>>19386167that poll was just to gauge opinion and it was stated from the start that it didn't matter in the end, though frankly it was a terrible idea anyways since clearly there was a lot of blowback towards smogon for little net gain
anyways to expand on the process, at the beginning of a gen things are quickbanned, where a council of fat, autistic, smelly, no-life, fedora-wearing neckbeards deems things that are incredibly broken and toxic to the metagame to be banned with no community input to save time and help stabilize the metagame. while i have my problems with smogon, this is not one of them, anything that gets quickbanned would certainly get banned in a formal test anyways
once things progress a bit, formal suspect tests are started, where the council only selects the things that are to be voted on. in order to vote, users need to reach a certain rating on the showdown ladders- one without the suspect, and one with (i.e. the current meta). personally i think the ladder without the suspect is pointless, the supposed point is to gauge how the meta is without the suspect, but it's such a small amount of time to adapt that all i think it does is waste time- if you can get reqs on the normal ladder, you can get them on the suspect ladder. anyways, i digress. i believe you need 2/3 votes in favor of a ban to ban something.
