The majority of the Other Metagames community feels that The Immortal is not fit to serve as its co-leader. He has run the OM community into the ground with one incredibly unpopular leadership decision after another. This post is simply intended to run down the many grievances a variety of different contributors have with TI, giving examples about his consistently detrimental behavior that differs vastly from what someone with the best interests of the community in mind ought to have, so that hopefully something can be done about his leadership.

DISCLAIMER: Some of this post may be highly critical of certain users or reflect pent-up annoyance at specific leadership decisions that certain people didn’t like, but we're just trying to reflect the general opinion of the community while demonstrating how consistently TI causes issues. In addition, different sections have different writers.

For example, he just recently (prompting this post) revoked nv's ownership of, and simultaneously eliminated the popular OM Inheritance, at one point an Other Metagame of the Month in Generation 6, solely because nv removed a mechanic that was believed to remove the whole aspect of unpredictability, which had previously made the OM fun—this was after he asked nv to make a choice as metagame leader on whether or not to keep said mechanic. Apparently nv made the wrong choice, because immediately afterward, he locked the OM’s thread and posted an OM submission of an extremely similar metagame that had overly complicated mechanics and was arguably worse than Inheritance. This is the text of the submission: http://pastebin.com/ii3fxqzp

It’s pretty clearly an issue when the leader consistently pushes his own agenda despite the entire community going nuts on Discord and/or on Showdown!. Not only this, a majority of the community was already quite fond of the way Inheritance already worked, and on top of that, Inheritance was one of if not the most popular non-ladder OM.

This wasn’t the first time TI had made a unilateral, unpopular decision to eradicate a well-liked metagame. Back in 2014, he abruptly removed the well-played Hackmons ladder (http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/hackmons-xy.3500418/page-15#post-5687690 also read the next page or so) without a substantive explanation, even though it at one time far exceeded Balanced Hackmons in terms of plays, and refused to hear any sort of objection. Even reduced to simply having a challenge option instead of a ladder, Classic Hackmons continued to have a presence within the OM community, winning Other Metagame of the Month. Later, seemingly irritated that people continued to criticize him for this decision, and frustrated by the low quality of discussion in the thread (which could have easily been solved with some actual moderation), he removed the challenge option and the thread, and eventually banned the metagame from being ever resubmitted. Now, a generation and a half later, Hackmons has been all but forgotten, simply because The Immortal thought it was bad.

There was also the situation with Mix and Mega, which is arguably one of the most popular OMs to ever be created. He basically neutered the OM in Generation 7 by preventing all unreleased Mega Stones from being used. While this seems logically okay at first, the entire Mix and Mega community, which is exponentially nearing the size of AG’s playerbase, was enraged by this. This policy does more than just remove a few aspects of the meta that are not available in game, it limits the mega stone choices by half. It would be equivalent to removing half of the abilities from Almost Any Ability. Players have consistently complained that this ruins the meta’s creativity and variety by severely limiting options, but instead of addressing this, TI had the leader blacklist any conversation of stone release from the thread. On top of this, the metagame was formerly led by Grains of Salt, who was incredibly biased and unable to control power. It took several months and influence from people that TI has exceedingly high amounts of respect for, such as Chloe., to finally get him to find a new leader for the metagame, who also happened to be Chloe. The reason that this took so long is because TI constantly ignored the cries from the Mix and Mega community, council, and even users that were neither of which but could still easily point out that the metagame’s leader was clearly not fit. Grains of Salt couldn’t play the metagame, knew nothing about it, and after a plethora of users repeatedly telling The Immortal these issues, he promptly ignored them to try to protect Grains of Salt’s position, even though it was really clear that nobody else BUT TI wanted him in that position. This is just one example of a history of consistently ignoring the community’s opinions very publicly, and doing it over and over without regard for what it was doing to the metagames.

A prime example of TI’s leadership doing more harm than good is AAA. This metagame had a permanent ladder and was led very successfully throughout gen 6, but going into gen 7 the previous leader was quitting. Despite most of the council recommending LaxLapras to lead the metagame, TI went with Lcass4919 specifically because Lcass’s tiering philosophy fell more in line with TI’s. This would be more reasonable if Lcass wasn’t one of the people who specifically recommended LaxLapras for leadership and didn’t end up quitting in about 2 months. Due to TI’s personal philosophy of unbanning as much as possible going into the new generation and another policy forbidding multiple OMs to run suspect tests at the same time, the metagame’s popularity immediately tanked going into Generation 7. Interest completely died, despite it having a permanent ladder. The Immortal effectively runs the metagame now, only giving LaxLapras ownership of the thread. This was one of the most popular Generation 6 OMs with a large enough playerbase to be included in OM C&C, with a specific trail of decisions made by TI destroying it in under 2 months.

TI’s own metagames do not really exemplify the sort of leadership he expects from others. Return’d was left extremely unbalanced because of his refusal to ban a clearly broken category of move, 102 Base Power with priority (and he picked it, his own metagame, to receive Leaders’ Choice and a ladder on the main server):
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/returnd.3566102/#post-6689744
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/returnd.3566102/page-7#post-7021142
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/returnd.3566102/page-7#post-7021185
In the “final” post he simply said “This isn’t a topic for discussion.”
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/returnd.3566102/page-7#post-7021652

The aforementioned one-suspect-at-a-time rule, which greatly encumbered the progress of many of the metagames at the beginning of the generation, and is still having a lasting effect on ladders such as Balanced Hackmons, truly exemplifies some of the flaws with TI’s leadership that have become more noticeable in recent times. Consider the following message, which he described as a “suggestion” to metagame leaders to follow the rule:

“You should wait, yes. I mean I'm not forcing you to guys to wait but it is, in my opinion, best to not have multiple OM suspect tests for the reason I mentioned above. For example, someone may only have time to do one so they do BH and AAA gets one less voter. Every potential voter matters because so few people vote compared to standard.”

He clearly doesn’t even understand the excessive strength of the authority he’s wielding. He claimed the above was “not a rule” here: http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/suggestions-for-om-improvement.3590275/#post-7152958.

One of TI’s more minor but equally irritating tendencies is his repeated pattern of attempting to get those who disagree with him to redact their opinions. This was part of the highly public controversy surrounding the first moderator nomination of imas: http://pastebin.com/UD0J8TVK

The next time I [Uselesscrab] posted an opinion that slightly differed from TI's in the New Direction for Other Metagames thread, he attempted to get me to publicly redact what I said by editing my post. He tried to "cover up" what I had said with flawed rebuttals: http://pastebin.com/EJw84d2n

Even after everything that we already mentioned, there’s still a prime example of why The Immortal shouldn’t be in a leadership position, or at least in charge of OMs. [url=’http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/ompl-week-two.3540708/page-5#post-6278749’]This[/url] post was a really elitist and obviously biased form of trying to get a user removed from the OM forum. Not only was TI in a place of power, people were obviously going to agree with him solely because of his position as leader. The user in question of being banned was also a highly respected user in the OM community at the time and attempted suicide after a few months of disappearing with a large part of his “note” being related to the OM community and how he was treated by The Immortal. I really wish I were kidding about that. Even though Monte Crist0 is currently permabanned from the website due to different issues, that still doesn’t excuse what happened.

These are issues that have been brought to TI before and it's clear that he isn't willing to work with the community. We don't necessarily have a suitable replacement, nor is it our right to choose who takes over, but even if OMs lacked concrete leadership it would still be better than the current system.

This “like if you agree” style of OM leadership was also demonstrated in the controversial decision to move 1v1 to a 3v3 format: http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/oras-1v1-3v3-team-preview.3496773/page-7#post-5551306
This thread is another great example of not really addressing the playerbase’s concerns even as people keep posting. Something similar happened recently in the SQSA thread after the inheritance drama explained above: http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/simple-questions-simple-answers-om-edition.3588349/page-3#post-7199010

Though this “like if you agree” pattern is very common in the OM community, the probably ONLY excusable use for it is voting for the OMotM.

Here’s wishes’ side (feel free to change the name of this or w/e)

Demoted without reason. Not once, but twice. First time in OM submissions forum then in OM room on Showdown! Never gave a reason for either.
Snapped for saying a user was annoying. This user was also one of TI’s favorite users and one that he defended. Many supported my side.
Leaked my personal information. Got called out for it then got it deleted. Never apologized to me either, btw.

Just so that these aren't baseless accusations we asked many notable people if they felt strongly that TI was a poor leader and would sign off on this request. Most of these people run an OM under TI or hold some other kind of position of importance in the OM community.
Kris
Megazard
Uselesscrab
Monte
LaxLapras
Rosalyn (The Official Glyx)
MAMP
wishes
Piccolo Daimao
fleurdyleurse