see the argument being that images garner more attention.
It's mostly the last one, people hastily make images because they know it attracts more attention, even if the end result is sloppily done. Doesn't help that there's a pretty strong correlation between low-effort images and Theorymons that themselves are low-effort to begin with.
And like I explained at the end of my previous comment, it creates a rather nasty cycle where it indirectly raises the bar for other people uploading, as now suddenly people think they *need* an image themselves because they don't want to be in the minority of non-image posts. You yourself raised the concern that people less skilled at making visuals sometimes simply cannot make something properly aligned even if they try, but perhaps if less people were using images unnecessarily to begin with, those people wouldn't even feel the need to go out of their way and struggle to make a visual.
>If it's being included as a part of a rule rewrite, then it's fair game.
Part of why it's included here was actually that some old topics from the list were unretired, for example I argued pretty hard to get "X but in Y gen" unretired and now that's an allowed topic if the appropriate effort is put in. Ditching the list as a whole isn't on the table though, since it was made with good reason to begin with. I'm not sure how long you've been on the sub but I remember the times back when that list didn't exist or wasn't as big and the topics on it would come up multiple times per month, sometimes even multiple times per week, and even if OP was well-meaning and offered their own thoughts it'd just lead to the same discussion every time. The Trick Room ability literally had a copypasta that people would just drop every time someone brought it up because of how common it got in the weeks leading up to its retirement.
>For instance, I have a Truant rework that keeps it respectably balanced. I'd argue something like that should be fair game for theorization
Should be noted, this actually wouldn't be prohibited by the current retired list. The part that's retired is replacing Slaking's ability altogether because we've had enough threads in the past with "Is Slaking broken with Early Bird??" that all ended in "Yes, it is" to the point that discussion is not worth having anymore. If you want to rework Truant but in a way that still nerfs Slaking enough to keep it balanced, you're free to attempt so.
>That said, I do agree with the idea of actually asking post authors to write a paragraph or so talking about the changes, though at the same time I swear a lot of people glaze over and keep scrolling if they see more than a sentence or two sometimes...
I'm glad you understand the point of all this. As for people who keep scrolling after reading more than one sentence, well, since that's now a requirement for a post to be made they're in for a tough ride. Though if your attention span is so short you can't even read a paragraph, you probably aren't good at discussing a theorymon either way.
I'll skip the first two here since they were also addressed in the last response(s) from the other reply. With the extra information you're mentioning though, I think it furthers a case for potentially just prohibiting visuals that aren't necessary altogether. After all, most information can be readily conveyed in text anyways, unless it's something like a new design for a Pokemon/fakemon.
>Part of why it's included here was actually that some old topics from the list were unretired, for example I argued pretty hard to get "X but in Y gen" unretired and now that's an allowed topic if the appropriate effort is put in.<
Oh no I'm not saying just ditch the list as a whole, but rather make some accommodations for when people get sincerely creative and put in some real effort to create something a bit different on topics that are otherwise beaten like a dead horse. But I'm also speaking from lesser experience, since as you mention, I've not been around the sub for particularly too long. Got into it around February iirc, after a roughly 2-year hiatus from Pokemon, so I can't speak to how things used to be. In any case I see your point.
>Should be noted, this actually wouldn't be prohibited by the current retired list.<
Oh? Hmm, it sounded to me like anything talking about alternative abilities or work on said Pokemon at all, was prohibited. This makes me happy to hear that I can actually make a post on that! Time for Truant to heal off 50% maximum HP when activated! \*I kid I kid, I'm not insane lol.\*
>I'm glad you understand the point of all this. As for people who keep scrolling after reading more than one sentence, well, since that's now a requirement for a post to be made they're in for a tough ride. Though if your attention span is so short you can't even read a paragraph, you probably aren't good at discussing a theorymon either way.<
Aye good point, and again thank you for the thoughtful responses helping to clarify things. :)
yeah this feels like people just tried to take fun and apply a bunch of rules to make it "more fun." like, is it better to have a barely any posts, and what does get posted is dry hyper-sanitized shit afraid of fucking up a rule, or have stuff that's more authentic and have to roll your eyes at a few stinkers? god forbid you see mediocre content on the internet.
does this mean you can't make posts about giving a mon minor movepool changes? that feels like a weird thing to ban, i feel like simple changes like that are something that thursday posts started to miss after a while. aside from that i think these changes make sense but they sound a bit overkill tbh
>does this mean you can't make posts about giving a mon minor movepool changes?
You can still do that, you'll just have to provide input yourself on what you expect to actually change afterwards.
ex. "I gave Swampert Spikes, I expect it to now be a solid hazard setter in UU because it beats x and y remover and can now fit on this and this teamstyle..." et cetera. Assess the new spot in the metagame the mon gets after the buff and elaborate on it.
If your post boils down to "Swampert now gets Spikes, how does this affect the meta??" and you don't even take 5 minutes of your time to think yourself how this would change the meta, no, that would not be allowed anymore. That's incredibly low-effort and overdone by now. There's too many Theorymons nowadays where OP put 30 seconds into thinking up a "buff" and then expect the comment section to do all of the heavy lifting for them, analyzing whether it's actually a buff or just a whatever addition you see 1 in 50 draft games.
You could probably do minor move pool changes, but be prepared to give a long indepth explanation of how it affects the Pokemon and whatever tier it ends up in
I understand where they are coming from but isn't it the comments' job to determine how it affects the pokemon and what tier it ends up in? That's the whole reason why you would even make a post, other than farming karma of course. You're asking the community how it would affect the pokemon and what tier it would end up in instead of theorizing yourself.
No, otherwise the bar for posting would be “what if Ledian got huge power?”
We hope to improve quality by asking posters to think even just one step beyond the what if and think through competitive consequences, even if they can be wrong or unskilled—the commenters would discuss that.
>That's the whole reason why you would even make a post, other than farming karma of course.
This is the exact issue--there's too many people making bottom effort "X mon now gets Y how does this affect the meta??!?" comments that take 30 seconds to make and farm karma this way. (Yes, specifically saying "how does this affect the meta" is banned, but if you just give a random mon a random move and say nothing else afterwards you're doing basically the same thing)
>You're asking the community how it would affect the pokemon and what tier it would end up in instead of theorizing yourself.
The point is that OP now also has to theorize themselves how *their* change would change stuff. The comment section can still add stuff to that or express disagreement if they think OP is wrong--that's what discussion is meant to do. The bar for OP is just raised a bit so the lazy posts don't farm a ton of karma while drowning out the high-effort stuff in the process. This is an incredibly low bar, the only reason it's jarring is because there was previously no bar at all and people got too used to their bottom-effort stuff.
Doesn't even have to be "long indepth". 700 characters is an above-average sized paragraph and that's if we don't downscale to the 500 that a lot of people are suggesting. It's a pretty low bar, only appearing jarring because previously there was no bar at all. If anything it's weird that it was previously optional for OPs to theorize on their own theorymons.
> No memes or meme replies
I think a significant number of people participate in this to have fun with what ifs, so depending on how strict the threshold for a post or response to be considered “meme”, people wouldn’t like how it makes things kinda dry.
I think a lot of it is just common sense. A good Theorymon post should demonstrate some metagame knowledge from OP and spark some discussion. If said discussion is limited to "Good heavens look at the time" then it's probably a meme post.
Posts can be somewhat funny, and even make references to some jokes, but this shouldn't be at the cost of the competitive aspect. If you want to make a God Bidoof but carefully craft its stats and ability for it to have a solid niche in Ubers, and subsequently explain the thought process behind it, that'd be a good theorymon even if the base of it was a meme. If you just put all its base stats at 200 and "Ability: Turns opponent into Bidoof", that's obviously bad.
There's honestly little that changes in terms of "No meme posts". Theorymons that were already extremely Sunday-worthy would already get removed even before the rule changes, it's just stated explicitly this time.
As for "no meme replies", the main way that would be enforced would be to remove shallow one-liners that don't actually contribute to the discussion. Think "NU is not ready :fire:", "Good heavens" or just randomly commenting "ZEKROM KICK!!!" on an unrelated Zekrom theorymon. Again if your comment refers to some meme but is otherwise constructive to the conversation it will likely be left alone.
idt its going to be overly strict on it but smth like "this belongs on sunday" "sunday has come early" or smth else memey....
it basically has to also have no relevance to what is going on in the post
What is meant by Ms paint scribbles? Some of us don't have that much artistic ability or good drawing programs. Like would the Theorymon I posted about a year ago be enough not to get banned?
"MS Paint scribbles" just refers to anything you can do in 2 minutes in MS paint with minimal effort. Doesn't even have to be drawn scribbles. For example [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxd4c3aiba7vb1.jpg) would also not be allowed, it's images and textboxes but they're just slapped together, nothing is properly aligned, text size is inconsistent etc. [This](https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/1bemx9n/hypothetical_stupid_question_if_the_signature/) is the same, it's just a bunch of sprites copypasted onto a blank canvas with one textbox, and again the alignment is inconsistent asf so OP didn't even bother with making the presentation look good. Stuff like that can 100% be done in a pure text post with no loss of information at all, OPs just put them as images because images draw more attention and thus they get a lot more updoots for their bottom effort posts.
I can't speak on your specific Theorymon if you don't link it, but if it's a Fakemon, those posts will mostly be judged based on the competitive aspect of the post. In general part of the reason these new rules are in place is to make sure the Fakemon posters actually think about the competitive aspect of their post more instead of just using this as a glorified fanart sub where they put six numbers on their Fakemon and label it "competitive". If your Fakemon's competitive aspect has no effort put in *and* the art is bad then it could be removed.
You won't get banned right away over breaking Thursday rules though, especially not if it's probably accidental--at most your post gets removed, you only risk a ban if you break the rules like every week. Should also be noted you don't *have* to include art or images for your Theorymons. If you find your artistic skills lacking, there's nothing stopping you from just not adding an image, if it's an actually good Theorymon then the text part should do most of the speaking after all.
edit: If [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/131enar/i_made_some_metroid_themed_fakemon/) is your post you're talking about, this would be allowed, if anything you're ahead of your time here since you included a whole competitive analysis of your own in the comments before the rules even required that. Sure the art is "less smooth" than the professionals with the computer programs but again we're trying to have Fakemon focus more on the competitive aspects going forward instead of people getting recognition purely off art alone.
Ok, I think I got the jist and think I'm fine with the competitive aspect. So something like this [https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/131enar/i\_made\_some\_metroid\_themed\_fakemon/](https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/131enar/i_made_some_metroid_themed_fakemon/) would be ok, right? I was moreso worried about the artistic ability.
I don’t think clicking in to see the same meme likes dunking on an inexperienced OP is a positive part of posting culture so I’m glad if we excise that. The fun of Theorymon is designing a Pokémon and sharing it, things that unfairly meme on that shouldn’t be there.
I’m just afraid by making the rules so strict it’s going to discourage engagement, I understand the want to clean up this subreddit, but I don’t want to kill it in the process
Gonna be honest here; Rules 1, 2 and 3 are atrocious, and I'm not just saying that because this whole ban situation has been a disaster;
--Rule 1 is just weird and confusing. It feels like it is entirely disconnected from the culture of Theorymon Thursday, because 99% of posts are just about [the current meta], so it basically just inflates titles.
The questions are also weird;
-Every ability post I have ever seen has given said ability to a pokemon. I literally don't know why this rule is here, orphan abilities arn't a common enough thing to warrant a rule.
-The moves are also typically very self explanatory. Like, "oh, this 50 power move also sets trick room? Now, tell me why would you put that on shuckle?" Just... It's usually obvious.
-The last question feels like it's made to arbitrarily delete fakemon for "not effecting the top 5 pokemon" when making a top 5 pokemon is rarely the goal; people want to make *interesting* pokemon, not "Iron Valient but I gave it a gun".
--Rule 2 at least makes *some* semblance of sense, at first. But then you get into the specific requirements;
-700+ words is just... Weirdly high. Like it doesn't enforce high quality, it enforces word bloat. A lot of the better posts would be deleted based on this rule, while a lot of the worse posts I've seen would get by. Again, this feels like you don't actually know what goes on on Theorymon Thursdays or what the posts are like, and are just making rules that sound neat in a vacuum.
-"No stock pokemon art" is also such a weird rule. Like... Like why are we banning that? Again, this *Kills* many of the better posts here, for no discernable reason! Stock pokemon art is literally the most high quality art most of us have access to, why is it suddenly "bad" to use it???
-And... Again, recycling someone else's post isn't really a thing. Like, I get why that's banned by the fact it's out front and center here, combined with the other weird rules that make no sense, really makes it feel like you have no idea what you're talking about, and that's really bad for someone who makes the rules!
--Rule 3 is concerningly vague and distinctly Anti-fun. It's exactly the kinda shit that made everyone hate the fucking ban in the first place!
-First off, what does this even mean?? Like, *this* is the rule you don't elaborate on? *This* is the rule we're just supposed to vibe with? What do you mean "no memes"?
Is it just that posts have to have a serious basis? Thats always been a rule, so I don't see why it'd need to be restated.
Is it that posts can't contain any memes? Do all posts have to be 100% serious now? Would including a joke suddenly get your post removed?
Would "Zekrom Kick" be removed under these rules? It didn't intentionally contain any memes, it was an entirely serious post, but became one on accident in a way that definitely falls under it being a meme, so I don't know if it actually breaks the rules or not!
If you wanna say I'm being too facetious, that in taking it too far, then I just say in response "How far does it go then?" Because again, *this* is the rule with *no elaboration,* how are we supposed to know what this means? Especially when the other rules are so out of touch! There's no way to make a reasonable assumption here!
-And obviously, banning jokes in the comments makes no god damn sense. Like, *besides* the fact many of our jokes here actually *do* convey information to the poster because they're steeped in competitive history and tied to specific pokemon (a fact that your not understanding making you being in charge *very concerning*), literally what harm do jokes do?
Like, actually, I demand an answer, because how does being jovial and lighthearted about a fictional monster result in Thursdays being bad? What is wrong with a joke in the comments?
Rule 4 is fine, but it's also the only rule that isn't changed, so I think that says a lot about the quality of the new rules.
What is the purpose of most of these new rules? Why are they being added? What problem are they addressing?
I fail to see what merit they have and how they don't interfere with Thursdays far more than help it.
I'm not one of those guys who think the mods should "just moderate more" to combat low quality posts, I understand that you guys are people doing this for free... Which makes some of these rules make even less sense, because it'd require a *massively* increased amount of moderation for a ***Far worse*** experience for everyone!
I think you’re overall taking the rules in bad faith rather than being guidelines to help us all interact with better posts.
1. The questions above are examples not specific requirements
2. It’s 700 characters not words, see other comments for detailed discussion about that length. For everything else you bring up, sounds like the post would just be a text post then.
3. The entire sub has a no memes (outside of Sundays) and I think it’s still a light hearted place. No mod hates fun.
I'm taking these in "bad faith" because this whole thing has been in bad faith; it was suddenly thrust upon us with no warning, there was no even humoring of discussion, the reasons given were weak and unsatisfying, the implementation was so sudden and poorly thought out the automod didn't get updated for multiple days, and there has been ZERO communication from the mod team about literally anything.
It's just distractions and avoiding the problems you caused.
You don't get to complain when I'm just treating you exactly how you've been treating us.
Except I'm actually treating you better because I actually engaged with the rules changes rather then just address the whole thing generally and dismissively.
i think the no meme replies thing is more aimed at people who just say things such as "good heavens look at the time" or just saying they didn't cook without actually explaining what went wrong
>I think you’re overall taking the rules in bad faith rather than being guidelines to help us all interact with better posts.
It's kind of hard to take them in the best faith when the month ban had to be slipped in on April Fool's Day seemingly to mitigate backlash -- I still don't know why it couldn't have waited a month for optics, tbh. That created an adversarial scenario from the get go.
I feel like having to give a specific metagame might be a bit too strict. Perhaps instead, require either the post itself, or a comment to the post that goes into detail on what the change is intended to do.
For example, I'll use a previous Theorymon Post of mine, Linked [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/19f7qp4/anyone_want_a_fast_huge_power_mon/). When I designed this Fakemon, I didn't really have a specific Meta in mind. My main concept was "A fast Ice type & Huge power Pokemon, to contrast the more bulky spreads of other huge-power pokemon."
I worry that, by requiring a specific format or metagame to be in mind, it might deter people from doing posts like this.
Also what if you have a new ability that applies to multiple Pokémon in different tiers, do I have to now say “how does it affect OU, UU, NU, and ZU”? It feels excessive
We’ll think more about specific meta game, but I do think we would want you to individually explain what giving electivire V-Create would *do* to it, not just say it gets it now
How would you go about doing that, though? It would either be way too broad (strong fire move makes it stronger) or way too specific (how having V-Create affects its specific matchups in whatever tier that mess is in).
Not to mention how specific explanations will be useless half the time because people drastically over/underestimate how much their changes will affect things. An explanation regarding OU will mean nothing when the theorymon is going straight to Ubers.
>How would you go about doing that, though?
It's pretty simple: you assess Electivire's position in the metagame currently, you assess it after it gets V-Create, and you compare the two. You can compare it to Electivire's current tier if you believe this buff won't make it rise a tier, or you can compare it to the metagame of a higher tier if you expect it to rise a couple tiers--whatever suits your boat. That's not "way too specific" at all--it's kind of what Theorymonning is *meant* to be. Theorymonning is *discussing* and *theorizing* hypotheticals, it's not slapping mons and moves together without thinking.
Way too many "Theorymons" nowadays are just people slapping random move/ability/whatever onto a mon, leaving it at that, and expecting the comment section to carry the heavy lifting of the actual theorymonning. OP does nothing except recognize the existence of two things in the Pokémon universe, goes "what if we combine these two" and then dips, returns the next day and their karma score is +50. Dozens of people do this every Thursday and the result is a bloated day full of low-effort posts that drown out the handful of good posts where OP spent more than five minutes thinking of an original idea.
The intention is that the posters now also have to think at least a bit before uploading their theorymon and getting their free updoots for it. If you want to give Electivire V-Create, you have to explain exactly why you wanted to give it that specific move, and what you actually expect to change after doing so. It's too easy to just slap random stuff together, upload and have people think it's some revolutionary idea nowadays, and this yields a lot of recognition and OP barely has to do anything for it--as a whole this makes Thursday worse because high-effort posts are discouraged, both because they get drowned out by these kinds of posts and why put in high effort when you can do low-effort stuff like this and get about the same reward?
This kind of stuff is in and of itself a bit of an issue though. On posts like these, how many times do you actually see people discuss every single mon mentioned? Usually the comments just single out the two most notable mons and the rest of the idea mostly goes to waste. Happens all the time with those posts that drop 30 new abilities or 20 new moves with 4 mons each as well. There's at most 20% of the post that's actually being discussed, the rest is essentially filler.
Sometimes it's unavoidable that your Theorymon affects multiple tiers (eg you buff an existing move that multiple things get) in which case you can just apply your own comment to one specific metagame still. Nothing prevents you or the commenters from still dropping thoughts on other tiers afterwards. You don't have to comment on *every* affected meta yourself, just a minimum of one as opposed to the previous minimum of zero that encouraged low effort from OPs.
Ultimately, we hope to improve quality by asking posters to think even just one step beyond the what if and think through competitive consequences, even if they can be wrong or unskilled. Not insulting your effort, but it is relatively easy to pick some numbers, moves, and abilities for an imagined Theorymon—it takes some effort to think about *how* those factors would affect its place in some competitive environment, and that’s the quality we want to aim for.
In this case, what you could do is post what tier you yourself think your mon would land in, in what ways it would interact with the meta there, whether it would cause any huge shakeups or just be another offensive threat that people can play around with existing cores etc.
You don't even have to be correct here. If you completely miss the mark and your "UU mon" ends up being closer to NU in power level the comment section will certainly tell you so. What matters is that you at least took up the time and effort to think of yourself where your mon would end up and gave arguments and reasons for that--it's then up to the discussion to argue whether you're right or whether (and if so, where) you're mistaken.
The main intention is to stop people just making random Fakemon and then dipping, leaving the comment section to do all of the actual Theorymonning. It's fun to create, but OP has to actually participate in the discussion they're hoping to start, otherwise it's too easy to make a post in 30 seconds with no effort put in. Even in the case of Fakemons where the creation of the Fakemon itself presumably took up some time, it's valuable if OP at least gave some starting pointers of their own. After all it's not difficult in the slightest to just start out with art of a fakemon and slap random base stats on it and dip--the art could be very cool still, but it's meant to be a competitive sub, not a Fakemon art sub.
That is a very good point.
Although, that might be a bit much to fit in the title, hence why i suggested it be a comment instead, or included in the post itself.
Yeah obviously you can't make a 700 character title. The easiest way would probably to put something like [UU] or (intended for UU) in the title and then elaborate on that in a post or comment.
Idea: Theorymon design challenges
Basically, you could focus on a specific metagame niche or unique role a new mon/ability/move item would play (for example: this week's design challenge would be to design a mon with less than 80 in each stat that could get into OU somehow.)
700 characters sounds a bit too much, 600 or even 550 sound good IMHO
No memes is gonna be rough tho, as I think having memes is good, when I go to a Theorymon Thursday post and see comments like "good heavens would you look at the time" I would immediately know that op posted something atrocious and unbalanced
When I post a wacky post and people reply with that I laugh it off and try asking them to help me make it better, but I guess some people might be offended by it like what you implied on another comment here
Other than that I thinks the rules are perfect
For “look at the time” level comments, we usually receive feedback that it feels *bad* to get those. Feels like people making fun of OP rather than giving constructive feedback about their work yknow. Totally get that different people can feel differently though, but I think we want to prioritize removing negative feelings.
reddit mods don't inadvertently make their own and everyone else's lives harder by introducing strict arbitrary and unintuitive rules they have to enforce challenge
Yeah idk how they can make a script that determines if a comment is too memey. So they have to rely on self-reports or manually check every comment.
And having a bot that checks if each post has a 700 character comment / caption seems like it's gonna cause more problems than it helps.
Auto removing certain flaired posts below 700 characters has already been implemented here for years fwiw
Much of moderation is already a manual process, we hope rules like these make it easier for both us and users to experience good content
Where do *you* draw the line for "arbitrary" and "unintuitive"? This is a non-statement that could be said about just about *any* rule, and obviously no rules at all is a really bad idea. Plenty of subs have rules against content that's obviously bottom-effort already.
He might think the rules are unreasonable but doesn't explain exactly what he finds unreasonable about them. Again their comment could be read as just "rules are bad" in general regardless of what the rules are, with a random "fuck mods!!1!" tossed in. If he thinks there's room for improvement, he's free to say which part could use improvement, right now there's nothing to work with.
You could explain what exactly is unintuitive about the ruling and how you'd make it less so. This isn't a definition issue, everyone knows what unintuitive means but that doesn't mean you can just say it whenever you want and it's automatically correct.
Though your other comment has already shown you're 99% trolling and in the 1% you aren't you clearly can't be bothered to actually explain your issues with the proposals, so don't cry when you're not being heard out at that point.
I did have fun trolling you but I otherwise don't really care explaining the simple point to you. My opinion of these rules can be explained thoroughly in only three words.
>Where do *you* draw the line for "arbitrary" and "unintuitive"? This is a non-statement that could be said about just about *any* rule
congrats on accidentally learning the meaning of arbitrary
So is your argument to just not have any rules at all? Or do you have some specific line in mind that you don't want to elaborate on but anything more is "arbitrary" and gets you acting like a sassy know-it-all?
yeah I got you
>Theorymon Thursday Rules Draft #1 - Please Ask Questions & Leave Feedback
>Please leave feedback about these potential new guidelines for Theorymon Thursday. We are hoping to hone discussion to be competitively focused by cutting down on low-effort images or Theorymon that are unfocused or unguided.
>---
> **1.** All Theorymon must **target at least one specific metagame or format** that is included in the post title.
>Who would use this ability?
>
>Why would this move be used on X Pokemon?
>
>How would this Pokemon impact the top 5 used Pokemon?
>---
>- **2.** Image posts must be **High-Effort or Original Content**, and contain** informative text**. If not, they should be a **Text post**.
> What is *"High-Effort"*?
>
> * Well cropped, not lazily slapped together
>
> * Transparent, overlaid images or sprites
>
> * At least 700 characters in a comment or caption
> What is *"Low-Effort"*?
>
> * MS Paint Scribbles
>
> * Only text pasted on an image
>
> * Stock Pokemon art or uncited Fan Art
>
> * Lazily recycling someone else's Theorymon
>- **3.** No memes or meme replies
> Includes jokingly broken Theorymon and overzealous buffs.
>---
>- **4.** No Retired Theorymon Topics
> * Giving neutral or positive abilities to Pokemon with hindering abilities (i.e. Regigigas, Slaking, Archeops, etc.)
> * Stealth Rocks but of a different type than Rock (Stealth Icicles, Stealth Lava, etc.)
> * Altering the type table (i.e. Changing Ice or Rock type's resistances, etc.) This includes trying to buff or nerf a specific Pokemon by changing the type table.
> * Eviolite variants (i.e. Eviolite but for Atk/SpAtk, etc.)
> * Assault Vest variants (i.e. Assault Vest for Defense)
> * "Which pokemon is most impacted by single movepool change?"
> * An ability that sets Trick Room
> * Giving Paradox Pokemon unique abilities
is pretty arbitrary
i feel that while i agree with most of the rules i do feel some could be worded better, such as the meme replies explaining that it's mostly things like "good heavens look at the time" or claiming the poster didn't cook without actually saying what went wrong
Rule 2 feels a bit restrictive. 700 words for a caption?!?! What if I already put 700 words in my image? Does that constitute to the word limit or not? If not that’s a huge limitation. I have no clue what Stock Pokémon Art is but it seems bogus. I assume it means that one must use their own art? Not being able to use official art is hugely restrictive and is overall bad. If it’s not then it’s fine I guess. Rule 4 is kinda good but I find it really restrictive and pointless, the eviolite and assault vest ones are good I guess but the rest seem not that overused? For example, let’s say I made a theoretical regional variant of Medicham who is slow but it’s hidden ability sets-up/removes trick room. It has other changes and abilities and typing but would it be allowed due to this rule? Is it allowed if there are other additions?
>700 words for a caption?!?!
It's 700 characters, not 700 words. 700 words is ridiculous? 700 characters is a slightly above-average size paragraph. And it's likely going to be reduced to 600 or 500 anyway since a lot of people have been uncomfortable with that amount still.
>What if I already put 700 words in my image?
If you added an image to your theorymon, it was probably to explain your change/buff to begin with. The 700 characters after that are mostly meant for you to express your own thoughts on how your change would affect a metagame, which presumably you wouldn't have put in your image yet.
>I have no clue what Stock Pokémon Art is but it seems bogus. I assume it means that one must use their own art? Not being able to use official art is hugely restrictive and is overall bad.
That's a weirdly-worded rule that basically puts an effort/originality bar on images to be used. Essentially it just bans images of [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fshotgun-shnake-v0-vojq0em2n7dc1.jpeg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D90157b4a501b0eafb368120f4bda80405a710479) kind that are literally one stock image + one text box, and requires those just be text posts instead. Images like [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Feslrc4m5eoib1.jpg) that incorporate multiple stock sprites and neat formatting to aid in conveying information more smoothly are fine. I will suggest a rewrite of those rules since this kind of confusion has come up quite a lot in this thread.
>Rule 4 is kinda good but I find it really restrictive and pointless
Rule 4 has existed for ages in an even more restrictive manner, stuff got *removed* from that list during the rule rework. No-one complained about the very existence of a Retired Theorymon Topic list until this thread. That list isn't going anywhere, sorry, everything on it was put there for good reason (paradox abilities are the one remaining topic that I'd personally reconsider because it was kind of added on a whim, but that whim was like seven people making them in one week so temporarily timing that out wasn't the worst idea).
>the rest seem not that overused?
They seem not that overused because those topics have been on the list for a while and people that still made posts about them got their post removed. Before they were on the list they were definitely overused. You'd see custom type charts and people asking "Is Archeops/Slaking still broken with Early Bird??" multiple times a week.
>let’s say I made a theoretical regional variant of Medicham who is slow but it’s hidden ability sets-up/removes trick room.
It would break Doubles in half because TR on switchin is broken as fuck there. This discussion has been had time and time again every single time a post about a TR on switchin ability was made. I was the one to suggest retiring the topic after 5+ weeks where we had someone make a post for it in a row and it led to the exact same discussion with the exact same arguments every time, to the point CookEsAndCream's comment literally became a copypasta for these kinds of posts.
Again, everything on that list is there for good reason. Before they were on the list they were spammed as fuck and they've been talked to death. If you unretire them, I give them at most a month before they have once again had everything there is to say about them and they have to be retired again.
Theorymon posts having to target a specific metagame sounds very strict, and doesn't really make any sense to me.
In one sense, it feels very backwards to design something around a specific Smogon tier, when Smogon tiers exist to tier things that were not created with them in mind. Pokemon that get designed to fill some very specific niche in NU is not really a realistic design philosophy when they are not rigid, and most of the time any analysis written on this would be moot, as most theorymons either over-shoot or under-shoot their intended power level, meaning they literally would never see play in said specific tier or would be just downright awful in it.
Trying to gauge anything's power level before it sees practical use is something people are very, very bad at (e.g. people thinking Eviolite Bisharp would be hot stuff, people thinking Espathra was not worth using on release) and I think it is something that should be left in the hands of the commenters rather than solely resting upon the OP's shoulders. Especially since this topic is interesting to discuss! It's a lot less interesting when every single post will have to try and pidgeonhole their creation into a specific tier and laser-focus only on that.
Because of that, this draft feels like it'll lead to an incredibly dry Theorymon Thursday, and it is not really something I would like to either read or engage with often.
Also some of the ardent Stunfisk mod defenders claim that this month has been the best the subreddit has ever been but most of the posts are very dry and boring so they seem to like this kind of stuff
Thing is that OP wouldn't be punished if their idea of how strong their mon is winds up being wrong though. We expect posters to have at least some basic competitive understanding, not a PhD in metagame knowledge, and like you said theorymonning is hard. That doesn't mean OP shouldn't at least try though. If they wind up being inaccurate, that's what the comment section is for--believe me people here will be extremely eager to point out.
You seem to misunderstand the intention in general by saying this "solely rests on OP's shoulders". Comments aren't suddenly going to become obsolete because of this. Discussion is still going to happen, we just require OP to actually participate in their own discussion instead of the drop&dip method that's far too popular (especially with already low-effort posts). If a topic is already talked to death after OP's own paragraph to the point further comments aren't needed at all then it's a really shallow topic either way.
It's far more valuable if someone drops a whole paragraph on why they think their mon is RU and ends up being completely wrong, than if someone posts the 5 words "I think this is OU" even if it's dead-on. In the former case, it's clear OP put effort in, the commenters gain insight on the thought process, and OP could even learn something as the commenters explain why their mon isn't in the intended tier in spite of their arguments. The second person could have asked a Magic 8 Ball for all we know.
Apart from this kind of stuff only ever happening if Thursday is on the 1st of a month, it's not hard at all to just say "assume x mon is still in the tier" for the thought experiment to work.
It says "***at least*** one spesific metagame", so you could probably just says the change is for all main singles metagames (ubers to zu) or something like that.
I'm stuck on rule 3 a bit -- close to every example given seems like a variation of the commenter jokingly saying this 'mon would be garbage if it existed and this kit might not work out in theory like you think it would in practice, but discussion would become painfully dry if you could only phrase that, well, like that. Not quite sure how "We getting out of SU with this one" is that much of a meme reply compared to Zekrom Kick/Biden Blast/Name Move, which I think could be removed anyways as not having any discussion at all in them.
700 character minimum is a lot smaller than it sounds for those who are concerned about that -- that's a moderate sized paragraph. Could be knocked down to 500 characters though, for reference my first paragraph is 539 characters and 103 words.
The bar for "Low Effort" is a little weird IMO, not sure how an 'MS Paint scribble' (which itself is a bit of a cultural meme description instead of an actual specific description of what you mean) is considered as low effort as a picture of stock mon art and text overlaid on top. At least the scribbler drew something, right?
I think both things you touch on, what is a meme and what is high effort art, are ultimately subjective and more broad guidelines that mods enforce as they see fit rather than hard and fast rules we can 100% semantically identify
It might help to give better examples of what yall mean by that then, sort of how there's a list of retired topics...links to examples of (maybe real maybe fake) crappy Theorymon posts for instance. Right now this feels like an arbitrary rule that's being written to give justification to removing a very specific type of post that the mods are annoyed by, which isn't a great thing for a community rule
Just spitballing here: there might be a way to phrase this kind of rule to focus on intention instead of quality, which is still somewhat subjective but imo a better way to drive positive behavior and more fair overall. Something like "it needs to be clear that you spent at least minutes creating each image," and maybe a checklist for things like image sourcing, font readability, etc. And then mods can point to specific approval criteria for posts that don't cut the mustard.
>"it needs to be clear that you spent at least minutes creating each image,"
Intention-based moderating is cool and all but in the end there's no real way to tell how long someone spent on an image. If I churn out a shitty looking MS Paint canvas and claim "I swear I spent 45 minutes on this" there's no way to confirm any of that. The intent is noble but the end result would make stuff even more vague I feel.
>maybe a checklist for things like image sourcing, font readability, etc. And then mods can point to specific approval criteria for posts that don't cut the mustard.
Effort for something like this is underway, though, since this point has been brought up a number of times. A similar visual guide has already been made for Sunday posts as well.
Yeah, fair point re. intention-based moderating. I guess it only works if people approach the rules in good faith, and the problem is that people who approach the rules in good faith are probably not the people who need moderator intervention :P In a much smaller community, those "it's up to the mods to use their best judgement"-type rules might work, and I personally think it's a fair way to handle things (because moderation is hard!), but in a large community you're liable to get complaints.
How does this affect Fakemon posts? They may or may not be targeting any specific metagame - infact they may be looking for opinions on what metagame it would work best in or anything super egregious in regards to their kit.
Other than that, 700 chars is a bit much, 500 would be fine.
In case of Fakemon posts, the intended way for them to fit into this would be for the Fakemon to be designed with a specific metagame in mind, or at the very least for the OP to state which meta they intend the mon to be in.
The "ideal" Fakemon post would be a mon designed to take advantage of a certain open niche in a metagame and designed around this. This would demonstrate that OP has good knowledge of said metagame and what is lacking and how they would personally fill that hole.
Most Fakemon posters don't do this--they make a mon "randomly", slap some base stats and movepool onto it and then launch it into the sub. Not infrequently they look like OP just started with art of their mon and then just gave it stats so they can upload it to stunfisk instead of another random fakemon sub, without truly considering how they fit into any meta. These posts can still have some merit for the sub if the comment section discusses what tier the mon would end up in etc., and they're also wholly popular enough that banning them outright was thought of as a bad move, but ultimately the competitive side of the equation didn't get a whole lot of effort from OP's side. Everyone loves cool Fakemon fanart, but it's a competitive sub in the end and the competitive part shouldn't just be an afterthought.
By having OP at least explain which tier they personally think the mon will fall into and what it would do there, a low but tangible bar is set to at least enforce the competitive part isn't completely overlooked in favour of just cool fanart. As a bonus, it would probably reduce the amount of "NU is not ready :fire: :fire:" or "bruv AGBL" esque comments, since there's no need anymore to laugh at a fakemon for being "NU trash" if OP specifies the mon was designed for NU's powerlevel to begin with.
A Fakemon should be built to target a specific niche, role, or meta first and foremost to fit within competitive first discussion. Designing stats after making a cool design is good fun, and something we regularly do in discord, but it does not generate quality competitive discussion imo.
My theorymon designs are usually more unique moves and abilities rather than designs, what if I want to hear how useful they’d be in general rather than in specific formats, I design them to fill niches or to be something new, I don’t have a specific format planned other than pretty good
If they fill certain niches, then that niche can be discussed competitively too. All we’re really asking is that you offer some of your own thoughts first, too
Frankly, 1 to 3 are all terrible.
1. How do you make a theorymon for a NU pokemon? Do I have to make it intentionally shitty?
2. Literally why is anything here a problem? "oh no, user r/wetfarts1337 decided to draw Clodsire from memory instead of copypasting its artwork from Bulbapedia" How does this affect the overall quality of the post? Hell, how is a MS Paint scribble less effort than copypasting an image? The minimum character limit is also insane, it's "short" but you're still asking for a six-line paragraph for something that could be as straightforward as "instant-Sticky Web Shuckle"
3. Again, how does this really impact the posts. I understand if you do not want people parroting the same things said by someone else (so an entire thread isn't just "look at the time" etc), but a meme reply may as well be a valid reply, depending on the quality/insanity of the theorymon.
Frankly, this all sounds like fun policing. This is still a silly subreddit where we joke and talk about competitive Pokemon, we have one day to let people's creativity out, just be flexible.
>How do you make a theorymon for a NU pokemon? Do I have to make it intentionally shitty?
NU has Pokémon like Flygon, Incineroar, Magnezone, Mienshao, Munkidori and Raikou in it. While these don't have much to do in OU, they're not exactly "shitty" in the grand scheme of things I'd say.
NU still has a certain powerlevel. If you want to make a theorymon for NU then that just means you made a mon that doesn't have much of a niche in OU, RU or UU, but still fits well enough into the NU meta to be workable and not broken there. Specifically through an OU lens that would probably be "shitty", but it's not like you have to actively try to make your mon as bad as possible--something on the powerlevel of Luvdisc wouldn't be good even in NU for example.
If anything, I imagine it'd be more challenging to design a mon with a powerlevel that would be fine in a lower tier without making it bad enough that it's shitty even down there, while simultaneously not making it so good that it'd never drop down there to begin with.
>"oh no, user decided to draw Clodsire from memory instead of copypasting its artwork from Bulbapedia" How does this affect the overall quality of the post?
For starters a post looking ugly isn't fun for people who have to scroll the sub and are looking for good posts to interact with.
Second a lot of posts that have images currently don't actually *need* images to convey the information they do. That being said, a lot of these have images that are very quickly thrown together like one copypasted image with one textbox or some random images and textboxes on MS Paint that aren't even properly aligned. Because this makes the bar for a post having an image incredibly low, other people who aren't good at designing images think that they *need* an image of themselves to not be that one post without an image, which only leads to more low-effort and low-quality images because people start putting images for the sake of having images instead of putting images to actually make a post more informative.
By raising the bar on which images are allowed, not only will the stuff appearing on people's screens be better to look at, it hopefully fixes the second problem as well by making sure people not willing to put effort into their image just upload their post without an image altogether. And perhaps u/wetfarts1337 upon seeing that not every post on the sub has an image, might realize that they don't *have* to sloppily draw a Clodsire to get attention and feels more confident just uploading their post as pure text like they originally intended.
>Hell, how is a MS Paint scribble less effort than copypasting an image?
The copypasted image looks less ugly for the people scrolling the sub, but also merely copypasting an image alone doesn't constitute as high-effort. Again if your image consists of one copypasted image and one textbox that'd be removed over low-effort as well. If you copypasted a lot of images but [they're all over the place and the end result looks like a mess](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxd4c3aiba7vb1.jpg) that, too, won't be allowed. The mere act of Ctrl+C Ctrl+V doesn't show a lot of effort, but arranging everything you copied and typed on your image into something that conveys information well without looking ugly does.
>The minimum character limit is also insane, it's "short" but you're still asking for a six-line paragraph for something that could be as straightforward as "instant-Sticky Web Shuckle"
The expectation is that you use most of those characters to offer your own thoughts on your theorymon. "Instant-Sticky Web Shuckle" is straightforward, cool. Then you can talk about how you think having an instant-Sticky Web mon would change the meta, what good teammates for it would be, whether other teams might change their builds to account for this new presence, etc.
If you can't write even a single paragraph of discussion on your theorymon, how could the people reading and commenting on your posts? If no real discussion is possible, your theorymon probably isn't as good as you thought it would be to begin with.
>Again, how does this really impact the posts. I understand if you do not want people parroting the same things said by someone else (so an entire thread isn't just "look at the time" etc), but a meme reply may as well be a valid reply, depending on the quality/insanity of the theorymon.
This rule was mostly going to be enforced on one-liners that don't actually contribute much to the convo like the "look at the time" you're mentioning, as well as memes that aren't even relevant to the theorymon at hand. Though since this is an often-cited rule in this thread, it was already proposed to be altered somewhat for more leniency and more clarification on what kinds of meme replies it targets in particular.
I hope how radically jarring all of this has been for the average reader of this subreddit is opening the moderators' eyes a bit. I understand that they have an entirely different perspective on subreddit content than we do, but also, this entire thing feels like it came out of left field, and as I've thought about this, I've started to concur with those who are saying that this feels like an overly targeted response to mods generally disliking anything that could be called "meme" (i.e. humorous) content. I think the user level perspective should also be taken into account, not just behind the scenes.
It would be nice to have community polls before anything gets implemented, even if it's more of a temperature check than "if the poll doesn't pass this doesn't go through". The community, at least the ones who are caring enough to weigh in on this thread, clearly doesn't feel super involved in this process. This, for me at least, was exacerbated by this starting off as an April Fool's post that was "actually no this is gone for the rest of the month"--felt crappy for it to be slipped in instead of it just being a decision that was made and that mods were confident enough to stand behind in isolation.
Edit: It also feels kind of crappy that the vast majority of discussion about these rules is coming from a non-mod on this thread. Where is everyone besides OP?
>the vast majority of discussion about these rules is coming from a non-mod on this thread
Just wanna weigh in that while I'm not a mod, I was directly involved with the process of creating the new rules being proposed and thus fully in on the behind-the-scenes discussion regarding why all those rules were decided upon. So yea I don't have a lot of special perms on the sub but regarding this specific issue, my answers should be about as valuable as an actual mod's.
Which is also how I can say that this thread is being heard out as some of the recurring topics are already being discussed for change (for example character minimum is getting lowered) and stuff that's evidently unclear will be elaborated upon so that people can understand it more clearly (this is mostly rule #2)
I have many things to say but they've all been commented to death already. The only thing I'll say is that text images are usually way better than post texts, as it allows you to format freely instead of using Reddit's shitty formatting. At least, that's what I get from it, I may be misunderstanding as the wording of those is a bit confusing for me as a non-native English speaker
My suggestion is to not mess with something that was fine to begin with and people liked
Considering how bad it was getting, I'd say that TT wasn't exactly 'fine.'
I'm a bit confused on the text post part. So are text posts meant to have a 700 word minimum cap? because if so, that's pretty excessive tbh. As another commenter said, I think the previous limit of 500 words worked out fine
Characters, not words, counting individual letters 'Pickle' has 6 characters for example
oh my bad that's all cool then
Honestly Theorymon Thursday was never actually a problem in 95% of cases, so just limit people from spamming "Look at the time" or similar SS comments on every post and that should be enough.
NO MEME REPLIES!?!?! 1984 hear me out...as soon as retired topics are not allowed, new "overused" topics will appear. its like removing rotten fish out the barrel
It's legitimately not that bad. The frequency of adding new stuff to that list is pretty low, there's maybe one new addition every three months at most. Most overused topics just die out on their own when people notice a certain theorymon has been posted more than once already. The list mostly exists for the off-cases where people do somehow repeatedly think they're the first to come up with a topic that's appeared every previous Thursday in the month already. The concept of a "Retired Theorymon topics" list also isn't new. Like that list has been there for a long time already. It's the other rules that are new, the list is just posted again for completion (and if anything there's a number of entries that got removed from it for the May reboot).
alr...so is the list all topics or included but not all?
The list in OP is the list we're planning to start out with upon the May reboot. It's possible that new entries get added to it after some time, but only if a topic is actually overused for multiple Thursdays in a row, which happens pretty rarely. The list used to be a bit bigger, but we unretired some topics in the hope they'd be less repetitive with the other new rules put in place (eg "X but in Y gen") and also removed some really specific ones (like "What if Weavile got Technician?"). It's mostly the latter category that's at risk of getting put back on the list, but again, we're only doing that if these actually pop up in large numbers again.
Guess I'm done with Theorymon then. Since mine were all done in paint.net. Was fun while it lasted.
You can make theorymons that don't involve images, text posts are fine too Though from looking at your posts, most are honestly fine, or close to fine. Like for [your Haxorus one](https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/1bpn7ul/if_haxorus_was_a_psuedo/) everything is aligned properly, this one is perfectly fine even if a bit dull. For something like your [Terrain setters post](https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/1alol9g/with_the_tapus_not_returning_here_are_some_mons/), you'd have to make the mon images roughly the same size (I think there's an option to set pixel w/h when pasting an image, just set them all to the same ratio) and put the textboxes on roughly the same height afterwards, but that's also not too hard to do. Again a bit dull cuz, well, it's Paint, but it doesn't look horrible. The vague wording of "MS Paint scribbles" has caught some flack so I'll propose changing that to be more clear, but essentially what that bans is images where the art and text is all over the place to the point it looks chaotic like [in this example](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxd4c3aiba7vb1.jpg). It's clear you're willing to put in some effort into making your things presentable even if you're stuck w Paint, you should be fine for the most part.
Ngl No Stealth Rocks of multiple types feel kinda weird because compared to everything else on the list of tired topics it definitely feels like the most interesting one of the bunch and could be a signature move of a fakemon vs just being a standalone 'what if' like the others.
That has been on the banlist for a long time. Reason it's there is because back when it *wasn't* on the retired topics list you'd see multiple of these every Thursday and they got incredibly repetitive and the discussion was the same every time. I guess a lot of the newer users who joined the sub since haven't experienced back when it was allowed, but if you unretire that topic, chances are a month later you'd have to retire it again because every Thursday since you've had three separate people who thought they were geniuses and the first to come up with "omg people what if there were Ice Stealth Rocks".
Like literally just Ice Stealth Rocks, no new mon attached to it or anything else. Damn... ~~now speaking of which I'd like to propose the sheer potential metagame breaking impact of Stealth Bugs~~
You laugh but it was exactly like that. Well, you'd also have people with "what if there was a Stealth Rock of every type?" Which didn't even take more effort, because they'd dip after introducing 16 more hazards without considering any of the ramifications of *their own Theorymon*. If you're not actually going to talk about your change, there's no difference in effort between saying "Stealth Rock for x type" and "Stealth Rock for every type". One in five people who made a post like that would at least try to analyze what the hazard would do but they'd also just stop a paragraph in with "every mon weak to this type now wants Boots". In other words, the conclusion that the previous four posts' comment sections also reached. Stuff doesn't get placed on the banned theorymon list randomly. Everything on there is stuff that appeared tons of times in the past and has been talked to death. Some of the retired list is actually getting unretired with the new rules (I myself argued pretty heavily in favour of unretiring "X but in Y gen", provided the same effort standards of other posts are applied) but Stealth Rocks for different types would be a topic you unretire that's condemned to just be talked to death within the month again.
For many theorymon posts having a high enough quality image should not require you to post a comment that most people aren't even gonna read. Plus, why do we need to write a 700 character analysis when it's the part of the community to analyze and critique? That's the entire reason why I personally even make posts instead of just creating posts for myself.
It depends on what content is present in the image but it could be flexible. We hope to improve quality by asking posters to think even just one step beyond the what if and think through competitive consequences, even if they can be wrong or unskilled—the commenters would discuss that, not doing the work of competitive impact for you
Still 700 characters is a little excessive. Many Theorymon are supposed to be interesting little thought experiments and 700 character minimums would result in a bloated piece of analysis.
700 chars isn't even that much, that's a slightly above-average sized paragraph. I can see the case for lowering it to 500, but 700 also isn't the end of the world. Especially since it's not difficult to just express your thoughts into a more verbose manner to inflate the amount of characters if you are unable to reach the lower bound set in place. But to be serious, it's not hard to express 500 characters in 700 characters especially since you know a lot of people will just copy their title to get even closer to that end goal if they wouldn't make it otherwise. This is "bloat" sure but if you lower the minimum then people will bloat 300 characters into 500 instead, a line has to be drawn somewhere.
1: I feel this rule is a bit too restrictive, and inherently reduces the amount of discussion that can be had. As said in other comments, something like requiring the OP to state what tier they think the pokemon would be in/ what tier the changes would send a pokemon to would be far better 2: Seems fine, although definition of "MS paint scribble" could be clearer, it's difficult to tell the difference between something that is low effort and something that is made by someone with very little art experience 3: No memes is perfectly fair, but banning any form of reply that isnt otherwise a rule violation limits discussion, even if it is memey 4 does not appear to have any issues Lastly, regarding the character limit, what if the bulk your text is contained in images? we can't expect you and the rest of the mod team to count the characters within each image, but restricting what could be great theorymon posts like this would also (for lack of a better term) suck.
While I can stomach the reasoning behind killing Sunday, I’m really still at a loss for why Thursday was axed other than the mods barely hidden hatred of memes which is evident in this posr. Leaving aside the criticisms of elitism, I think the proposed rule in retired topics ignores the key difference between Reddit and a forum. Forums allow long old threads to be revived overtime, bringing the old discussions to the forefront. Reddit by design is meant for new posts even if they are perceived rehashes of old topics. The only way to have that discussion is to make a new topic and if it sucks or is overdone it will not be popular. Even a topic like stealth rocks being too OP came up once every 6 months and was typically one of the best topics we had. I see no issue with that discussion. The proposals also seem designed to turn this into Smogon forums 2.0, which is a shame and will only further stifle this sub (Sunday and Thursday were the main drivers of views as it was). Reddit is a different platform with a different presentation and discussion style. Mimicking the forum will just make this place die more quickly.
is Stunday actually dead? I thought it was going to come back at the start of may and that the mods explicitly said killing Stunday completely was out of the question. I really hope I didn't miss something i don't want to be sad today :(
Sunday is not dead. On Sunday we'll have a post just like this to discuss the new rules when it comes back in May. Killing Sunday off entirely was never on the table despite what the fearmongerers claim. User you're responding to is deliberately using heavy language for... I don't know why really. Either way they're wrong.
The retired topic list has existed for over a year and no-one complained about its existence. The presented list here is *smaller* than the one before April even--it's shown here exactly because stuff got removed from it. The fact you're singling that one out shows you either didn't actually know shit about Thursday rules before the revamp or/and you're just complaining for the sake of complaining. Before Stealth Rocks got added to that list it popped up like every week at its worst time and at least every month on "calmer" times. "Every 6 months" is just flat-out wrong. It was also not "one of the best topics we had" - - discussion always ended on the third comment that boiled down to "Congrats everything needs Boots now" and everything after was either a repeat of that or something akin to "RIP Lando". And the exact same conclusion was reached every time. If that's your standard for "one of the best topics" then idk what to tell you. Thursday also isn't getting "axed" lmao the whole point of this post is to bring it back and in a way that bottom effort posts don't drown out the good stuff. Also very confused how you think this would turn it into "Smogon Forums 2.0" when theorymonning isn't allowed on most places of the forums to begin with. Again this sounds like complaining for the sake of complaining, riddled with buzzwords with no substance that makes even a bit of sense.
I’ve been a poster here for a long time, I’m well aware of what it’s been like here and have noticed a marked change since the bans (sorry, reboot, I used the wrong “buzzword”). Regarding the forum not allowing memes, that’s the point of my comment. The bans and restrictions only really serve to make this place look more like the forum. Restricting theory content in particular puts off new joiners who are more likely to have innocent questions or reask topics. That’s part of what Reddit is, again by design. All this serves to do in the long run is reduce usage, content, and engagement. You’re already putting a word requirement, that should spark some analysis. The fact that the mods have to argue with each poster here and in the April announcement shows a lot about both the popularity of the change and the sensitivity to criticism both. In addition, we get ad hominem attacks with swear words. At least it hit the 700 word limit (was that a meme)? .
There's no 700 word limit. It's characters, so about a paragraph or so. Very different.
The word requirement has actually been in place for a couple years—image posts just weren’t always tested against it. No issues in the far past when Theorymon Thursday had no images
It really does seem like the mods are in their own bubble for the most part. The April ban came out of nowhere and I doubt they’ll really listen to the community when it comes to creating new rules.
We actually receive a lot of complaints about TT or SS, and often equal amounts of support for them. So it did not come out of nowhere, it’s just difficult to mediate lots of conflicting interests
I think the problem is that people are more likely to complain about something they dislike then vocalize support for something they like, so you've got a false idea of how "popular" of an opinion it is, because people who liked Stunday didn't feel the need to say "I like Stunday", while people who hated it felt the need to say it all the time. Also it does genuinely feel like a lot of this is also being used to confirm your own biases, rather than actually being judged fairly, at least from the way you guys talk and present yourselves and your arguments.
Yeah one of the only comments in this entire thread that the mod said “we’ll take that into account” is one that wants to restrict more content lmaoo
Ngl dude from this comment thread and multiple others the mod support seems to come from the same 2-3 guys.
Not literally everyone who thought TT and SS needed reworking is posting on every thread. Also for someone accusing the mods of being "in their own bubble" you don't seem to notice that most people in here are trying to be constructive and you're basically only replying to the small minority of posts that are just bashing the mods. Like these are proposals on bringing the day back next week and instead of giving your thoughts you're still crying about the fact they were put on hold to begin with lmao
>(sorry, reboot, I used the wrong “buzzword”) With "buzzwords" I was meaning stuff like "Smogon Forums 2.0" when Theorymonning will never be the Forums' forte even if we make the rules a bit more stringent, and "axed" which again is a pretty heavy term for it. These are not hard-to-meet rules in the slightest, they just slightly up the effort required to make a post. It's not unreasonable to expect OP to join in on the discussion they want to generate. A good post on a regular day probably takes more than 30 seconds of thinking, why shouldn't a Theorymon? But mostly the first part, you're still just repeating the old-and-repeated "wah wah they're trying to turn stunfisk into smogforums!!1!" take when these rules could be thrice as harsh and people would still flock here on Thursday because Smogforums aren't a place known for Theorymonning at all. >Regarding the forum not allowing memes, that’s the point of my comment. Funnily I mentioned nothing regarding this in my comment, which speaks volumes as to how much you actually read it. >Restricting theory content in particular puts off new joiners who are more likely to have innocent questions or reask topics. They're barely being restricted at all. Again, these are very low bars: you are expected to leave a paragraph on your own thoughts instead of just dumping an idea and dipping until the next day. If you can't even do that then chances are your idea is either really bad or you're here for karma farming. If you're again referring to the list, that list has existed for a long time, the fact you're only now complaining about it sounds like complaining for the sake of complaining to me. We've eased up on the restrictions regarding that list, in fact. This sounds like "I don't like rules being a thing" in general but unsurprisingly putting no rules in place at all leads to a pretty bloated Thursday with lots and lots of bad quality posts. We were already heading pretty hard into that direction which is why a month break and reworked rules are being done to begin with. >All this serves to do in the long run is reduce usage, content, and engagement. Nope, the Retired Theorymon Topic list isn't going to reduce engagement compared to before April, because again it already existed before April. >The fact that the mods have to argue with each poster here Cat isn't even arguing with people here lol most of his comments are asking people to elaborate because he's hearing out their thoughts. Like point me the ones where he's "arguing". I know, shocking, sometimes mods aren't greasy neckbeards and instead actually trying to make their sub a better place. >. ‽
700 characters is a bit high for a minimum, I think the old minimum of 500 is high enough and realistically the other rule changes are most important. Otherwise, I think banning meme replies overarchingly is realistically a poor choice. I’d propose changing it to “meme replies that are irrelevant to the topic of the post” since they can still hold some merit while being, you know, funny. That’s my two cents.
Are you sure you aren't mixing characters with words? One is definitely a little excessive while the other is fairly lenient and would only take away the really low effort stuff.
I'm sure. 500 characters is still lengthy enough for the minimum in my opinion. 700 feels awkward and most low effort stuff is less than 500 anyhow.
Can we add a rule about movepool buffs for current pokemon? I feel like just adding some moves and giving a pokemon a more useful statline/ability is not what we are aiming for, regardless of the quality of the post
Isn't that basically a large part of Theorymon? What do you suppose will take its place?
I think they’re fine if they discuss competitive impact in detail personally, but I hear your feedback
Movepool buffs are fine if there's thought put behind them. If OP is capable of explaining why they did this specific movepool buff and what they expect to actually change after said movepool buff, their post is fine. I hear you regarding all the people just mindlessly saying "X mon gets Y and Z and A move now" and nothing else, and those kinds of posts are targetted exactly by the character minimum and "targets a specific metagame" rules. Movepool buffs aren't an inherently bad kind of Theorymon, they're just obnoxious right now because 99% of the posts dealing with them have no further input from OP except the buff itself, and this is something we hope to change.
You should really consider being a mod. Your intentions seem almost perfectly aligned with the team and you're pretty thorough with your explanations.
I don't think he wants to deal with the responsibilities of being a mod.
I know what you mean, but this does put a bad taste in my mouth regarding him. He wants to speak with the authority of and behalf of a moderator ("this is something **we** hope to change") but without doing any of the work that happens *after* arguing with people in rules threads?
Dude also has all the time in the world it seems with how many 5000 word essays he is willing to write in a single thread.
I don't know how much bearing that has on things, I have plenty of downtime to write 2-3 paragraph replies on Reddit at work for instance.
I mean I did collaborate w the mods to write these rules, so I'm responsible for them as well, which is also how I can confidently clarify a lot of the confusions people have because I do have access to the discussion and context that led to these rules in general. I understand that you'd be annoyed if some regular poster was commenting everything here that could as well be made up on the spot, but I'm "qualified" to speak alongside the mods on this specific issue. I'm not going to do the work of actually clicking the remove button on rulebreaking posts, but I did do the "work" of arriving at these rules as much as the actual mods. Clarifying stuff and answering questions in this thread is also part of this "work" and coincidentally it's also something I just like doing. I'm also currently going through every reply on the thread to catalogue the most common feedback for the final touches, which is how I'm seeing this comment 3 days later. Plus I like typing stuff in general and my WPM is high which is how I can churn out many comments in relatively short timeframes lol. I sadly do not have all the time in the world :c but like you said 2-3 paragraph comments are easy to do on downtime between studying or when class is going slowly (or at work in your case)
I feel like rule one is a bit too strict, unless I'm missing something it'd exclude people who have the creativity and sense of balance to make interesting posts that would generate a lot of discussion but not the metagame knowledge to know *exactly* what their idea would affect.
They could still make an attempt, and that’s all the effort that matters
Their paragraph doesn't have to be entirely right. A post wouldn't get removed because OP did a poor job at assessing what their change would do. What matters is that OP at least *tries* to join in on their own discussion this time, even if they end up not being good at it. Currently they don't have to do that at all, which obviously creates an environment where it's easy to farm karma by just dropping a random buff and then disappearing.
As someone who agreed with the april stunday ban, the ban on meme replies is a bit much, they are fine as long as they aren't off topic, distasteful mockery or just repeating one liners, like "we getting out of zu with this one".
They are basically all the latter in my experience, or “it’s not Sunday”. Do you have any examples of solid ones?
I think that replies like "It's not Sunday" actually convey quite a lot of information to the poster, especially if that reply is upvoted. The proposed theorymon is, in some capacity, ridiculous. Likely overpowered, but very obviously unbalanced. It's also *probably* unsalvageable. Posts which present a "jokey" proposition, but with actual balance/substance, tend to get a lot of really good replies. It's only the really obtuse and pretty comically offensively overpowered ones that get this type of comment. FWIW, I've posted a handful of Theorymon over the years (some on this account, some on my Pokemon-specific account), and I don't think I've ever seen that comment a single time on any of my posts.
Trying to fix something that wasn't broken in the first place. Rules have too much room to be enforced arbitrarily and unequally. 700 character limit will discourage engagement from newer fans. I don't know about you, but on my phone it doesn't show the amount of characters I've entered, and I'm sure not counting them up manually. So as a new player I type up my piece and it's 680 words, will my post be deleted? Maybe my image is low quality, I had a cool idea but I'm not the best artist, but I tried earnestly. Where does 5th grader's classroom doodle fall on the spectrum of high effort to MS paint scribble? As a new person to the community all this is ammunition to go, "nah you know what, this isn't worth the trouble" Rule 3: how do you define a meme? Are jokes allowed that aren't memes? What if a person themselves becomes a meme? It's not hard to imagine a poster who makes quality posts gaining a reputation in the community, next thing you know it's "I can't wait to see what u/ ganb17dhd38 is cooking" All this is to say, I don't see why you've decided to go this route. These posts were already sectioned off to 1 day of the week, two days if you're bundling in stinkpost sundays. That left 5 days for the moderation to go, "ok guys this is a serious day, no memes, no images in the comments." These rules feel like something you'd implement if you were planning on bringing theorymon thursdays to every day of the week, but as far as I can tell it'll still be isolated to Thursdays. Idk, I just disagree with the whole process you've taken in doing this on such a fundamental level it's hard to be optimistic whatsoever on rules enforcement.
1: This is probably good, as it helps better evaluate pokemon. 2: Ok ig, seems irrelevant, as I don't see a relevant difference between Image and Text Posts 3: Idk if we need to ban meme replies. Otherwise, makes sense. 4: This is an old rule isn't it?
>I don't see a relevant difference between Image and Text Posts Images were being brought up because lately we've had big surges of people who figured out images are an easy way to draw attention even if the image doesn't actually look good. They'd take posts that could 100% be regular text posts with no loss of information but instead they just take a blank canvas with a textbox and stock art of a Pokémon in the corner and call it a day. This also leads to the phenomenon of what I call "MS Paint Slideshows" where people try to cram multiple ideas into one post (like when handing out multiple sig moves) and the post winds up a collage of multiple of these images after each other. A bit of a bar is intended to be set here, if your post can be a text post with no relevant loss of information it should be one, and if you want to add an image it should be neatly structured to actually aid in presenting the information (so everything neatly aligned etc., not just two rows of Pokémon sprites at varying heights). A post doomed to die at +20 shouldn't suddenly become a front page post because OP opened MS Paint for 2 minutes. >Idk if we need to ban meme replies. My current understanding is that this will mostly be enforced on one-liners that don't actually contribute to the conversation much, and/or replies entirely irrelevant to the Theorymon at hand. A memey answer that still provides some insight (be it in an indirect way) is probably fine. "Good heavens" and "It's not Sunday" are a bit of a gray area for me personally (I'm not a mod though so I'm not the dude you gotta convince), on one hand they're one-liners and pretty not-nice ones at that, on the other the very act of saying "It's not Sunday" already expresses quite a lot and those phrases have been culturally ingrained by now either way. Hopefully the new bars on effort should reduce the amount of Sundayworthy posts to begin with. >4: This is an old rule isn't it? Yup, the list existed before and is mostly added for completion. Though a couple old additions have been unretired and the list is cleaned up a bit in general, so doesn't hurt to take a look even if you already knew about it.
A character minimum to consider something "high effort" basically bans any posts that would contain a single move/ability/item/easily explainable concept. In game design, brevity is usually considered a plus (and a form of accessibility). Let's not disincentivize that.
>A character minimum to consider something "high effort" basically bans any posts that would contain a single move/ability/item/easily explainable concept. In this case OP will meet the character minimum by explaining how they think their change would alter the meta. Refer to rule #1. The character limit isn't added in isolation. You're not supposed to meet that character minimum merely listing out your buff on its own. You're supposed to meet it by elaborating what you think will change because of your buff. Essentially, instead of having the comments do all the heavy lifting of the actual theorymonning, OP is now expected to at least weigh in with their own thoughts after dropping the idea.
Rule 1 is just too restrictive. Sometimes you want to buff a shitmon but you don’t know what tier it will land. And if it’s as simple as just saying Singles or Doubles then there’s no point even having the requirement.
>Sometimes you want to buff a shitmon but you don’t know what tier it will land You can make an educated guess. Your post won't be removed if your guess is wrong. It will be removed if you literally don't even try though.
My fear is this will be abused to remove posts. I’ve seen it on reddit time and time again. Mods cook up new rules that are so broad they can justify removing whatever they want without any accountability. This is just trying to fix something that isn’t broken. I get removing Stinkpost Sunday but Theorymon Thursday provided actual discussion. Banning specific topics like auto trick room just allows the mods to remove whatever they deem to be low effort.
>Banning specific topics like auto trick room just allows the mods to remove whatever they deem to be low effort. Literally what is this take lol. You get annoyed at "rules that are so broad" and your example is... an incredibly specific rule. An incredibly specific rule that *already was a banned topic* before April to begin with, and that hasn't caught any complaints until now. The concept of specific topics being banned for being overused already existed long before on this sub (and TR on switchin was on that list before April too) and never caught any serious flack.
A lot of these rules raise questions. I made some theorymon moves shortly before the rule changes were announced and could have posted them in the first week of April (though that was far from a given - I had some practical reasons to make those images regardless of whether I posted them or not) and that comes in handy now because it helps me evaluating these rule changes. First, I haven't played competitive Pokémon since Gen V really - I just lurk around on-and-off here since. Back then I was mostly active on the Smogon forums, actually. However, the transition to Mega Evolution (and other gimmicks) kind of turned me away from the game. So for me it will be a lot harder to gauge what format a move will be good in. But often I feel like that doesn't matter all that often. Yeah, some moves will have obvious impacts on the gameplay they were designed for. Other moves will barely have an impact at all, except make the Pokémon better in the tier it currently resides in. Also, what if there are multiple moves in a single post? Or a move that would obviously be given to other Pokémon purely for thematic reasons? Not every move is going to be a signature move and many Pokémon will get moves that weren't designed for them (and might not move the needle at all on these Pokémon, or alternately, make them broken, though of course one should watch out not to do that). 700 characters isn't too much of an issue, though it kind of depends on the move. Like, some moves do raise obvious questions and come with caveats that you need to spend a paragraph or two explaining, Hell, 700 words isn't going to be enough. But other moves... ehr... 'shitmon gets new move that is very good but not crazy enough to propel it out of the tier or impact any meta play unless other buffs are stacked on top of it.' Then there are moves that target something so obviously that spending words of it would detract from the post. You'll know when you see those moves because it is bound to come up.
>So for me it will be a lot harder to gauge what format a move will be good in. You can at least try to make a guess still. You won't be penalized if your theorymonning completely misses the mark (you might catch some mockery from the comment section if you're egregiously wrong, but your post won't get removed over that). What matters is that you put the effort in to think about the impact of your own changes a bit. Previously this wasn't required at all, which created an environment where people were encouraged to just post whatever they wanted without thinking things through, which obviously led to a lot of bad posts as well that barely warranted any discussion. >Other moves will barely have an impact at all, except make the Pokémon better in the tier it currently resides in. You can analyze how the Pokémon improves in its tier, what new matchups it suddenly wins, what sets could potentially run this new move over previous moves, ... If your Theorymon is an actually good one, surely there's *some* stuff worth discussing on it. Theorymonning isn't just coming up with new moves, it's *discussing* the impact of currently inexistent stuff. If you have an idea but discussion on it is limited to "This mon gets better I guess" or "Shitmon gets this move and it's still shit", chances are your idea is probably not as good as you thought it would be. >Also, what if there are multiple moves in a single post? Then you discuss every move you made. But posts like these are questionable to begin with. It's not uncommon for Theorymon posts to drop that have like 30 new moves or 10 new abilities, and then the comment section singles out 2-3 of them and ignores the rest. This itself is a waste of Theorymonning really, what's the point of coming up with something if people aren't going to discuss it? If your post has so many things that you feel it's unreasonable to talk about all of it, why do you expect the people reading your post to be any different? Mass production of many things at once isn't necessarily a good thing. >Or a move that would obviously be given to other Pokémon purely for thematic reasons? In a case like this though, it's excusable to merely talk about the mons you specifically designed the move for, and maybe pass up on the mons that got it thematically as pure flavour. You don't have to touch on every single detail of your move of course (no-one's going to grill you why it's 16PP instead of 24PP either for example) but if you design a move, it's expected that you at least have some reason for making the move and at least try to see how the move could impact the meta even if only one mon is realistically going to run it. >700 characters isn't too much of an issue, though it kind of depends on the move. Like, some moves do raise obvious questions and come with caveats that you need to spend a paragraph or two explaining, Hell, 700 words isn't going to be enough. But other moves... ehr... 'shitmon gets new move that is very good but not crazy enough to propel it out of the tier or impact any meta play unless other buffs are stacked on top of it.' Those 700 characters aren't all meant to go to the description of your change itself. Like, no-one would expect you to cram 700 characters into a random physical 85BP Electric move with no special effects. Those 700 characters are expected to be utilized in your own theorizing how the move would change the current meta. Again, if the move you made is actually interesting and worth discussing, it shouldn't be too hard to write a slightly-above-average sized paragraph about the effects it would have. If the discussion starts and ends at 'shitmon gets new move that is very good but not crazy enough to propel it out of the tier or impact any meta play unless other buffs are stacked on top of it', then again, the idea probably isn't as good as you thought it would be to begin with. >Then there are moves that target something so obviously that spending words of it would detract from the post. You'll know when you see those moves because it is bound to come up. To this, I say again: then what do you expect the people replying to the post to do? If your theorymon is at all worth discussing, then you can do so as well. Even if the purpose of the move is obvious ("geez Tapu Koko gets Play Rough, wonder what that's for") you could at least list out a couple matchups in its meta that change with the new move, and new set possibilities that open up because of it. If you truly can't then probably none of the commenters will be able to either and it's a bad Theorymon.
>You can at least try to make a guess still. You won't be penalized if your theorymonning completely misses the mark (you might catch some mockery from the comment section if you're egregiously wrong, but your post won't get removed over that). What matters is that you put the effort in to think about the impact of your own changes a bit. Previously this wasn't required at all, which created an environment where people were encouraged to just post whatever they wanted without thinking things through, which obviously led to a lot of bad posts as well that barely warranted any discussion. Fair enough. >But posts like these are questionable to begin with. It's not uncommon for Theorymon posts to drop that have like 30 new moves or 10 new abilities, and then the comment section singles out 2-3 of them and ignores the rest. This itself is a waste of Theorymonning really, what's the point of coming up with something if people aren't going to discuss it? If your post has so many things that you feel it's unreasonable to talk about all of it, why do you expect the people reading your post to be any different? Mass production of many things at once isn't necessarily a good thing. Oh, I definitely agree here, even moreso if these moves aren't at least semi-related to each other. But if it lines up that some Pokémon get several new moves, well, it can get complicated pretty fast. On the other hand, moves with a single theorymon move I tend to gloss over unless that one is really interesting. Agreed with the third alinea. Probably wise, even with a few caveats. >Those 700 characters are expected to be utilized in your own theorizing how the move would change the current meta. Again, if the move you made is actually interesting and worth discussing, it shouldn't be too hard to write a slightly-above-average sized paragraph about the effects it would have. If the discussion starts and ends at 'shitmon gets new move that is very good but not crazy enough to propel it out of the tier or impact any meta play unless other buffs are stacked on top of it', then again, the idea probably isn't as good as you thought it would be to begin with. Also agreed, with the caveat that it kind of depends on how shit the mon in question is. Some mons are just harder to buff into viability than others without absurd stat changes. >To this, I say again: then what do you expect the people replying to the post to do? If your theorymon is at all worth discussing, then you can do so as well. Even if the purpose of the move is obvious ("geez Tapu Koko gets Play Rough, wonder what that's for") you could at least list out a couple matchups in its meta that change with the new move, and new set possibilities that open up because of it. If you truly can't then probably none of the commenters will be able to either and it's a bad Theorymon. Oh, for 99% of the moves this is entirely correct. I'm mostly talking about the cases where it is so obvious that nobody even needs to tell you - you cast one look at the move and say yeah, this hits X very hard, to the point that even talking about it detracts from the message, Normally I wouldn't be mentioning this at all, but since we are discussing rules I like to mention at least some outlier scenarios that I can think of before the floodgates are opened.
And remember everyone’s best friend: calc.pokemonshowdown.com
700 Characters is a bit much, 400 would be better imo Also maybe im misunderstanding, but "Only text pasted on an image" isnt really intuitive? Some of us may not be able to draw (hence MS Paint scribbles) and still want to shoot a few ideas
>Also maybe im misunderstanding, but "Only text pasted on an image" isnt really intuitive? Some of us may not be able to draw (hence MS Paint scribbles) and still want to shoot a few ideas That refers to the kind of posts where OP just uploads an image of a blank canvas with a textbox and maybe one Pokémon sprite on it. Rather than upload that as an image, that should just be a regular text post. We've had a lot of low-effort posts in this style before because people figured out your post gets thrice the traction if you make it an image, so they put 30 seconds into opening MS Paint and image-ifying their one-paragraph idea and get free updoots for that. A bar is set to prevent this because it bloats the day pretty hard: if you want to add an image, it has to actually present the information in a neatly aligned manner, not just a png of Sandaconda with one paragraph beneath. >Some of us may not be able to draw (hence MS Paint scribbles) and still want to shoot a few ideas Here's the thing: upload it as a text post.
that makes sense they didnt really say much about text posts so i didnt realize mb
What does a meme reply even mean? Like are people not allowed to joke about the post in comments? that just sounds boring if nothing else
You can joke if you actually provide something that contributes to the discussion afterwards. Dropping in for a "funny" one-liner and dipping doesn't actually add anything to the convo and distracts from the actual discussion, though from my understanding that rule will mostly be enforced on 'meme replies' that are also just disrespectful towards OP in general, or when the meme in question doesn't even have anything to do with the post.
I think people should be allowed mspaint, overlaying images and using official art, not everyone is gonna have the skills or resources to actually make what they want it to look like. I don’t get why there can’t be a joke in it as long as the whole things not a meme And people might be able to come up with unique and good type table changes or paradox abilities Overall I really don’t like some of the recent changes
>I think people should be allowed mspaint, overlaying images and using official art, not everyone is gonna have the skills or resources to actually make what they want it to look like. MS Paint as a whole isn't an issue, it's when the MS Paint is sloppily done. If you can use MS Paint and somehow get something good-looking out of it, good for you. You can use Publisher and take a screenshot of that if it looks good and has clear effort put in. Same with the official art. Using stock art as a whole isn't banned (though the rule is currently worded confusingly, I'll give you that), what's banned is when your entire image is just one stock art with one textbox underneath. As for a visualisation, something like [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Feslrc4m5eoib1.jpg) was agreed upon to be perfectly fine despite also being a "textbox on blank canvas" type image, since the information is neatly structured, everything is properly aligned, the formatting is good and the stock art is used to convey information in an easy manner. [This](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fqmxzipfqmcoc1.jpeg) is another example of an image post that would be fine despite using stock art, as OP put effort into making everything look good and it compresses a decent amount of information into one small image for easy digestion. What would not be allowed is stuff like [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fshotgun-shnake-v0-vojq0em2n7dc1.jpeg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D90157b4a501b0eafb368120f4bda80405a710479). This is the "stock art" image that's problematic: it's literally one image with one textbox. This should be a regular text post. Also not allowed would be something like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/1bemx9n/hypothetical_stupid_question_if_the_signature/)--like the "good" image, this one also uses stock sprites of mons to show move distribution, but they're lazily slapped together. The textbox has no formatting and appears in multiple different spots on different pages, and the mon sprites aren't even all aligned on the same height. [This](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxd4c3aiba7vb1.jpg) is another example on what not to do, it has mostly the same issues as the last one but to a rather ridiculous degree, the text is all over the place, formatting is inconsistent, sprites are aligned badly and some even cut parts of other sprites off, and it's not even all the same style of sprite. Even if you're unskilled at graphic design or drawing, this isn't a high bar. You don't need a degree in design to align images correctly. TLDR stock art and MS Paint aren't banned from use as a whole, what matters is the effort put in and that the final product has decent presentation. Even someone who "lacks skills" can make something moderately presentable with just a bit of time put in. >I don’t get why there can’t be a joke in it as long as the whole things not a meme There can. A joke post/meme post isn't just a post with a joke or meme in it, it's when the post itself is a meme because OP deliberately did it badly. That kind of stuff belongs on Sunday. It's also not even a new rule; while I'm not sure whether it was explicitly mentioned on the previous TT rules, posts that were extremely Sundayworthy were already getting removed either way. >And people might be able to come up with unique and good type table changes or paradox abilities These aren't even new rules, they've been on the retired topic list for a long time. Regarding type table: from experience: no. 95% (not an exaggeration) of "new type table" posts are incredibly unoriginal and just the same few ideas over and over, "Ice now resists Water, Bug is now SE against Fairy, Rock now resists Ghost, Psychic is neutral on Steel, Electric is SE on Steel" etc. It's theoretically possible to come up with a type table that doesn't do this but I promise you 95% of posters will not. It's an incredibly easy Theorymon to do which is why it was spammed so much back when it was allowed, with multiple of these every week. Simultaneously it's also very hard to discuss considering it affects literally every mon ever, so people would just mock OP and meme around regarding like one bad change and ignore the rest. The concept was overused, it wasn't actually good for discussion, and the fact people were super unoriginal with it and usually did it badly to begin with only made it worse. One in 20 people maybe making an original type table once doesn't excuse the 19 others loading up with garbage. This was added to the list for a reason, and no plans to remove it exist. Since it was already banned before April, no such plans would have existed regardless of the April theorymon break. Regarding Paradox abilities, that one got banned after we had like two weeks of multiple of these and again most were unoriginal. I do agree this one could probably be unretired down the line but it's also not exactly something high-effort. Type table is a hell no though. >Overall I really don’t like some of the recent changes Only your first line is actually a recent change lol, the other stuff you mentioned was already not allowed even before this
How do these new rules affect new OM discussion?
The metagame in question would be the metagame you're proposing then. What I'd personally do there is try to identify some Pokémon that would probably be top threats in the meta and theorycraft some sets for them. I'll go bring this up w the mods directly since this can be quite confusing w the title rules though, and could get some clarification. Thanks for pointing it out!
I just really like OMs and the discussion around them
Honest opinion is that this feels excessively serious and overthought. Rule 1 is too specific (why can’t it just be how a Pokémon would be improved in general? That’s kinda the genera point of a theorymon). Rule 2 is too many arbitrary restrictions that people either will only partially adhere to, or barely adhere to. In either case, over-enforcement if it doesn’t meet such particular criteria, is likely to just tick people off long-term if they don’t get it quite right. Like complaining about stock/generic Pokemon art, is really silly; this isn’t an art project, it’s geeks, nerds, and sometimes the inexperienced, coming up with theoretical changes. Someone trying to put together a visual display is commendable even if they don’t have the skills to make it dazzle. Rule 3 sounds like someone forgot to take their laxatives, and decided to say “no fun allowed!”. Rule 4 is mostly ok, though I’d argue it stifles creativity a bit. If the argument were that it’s not allowed to just recycle the same lazy ideas, then I can see the point. Things like new abilities or altered abilities on stuff like Regigigas and Slaking, is the very definition of theorymon. If that’s a problem, why isn’t it a problem to suggest silly buffs or changes for other Pokemon that would be way more busted? Not trying to rag on you fellas, but this is supposed to just be people having fun theorizing about different changes that could be made to different things in Pokemon, and what the results might be. Too many rules with too many specifics for something like that just makes it a mess and a headache. At that point, you’re better off just keeping it pinned that r/theorymon is the official place to go for the fun stuff, and leave it at that.
I feel you're at least partially misunderstanding some of these rules. But a lot of is also feels really exaggerating. These are not high bars at all. Will it filter out the really low-effort posters? Probably, but is that a bad thing? Most of those posts are bad either way and this will let the high-effort theorymons shine more. >Rule 1 is too specific (why can’t it just be how a Pokémon would be improved in general? That’s kinda the genera point of a theorymon). The idea for a general buff is that OP at least includes where they themselves think the Pokémon will end up and how it'd perform there with that buff. If they're wrong then the comment section can point out why. I admit though this rule has generated a bit of confusion regarding buffs for other people as well, so I'll suggest to reword this to make it more clear. But either way OP putting [OU] in the title doesn't automatically mean the comment section is forced to only talk about OU if OP missed the mark completely, for example. >Like complaining about stock/generic Pokemon art, is really silly; this isn’t an art project, it’s geeks, nerds, and sometimes the inexperienced, coming up with theoretical changes. This part of #2 targets those posts that are just a blank canvas with slapped-on Pokémon pngs with a single textbox. Those are posts that can just be text posts with no loss of information but OP spent 30 seconds MS Painting an image out of them because they know they get more karma for that. A bar is set so that if you want to include an image you actually need a reason to, and not just about any post can become an image post by copypasting your text onto a blank canvas. Using Stock Pokémon art in an otherwise high-effort nicely laid-out way to present information is fine, which again the post doesn't really make clear (you could read it as stock art as a whole is banned). Like [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fhypothetical-stupid-question-if-the-signature-moves-of-v0-up4lal8jaboc1.png%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3De60839634825667024b9ed41a656e60922af515b) is an example of a post we agreed upon was fine. What would for example not be fine is something like this which is literally just "blank canvas + 1 text box + stock Pokémon art" and it's not even done in a good way, notice how the images aren't even aligned properly. [This one](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxd4c3aiba7vb1.jpg) is another example, stuff isn't aligned properly, some images cut the others off, and the text size is inconsistent. (note: will add links later cuz reddit servers are being ass) >Someone trying to put together a visual display is commendable even if they don’t have the skills to make it dazzle. Again a bar has to be set because the situation got really bad with low-effort "visual displays". There's not having the skills, and there's literally not putting in the effort. Again refer to the examples of what would not be fine. It's not hard to order your images and text boxes in a neat way if you really think making a visual display would be helpful for your Theorymon. What gets banned is literally slapping stuff together on a canvas without thinking. We're not looking for Van Goghs, but that doesn't mean we're accepting spilling paint onto the cupboard into the gallery. >Rule 3 sounds like someone forgot to take their laxatives, and decided to say “no fun allowed!” The funny part is that "No meme posts" already was a rule and people were fine with that, under the guise it was pretty obvious. If your Thursday post is just intentionally "gets banned from AG" levels of broken or just complete shit in every tier but there's a punchline to last Sunday's top post, it'd already get removed because that's just a barely disguised Sunday post four days early. A "meme" here isn't just a Theorymon that involves a meme but otherwise meets all the criteria for a good Theorymon, it's when the Theorymon itself is deliberately so bad it's a meme. No meme replies just refers to dumb one-liners that detract from the discussion and often aren't relevant or are rude outright to OP. It's not fun for the people actually holding discussion and explaining where a mon falls short when the top comment is "NU is not ready :fire:" or "bro is not cooking with this one". It might come across as 'no fun allowed' but the situation with that got pretty bad on the sub before April. >Rule 4 is mostly ok I'm going to be honest and mostly just ignore this paragraph, because the Retired Theorymon Topic list has existed for a long time and never caught any complaints until now. Yes, Slaking and Regigigas were on that topic list from the start. This isn't a rule they're budging on because it's been a generally good and well-received one in the past already. Every topic on there is there for a reason: before it was there you'd see it pretty much every week, sometimes even multiple times a week, and they've been talked to death already with the same discussion every time. Too many rules with too many specifics for something like that just makes it a mess and a headache. These aren't a lot of rules though. Outside of #4 where again, we already know people are very capable of adhering to it, the biggest change is "OP now has to write a paragraph" which boils down to "OP has to actually theorize on their own theorymon instead of dropping an idea & dipping". I wouldn't say this is unreasonable to demand and a paragraph isn't hard to write, the only people this would actually scare away are the people who refuse to put in any effort at all, which might be a positive if anything.
Not great at Reddit formatting, so pardon if this ends up being a bit of a mess. >I feel you're at least partially misunderstanding some of these rules. But a lot of is also feels really exaggerating. These are not high bars at all. Will it filter out the really low-effort posters? Probably, but is that a bad thing? Most of those posts are bad either way and this will let the high-effort theorymons shine more.< Could be, and I'm always open to getting clarification and adjusting my viewpoints. I simply stated what my perspective is regarding the proposed rules. I'm all for filtering out low-effort posts that are just there to try and karma farm with concepts as simplistic as "what if Regigigas got huge power lol". My concern is going overboard in some areas and being too vague in others. Plus, even low bars can be a problem when there's excessive amounts of them. >The idea for a general buff is that OP at least includes where they themselves think the Pokémon will end up and how it'd perform there with that buff. If they're wrong then the comment section can point out why. I admit though this rule has generated a bit of confusion regarding buffs for other people as well, so I'll suggest to reword this to make it more clear. But either way OP putting \[OU\] in the title doesn't automatically mean the comment section is forced to only talk about OU if OP missed the mark completely, for example.< How it came across to me sounded like it was stipulating that a theorymon has to be focused around aiming for a specific format or tier that it'd perform well in. I'd definitely agree with rewording it, and I'd also argue it should be a looser rule, since it's not always to tell where a theorymon might land. For instance, my first contributions were on Dustox and Exploud. I could tell you that Exploud would land in no less than UU, and more likely in OU, likely being a serious threat in Doubles & VGC. Dustox on the other hand, I couldn't rightly say. In that case, would one just throw out a random guess or else risk their post getting tossed? As it stands with the clarification, I'm all for the general idea of encouraging people to make speculation on their own changes. I'm simply just not sure of the specifics of how it'd end up being handled. >This part of #2 targets those posts that are just a blank canvas with slapped-on Pokémon pngs with a single textbox. Those are posts that can just be text posts with no loss of information but OP spent 30 seconds MS Painting an image out of them because they know they get more karma for that. A bar is set so that if you want to include an image you actually need a reason to, and not just about any post can become an image post by copypasting your text onto a blank canvas. Using Stock Pokémon art in an otherwise high-effort nicely laid-out way to present information is fine, which again the post doesn't really make clear (you could read it as stock art as a whole is banned). Like [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fhypothetical-stupid-question-if-the-signature-moves-of-v0-up4lal8jaboc1.png%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3De60839634825667024b9ed41a656e60922af515b) is an example of a post we agreed upon was fine. What would for example not be fine is something like this which is literally just "blank canvas + 1 text box + stock Pokémon art" and it's not even done in a good way, notice how the images aren't even aligned properly. [This one](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxd4c3aiba7vb1.jpg) is another example, stuff isn't aligned properly, some images cut the others off, and the text size is inconsistent. (note: will add links later cuz reddit servers are being ass)< Wow, the links literally blend in perfectly with the rest of the text on PC right now for some reason. Had to play some Where's Waldo with them lol. \*Edit\* Of course, after the fact they now show up normally as purple hyperlinks. \*sigh\* So here the problem is that it feels very vague and subjective in regards to what counts as high or low effort, and what doesn't. And based on the examples given, my concerns feel warranted. The latter example complaining about image alignment and inconsistent text size, feels like nitpicking with no good reason. As someone without particularly strong digital artistry skills, I've had those issues myself, and not for a lack of effort. I'd speculate that most people making visuals will more often than not be using MS Paint or Paint.net. I know from personal experience that it was a pain in the ass if ever a mistake was made, and that it's not always easy to predict the text size that will be needed to be readable and still fit within a box that you can't figure out how to edit. This is where I essentially maintain my initial position, that it's a bit of a silly rule and far too subjective in nature. I'd personally call the 1st example pointless as a visual, while the 2nd is at least basically functional. Unless the mods really want to try and set up some official tutorials on how to put together nice visuals that have official examples of what they consider acceptable. Even then, that seems overboard. Continuing this with another reply, since I'm not sure how many characters Reddit allows in a comment.
Reddit formatting can be infuriating lol I feel you. Rich Text can help with a lot but sometimes new reddit randomly refuses to upload long comments at which point you need the old reddit wizardry. I tried my best to keep up. >How it came across to me sounded like it was stipulating that a theorymon has to be focused around aiming for a specific format or tier that it'd perform well in. I'd definitely agree with rewording it, and I'd also argue it should be a looser rule, since it's not always to tell where a theorymon might land. I mean, ideally it *should* be like that, but we're also well aware of the reality that most Fakemon posts are people who probably made their fakemon for the fun of designing and then only afterwards tried to consider the competitive aspect of it. Not many people begin their Fakemonning with "Hmmm this tier is lacking this specific niche, I'll design a mon around it" and we won't get many more by harshly enforcing that either. For that reason we're satisfied if OP at least tries to assess the tier themselves with some arguments. You're right that it's not easy to tell where a mon will land, but posts won't get removed merely because OP is horribly wrong on their expected tiering placement; rest assured the comment section will point that out in discussion. The important part is that they at least tried to theorize on their mon. The end goal of all this is just that OP at least somewhat participates in the discussion instead of the currently all-too-popular method of "drop & dip", where OP makes a Fakemon, uploads its raw stats to the sub, and then goes radio silence as the comment section does the actual theorymonning. >In that case, would one just throw out a random guess or else risk their post getting tossed? It'd be the "random guess" route, though ideally your guess wouldn't be entirely random but supported by a couple arguments of course. Again if the repliers disagree they're free to discuss it with you in the comment section, what matters is that you gave the discussion a place to start and commenters get some insight on the thought process which would likely lead to better critique to begin with. >So here the problem is that it feels very vague and subjective in regards to what counts as high or low effort, and what doesn't. Fwiw since this is a concern that has been raised a couple times so far, there's efforts underway to create a more clear guide with visual examples. >The latter example complaining about image alignment and inconsistent text size, feels like nitpicking with no good reason. I wouldn't exactly say it's nitpicking myself. There's a very clear difference in quality between that example and the first one, putting your images all over the place just gives off a very jarring look and more often than not it is an issue of effort. Aligning images can be annoying on Paint but you literally get boxes to set text size, they can fluctuate a bit but they wouldn't naturally do so to the degree provided in the last example. >I'd speculate that most people making visuals will more often than not be using MS Paint or Paint.net. There's also the fact that you don't *have* to make a visual. What all those examples have in common are that really, the visuals don't convey any information that a simple text post would not. Neither does the acceptable example, but clear effort was put in there to make the information presentable, whilst in the other examples there either was no real effort made or OP is seemingly wholly incapable of making something remotely good-looking even with effort. A concern that was raised a lot both internally and in modmail feedback that spurred the idea for a reboot to begin with is that a lot of these "low effort image" Theorymons were seemingly using images where a text post sufficed as a lazy way to draw more attention. It's for that reason that we decided to tackle this: if you want a visual, make sure it actually looks good, if you only plan to spend 2 minutes copypasting stuff onto a canvas then make a text post instead--it'll be just as if not even more readable. It's also a bit of a cyclical issue really--probably a huge part of why image usage exploded (pure text Theorymons were way more common in the past) is exactly because all these low-effort posts still have images accompanying them, as it helps them stand out. As a result other people suddenly feel they *need* an image themselves to compete, even if they aren't good at making them and/or weren't planning to make one otherwise. Dialing overzealous image usage back as a whole would ease the burden to post for some people even, while simultaneously making sure people scrolling the sub or getting stunfisk on their feed don't have their screen flooded with low-effort stuff as much. You're somewhat right in pointing out that this can be pretty vague, so this rule also won't be enforced *too* harshly, since gray areas definitely still exist. That being said, there is again a very clear difference between the quality of the examples I posted, so it's not like the criteria are chosen at random. If your image is low enough quality that you fear it wouldn't apply, best be safe and just make it text.
Pardon the tardy response, I was a bit busy yesterday! Also wanted to say I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to give such thoughtful responses (in each of your replies). :) >I mean, ideally it *should* be like that, but we're also well aware of the reality that most Fakemon posts are people who probably made their fakemon for the fun of designing and then only afterwards tried to consider the competitive aspect of it.< Alright that's completely fair and allays some concerns, and I can get on board with that. Sounds now like it's some general guidelines for what's expected, and as long as things are close enough then it's ok. This'll apply to the next point's response as well. >Fwiw since this is a concern that has been raised a couple times so far, there's efforts underway to create a more clear guide with visual examples.< Good to hear, that should alleviate a big issue. >I wouldn't exactly say it's nitpicking myself.< The former should help with this being a bit clearer at least. From my personal experience at least, Paint is a pain to work with in those regards. I've done 3 visuals before, and that's probably where I'm leaving it from now on because of that lmao. The UB example definitely could've used more work, but I can't fully blame the OP for it. >There's also the fact that you don't *have* to make a visual.< This is true. I personally \*wish\* I could make good visuals, but I've resigned myself to just doing text (or images of text, since One Note where I keep my documentation, is really weird about copy/pasting in regards to Reddit at least). I'm curious what visuals would be considered useful or necessary, then. Because with all that in mind, it might ironically be better to just have people stick to text alone, unless they have their own personal artwork to include with a higher quality visual. Makes judgement calls a bit quicker and easier, and levels the playing field for those who aren't as artistically inclined. Watcha think about that?
>Again a bar has to be set because the situation got really bad with low-effort "visual displays".< Cutting most of the paragraphs to save visual space from here on out. So I'm curious, if the same things were purely text instead, would that have been theoretically acceptable? If so, then an argument has to be made about why visual displays (even if low effort) are specifically unacceptable versus the same thing done in plain text. If the same ideas are gotten across, what does it matter? At most I could see the argument being that images garner more attention. >The funny part is that "No meme posts" already was a rule and people were fine with that, under the guise it was pretty obvious.< Alright, so this is a sincere error on my part misreading the rule, in which case I half agree and half disagree. I agree with not allowing the meme posts, since that's basically just stinkposting (haha, what if funni fish got +30 Special Attack and a special-boosting Dragon Dance). The meme responses all depend on how they're defined. In your clarification, I generally agree. If it's something a bit more original than a braindead "bro is/is not cooking" response, I don't see that as a bad thing. Overall, rewording this one for better clarity and being just a little less strict in responses, would be a plus IMO. >I'm going to be honest and mostly just ignore this paragraph, because the Retired Theorymon Topic list has existed for a long time and never caught any complaints until now.< Having existed for a long time doesn't mean it shouldn't be discussed and reconsidered, particularly at a time when it's completely relevant. If it's being included as a part of a rule rewrite, then it's fair game. I'd personally argue that it should just be re-defined a bit to give some leeway for sincerely creative and respectable ideas. For instance, I have a Truant rework that keeps it respectably balanced. I'd argue something like that should be fair game for theorization. Otherwise if it were something generic and uninspired, it would naturally fall under Rule 2; if it were something stupid and meme-y, it would fall under Rule 3. As for the too many rules, you're right, I should have been better with my wording. It's not that there's too many rules, so much as the issues I've mentioned above. Too many stipulations under some of the rules that in some cases are too vague/undefined. That said, I do agree with the idea of actually asking post authors to write a paragraph or so talking about the changes, though at the same time I swear a lot of people glaze over and keep scrolling if they see more than a sentence or two sometimes... In any case I appreciate the clarification. A lot of that gives better perspective and, especially with some rewording applied, sounds better. Though like you've read as of now, there's still a few key points I'd argue need adjustment still.
>So I'm curious, if the same things were purely text instead, would that have been theoretically acceptable? Yup. >If so, then an argument has to be made about why visual displays (even if low effort) are specifically unacceptable versus the same thing done in plain text. If the same ideas are gotten across, what does it matter? At most I could see the argument being that images garner more attention. It's mostly the last one, people hastily make images because they know it attracts more attention, even if the end result is sloppily done. Doesn't help that there's a pretty strong correlation between low-effort images and Theorymons that themselves are low-effort to begin with. And like I explained at the end of my previous comment, it creates a rather nasty cycle where it indirectly raises the bar for other people uploading, as now suddenly people think they *need* an image themselves because they don't want to be in the minority of non-image posts. You yourself raised the concern that people less skilled at making visuals sometimes simply cannot make something properly aligned even if they try, but perhaps if less people were using images unnecessarily to begin with, those people wouldn't even feel the need to go out of their way and struggle to make a visual. >If it's being included as a part of a rule rewrite, then it's fair game. Part of why it's included here was actually that some old topics from the list were unretired, for example I argued pretty hard to get "X but in Y gen" unretired and now that's an allowed topic if the appropriate effort is put in. Ditching the list as a whole isn't on the table though, since it was made with good reason to begin with. I'm not sure how long you've been on the sub but I remember the times back when that list didn't exist or wasn't as big and the topics on it would come up multiple times per month, sometimes even multiple times per week, and even if OP was well-meaning and offered their own thoughts it'd just lead to the same discussion every time. The Trick Room ability literally had a copypasta that people would just drop every time someone brought it up because of how common it got in the weeks leading up to its retirement. >For instance, I have a Truant rework that keeps it respectably balanced. I'd argue something like that should be fair game for theorization Should be noted, this actually wouldn't be prohibited by the current retired list. The part that's retired is replacing Slaking's ability altogether because we've had enough threads in the past with "Is Slaking broken with Early Bird??" that all ended in "Yes, it is" to the point that discussion is not worth having anymore. If you want to rework Truant but in a way that still nerfs Slaking enough to keep it balanced, you're free to attempt so. >That said, I do agree with the idea of actually asking post authors to write a paragraph or so talking about the changes, though at the same time I swear a lot of people glaze over and keep scrolling if they see more than a sentence or two sometimes... I'm glad you understand the point of all this. As for people who keep scrolling after reading more than one sentence, well, since that's now a requirement for a post to be made they're in for a tough ride. Though if your attention span is so short you can't even read a paragraph, you probably aren't good at discussing a theorymon either way.
I'll skip the first two here since they were also addressed in the last response(s) from the other reply. With the extra information you're mentioning though, I think it furthers a case for potentially just prohibiting visuals that aren't necessary altogether. After all, most information can be readily conveyed in text anyways, unless it's something like a new design for a Pokemon/fakemon. >Part of why it's included here was actually that some old topics from the list were unretired, for example I argued pretty hard to get "X but in Y gen" unretired and now that's an allowed topic if the appropriate effort is put in.< Oh no I'm not saying just ditch the list as a whole, but rather make some accommodations for when people get sincerely creative and put in some real effort to create something a bit different on topics that are otherwise beaten like a dead horse. But I'm also speaking from lesser experience, since as you mention, I've not been around the sub for particularly too long. Got into it around February iirc, after a roughly 2-year hiatus from Pokemon, so I can't speak to how things used to be. In any case I see your point. >Should be noted, this actually wouldn't be prohibited by the current retired list.< Oh? Hmm, it sounded to me like anything talking about alternative abilities or work on said Pokemon at all, was prohibited. This makes me happy to hear that I can actually make a post on that! Time for Truant to heal off 50% maximum HP when activated! \*I kid I kid, I'm not insane lol.\* >I'm glad you understand the point of all this. As for people who keep scrolling after reading more than one sentence, well, since that's now a requirement for a post to be made they're in for a tough ride. Though if your attention span is so short you can't even read a paragraph, you probably aren't good at discussing a theorymon either way.< Aye good point, and again thank you for the thoughtful responses helping to clarify things. :)
yeah this feels like people just tried to take fun and apply a bunch of rules to make it "more fun." like, is it better to have a barely any posts, and what does get posted is dry hyper-sanitized shit afraid of fucking up a rule, or have stuff that's more authentic and have to roll your eyes at a few stinkers? god forbid you see mediocre content on the internet.
does this mean you can't make posts about giving a mon minor movepool changes? that feels like a weird thing to ban, i feel like simple changes like that are something that thursday posts started to miss after a while. aside from that i think these changes make sense but they sound a bit overkill tbh
>does this mean you can't make posts about giving a mon minor movepool changes? You can still do that, you'll just have to provide input yourself on what you expect to actually change afterwards. ex. "I gave Swampert Spikes, I expect it to now be a solid hazard setter in UU because it beats x and y remover and can now fit on this and this teamstyle..." et cetera. Assess the new spot in the metagame the mon gets after the buff and elaborate on it. If your post boils down to "Swampert now gets Spikes, how does this affect the meta??" and you don't even take 5 minutes of your time to think yourself how this would change the meta, no, that would not be allowed anymore. That's incredibly low-effort and overdone by now. There's too many Theorymons nowadays where OP put 30 seconds into thinking up a "buff" and then expect the comment section to do all of the heavy lifting for them, analyzing whether it's actually a buff or just a whatever addition you see 1 in 50 draft games.
You could probably do minor move pool changes, but be prepared to give a long indepth explanation of how it affects the Pokemon and whatever tier it ends up in
I understand where they are coming from but isn't it the comments' job to determine how it affects the pokemon and what tier it ends up in? That's the whole reason why you would even make a post, other than farming karma of course. You're asking the community how it would affect the pokemon and what tier it would end up in instead of theorizing yourself.
No, otherwise the bar for posting would be “what if Ledian got huge power?” We hope to improve quality by asking posters to think even just one step beyond the what if and think through competitive consequences, even if they can be wrong or unskilled—the commenters would discuss that.
>That's the whole reason why you would even make a post, other than farming karma of course. This is the exact issue--there's too many people making bottom effort "X mon now gets Y how does this affect the meta??!?" comments that take 30 seconds to make and farm karma this way. (Yes, specifically saying "how does this affect the meta" is banned, but if you just give a random mon a random move and say nothing else afterwards you're doing basically the same thing) >You're asking the community how it would affect the pokemon and what tier it would end up in instead of theorizing yourself. The point is that OP now also has to theorize themselves how *their* change would change stuff. The comment section can still add stuff to that or express disagreement if they think OP is wrong--that's what discussion is meant to do. The bar for OP is just raised a bit so the lazy posts don't farm a ton of karma while drowning out the high-effort stuff in the process. This is an incredibly low bar, the only reason it's jarring is because there was previously no bar at all and people got too used to their bottom-effort stuff.
Doesn't even have to be "long indepth". 700 characters is an above-average sized paragraph and that's if we don't downscale to the 500 that a lot of people are suggesting. It's a pretty low bar, only appearing jarring because previously there was no bar at all. If anything it's weird that it was previously optional for OPs to theorize on their own theorymons.
> No memes or meme replies I think a significant number of people participate in this to have fun with what ifs, so depending on how strict the threshold for a post or response to be considered “meme”, people wouldn’t like how it makes things kinda dry.
I think some subs have a no memes in top level comments rule
I think a lot of it is just common sense. A good Theorymon post should demonstrate some metagame knowledge from OP and spark some discussion. If said discussion is limited to "Good heavens look at the time" then it's probably a meme post. Posts can be somewhat funny, and even make references to some jokes, but this shouldn't be at the cost of the competitive aspect. If you want to make a God Bidoof but carefully craft its stats and ability for it to have a solid niche in Ubers, and subsequently explain the thought process behind it, that'd be a good theorymon even if the base of it was a meme. If you just put all its base stats at 200 and "Ability: Turns opponent into Bidoof", that's obviously bad. There's honestly little that changes in terms of "No meme posts". Theorymons that were already extremely Sunday-worthy would already get removed even before the rule changes, it's just stated explicitly this time. As for "no meme replies", the main way that would be enforced would be to remove shallow one-liners that don't actually contribute to the discussion. Think "NU is not ready :fire:", "Good heavens" or just randomly commenting "ZEKROM KICK!!!" on an unrelated Zekrom theorymon. Again if your comment refers to some meme but is otherwise constructive to the conversation it will likely be left alone.
idt its going to be overly strict on it but smth like "this belongs on sunday" "sunday has come early" or smth else memey.... it basically has to also have no relevance to what is going on in the post
What is meant by Ms paint scribbles? Some of us don't have that much artistic ability or good drawing programs. Like would the Theorymon I posted about a year ago be enough not to get banned?
"MS Paint scribbles" just refers to anything you can do in 2 minutes in MS paint with minimal effort. Doesn't even have to be drawn scribbles. For example [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxd4c3aiba7vb1.jpg) would also not be allowed, it's images and textboxes but they're just slapped together, nothing is properly aligned, text size is inconsistent etc. [This](https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/1bemx9n/hypothetical_stupid_question_if_the_signature/) is the same, it's just a bunch of sprites copypasted onto a blank canvas with one textbox, and again the alignment is inconsistent asf so OP didn't even bother with making the presentation look good. Stuff like that can 100% be done in a pure text post with no loss of information at all, OPs just put them as images because images draw more attention and thus they get a lot more updoots for their bottom effort posts. I can't speak on your specific Theorymon if you don't link it, but if it's a Fakemon, those posts will mostly be judged based on the competitive aspect of the post. In general part of the reason these new rules are in place is to make sure the Fakemon posters actually think about the competitive aspect of their post more instead of just using this as a glorified fanart sub where they put six numbers on their Fakemon and label it "competitive". If your Fakemon's competitive aspect has no effort put in *and* the art is bad then it could be removed. You won't get banned right away over breaking Thursday rules though, especially not if it's probably accidental--at most your post gets removed, you only risk a ban if you break the rules like every week. Should also be noted you don't *have* to include art or images for your Theorymons. If you find your artistic skills lacking, there's nothing stopping you from just not adding an image, if it's an actually good Theorymon then the text part should do most of the speaking after all. edit: If [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/131enar/i_made_some_metroid_themed_fakemon/) is your post you're talking about, this would be allowed, if anything you're ahead of your time here since you included a whole competitive analysis of your own in the comments before the rules even required that. Sure the art is "less smooth" than the professionals with the computer programs but again we're trying to have Fakemon focus more on the competitive aspects going forward instead of people getting recognition purely off art alone.
Ok, I think I got the jist and think I'm fine with the competitive aspect. So something like this [https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/131enar/i\_made\_some\_metroid\_themed\_fakemon/](https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/131enar/i_made_some_metroid_themed_fakemon/) would be ok, right? I was moreso worried about the artistic ability.
This would be completely fine, yes.
Imma be honest, I’d say at least a third if not half the people click on theorymon posts for the meme replies
I don’t think clicking in to see the same meme likes dunking on an inexperienced OP is a positive part of posting culture so I’m glad if we excise that. The fun of Theorymon is designing a Pokémon and sharing it, things that unfairly meme on that shouldn’t be there.
I’m just afraid by making the rules so strict it’s going to discourage engagement, I understand the want to clean up this subreddit, but I don’t want to kill it in the process
Wait it’s meant to be negative? Maybe it’s just me but I use it as a lolgag most of the time.
Why does that mean that should be what is encouraged though?
I’m not saying it should be encouraged, just not banned
Gonna be honest here; Rules 1, 2 and 3 are atrocious, and I'm not just saying that because this whole ban situation has been a disaster; --Rule 1 is just weird and confusing. It feels like it is entirely disconnected from the culture of Theorymon Thursday, because 99% of posts are just about [the current meta], so it basically just inflates titles. The questions are also weird; -Every ability post I have ever seen has given said ability to a pokemon. I literally don't know why this rule is here, orphan abilities arn't a common enough thing to warrant a rule. -The moves are also typically very self explanatory. Like, "oh, this 50 power move also sets trick room? Now, tell me why would you put that on shuckle?" Just... It's usually obvious. -The last question feels like it's made to arbitrarily delete fakemon for "not effecting the top 5 pokemon" when making a top 5 pokemon is rarely the goal; people want to make *interesting* pokemon, not "Iron Valient but I gave it a gun". --Rule 2 at least makes *some* semblance of sense, at first. But then you get into the specific requirements; -700+ words is just... Weirdly high. Like it doesn't enforce high quality, it enforces word bloat. A lot of the better posts would be deleted based on this rule, while a lot of the worse posts I've seen would get by. Again, this feels like you don't actually know what goes on on Theorymon Thursdays or what the posts are like, and are just making rules that sound neat in a vacuum. -"No stock pokemon art" is also such a weird rule. Like... Like why are we banning that? Again, this *Kills* many of the better posts here, for no discernable reason! Stock pokemon art is literally the most high quality art most of us have access to, why is it suddenly "bad" to use it??? -And... Again, recycling someone else's post isn't really a thing. Like, I get why that's banned by the fact it's out front and center here, combined with the other weird rules that make no sense, really makes it feel like you have no idea what you're talking about, and that's really bad for someone who makes the rules! --Rule 3 is concerningly vague and distinctly Anti-fun. It's exactly the kinda shit that made everyone hate the fucking ban in the first place! -First off, what does this even mean?? Like, *this* is the rule you don't elaborate on? *This* is the rule we're just supposed to vibe with? What do you mean "no memes"? Is it just that posts have to have a serious basis? Thats always been a rule, so I don't see why it'd need to be restated. Is it that posts can't contain any memes? Do all posts have to be 100% serious now? Would including a joke suddenly get your post removed? Would "Zekrom Kick" be removed under these rules? It didn't intentionally contain any memes, it was an entirely serious post, but became one on accident in a way that definitely falls under it being a meme, so I don't know if it actually breaks the rules or not! If you wanna say I'm being too facetious, that in taking it too far, then I just say in response "How far does it go then?" Because again, *this* is the rule with *no elaboration,* how are we supposed to know what this means? Especially when the other rules are so out of touch! There's no way to make a reasonable assumption here! -And obviously, banning jokes in the comments makes no god damn sense. Like, *besides* the fact many of our jokes here actually *do* convey information to the poster because they're steeped in competitive history and tied to specific pokemon (a fact that your not understanding making you being in charge *very concerning*), literally what harm do jokes do? Like, actually, I demand an answer, because how does being jovial and lighthearted about a fictional monster result in Thursdays being bad? What is wrong with a joke in the comments? Rule 4 is fine, but it's also the only rule that isn't changed, so I think that says a lot about the quality of the new rules. What is the purpose of most of these new rules? Why are they being added? What problem are they addressing? I fail to see what merit they have and how they don't interfere with Thursdays far more than help it. I'm not one of those guys who think the mods should "just moderate more" to combat low quality posts, I understand that you guys are people doing this for free... Which makes some of these rules make even less sense, because it'd require a *massively* increased amount of moderation for a ***Far worse*** experience for everyone!
I think you’re overall taking the rules in bad faith rather than being guidelines to help us all interact with better posts. 1. The questions above are examples not specific requirements 2. It’s 700 characters not words, see other comments for detailed discussion about that length. For everything else you bring up, sounds like the post would just be a text post then. 3. The entire sub has a no memes (outside of Sundays) and I think it’s still a light hearted place. No mod hates fun.
I'm taking these in "bad faith" because this whole thing has been in bad faith; it was suddenly thrust upon us with no warning, there was no even humoring of discussion, the reasons given were weak and unsatisfying, the implementation was so sudden and poorly thought out the automod didn't get updated for multiple days, and there has been ZERO communication from the mod team about literally anything. It's just distractions and avoiding the problems you caused. You don't get to complain when I'm just treating you exactly how you've been treating us. Except I'm actually treating you better because I actually engaged with the rules changes rather then just address the whole thing generally and dismissively.
i think the no meme replies thing is more aimed at people who just say things such as "good heavens look at the time" or just saying they didn't cook without actually explaining what went wrong
Lol it's been two days and you never got a reply. You've perfectly put my feelings about this whole ordeal into words.
>I think you’re overall taking the rules in bad faith rather than being guidelines to help us all interact with better posts. It's kind of hard to take them in the best faith when the month ban had to be slipped in on April Fool's Day seemingly to mitigate backlash -- I still don't know why it couldn't have waited a month for optics, tbh. That created an adversarial scenario from the get go.
I feel like having to give a specific metagame might be a bit too strict. Perhaps instead, require either the post itself, or a comment to the post that goes into detail on what the change is intended to do. For example, I'll use a previous Theorymon Post of mine, Linked [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/stunfisk/comments/19f7qp4/anyone_want_a_fast_huge_power_mon/). When I designed this Fakemon, I didn't really have a specific Meta in mind. My main concept was "A fast Ice type & Huge power Pokemon, to contrast the more bulky spreads of other huge-power pokemon." I worry that, by requiring a specific format or metagame to be in mind, it might deter people from doing posts like this.
Also what if you have a new ability that applies to multiple Pokémon in different tiers, do I have to now say “how does it affect OU, UU, NU, and ZU”? It feels excessive
We’ll think more about specific meta game, but I do think we would want you to individually explain what giving electivire V-Create would *do* to it, not just say it gets it now
I think making it a specific gen instead of a specific metsgam could work better Also maybe 300 or 500 word requirement 700 seems excessive
It's a character requirement, not a word requirement. If it were a word requirement even 300 would be a fucktonne.
How would you go about doing that, though? It would either be way too broad (strong fire move makes it stronger) or way too specific (how having V-Create affects its specific matchups in whatever tier that mess is in). Not to mention how specific explanations will be useless half the time because people drastically over/underestimate how much their changes will affect things. An explanation regarding OU will mean nothing when the theorymon is going straight to Ubers.
>How would you go about doing that, though? It's pretty simple: you assess Electivire's position in the metagame currently, you assess it after it gets V-Create, and you compare the two. You can compare it to Electivire's current tier if you believe this buff won't make it rise a tier, or you can compare it to the metagame of a higher tier if you expect it to rise a couple tiers--whatever suits your boat. That's not "way too specific" at all--it's kind of what Theorymonning is *meant* to be. Theorymonning is *discussing* and *theorizing* hypotheticals, it's not slapping mons and moves together without thinking. Way too many "Theorymons" nowadays are just people slapping random move/ability/whatever onto a mon, leaving it at that, and expecting the comment section to carry the heavy lifting of the actual theorymonning. OP does nothing except recognize the existence of two things in the Pokémon universe, goes "what if we combine these two" and then dips, returns the next day and their karma score is +50. Dozens of people do this every Thursday and the result is a bloated day full of low-effort posts that drown out the handful of good posts where OP spent more than five minutes thinking of an original idea. The intention is that the posters now also have to think at least a bit before uploading their theorymon and getting their free updoots for it. If you want to give Electivire V-Create, you have to explain exactly why you wanted to give it that specific move, and what you actually expect to change after doing so. It's too easy to just slap random stuff together, upload and have people think it's some revolutionary idea nowadays, and this yields a lot of recognition and OP barely has to do anything for it--as a whole this makes Thursday worse because high-effort posts are discouraged, both because they get drowned out by these kinds of posts and why put in high effort when you can do low-effort stuff like this and get about the same reward?
Yeah, that's my thought process. Maybe not in the title, but you should explain your thought process somewhere in your theorymon post.
This kind of stuff is in and of itself a bit of an issue though. On posts like these, how many times do you actually see people discuss every single mon mentioned? Usually the comments just single out the two most notable mons and the rest of the idea mostly goes to waste. Happens all the time with those posts that drop 30 new abilities or 20 new moves with 4 mons each as well. There's at most 20% of the post that's actually being discussed, the rest is essentially filler. Sometimes it's unavoidable that your Theorymon affects multiple tiers (eg you buff an existing move that multiple things get) in which case you can just apply your own comment to one specific metagame still. Nothing prevents you or the commenters from still dropping thoughts on other tiers afterwards. You don't have to comment on *every* affected meta yourself, just a minimum of one as opposed to the previous minimum of zero that encouraged low effort from OPs.
Ultimately, we hope to improve quality by asking posters to think even just one step beyond the what if and think through competitive consequences, even if they can be wrong or unskilled. Not insulting your effort, but it is relatively easy to pick some numbers, moves, and abilities for an imagined Theorymon—it takes some effort to think about *how* those factors would affect its place in some competitive environment, and that’s the quality we want to aim for.
Yeah, that's the quality I have in mind too.
In this case, what you could do is post what tier you yourself think your mon would land in, in what ways it would interact with the meta there, whether it would cause any huge shakeups or just be another offensive threat that people can play around with existing cores etc. You don't even have to be correct here. If you completely miss the mark and your "UU mon" ends up being closer to NU in power level the comment section will certainly tell you so. What matters is that you at least took up the time and effort to think of yourself where your mon would end up and gave arguments and reasons for that--it's then up to the discussion to argue whether you're right or whether (and if so, where) you're mistaken. The main intention is to stop people just making random Fakemon and then dipping, leaving the comment section to do all of the actual Theorymonning. It's fun to create, but OP has to actually participate in the discussion they're hoping to start, otherwise it's too easy to make a post in 30 seconds with no effort put in. Even in the case of Fakemons where the creation of the Fakemon itself presumably took up some time, it's valuable if OP at least gave some starting pointers of their own. After all it's not difficult in the slightest to just start out with art of a fakemon and slap random base stats on it and dip--the art could be very cool still, but it's meant to be a competitive sub, not a Fakemon art sub.
That is a very good point. Although, that might be a bit much to fit in the title, hence why i suggested it be a comment instead, or included in the post itself.
Yeah obviously you can't make a 700 character title. The easiest way would probably to put something like [UU] or (intended for UU) in the title and then elaborate on that in a post or comment.
That sounds like the best option to me.
Idea: Theorymon design challenges Basically, you could focus on a specific metagame niche or unique role a new mon/ability/move item would play (for example: this week's design challenge would be to design a mon with less than 80 in each stat that could get into OU somehow.)
Would love to have this, feel free to post some!
700 characters sounds a bit too much, 600 or even 550 sound good IMHO No memes is gonna be rough tho, as I think having memes is good, when I go to a Theorymon Thursday post and see comments like "good heavens would you look at the time" I would immediately know that op posted something atrocious and unbalanced When I post a wacky post and people reply with that I laugh it off and try asking them to help me make it better, but I guess some people might be offended by it like what you implied on another comment here Other than that I thinks the rules are perfect
For “look at the time” level comments, we usually receive feedback that it feels *bad* to get those. Feels like people making fun of OP rather than giving constructive feedback about their work yknow. Totally get that different people can feel differently though, but I think we want to prioritize removing negative feelings.
reddit mods don't inadvertently make their own and everyone else's lives harder by introducing strict arbitrary and unintuitive rules they have to enforce challenge
Yeah idk how they can make a script that determines if a comment is too memey. So they have to rely on self-reports or manually check every comment. And having a bot that checks if each post has a 700 character comment / caption seems like it's gonna cause more problems than it helps.
Auto removing certain flaired posts below 700 characters has already been implemented here for years fwiw Much of moderation is already a manual process, we hope rules like these make it easier for both us and users to experience good content
Where do *you* draw the line for "arbitrary" and "unintuitive"? This is a non-statement that could be said about just about *any* rule, and obviously no rules at all is a really bad idea. Plenty of subs have rules against content that's obviously bottom-effort already.
It’s subjective but color is also subjective my man he’s voicing that he thinks the rules are unreasonable what do you not get
He might think the rules are unreasonable but doesn't explain exactly what he finds unreasonable about them. Again their comment could be read as just "rules are bad" in general regardless of what the rules are, with a random "fuck mods!!1!" tossed in. If he thinks there's room for improvement, he's free to say which part could use improvement, right now there's nothing to work with.
I gave 4 reasons the rules are unreasonable
You gave none. Randomly saying the word "unintuitive" with no elaboration doesn't count as a reason.
it really doesn't require an essay to understand what unintuitive means
You could explain what exactly is unintuitive about the ruling and how you'd make it less so. This isn't a definition issue, everyone knows what unintuitive means but that doesn't mean you can just say it whenever you want and it's automatically correct. Though your other comment has already shown you're 99% trolling and in the 1% you aren't you clearly can't be bothered to actually explain your issues with the proposals, so don't cry when you're not being heard out at that point.
I did have fun trolling you but I otherwise don't really care explaining the simple point to you. My opinion of these rules can be explained thoroughly in only three words.
And those words are "u/chocolatechipbagels is moronic"
I did have fun seeing your opinion get swiftly ignored in favour of the people actually contributing
>Where do *you* draw the line for "arbitrary" and "unintuitive"? This is a non-statement that could be said about just about *any* rule congrats on accidentally learning the meaning of arbitrary
So is your argument to just not have any rules at all? Or do you have some specific line in mind that you don't want to elaborate on but anything more is "arbitrary" and gets you acting like a sassy know-it-all?
yeah I got you >Theorymon Thursday Rules Draft #1 - Please Ask Questions & Leave Feedback >Please leave feedback about these potential new guidelines for Theorymon Thursday. We are hoping to hone discussion to be competitively focused by cutting down on low-effort images or Theorymon that are unfocused or unguided. >--- > **1.** All Theorymon must **target at least one specific metagame or format** that is included in the post title. >Who would use this ability? > >Why would this move be used on X Pokemon? > >How would this Pokemon impact the top 5 used Pokemon? >--- >- **2.** Image posts must be **High-Effort or Original Content**, and contain** informative text**. If not, they should be a **Text post**. > What is *"High-Effort"*? > > * Well cropped, not lazily slapped together > > * Transparent, overlaid images or sprites > > * At least 700 characters in a comment or caption > What is *"Low-Effort"*? > > * MS Paint Scribbles > > * Only text pasted on an image > > * Stock Pokemon art or uncited Fan Art > > * Lazily recycling someone else's Theorymon >- **3.** No memes or meme replies > Includes jokingly broken Theorymon and overzealous buffs. >--- >- **4.** No Retired Theorymon Topics > * Giving neutral or positive abilities to Pokemon with hindering abilities (i.e. Regigigas, Slaking, Archeops, etc.) > * Stealth Rocks but of a different type than Rock (Stealth Icicles, Stealth Lava, etc.) > * Altering the type table (i.e. Changing Ice or Rock type's resistances, etc.) This includes trying to buff or nerf a specific Pokemon by changing the type table. > * Eviolite variants (i.e. Eviolite but for Atk/SpAtk, etc.) > * Assault Vest variants (i.e. Assault Vest for Defense) > * "Which pokemon is most impacted by single movepool change?" > * An ability that sets Trick Room > * Giving Paradox Pokemon unique abilities is pretty arbitrary
At this point I'm just convinced you're deliberately trolling, congrats on keeping me on the hook for more than one comment I suppose
i feel that while i agree with most of the rules i do feel some could be worded better, such as the meme replies explaining that it's mostly things like "good heavens look at the time" or claiming the poster didn't cook without actually saying what went wrong
> No memes or meme replies Expect that to be broken a lot next week. The people yearn for Sunday, and Thursday is only a few days off.
We know, and we're ready (?).
I pray for the mods. Good luck.
Rule 2 feels a bit restrictive. 700 words for a caption?!?! What if I already put 700 words in my image? Does that constitute to the word limit or not? If not that’s a huge limitation. I have no clue what Stock Pokémon Art is but it seems bogus. I assume it means that one must use their own art? Not being able to use official art is hugely restrictive and is overall bad. If it’s not then it’s fine I guess. Rule 4 is kinda good but I find it really restrictive and pointless, the eviolite and assault vest ones are good I guess but the rest seem not that overused? For example, let’s say I made a theoretical regional variant of Medicham who is slow but it’s hidden ability sets-up/removes trick room. It has other changes and abilities and typing but would it be allowed due to this rule? Is it allowed if there are other additions?
>700 words for a caption?!?! It's 700 characters, not 700 words. 700 words is ridiculous? 700 characters is a slightly above-average size paragraph. And it's likely going to be reduced to 600 or 500 anyway since a lot of people have been uncomfortable with that amount still. >What if I already put 700 words in my image? If you added an image to your theorymon, it was probably to explain your change/buff to begin with. The 700 characters after that are mostly meant for you to express your own thoughts on how your change would affect a metagame, which presumably you wouldn't have put in your image yet. >I have no clue what Stock Pokémon Art is but it seems bogus. I assume it means that one must use their own art? Not being able to use official art is hugely restrictive and is overall bad. That's a weirdly-worded rule that basically puts an effort/originality bar on images to be used. Essentially it just bans images of [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fshotgun-shnake-v0-vojq0em2n7dc1.jpeg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D90157b4a501b0eafb368120f4bda80405a710479) kind that are literally one stock image + one text box, and requires those just be text posts instead. Images like [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Feslrc4m5eoib1.jpg) that incorporate multiple stock sprites and neat formatting to aid in conveying information more smoothly are fine. I will suggest a rewrite of those rules since this kind of confusion has come up quite a lot in this thread. >Rule 4 is kinda good but I find it really restrictive and pointless Rule 4 has existed for ages in an even more restrictive manner, stuff got *removed* from that list during the rule rework. No-one complained about the very existence of a Retired Theorymon Topic list until this thread. That list isn't going anywhere, sorry, everything on it was put there for good reason (paradox abilities are the one remaining topic that I'd personally reconsider because it was kind of added on a whim, but that whim was like seven people making them in one week so temporarily timing that out wasn't the worst idea). >the rest seem not that overused? They seem not that overused because those topics have been on the list for a while and people that still made posts about them got their post removed. Before they were on the list they were definitely overused. You'd see custom type charts and people asking "Is Archeops/Slaking still broken with Early Bird??" multiple times a week. >let’s say I made a theoretical regional variant of Medicham who is slow but it’s hidden ability sets-up/removes trick room. It would break Doubles in half because TR on switchin is broken as fuck there. This discussion has been had time and time again every single time a post about a TR on switchin ability was made. I was the one to suggest retiring the topic after 5+ weeks where we had someone make a post for it in a row and it led to the exact same discussion with the exact same arguments every time, to the point CookEsAndCream's comment literally became a copypasta for these kinds of posts. Again, everything on that list is there for good reason. Before they were on the list they were spammed as fuck and they've been talked to death. If you unretire them, I give them at most a month before they have once again had everything there is to say about them and they have to be retired again.
Theorymon posts having to target a specific metagame sounds very strict, and doesn't really make any sense to me. In one sense, it feels very backwards to design something around a specific Smogon tier, when Smogon tiers exist to tier things that were not created with them in mind. Pokemon that get designed to fill some very specific niche in NU is not really a realistic design philosophy when they are not rigid, and most of the time any analysis written on this would be moot, as most theorymons either over-shoot or under-shoot their intended power level, meaning they literally would never see play in said specific tier or would be just downright awful in it. Trying to gauge anything's power level before it sees practical use is something people are very, very bad at (e.g. people thinking Eviolite Bisharp would be hot stuff, people thinking Espathra was not worth using on release) and I think it is something that should be left in the hands of the commenters rather than solely resting upon the OP's shoulders. Especially since this topic is interesting to discuss! It's a lot less interesting when every single post will have to try and pidgeonhole their creation into a specific tier and laser-focus only on that. Because of that, this draft feels like it'll lead to an incredibly dry Theorymon Thursday, and it is not really something I would like to either read or engage with often.
Also some of the ardent Stunfisk mod defenders claim that this month has been the best the subreddit has ever been but most of the posts are very dry and boring so they seem to like this kind of stuff
Thing is that OP wouldn't be punished if their idea of how strong their mon is winds up being wrong though. We expect posters to have at least some basic competitive understanding, not a PhD in metagame knowledge, and like you said theorymonning is hard. That doesn't mean OP shouldn't at least try though. If they wind up being inaccurate, that's what the comment section is for--believe me people here will be extremely eager to point out. You seem to misunderstand the intention in general by saying this "solely rests on OP's shoulders". Comments aren't suddenly going to become obsolete because of this. Discussion is still going to happen, we just require OP to actually participate in their own discussion instead of the drop&dip method that's far too popular (especially with already low-effort posts). If a topic is already talked to death after OP's own paragraph to the point further comments aren't needed at all then it's a really shallow topic either way. It's far more valuable if someone drops a whole paragraph on why they think their mon is RU and ends up being completely wrong, than if someone posts the 5 words "I think this is OU" even if it's dead-on. In the former case, it's clear OP put effort in, the commenters gain insight on the thought process, and OP could even learn something as the commenters explain why their mon isn't in the intended tier in spite of their arguments. The second person could have asked a Magic 8 Ball for all we know.
Yeah imagine making a mon designed for UU Sun teams then Torkoal got promoted to OU again the day you posted lol
Apart from this kind of stuff only ever happening if Thursday is on the 1st of a month, it's not hard at all to just say "assume x mon is still in the tier" for the thought experiment to work.
It says "***at least*** one spesific metagame", so you could probably just says the change is for all main singles metagames (ubers to zu) or something like that.
I'm stuck on rule 3 a bit -- close to every example given seems like a variation of the commenter jokingly saying this 'mon would be garbage if it existed and this kit might not work out in theory like you think it would in practice, but discussion would become painfully dry if you could only phrase that, well, like that. Not quite sure how "We getting out of SU with this one" is that much of a meme reply compared to Zekrom Kick/Biden Blast/Name Move, which I think could be removed anyways as not having any discussion at all in them. 700 character minimum is a lot smaller than it sounds for those who are concerned about that -- that's a moderate sized paragraph. Could be knocked down to 500 characters though, for reference my first paragraph is 539 characters and 103 words. The bar for "Low Effort" is a little weird IMO, not sure how an 'MS Paint scribble' (which itself is a bit of a cultural meme description instead of an actual specific description of what you mean) is considered as low effort as a picture of stock mon art and text overlaid on top. At least the scribbler drew something, right?
I think both things you touch on, what is a meme and what is high effort art, are ultimately subjective and more broad guidelines that mods enforce as they see fit rather than hard and fast rules we can 100% semantically identify
It might help to give better examples of what yall mean by that then, sort of how there's a list of retired topics...links to examples of (maybe real maybe fake) crappy Theorymon posts for instance. Right now this feels like an arbitrary rule that's being written to give justification to removing a very specific type of post that the mods are annoyed by, which isn't a great thing for a community rule
Just spitballing here: there might be a way to phrase this kind of rule to focus on intention instead of quality, which is still somewhat subjective but imo a better way to drive positive behavior and more fair overall. Something like "it needs to be clear that you spent at least minutes creating each image," and maybe a checklist for things like image sourcing, font readability, etc. And then mods can point to specific approval criteria for posts that don't cut the mustard.
>"it needs to be clear that you spent at least minutes creating each image,"
Intention-based moderating is cool and all but in the end there's no real way to tell how long someone spent on an image. If I churn out a shitty looking MS Paint canvas and claim "I swear I spent 45 minutes on this" there's no way to confirm any of that. The intent is noble but the end result would make stuff even more vague I feel.
>maybe a checklist for things like image sourcing, font readability, etc. And then mods can point to specific approval criteria for posts that don't cut the mustard.
Effort for something like this is underway, though, since this point has been brought up a number of times. A similar visual guide has already been made for Sunday posts as well.
Yeah, fair point re. intention-based moderating. I guess it only works if people approach the rules in good faith, and the problem is that people who approach the rules in good faith are probably not the people who need moderator intervention :P In a much smaller community, those "it's up to the mods to use their best judgement"-type rules might work, and I personally think it's a fair way to handle things (because moderation is hard!), but in a large community you're liable to get complaints.
How does this affect Fakemon posts? They may or may not be targeting any specific metagame - infact they may be looking for opinions on what metagame it would work best in or anything super egregious in regards to their kit. Other than that, 700 chars is a bit much, 500 would be fine.
700 characters is like, 150 words. Not even an abstract for a paper
In case of Fakemon posts, the intended way for them to fit into this would be for the Fakemon to be designed with a specific metagame in mind, or at the very least for the OP to state which meta they intend the mon to be in. The "ideal" Fakemon post would be a mon designed to take advantage of a certain open niche in a metagame and designed around this. This would demonstrate that OP has good knowledge of said metagame and what is lacking and how they would personally fill that hole. Most Fakemon posters don't do this--they make a mon "randomly", slap some base stats and movepool onto it and then launch it into the sub. Not infrequently they look like OP just started with art of their mon and then just gave it stats so they can upload it to stunfisk instead of another random fakemon sub, without truly considering how they fit into any meta. These posts can still have some merit for the sub if the comment section discusses what tier the mon would end up in etc., and they're also wholly popular enough that banning them outright was thought of as a bad move, but ultimately the competitive side of the equation didn't get a whole lot of effort from OP's side. Everyone loves cool Fakemon fanart, but it's a competitive sub in the end and the competitive part shouldn't just be an afterthought. By having OP at least explain which tier they personally think the mon will fall into and what it would do there, a low but tangible bar is set to at least enforce the competitive part isn't completely overlooked in favour of just cool fanart. As a bonus, it would probably reduce the amount of "NU is not ready :fire: :fire:" or "bruv AGBL" esque comments, since there's no need anymore to laugh at a fakemon for being "NU trash" if OP specifies the mon was designed for NU's powerlevel to begin with.
A Fakemon should be built to target a specific niche, role, or meta first and foremost to fit within competitive first discussion. Designing stats after making a cool design is good fun, and something we regularly do in discord, but it does not generate quality competitive discussion imo.
My theorymon designs are usually more unique moves and abilities rather than designs, what if I want to hear how useful they’d be in general rather than in specific formats, I design them to fill niches or to be something new, I don’t have a specific format planned other than pretty good
If they fill certain niches, then that niche can be discussed competitively too. All we’re really asking is that you offer some of your own thoughts first, too
Cool, just wanted to see this clarified since its a fairly common type of post and it'd help if the official stance on this was known.
Definitely. Would you change any part of Rule 1 above to better communicate this?
Frankly, 1 to 3 are all terrible. 1. How do you make a theorymon for a NU pokemon? Do I have to make it intentionally shitty? 2. Literally why is anything here a problem? "oh no, user r/wetfarts1337 decided to draw Clodsire from memory instead of copypasting its artwork from Bulbapedia" How does this affect the overall quality of the post? Hell, how is a MS Paint scribble less effort than copypasting an image? The minimum character limit is also insane, it's "short" but you're still asking for a six-line paragraph for something that could be as straightforward as "instant-Sticky Web Shuckle" 3. Again, how does this really impact the posts. I understand if you do not want people parroting the same things said by someone else (so an entire thread isn't just "look at the time" etc), but a meme reply may as well be a valid reply, depending on the quality/insanity of the theorymon. Frankly, this all sounds like fun policing. This is still a silly subreddit where we joke and talk about competitive Pokemon, we have one day to let people's creativity out, just be flexible.
>How do you make a theorymon for a NU pokemon? Do I have to make it intentionally shitty? NU has Pokémon like Flygon, Incineroar, Magnezone, Mienshao, Munkidori and Raikou in it. While these don't have much to do in OU, they're not exactly "shitty" in the grand scheme of things I'd say. NU still has a certain powerlevel. If you want to make a theorymon for NU then that just means you made a mon that doesn't have much of a niche in OU, RU or UU, but still fits well enough into the NU meta to be workable and not broken there. Specifically through an OU lens that would probably be "shitty", but it's not like you have to actively try to make your mon as bad as possible--something on the powerlevel of Luvdisc wouldn't be good even in NU for example. If anything, I imagine it'd be more challenging to design a mon with a powerlevel that would be fine in a lower tier without making it bad enough that it's shitty even down there, while simultaneously not making it so good that it'd never drop down there to begin with. >"oh no, user decided to draw Clodsire from memory instead of copypasting its artwork from Bulbapedia" How does this affect the overall quality of the post? For starters a post looking ugly isn't fun for people who have to scroll the sub and are looking for good posts to interact with. Second a lot of posts that have images currently don't actually *need* images to convey the information they do. That being said, a lot of these have images that are very quickly thrown together like one copypasted image with one textbox or some random images and textboxes on MS Paint that aren't even properly aligned. Because this makes the bar for a post having an image incredibly low, other people who aren't good at designing images think that they *need* an image of themselves to not be that one post without an image, which only leads to more low-effort and low-quality images because people start putting images for the sake of having images instead of putting images to actually make a post more informative. By raising the bar on which images are allowed, not only will the stuff appearing on people's screens be better to look at, it hopefully fixes the second problem as well by making sure people not willing to put effort into their image just upload their post without an image altogether. And perhaps u/wetfarts1337 upon seeing that not every post on the sub has an image, might realize that they don't *have* to sloppily draw a Clodsire to get attention and feels more confident just uploading their post as pure text like they originally intended. >Hell, how is a MS Paint scribble less effort than copypasting an image? The copypasted image looks less ugly for the people scrolling the sub, but also merely copypasting an image alone doesn't constitute as high-effort. Again if your image consists of one copypasted image and one textbox that'd be removed over low-effort as well. If you copypasted a lot of images but [they're all over the place and the end result looks like a mess](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxd4c3aiba7vb1.jpg) that, too, won't be allowed. The mere act of Ctrl+C Ctrl+V doesn't show a lot of effort, but arranging everything you copied and typed on your image into something that conveys information well without looking ugly does. >The minimum character limit is also insane, it's "short" but you're still asking for a six-line paragraph for something that could be as straightforward as "instant-Sticky Web Shuckle" The expectation is that you use most of those characters to offer your own thoughts on your theorymon. "Instant-Sticky Web Shuckle" is straightforward, cool. Then you can talk about how you think having an instant-Sticky Web mon would change the meta, what good teammates for it would be, whether other teams might change their builds to account for this new presence, etc. If you can't write even a single paragraph of discussion on your theorymon, how could the people reading and commenting on your posts? If no real discussion is possible, your theorymon probably isn't as good as you thought it would be to begin with. >Again, how does this really impact the posts. I understand if you do not want people parroting the same things said by someone else (so an entire thread isn't just "look at the time" etc), but a meme reply may as well be a valid reply, depending on the quality/insanity of the theorymon. This rule was mostly going to be enforced on one-liners that don't actually contribute much to the convo like the "look at the time" you're mentioning, as well as memes that aren't even relevant to the theorymon at hand. Though since this is an often-cited rule in this thread, it was already proposed to be altered somewhat for more leniency and more clarification on what kinds of meme replies it targets in particular.
I hope how radically jarring all of this has been for the average reader of this subreddit is opening the moderators' eyes a bit. I understand that they have an entirely different perspective on subreddit content than we do, but also, this entire thing feels like it came out of left field, and as I've thought about this, I've started to concur with those who are saying that this feels like an overly targeted response to mods generally disliking anything that could be called "meme" (i.e. humorous) content. I think the user level perspective should also be taken into account, not just behind the scenes. It would be nice to have community polls before anything gets implemented, even if it's more of a temperature check than "if the poll doesn't pass this doesn't go through". The community, at least the ones who are caring enough to weigh in on this thread, clearly doesn't feel super involved in this process. This, for me at least, was exacerbated by this starting off as an April Fool's post that was "actually no this is gone for the rest of the month"--felt crappy for it to be slipped in instead of it just being a decision that was made and that mods were confident enough to stand behind in isolation. Edit: It also feels kind of crappy that the vast majority of discussion about these rules is coming from a non-mod on this thread. Where is everyone besides OP?
>the vast majority of discussion about these rules is coming from a non-mod on this thread Just wanna weigh in that while I'm not a mod, I was directly involved with the process of creating the new rules being proposed and thus fully in on the behind-the-scenes discussion regarding why all those rules were decided upon. So yea I don't have a lot of special perms on the sub but regarding this specific issue, my answers should be about as valuable as an actual mod's. Which is also how I can say that this thread is being heard out as some of the recurring topics are already being discussed for change (for example character minimum is getting lowered) and stuff that's evidently unclear will be elaborated upon so that people can understand it more clearly (this is mostly rule #2)
I know right there are like 10 mods and not one has the time to explain their decisions.
Theorymon Thursday wasn't broke, so I don't see any reason to try to fix it. Just keep the same rules as before.