Tournament Third Team Tournament Format Discussion

[gum]

Hello, this is something that has been briefly mentioned before, but with PUWC playoffs starting this feels like a good time to have a proper thread for it.

We're planning to add a third team tour with the main difference being more oldgens inclusion. This would mean every generation, from SV to RBY, is included. Everything else is still up for debate though

What format? How many SV slots? 2 or 4? (so 10 slots total with 8 teams, or 12 slots total with 6 teams)? Should we have it early in the year, in the middle (taking PUPL's place, with PUPL being early / late), or towards the end (taking PUWC's place, with PUWC being around next summer). We're currently leaning with a Snake Draft, 10 slots + 8 teams, and sometimes in february, but ideas and opinions are always welcome!!

 

[avarice]

personally, i would really like to see a blind or dutch auction (moreso blind) instead of snake to have a different format while not just being pupl 2 entirely. bots might need to be made for running those auctions on PS but it sounds doable with enough notice. I think with PUWC being all cg there's ample representation but i would probably stick with 4 sv to be "Safe" for the first iteration of whatever tour. starting with 2 and increasing to 4 if signups look good enough for it sounds fine too, but as a concept i dislike giving the current gen only 2 slots. most PU gens aren't super populated as is. team count would probably aim for 8 and just consider less if the pool seems too shallow. idk how much of a concern this is, 6 doesn't sound terrible or anything but i think 8 is usually achievable regardless of the amount of playing slots in the tour

for timing, having early PUSD (or whatever) in the year taking PUPL's place sounds good. would aim for PUPL in summer and PUWC closing out the year. i like having PUPL in the summer months where ppl are (generally) more free with it being the "most competitive" tour, but it would require PUSD starting pretty "early". i think the introduction of third tour will always be kinda awkward with the amount of downtime in between tours. maybe not doing both PUSD or PUWC every year since that can be A Lot.

 

[Tack]

snake draft is a crime please dont
this tour only exists because oldgens got cut from wc make it 0 slots of sv if real

(and then delete this 3rd tour every following year and put oldgens back in wc)

 

[FakeFan0]

If the emphasis is on old gens, there is merit in having 0 slots for sv. However, I feel that having an sv slot regardless would help that current meta develop better and make the tour develop a stronger identity of being every gen and format, as well as still not having a high entry barrier and restricting a lot of newer players from taking part(I get that this is more for veterans of the oldgens formats but having newer input would be beneficial to the entirety of the metagames as a whole)(I'm not even saying this for myself, if this does happen I'll be trying to get drafted for dpp or swsh). However, I do like the idea of it being in the early year and pupl moving to the summertime, where the most players are able to participate.

 

[Hera]

unrelated rant about puwc that you should still read

personally i think that all cg pu in puwc this year was a failure and would rather have us revert back to the old format of 2-4 cg slots + all oldgens from ss to adv, rather than jam in another team tour. we focused too much on trying to differentiate puwc from pupl too much and tried to justify it by saying this would improve innovation and it would mean less resusing teams for weaker regions, but it turned out very little innovation happened apart from changing one mon on the gum ho sample sometimes and there was a wide amount of team reusing because even though the change was supposed to lower the building requirement for teams, a lot of regions still lacked good pu builders. usage stats aren't out yet but i wouldn't be surprised if there ended up being like a ~40% usage rate of standard ho cores, i.e sneasel + veluza + farig/tomb + hlugg, which is kinda dumb when you think about it. plus i also don't like the idea of another monthslong teamtour because where do you really put it? if we do switch summer tour and classic around then you would ideally put it at the beginning of the year which causes overlap with the now winter tour and potentially right off the heels of puwc or too close to pu open. if we don't then you end up putting it around spring/summer which is also right before pupl and potentially during the middle of pu open. you end up with really awkward timing and overlap no matter what. i didn't really like this change and think we should just stick with what worked in the past.

if we are 100% having a new team tour then i think 2-4 cg slots + all oldgens sounds like a good start, not having any cg slots at all sounds a bit weird and probably would be more unpopular than if we just did all oldgens, which is my personal favorite but would probably be too gimmicky. meme pick would be to just randomly assign pools of people to teams and let managers pick and choose who to add to their team but no one would go for that so yeah snake draft is probably the best way to do it. in terms of timing i think no matter what we do we end up with weird overlap so the option with the least overlap would be during spring i guess right after the winter tour ends and hope that you don't intrude on summer tour or pu open that much.

 

[ManOfMany]

I think this tournament should be just Old Gens, or 1 SV slot at the maximum. Otherwise it is basically the same thing as PUPL and lacks identity.

It is possible that this would the player base is smaller and the tour may have less teams than PUPL and PUWC, but I think that is okay. Players always have those tours to look forward to as well as the numerous Circuit tournaments to get their fill of current gen play. PUWC should continue to be all Current Gens and PUPL should continue with 4 Current Gens + the next four oldest gens.

 

[ishtar]

Hi, friends! I wanted to weight in a bit on this since I had been meaning to comment on it for a little while now but got extremely sick, as well as to update on some of the ideas that have been showcased here since there's been a couple of developments.

Firstly, I wanna show support for the 2 SV + all oldgens format. It's the most inclusive format that still allows the focus of the tournament to be on our oldgens, which means that I am personally against 4 SV slots naturally.

Secondly, I wanted to talk about the draft format a little bit. Initially the idea of this tournament was for this to be a snake draft, idea which was met with multiple alternatives, one of the which was a blind auction. This was mentioned by avarice here and by more users in the discord. I decided to look into the viability of this option and talked to a couple of devs including Felucia, who currently runs Scrappie. She was kind enough to tell me that this is indeed something that can be implemented within the bot with the proper amount of time and preparation (THANK YOU SO MUCH!). We would be looking at sort of a mid-late Feb auction but I really wanna know if more people are in support of this idea before we go ahead with it! Are you interested in this type of draft? Are you in preference of a regular or a snake draft? Do we make RBY BO2?

Just for those who don't know, the blind auction process would be the same as a normal auction but other teams would not be able to see each player's bids, and highest bidder gets the player. Also do keep commenting on the nature of the tournament from a tiers perspective and thank you for keeping the conversation going! Happy holidays!!!

 

[Felucia]

Hi Scrappie dev here whatever you want I'll try to make it happen

Edit: I was sick and didn't have much time or energy to make a proper post, now that I've recovered somewhat here's something a lil less short. The reason I'm posting here is because I don't want yall to hold back for tech reasons, I want you to believe anything you want is achievable and go wild to create the perfect tournament format(s). Then, when you're done, if it really can't be done I'll let you know, but until then there's no use worrying about it. Trust me, there's a lot more options than people often think.