>>54699273>but the fact that smogon has to hammer and nail this shit so much to try and make the meta into something half-way functional, and not just endless mirror matches and super-counters, speaks to how fucking bad pokemon is competitively. It's literally like a Theseus's ship, where eventually you can make the fucking thing float but is it even pokemon anymore?This is pretty much exclusively a nu-gen problem. Gens 1 - 4 function very well with few bans because power creep wasn't a huge issue. 6 and 7 had relatively few bans as well, but that's simply because they have the most Pokemon available in any generation. There's about as many Ubers Pokemon in Gens 6 and 7 as 8 and 9, but 8 and 9 have far fewer Pokemon so it seems more egregious.
That being said, Smogon's lower tiers are plenty balanced. They tend to be more balanced because they're way more ban-happy than OU. There are generations where UUBL is like 60% the size of Ubers, and Ubers has 18x Arceus. No one on /vp/ cries when Thundurus-T and Dragonite get banned from UU.
