Announcement Official and Unofficial Tournament Hosting Guide

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Luigi

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Hey pals the old hosting guide is extremely outdated and i wrote this for the Classic/Slam hosts so i'm making it public to help host unofficial tours and also to have a public place of easy access for the new bracketmaker. The stuff here is valid for any individual, non-live tournament on Smogon.

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Step 1. Get permission to host your tour and post the signups in the appropriate forum.

Step 2. Close signups 7 days after posting OR you can close it earlier if you don't think you'll get enough people to reach the next threshold OR you can close it earlier/later than 7 days if that's more convenient for you, but make sure to make it clear when you're closing the signups in your OP. Also make sure to include "a bunch of rulings i expect you all to read to all the OP's of your tour.

hey pals this stuff is just the cliffnotes, for the full list of rules for Smogon Tournaments check here

Identity

About playing on alts: It is entirely allowed to play on an alt other than your own main forum name, though if your opponent wishes to confirm your identity, you must log on to your main alt to show them you are who you claim to be. This is to prevent people from pretending to be who they're not.

About playing on different servers: Tournament matches must be played on the Smogtoursserver. The Main PS! serveris also acceptable if both parties agree to that. Other servers are not sanctioned by the TD team and playing in them might result in your game not counting. Protect yourself from that by playing in Smogtours, where we also have the power to recreate games that end due to DC's.

Scouting

On scouting opponents: Going through your opponents replays of tournament and ladder games is entirely allowed, as long as a game is public there is nothing preventing you from watching it. An exception to this is abusing powers granted to you by being staff on Smogon or PS! to gain access to information a normal user wouldn't have access to, which is strictly forbidden.

On leaking teams: Divulging private information about someone's planned team to their opponent is never allowed, and will be heavily sanctioned. Requesting that such information be divulged is also grounds for punishment. Keep your scouting to publicly available information and you'll be fine.

Timer Clause / Disconnections

On the Timer: The timer must stay on throughout the whole battle..

On Timeout losses: A player that loses by having all his time run out loses the game. This is only not the case if the player that received the timeout loss can be verified to have suffered a True Disconnection. Rematches are only allowed if there was a True Disconnection.

On True Disconnection: The TD team has a secret threshold of seconds that your timer must be at or above, from the moment you disconnect, for a timeout loss to be considered a True disconnection. If your game is determined to be a true disconnection if you played on Smogtours and contacted a TD before the room expired your game will be recreated up to the point the disconnect happened. It is the responsibility of the player that disconnected to get a TD into the room before it expires.


Step 3. Open the Bracketmaker (https://www.smogon.com/bracketmaker/new/). This bracketmaker must be used for every Tournament on Smogon. It logs every bracket which means rigging the pairings is impossible with it, so you can play in the tour you're hosting, as long as you get a TD to do activity calls that concern you directly. If you lack a badge, you can't use it but worry not, simply ask a badged friend to make the bracket for you, or perhaps a TD.

Step 4. Put the name of the round you're making at the top IE: UU Open - Round 1

Step 5. Put the URL of the Signups thread in the appropriate box. Ignore the "Additional users to add" for now.

The bracketmaker will determine the size of the tour for you. Just verify to make sure the tour is the correct size. Correct sizes:

24, 18 with byes
32, 25 with byes
48, 36 with byes
64, 49 with byes
96, 72 with byes
128, 97 with byes
192, 144 with byes
256, 193 with byes
384, 288 with byes
512, 385 with byes
768, 576 with byes
1024, 769 with byes
1536, 1152 with byes
2048, 1537 with byes

If, and only if, you are hosting a Double Elimination tournament, then use the sizes listed in this post, and tick the box labeled "Is double elimination" when creating the bracket.


So if 769 people signed up, the bracketmaker will make a 1024 man bracket with 100 byes. If 768 people signed up the bracketmaker will make a 768 man bracket since the threshold for 1024 wasn't reached.


Step 6. Check the "Randomize signups beyond 5/8 * size" box. (only for round 1)

Step 7. Post the thread. People will report their wins and all that, you will bold the names of the winners in the OP of the thread AND at the same time make a list of the winners in a text document, you'll need that later. If you have byes and people post wanting to sub in, you replace the byes with the people that signed up in a first come first serve basis (the order the byes go should be randomized). If someone posts saying they are dropping out, or that their opponent gave them the win you replace the inactive player with a bye as well.

Step 7.5. People will post in your thread saying they wish to join the tournament as a substitute. If you have byes you immediately pair up the sub with someone that had a bye at random (it does not go bye 1 first then bye 2, etc). If you have no byes then halfway through the round do an activity sweep, checking for people that dropped out or haven’t replied to their opponent’s attempts to schedule and sub those people for the subs. Always make a post in the thread announcing the new pairings, even if it’s a bye that’s getting subbed out!

Step 8. When you reach the deadline of the round you'll have many games that went unplayed for whatever reasons, you then must look at the thread for people claiming activity wins and asking for extensions (and you'll need to do a little investigation by checking their profiles for VM communication as well). Generally as a rule of thumb you:

Give an activity win: if one person tried significantly harder than the other to get the game done. Check here
Give an extension (extend the deadline until Wednesday of the following week): if both people put in similar amounts of effort in getting the game done.
Coinflip the match: if neither person put in any appreciable effort to get the game done.

Don't be afraid to ask a TD for help if you're unsure about an activity case.

(and reminder that the only thing you take into account in an activity case is VM communication, unless one of the parties posted in the thread with explicit proof they scheduled through some other mean like Discord or Showdown PM.)

Step 9. Now you take your list of winners and check if it's half the size of the number of players from Round 1, if round 1 had 256 players, then your winner list HAS to have exactly 128 names. Use pastebin or something similar to check the number of lines. If you gave an extension to a match, for example, Luigi vs ABR, you put (Luigi vs ABR) as a single winner into the winner list. The bracketmaker is kind of annoying in that it exclusively works with Smogon names, so since there is no Smogon account called "(Luigi vs ABR)" it'll give you a error message. What you do is write down just "Luigi" or just "ABR" and then substitute that for (Luigi vs ABR) before posting the new round.

Step 10. Now you open the bracketmaker again, name it appropriately, IE: UU Open - Round 2, put your list of winners into the "Additional users to add" box. A tool for easily getting a list of winners from the previous round can be found here!

Step 11. Do steps 7, 8, 9 and 10 again until a winner is found.

And if at any moment in your tournament you feel a player is cheating immediately contact a tournament director and explain your suspicions, we're much better equipped to investigate cheating than you are.
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If anything remains unclear to you after reading this guide talk to me on discord (get backer#0509) and we'll figure it out :blobthumbsup:
 
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