Hello everyone! I wanted to share my thoughts about the last slot discussion that is going on. As one of the oldest DLC players I would love to see this tier in the DPL, sadly I believe it is not as popular as the other low tiers in the DOU community.
However, I am surprised about some statements that people have written above in this thread. Since, DLC is not very attached to this community I can understand the lack of knowledge of some people, so let me talk a bit about the DLC tier.
Doubles LC started as a tier in an LC unofficial team tour during USUM (yes, is that old), that's why we have always been closer to the LC community. To be honest at the first it was a meme tier, but it kept growning and growing until we jumped into the smogon forums. In SS, we worked in all the necessary resources to be considered a serious tier and finally, in 2022, we had our first full-year Circuit with 4 tours in it: two Seasonals, one Swiss and one Majors; plus the Invitational at the end of it.
I don't actually know how many people was aware of this, since like I said earlier, due to... well, "external circunstances" to the tier itself; it hasn't been very popular in the DOU community. We don't have a thread in the DOU forums (now there is a link to our thread in the LC forums), we don't even have a channel in the DOU discord, like other low tiers. So I guess some of the recent comments about DLC have been done from a good-intentioned ignorance.
In the first place, some people say DLC has not enough player base. If we take a look at the number of people who play the tours we can see that the two Seasonals got 31 and 32 sign-ups respectively, the Swiss got 48 and the Majors got 57. Overall, up to 85 players participate in at least one of the circuit tour. (You can check the
standings here)
We all know some of them are casual players, but I think we can agree that this is a decent amount of player base for a low tier. DLC is rather a unique tier due to the fact that the people that usually play this, comes from both DOU, but also LC community. So we can provide the tour with some new players that are not really familiar with the DOU community.
On the other hand, some people say that DUU is the only low tier with a functional and developed meta, or that DLC is a mess with poorly ruleset (I have the greatest of respects for a player like Eragon, but that quote was really unfortunate from him...). But what most people don't know is that we actually do have a developed meta.
If you guys want to spend a couple of minutes checking our
SS thread and
SV thread, you will see that we have been constantly working on the tier since 2020, building the necessary resources for new players (speed tiers, role compendium...), posting the usage stats from our tours, doing regular updates to the VR and the sample teams and several discussions about the state of the meta through the SS generation, with the following suspects that were needed to keep the tier healthy. We also had an active council and an active discord server. I can proudly say that our tier is very well-cared and fully functional.
It is true what some people said, having no Ladder has always been a huge issue fo us, as it holds back the developement of the tier. If this is a main factor for some people to think that DLC is not worth, I believe this problema is going to be solved soon (hopefully).
Sorry for this long explanation, but I felt the necessity to talk about it since apparently some people don't know the tier at all, and have a wrong opinion of it.
I'm unaware about the states of the ADV and Dubers tiers, however I'm confident enough to affirm that DLC is more developed as tier in general and has the necessary tools to be part of the DPL, maybe not this year, but in future DPLs at least.
As I said at the beggining of my post, my intention is not to try to convince you to put DLC as the last slot. As much as I would love to have it, DUU has a good developed tier as well, and it´s more popular in DOU community, that´s a real fact. Only the hosts can make the choice and judge which tier has more developement and popularity to take the final slot. But I strongly believe it should be between DLC and DUU.
I guess the real reason why I made this post is to give some visibility to the low tiers. I believe that both DLC and Dubers have a great potential in the future of the community. DLC has zero visibility right now in the circuit, if we want to look forward to a DLC tier (or maybe even the three of them) in a future DPL, we should aim to have more tours or cups, like the recent Maushold Cup, or even official ones inside the circuit, but that is more complicated... But overall, I would love to see that the DOU community gives more recognition to DLC, as it should be an active part of the community just like DUU and Dubers.
I hope that this serves as well to encourage people to join the low tiers Circuit, I also hope you guys give a chance to DLC in particular, thanks for reading!