Welcome to Smogon! Take a moment to read the Introduction to Smogon for a run-down on everything Smogon, and make sure you take some time to read the global rules.
"Battles that have a player with a medal will be forced public the last 3 days of every month leading into the Hall of Fame updates."
Is there any possibility of this being changed? Maybe by making it so only gold medal games would be publicized, or requiring both players to have silver/gold medals or something, if not outright removing it (outright removal is what I support the most, but I get if that is undesirable)? Ladder is the best place to test teams for stuff like tournaments, and forcing public games means you either run the risk of whatever you're testing being made public or forcing yourself to not test on ladder for the last 3 days of the month (this latter part especially wouldn't benefit anyone). I think this might just end up being a bit counterproductive, people would be playing less ladder, not more. The overall idea is rly cool though @ medals and stuff, just think forcing public games is a net negative, even if it is only for 3 days.
"Battles that have a player with a medal will be forced public the last 3 days of every month leading into the Hall of Fame updates."
Is there any possibility of this being changed? Maybe by making it so only gold medal games would be publicized, or requiring both players to have silver/gold medals or something, if not outright removing it? Ladder is the best place to test teams for stuff like tournaments, and forcing public games means you either run the risk of whatever you're testing being made public or forcing yourself to not test on ladder for the last 3 days of the month (this latter part especially wouldn't benefit anyone). I think this might just end up being a bit counterproductive, people would be playing less ladder, not more. The overall idea is rly cool though @ medals and stuff, just think forcing public games is a net negative, even if it is only for 3 days.
yeah i agree, even though i am nowhere close to being eligible to commenting on this, i am doing this to continue the support for the solution of this ever annoying problem.
ngl just remove the forced public games feature entirely, disincentivising players with medals from actually laddering seems pretty counterproductive to the whole point of having this seasons thing in the first place
The premise of the medals and putting some reward/weight on the ladder is good. I like the overall idea and appreciate the effort put into it.
I do think forcing replays to be public should be removed. Just think that it ends up ruffling more feathers and compromising more people than anything else. Maybe for other tiers like Randbats it can be kept, but not for OU or tiers where people ladder to prepare for tournaments.
"Battles that have a player with a medal will be forced public the last 3 days of every month leading into the Hall of Fame updates."
Is there any possibility of this being changed? Maybe by making it so only gold medal games would be publicized, or requiring both players to have silver/gold medals or something, if not outright removing it (outright removal is what I support the most, but I get if that is undesirable)? Ladder is the best place to test teams for stuff like tournaments, and forcing public games means you either run the risk of whatever you're testing being made public or forcing yourself to not test on ladder for the last 3 days of the month (this latter part especially wouldn't benefit anyone). I think this might just end up being a bit counterproductive, people would be playing less ladder, not more. The overall idea is rly cool though @ medals and stuff, just think forcing public games is a net negative, even if it is only for 3 days.
i also support this in a sense that they said they wouldn't consider the idea of adding a button to hide the medals and said that it defeats the purpose and that we should " alt ". I get what they mean by defeating the purpose but basically you are asking all if not most tournament players to " alt " there way up to the ladder which can take around 6 - 7 hours depending on the games which then after a while when they reach to the point of ladder where they get sufficient games to test team nearing the end of the month we dont even have the ability to hide the replays ? I think you should at least give the players the benefit of the doubt the to at least hide the replays.
i also support this in a sense that they said they wouldn't consider the idea of adding a button to hide the medals and said that it defeats the purpose and that we should " alt ". I get what they mean by defeating the purpose but basically you are asking all if not most tournament players to " alt " there way up to the ladder which can take around 6 - 7 hours depending on the games which then after a while when they reach to the point of ladder where they get sufficient games to test team nearing the end of the month we dont even have the ability to hide the replays ? I think you should at least give the players the benefit of the doubt the to at least hide the replays.
Even if you do “alt”, your game will still be forced public anyways if you face someone ranked up there, and even still if you test a whole lot your alt is going to eventually also get ranked so you have to keep changing the alt and start back at 1000 ELO when you get too high? Remove forcing public please.
there's the initial shock of queueing up a game today to test a team and finding out your match is public, but once you know that 3 days a month the ladder will be public it isn't that big a deal, the benefits outweigh the costs.
Ladder seasons (and the accompanying public games it requires) may be the single greatest idea Showdown has had in years, it just takes some getting used to.
The mad dash at the end of a cycle to clinch a placement is one of the most exciting things about OLT, Here it's just replicated by that fight for medal placements. Watching good players play games in the final few days while laddering for OLT is hella fun. It's fun for the players too to feel like their games mean something. Similarly, it's fucking cool to watch two 1900 rated players fight it out for a gold medal with 100+ people watching. Even fighting for a bronze metal and watching games is fun. The ingame VGC ladder has a similar dynamic, the ladder is extremely competitive with people trying to secure a high ladder placement even though the ladder doesn't mean anything for tournaments. It's a point of pride to secure a good finish at the end of the month.
An attempt to create this sort of competitive ladder dynamic is good. For a few days, it represents a fundamental shift of what the ladder is supposed to be. For 3 days, instead of a training grounds for tournaments, it IS the tournament. As such, I don't believe that the ladder will die down with people trying to hide their teams, people will go for that medal.
Of course, it does come with that concession that you really can't test teams for 10% of the month. Whether that outweighs the excitement of an end of season ladder rush is a matter of opinion. My opinion is that it doesn't. If it really is an issue, maybe reduce it to only the final day of the month? But I like the concept of making the ladder more meaningful.
i'm not sure if this is intended or not, but currently if you have any medal all your games will be forced public, including challenging someone into a game on any format, even unrelated to the badge fixed this
if y'all REALLY don't want to remove the forced public games (and i think it IS the easier solution), i encourage y'all to AT LEAST make it so players can opt out of the forced public game, and abdicate of their medals for the next month by virtue of that. so you'd have a togglable box that would allow you to test teams in all the secrecy you'd like.
because as is, you're kinda forcing EVERYONE on the ladder to play for a tournament they didn't sign up for, and forcing them to reveal sets and ideas, even if anonymously... which obviously could be a huge disadvantage for them in the tournament they're ACTUALLY prepping for
If we're having the forced public games on at the end of the month so that we can see what the ladder is like, I think the best solution is probably the one that Lydian suggested above and an alternate solution would be to shorten it to just one day.
Forcing games to be public in order to see what the metagame is like only seems like it works in theory rather than in practice. In theory, you get to see what top ladder players are using and see metagame developments that you normally would not be able to, but all you really are doing is allow people to view games in the 1800-1900 range from players that, albeit talented, aren't really indicative of the meta. This is because more casual players will play the game as normal, but tournament players that know the meta well and are testing on alts won't play games on these days. Maybe ladder fiends are okay with having games forced public, but it can get annoying that what you are using to win games on the ladder is known relatively quickly and there's little you can do about it.
Another issue I could potentially see here is scouting, and while scouting is okay in more of a tournament setting such as the ones in OLT, when casual players in the 1800 ELO range may have to deal with this, I think it could get sort of unfun for them overall, which is not what we want in all honesty. Additionally, teams that are used to counterteam are not necessarily indicative of the meta either.
And before saying that we can just alt it away, I'm not spending 2-3 hours to ladder up to where I want to test my teams and then have to do it all over again when the alt gets revealed.
Although you could argue that everyone would just opt out of medals if they could, I don't think that's an issue of choice moreso an issue of a lack of that the reward is not fitting for a more tournament-like environment. The medal system is not permanent, which is fine, but at least one of two things should be done with the medals in my opinion:
1) Let the player keep the medal for the rest of the season if they hit the peak and then tilted and let the player keep the medal for the next season and have it remove the following one if they finished with that badge or
2) Implement a "legacy" badge system where you can see former hall-of-fame members. In order to stop cluttering, just taking the best performance will be enough.
This would be a step in the right direction in my opinion because the hall-of-fame system doesn't really mean anything to be honest, I don't really know many (if any) people that even bother to check it unless it is a "what's this" type of deal.
If, at the end of the day, this is supposed to be something to encourage competitive laddering, then put it in a competitive laddering experience. Turn it into an actual sort-of mini-ladder tournament and give the winners a form of lasting prestige other than a username being put in a list that you only get after you click on the ladder standings and a small button next to the "refresh" button. Let them be able to show that they peaked the ladder at the end of the ladder season.
The other option here is shortening it to just one day, which also seems somewhat fair in my eyes and lets you change pretty much nothing about the rewards themselves that you would need to by making it a signup. Let's say you wanted to prep for a tournament that's upcoming, but it is in the same week as the last 3 days of the season; you already have up to half (maybe more) of the time you could be using for prepping taken away, but if it were just one day, you could just choose not to ladder that one day if you wanted to and spend that day on maybe just teambuilding and/or prepping with a friend in private matches instead of having to play private matches for 3 days straight, where you likely would not be able to adequately test your team in the meta. I would take 1 day of public games over 3 days of public games in this case.
The overall concept for ladder seasons is good otherwise, but if we are going to be forcing something that can have negative consequences on other players' laddering experiences, at least let them sign up for it and at least reward them with more prestige for doing so, or at least make it only for a day; makes no sense for tournament alts to be the collateral in this situation.
#1. casuals prefer just PLAYING the game (or chatting). I just don't understand who this is appealing to besides other high level players who just want to see teams that they might want to steal / garner ideas from for teambuilding. I've been joining the public medal OU games and there's like 5-10 people max in the userlist including the 2 players, which is a bit underwhelming for such a huge change in user privacy. To be blunt casuals don't know high level gameplay and unless they want to "get good", most don't even want to know the intricacies of high level competitive Pokemon beyond content (YouTube, Twitch). However even with public battles, unless you have a high level understanding of the game you won't be learning too much, currently its mainly other high ladder players watching to garner info / teams.
Also this is a bit of conjecture, but most casuals are on the younger side and I am not gonna lie I don't think they are counting the days in the month, to be aware that the games are public lmao. Another thing is the amount of battles is pretty low besides randbats which has a good portion of high ladder games still public because of increased playerbase so more likely to be public games. What this means is the amount of battle's actively shown is not going to be much, so like what is this even for. It'd be different if it was like OLT where you can have 30 people queing at once but ladder with no stakes = games are gonna be spread out. I am not even cherry picking here, the most battles ive seen in 1700+ is 3 at once, with two of them being the same person doing 2 battles at once.
what casuals are gonna enjoy this gameplay btw
Most important point imo: Something else I've seen is people being very VERY annoying in these battles, particularly the few casual players who are watching the battles and saying their thoughts. If you have ever played low ladder in any tier, the people in there range from rude to annoying in most cases because they care less about being punished since they aren't as involved in the community / are on the younger side so less maturity and social awareness. Imagine having to deal with some random guys joining your game going 'well that was a bad play' because of a feature made for this same specific audience (unless you want high ladder to just steal teams from eachother, I am assuming casuals are the basis). The chat quality WILL UNDOUBTEDLY get worse (it already has). I am not saying this to be rude to low ladder players but that's just how it is generally speaking. I've played suspects, laddered up accounts many times etc, the people are just meaner. If this is meant to allow those players to watch these games, that will come with it's own set of problems. In fact I had someone by the name of gt44 in the OU chat ask "how do I turn off the public games, I had some random be toxic to me in chat". Of course you can set modchat +, you can even report them as Mada recommended in the room, but why should these situations be forced upon the more dedicated community members in the first place??????????
The benefits of forced public games if im being real, is troll, and does way more problems than any sort of benefits imo (however I will be stealing that moltres semi stall by 70to90gxe, thanks LOOOOL). The amount of people using this feature is low, it does not cater to the audience the devs are trying to cater to with this feature based off the userlist, and it actively discourages people from playing and diminishes the fun of playing due to rude users even if you're not trying to hide your teams.
Solution: I get the idea, you want to have some way for casuals or low ladder players to interact and watch high level gameplay OUTSIDE of tournaments. However, they do NOT care unless its presented in some form that can be consumed as entertainment. Perhaps instead battles are public on the final day, all games are automatically set to modchat +, and the battles are streamed on the Smogon Twitch or Youtube where there's live commentary of it. That way what's happening in the battles can be properly relayed to the casual players, and they also have a place to talk about the match without potentially upsetting the players who don't want to deal with that. Another way could be the battles are again on the final day and auto modchat + but battles are announced some way in the respective tiering rooms. Players could discuss about the battles IN THOSE ROOMS, rather than in the battle chat and it'd be a lot more interesting for casuals than just watching alone...silently...with 5 people lol.
The only world where I think force public works is if the benefits are enough for the viewers along with their being enough viewers to begin with, while also making the playing experience not worse (via auto modchat + imo).
I think there should be an option to disable showing medals during a game... I don't always want to show my opponent my medal, especially if I'm playing a different tier or in a tournament... I tend to play differently knowing the rank of my opponent. I know you can still easily check the ELO and GXE of a player but that's just doing "research", it's different than just "telling" your opponent: "Hey, I'm in the top spots"... It probably isn't a major problem but I'd like to have the option to disable those.
Also why should matches become public only because you have a medal? I don't play Tiers that much so I won't make the "I don't want people to steal my team argument" but I can see why some people might dislike that feature...
Also do the games become public immediately or only after they finish? I tend to get nervous when I play and that's why I usually disable specator during the game, keeping my matches private... do I really have to disable spectators during the game now because of this?
I'm curious, will only the tiers included in this season have updated medals? I've had a bronze NU medal since the start of the month, but I've cracked the top 30. Will this stay the same all the way until July/August?
fixed this 
