If a part isn't being held back by a concern relevant to tournaments then it can still be ban-worthy because someone will eventually show up and get an unfair win with it, and if the testing is clear and comprehensive enough and you use common sense with regards to how it will pan out given the general overall nature of metagames (which is honestly not that hard to do - I went over a basic version of the reasoning w/ regards to scythe in response to Kei a couple of pages back, so read that and if you want more I can write up a whole thing on the subject). If it doesn't "fit" into a metagame then obviously it's not actually powerful enough that metagames couldn't just adapt slightly and beat it and therefore not a concern. If it is powerful enough and just too rare for anyone to have it, then that doesn't mean it isn't overpowered, and fairly simple reasoning can be used to work out what effect it is likely to have with sufficient testing and familiarity with how it works - matchups with major combos in the meta, checking for counters, and looking at difficulties it could face if done correctly will provide accurate information on that.
Re-read what I said about how holding off on parts like that gives people an incentive to sit on things, in my previous post, as similar things apply to this.

I'm not saying to disregard tournament results, but you can't deduce a part isn't broken from the fact it isn't showing up if you know that's because no one in those metas has it. If you do that, someone can easily exploit that for cheap wins just by putting together a tournament scene and beating it with that combo until we eventually say 'yep okay that's probably bad' - the changes to the winning combos thread are a big step in that direction but making decisions without testing in a case like that where only one person is really using/succeeding with it is at least as error prone as just taking one person's testing and making a decision based on that, no?

What we're doing with scythe is a compromise on this and a step in the right direction IMO, but personally as someone who usually has to make do with testing results as well as general information on other metagames or so on to work out what would work if I ever made the trip out to them (look when you don't have other people to play with you have to use your imagination to stay interested okay?) I'm basically very much used to working based on these assumptions and they generally pan out as one would expect after accounting for the various factors when someone actually does what I figure would work or whatever - don't get me wrong, not pulling an ultra and claiming "i can see the tops in my mind from pictures and know how they work" - I'm talking about doing a huge amount of testing and experimentation and adjusting for various factors based on historical data - and obviously there are oversights where someone comes up with a counter that you don't expect or see coming and time does need to be taken to assess all the variables at tournaments, oversights along these lines are not uncommon and it makes doing this as a single person much less worthwhile, however with a good testing culture as a group, the forum can generally manage to take care of most of that, given members are motivated to try to take a combo down or whatever - which is why I've always advocated counter lists in the OP's of combo threads, to encourage that.

A lot of people engage in speculation about how things will affect various metagames including the standard one, though, and while certain places are hard to predict because they centralise themselves around certain setups/things used by certain people, for the most part if you take appropriate caution it's accurate enough to be used for things that are more predictable and generic - primarily defense/balance wheels - tl;dr if something does better than an already popular/effective combo type in the same way with no additional effort or risk it's practically guaranteed to succeed in a tournament situation.

Perhaps w/ regards to scythe due to the obfuscation certain gravity combos were causing it was too early for me to make that call myself, because it was also based on another prediction of how things are going to go with gravity removed from the picture - personally though I like my odds on the format becoming a bit more defensive now that gravity spin stealers are gone, seeing as things like libra rsf if launched hard enough can KO more standard stamina, main factor I'm not 100% sure on is if something will rise up and take gravity's place on spin-stealers and how well it'll take hits, but scythe's topside etc make me think that unless one of the metal fury ldragos or by some stroke of luck one of the Chrome Wheels manages to pull off f230 and be able to take hits, it'll still be a problem - and that's before just looking at the standard effect something that strong defensively being around at all has on attack usage (particularly for older attack wheels) due to how confidence based on that is - either way, in that case I've already agreed that waiting to see is acceptable so we'll do that. A couple of people in London have AA2 Scythes and there's generally good part supply there so hopefully that should be a good sample, as my other doubt about me using it here is that the meta might not be developed enough to provide a fair sample.


Basically, there's a lot more than solo testing and so on involved. I should really stop being lazy and brush up on my stats etc to show how this works but personally it's all quite intuitive, but still of course I agree that actually getting that tournament data is a better way to go about it, so what I'm explaining here is more of an alternative/last resort that should only be considered under the most conducive conditions - which I do feel is generally the case with Scythe, hence my arguments to that effect (though admittedly I did keep in mind that anything I said would be balanced out by other factors, making the call myself, probably would have gone with nocto's compromise just to get more testing sorted, and I can understand that if you don't have this thing/haven't seen it in action even that would likely seem too extreme).

Either way, I don't think it's *too* big an issue because there's nothing much left that isn't generally widely available that's gonna throw up a problem (unless perhaps Hasbro release the unreleased ZG beys and they are really good or something) because at this point most parts have been tested or at least weighed, so this is the last time we're likely to have to rely on just a couple of testers for data anyway, at least until the next series comes out haha. So yeah if what I've said here sounds too much like 'beymind' to you, feel free to disregard it as I doubt it will be relevant again for a very long time, hopefully not ever. First part of my post is the most relevant part overall.

The general idea with limited is to maximise the number of viable wheels (seeing as these are generally the key part), with a focus on the pre-maximum series releases (up until the max series parts were generally pretty evenly balanced at least post-rsf), so if something has a significant negative impact on that, it is banworthy. The second factor is balancing the types in a tournament scenario, though due to the aggressive nature of most pre-maximum wheels, this generally comes as part of the former anyway, because if defense is too strong then the weaker attack wheels just can't be used. Thirdly, in the case of outright brokenness, the metagame has to shift significantly in response to a combination, generally because it beats the standard attack, defense and stamina customs, and brokenness is banworthy.