Introducing the PvP Council

[Shinohara]

 

With the addition of mega evolutions, new Pokémon like Volcanion and the incoming additons that will strike in the future, it has been decided to finally establish a dedicated group that focuses purely and solely on the PvP aspect of Pokemon Revolution Online. In this thread we will explain as clear as possible why it has been established, the objective and future plans that awaits for it, as well as answers as many questions that may arise from the public.

 

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The PvP Council is the entity in charge of managing and overseeing the competitive side of the game, looking after the meta in lookout for Pokémon, moves or combination that prove to be harmful or unhealthy for it with the help of the moderation team, and decide a favorable approach in order to make competitive more enjoyable and balanced for everyone. Players will be able to interact with the council members directly through a dedicated discord server in which they will be able to see the inner works of the group, for the sake of transparency.

Players will be able to join the discord as Observers and read the council discussions in their council-chat for the sake of transparency, without however being able to participate into them directly.

 

To access this discord you can use the invite below, however before you do so please be mindful of the following rules:

1. Respect the Game Rules.
2. Only use English in order to communicate since English is the "official" language of PRO.
3. Respect all the members, doesn't matter if they lack enough knowledge in PvP. Members of the server should be respectful towards one another, including staff.

   • Excessive foul language, deplorable behaviour, toxicity, spam and verbal assault are not tolerated.

   • Do not use any racist or homophobic words as an insult, even if it is just meant as a joke.

   • Do not promote suicide in any form.

   • Excessive amounts of symbols, letters, numbers, emojis, images or lines will be deleted and the infringing user will be punished.

4. NSFW, other inappropriate content, topics and malicious links are strictly forbidden. This includes anything sexually explicit, inciting hate or anything illegal.
5. Do not message Staff members or Council Members for private support. Staff members reserve the right to have their messages disabled and moderated under PRO's T&C and Rules. Do not message PRO Staff and Discord Staff for the following reasons:
   • Appealing a ban.
   • Reporting a player.
   • Looking for support.
   • Enquiring about the server/ forum status.
   • Applying to the team.
6. Staff impersonation is strictly forbidden and users will be punished if attempted. This includes mini-modding; members who continually act through moderating other members behaviour or assuming the role of staff. Mini-modding will result in a warning.
7. Members of the server should have an appropriate Username, Avatar, Playing Status and Custom Status
8. Do not advertise other Discord Servers and Pokémon fan-games here or in PMs.

 

By joining the discord, you hereby agree to follow the rules aforementioned and are completely aware of the consequences that may carry if breaking them. 

https://discord.gg/YcVhsnH

 

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1. What is the PvP Council?

Quoting what OU Smogon Council said, which is the mindset/view we agree on:

"The OU Council's purpose, ultimately, will be to guide the community and the metagame to the best of its ability. We will try our best to make decisions as transparent as possible while also providing you with the "best" (the quotation marks are extremely important) possible metagame on which to enjoy wasting as much of your personal time as possible. The most important thing I can tell you is that competitive online Pokémon is subjective, and this subjectivity is inherent in ban philosophies, metagame preferences, definitions of "broken", and many other factors. While I am certain that you will not agree with all of our decisions all of the time, I hope that the justification we provide will be enough for you to at least accept our decisions, even if you cannot agree with them entirely."

Source: https://www.smogon.com/smog/issue31/council

 

2. Why does PRO need a PvP Council? Why now?

R: To start things with, PRO is not Showdown. With the lack of features and Pokémon, PRO has created its own combination of older generations with newer mechanics. However, a major PvP rework and a HUGE list of implementations & fixes has struck recently, violently shifting the course of this meta which in return causes a chaotic metagame difficult to adapt to. With more Pokémon and features being implemented, it has become vital to create and hold a council to regulate and ideally maintain this unique metagame for everyone to enjoy, because as said before, PRO is not showdown.

 

3. How and where will the council operate?

R: The council is in charge of managing proposals and solutions (Bans, Unbans, Complex Bans, etc.) for administration to review, this however, does not come out of the blue. Discussions shall be made between the council members to identify possible threats and/or possible solutions that can balance out the metagame towards a healthy course. Afterwards, the council shall decide between which of these threats/solutions should be dealt with first, and define a list of priorities. Once this list has been made, they shall define among themselves the appropriate course of action and ultimately carry on a vote between themselves to decide whether these proposals should be forwarded to administration for them to approve or deny. These discussions take place in the PvP Council discord.

 

4. What if the Council abuses its power?

Safeguards are in place in order to minimize the likeliness of self-driven decisions. Although we cannot guarantee these from happening, council members are heavily monitored by the moderation team in order to identify any kind of shady business/activity. In case the moderation team catches a council member behaving toxically, disrespectfully or egoistically on a constant basis, the member shall be removed and replaced with the selection procedure explained at the end of the FAQ.

We cannot allow the council to do as it pleases, and as such all proposals are to be reviewed by Admins to prevent this from happening. We do not want this to be a failure nor hurt the game and its community, and thus administration holds the power to approve or deny all the proposals approved by the council, either due to lack of argument or another reason. Quoting what an old moderation lead said:
"A completely free player driven council is simply not possible, nor is anyone willing to take the risk however we try to give as much powers to the council as possible".

 

5. The MMO side-effects from a PvP Council

R: A major concern that arises is how can it impact other aspects of the game, such as the economy for example. The council strives to maintain a healthy metagame, and thus we cannot avoid these decisions from having an impact on the prices of Pokémon (See Speed Boost Blaziken, for example). We know council members are also players, so they're still able to interact and play with others without any kind of restrictions.

People interested will be able to apply for the position, filling an application, and said person will be then discussed within the council chat to see if he's worth to be taken into the council or not.

 

6. How can I join the PvP Council?

The initial council members have been hand picked accurately in order to start the project itself and considering all of the below listed requirements/factors. We are aware not everyone might agree with the council members, some will do it for personal reasons and others simply cause they think the selected people are not worth, however we do ask you to have trust/faith in us and to not worry about it as the council will definitely be updated with time and everyone who meet the below listed factors have a chance to join it.

In specific, whenever a current member of the council drops/is removed from his position (or whenever there will be the need of new people), whatever the reason might've been, a new possible member is selected based on their PvP Record, their participation in discussions/debates, their contribution to these discussions/debates and their overall insight. Being able to communicate in English is a requirement in order to be eligible in this process.

A council member must:

• Have an extensive knowledge of Pokemon PvP
• Must be able to communicate in English.
• Have a clean record in regards to boosting related offenses, behaviour record may not be looked at
• Have an extensive ladder and ladder tournament experience in PRO, you can not evaluate a meta without actually playing it.
• Must be following all #council-rules (can be found within the discord)

 

Edited December 16, 2020 by Novus
Grammar fix

[Madtrainer]

I just want to say thanks to all people who worked hard to make this thing real. 

I have not pvped since very long now, but I will still follow those council related things.

Thanks again to everybody! =3

Have fun and good game!

[Aphotyx]

I would like to shout this out. I know this has been in the works for a long time, and I think it will be very healthy for the game. 

Much Love to the Current Staff Members

[Orihara]

[Teerav]

This is a long awaited necessary step to bettering the PvP environment, very happy to see it put in place. Some critiques:

 

1. Why create a brand new discord for this? I feel as though you could have simply created a new category in the current PRO Discord labeled "PvP Discussions" and created the role necessary. All rules within the PvP Council Discord are essentially the exact same as PRO Discord. PRO Discord already has an active and capable crew of moderators. Many guild and community discords already follow announcement channels from PRO Discord. A Council Announcement could easily be created under a newly created PvP Discussions category. You could created a new role "PvP Council" that has special access to necessary channels. PRO already has issues keeping announcements consistent across all platforms, this will not help. Keeping it all in one discord would have simply helped with communication across the board.
2. Why specify you may not look into council member's behavior history? This tells me you have already accepted at least one council member that has a very public history of bad behavior and you are trying to get ahead of the issue by declaring thats not an aspect you look at. It also signals to the community that we can be complete and utter dumper fire immature poopoo heads and still have a chance to hold a position that makes major decisions about the games future. Honestly you should have just left this line out. I immediately have the impression council members are arrogant toxic douchebags.
3. I believe ladder experience and ladder tournament experience is an awesome requirement, but it should be explicit that experience needs to be recent and consistent. There are a lot of great pvpers, but the game is drastically different than it was a year ago. 

 

To finish on a positive note, I really *really* like that the #council-chat and #suspect-results-votes is visible to the public. I believe this is essentially to avoid any abuse in the market. Although simple talk about a pokemon, ability, nature, item, etc. could influence the market, but its clear from start of conversation to final vote what gets changed to players can make well educated economic decisions with their pokemon. I believe it also eliminates nearly all fear of abuse. PLUS, its great educational content! It's often very fun to read thoughtful discussions from proven and trusted PvP experts.

 

[Anurag2006]

YAY, FINALLY!!!! YAY!!

[Orihara]

On 10/25/2020 at 5:13 AM, teerav said:

This is a long awaited necessary step to bettering the PvP environment, very happy to see it put in place. Some critiques:

 

1. Why create a brand new discord for this? I feel as though you could have simply created a new category in the current PRO Discord labeled "PvP Discussions" and created the role necessary. All rules within the PvP Council Discord are essentially the exact same as PRO Discord. PRO Discord already has an active and capable crew of moderators. Many guild and community discords already follow announcement channels from PRO Discord. A Council Announcement could easily be created under a newly created PvP Discussions category. You could created a new role "PvP Council" that has special access to necessary channels. PRO already has issues keeping announcements consistent across all platforms, this will not help. Keeping it all in one discord would have simply helped with communication across the board.
2. Why specify you may not look into council member's behavior history? This tells me you have already accepted at least one council member that has a very public history of bad behavior and you are trying to get ahead of the issue by declaring thats not an aspect you look at. It also signals to the community that we can be complete and utter dumper fire immature poopoo heads and still have a chance to hold a position that makes major decisions about the games future. Honestly you should have just left this line out. I immediately have the impression council members are arrogant toxic douchebags.
3. I believe ladder experience and ladder tournament experience is an awesome requirement, but it should be explicit that experience needs to be recent and consistent. There are a lot of great pvpers, but the game is drastically different than it was a year ago. 

 

To finish on a positive note, I really *really* like that the #council-chat and #suspect-results-votes is visible to the public. I believe this is essentially to avoid any abuse in the market. Although simple talk about a pokemon, ability, nature, item, etc. could influence the market, but its clear from start of conversation to final vote what gets changed to players can make well educated economic decisions with their pokemon. I believe it also eliminates nearly all fear of abuse. PLUS, its great educational content! It's often very fun to read thoughtful discussions from proven and trusted PvP experts.

 

1- Too many "exceptional roles" creates a security breach, someone can just send in a bot and get all the conversation history of those channels that have exceptional role access, so creating seperate discord server is not really an issue.
2- If i were to guess, it'd be pvp council does not really fall under the same category as your usual staff, therefor dont really need to be the "shining examples" of the community but rather PvP skills. Other reason could be most pvpers are rather toxic so an exception is to be made to favor quality pvpers and sacrifice behaviour for it, rather than risking low tier pvp quality for the sake of behaviour.

[Teerav]

On 10/25/2020 at 11:23 PM, Orihara said:

1- Too many "exceptional roles" creates a security breach, someone can just send in a bot and get all the conversation history of those channels that have exceptional role access, so creating seperate discord server is not really an issue.
2- If i were to guess, it'd be pvp council does not really fall under the same category as your usual staff, therefor dont really need to be the "shining examples" of the community but rather PvP skills. Other reason could be most pvpers are rather toxic so an exception is to be made to favor quality pvpers and sacrifice behaviour for it, rather than risking low tier pvp quality for the sake of behaviour.

1 - That's ridiculous as its impossible to add a bot without explicit permission of a discord Admin. If an Admin is adding bots to the discord without considering security, there is much larger problems.
2 - I disagree with you. Sure, you don't want to any low tier pvp quality members in the council, but there are plenty of high tier pvpers who are mature. To say "most pvpers are rather toxic" is extremely wrong. I assume you are confusing competitive attitudes with toxic attitudes. You do not need to be a toxic airhead to be competitive.

[Orihara]

7 hours ago, teerav said:

1 - That's ridiculous as its impossible to add a bot without explicit permission of a discord Admin. If an Admin is adding bots to the discord without considering security, there is much larger problems.
2 - I disagree with you. Sure, you don't want to any low tier pvp quality members in the council, but there are plenty of high tier pvpers who are mature. To say "most pvpers are rather toxic" is extremely wrong. I assume you are confusing competitive attitudes with toxic attitudes. You do not need to be a toxic airhead to be competitive.

1- I've seen it happen multiple times on Ark discords, someone gets a hold of a perm invite link, sends a bot in and boom, entire chat history of exceptional role view privilages are downloaded as txt file.
EDIT: The bot doesnt require a permission to view anything, lets say there is a dmod chat, which dmod and staff can view, those are general roles. But a role named "lol" is created and can see dmod, thats an exceptional role, discord bots can breach that and get access to your entire chat history of that specific channel.
2-I mean yeah, just was a general assumption as to why that might've been the case

Edited October 31, 2020 by Orihara

[Teerav]

10 hours ago, Orihara said:

1- I've seen it happen multiple times on Ark discords, someone gets a hold of a perm invite link, sends a bot in and boom, entire chat history of exceptional role view privilages are downloaded as txt file.
EDIT: The bot doesnt require a permission to view anything, lets say there is a dmod chat, which dmod and staff can view, those are general roles. But a role named "lol" is created and can see dmod, thats an exceptional role, discord bots can breach that and get access to your entire chat history of that specific channel.

You clearly have no idea how bots work in discord.