Project Ubers Winter Team Tour I - Feedback / Team Dump

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Fc

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The first iteration of our revamped winter tour has just concluded, with the Luminous Lunalas winning, congrats (insert Obama medal meme here)! This thread can be used for any feedback for the tournament format, timing, etc. as well as a place for anyone, player, manager, or helper, to drop teams / sets made during the tour.

A few things to spark discussion that I think can be worked with the most:

Format - Vague to speak on fully, but the format was somewhat experimental this tour and thus can be worked with. Did you enjoy boosts, did you dislike them? What about slots, was SS BO3 too much to stay? Anything of the sorts, the format can be tweaked as we go, this tour slot has always been changing and it can continue to as we try to stabilize it for the best tour possible.

Name - Let's face it, the name isn't that catchy. It doesn't have the same ring to it as Most Wanted or the prestige attached that UPL does, so it can be worked with too. It's not bad by any means, but could stand out more to get the tour more attention.

Length - 5 weeks into finals, how did that feel for the format? 8 teams 7 weeks or more teams and a "division" style could also be possible somewhat like what Sparksblade suggested here with a home / away type system. If that isn't preferred and 5 weeks felt great for the tour, another option is changing playoffs from top 2 to top 3. This would increase competition until the end, and give the top team a bigger advantage with a bye to finals.

With all those thrown out there, any and all discussion about the tour is welcome!
 

64 Squares

Mayonnaise colored Benz, I push miracle whips
is a Tiering Contributor
Hey I already made a post about SS during this tour which you can read about here.

Overall this tour was fun and I liked the format. Kinda sucked for subs though since every game mattered even after the week was "won" so we couldn't sub people in to get games, until we clinched in the final week. I'm really glad RBY was included, it should 100% be in this winter team tour from here on out. I'm not too sure about its place in upl though, as only like 4 of the players (maybe 5) would start in what i'd consider a good upl pool. So I think we should maybe wait for signups to come to a decision on that.

Might post some thoughts on old gens later as I built a lot but I'm tired, you should definitely read my other post though!
 

byulharang

formerly Holy Ghost
is a Tiering Contributor
As a manager I really had a fuckin blast and this was my favorite tour yet. Boosts are really cool and I didn't expect them to mean so much but they really do stack up over time, deciding as a team who should be boosted was also pretty fun. At first I was skeptical of finals being the two teams with most wins but honestly it felt really cool? No team really felt out until the very end, Zacians were doing poorly but put in work in the last weeks and ended up being 3rd/4th iirc and my team started off extremely good but ended up being 5th. That is a huge improvement from Most Wanted in regards to feeling like your wins are pointless or if youre team has no chance early on. 5 weeks felt fine, not sure if motivation would have kept strong for longer if it is changed. I have a love hate relationship with rby but my players really changed my mind on it, I would honestly like to keep it as a slot in this tour along with gsc (if thats even being discussed).
Iry didn't trust my vision so I didn't really build much heat for usm sadly..
 

Isa

I've never felt better in my life
is a Tournament Director Alumnusis a Social Media Contributor Alumnusis a Community Leader Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnus
boosts were shit and should be removed

i argue that managers should be able to predict who would most likely win on their team 75% of the time. in practice, it happened 16 times out of 32, for a success rate of 50% - managers thus failed to pick a winner on their team just as often as they succeeded. since im taking stats atm i ran a cdf on these numbers and there's a 0.2% chance that you'd get these numbers, or worse, if the success rate truly is 75%.

numbers aside i think it's clear to me that boosts are nothing more than arbitrary variance that sometimes screws a team over. pokemon is way too swingy for boosts to be rewarding good managing with regards to boosts. in practice and over time i dont think the success rate is much different from 50%.

we also saw cursedstar in gsc get boosted against 3/5 times. it's not a good system if a team drafts a weak link and as a result gets boosted against with such frequency. that doesn't reward clever managing, it just repeatedly dunks on poor management at best.
finals being decided on boosts was also a ?? moment. the teams went 5-5 but one team was made the winner because the other manager got unlucky with who they thought would win. that's a feelsbad moment to me.


also the real name issue isnt the tour name but the teams. who approved "litwicks" and a manager naming a team after themselves??
 
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corvere

and beneath the mist, i saw my true reflection
is a Contributor to Smogon
this was a fun tour skipping the fact that i got assblasted and boosted 3/5 times (remove boosts)
ty giratina's for believing in me and giving me a chance in a player pool filled with boomers, even tho i sucked complete dick. i will l2p for upl. (please buy me)
https://pokepast.es/0e276072b69f2759 my teamdump for the entirety of this tour. all the teams i ended up using with its prior versions. thanks TLTK for being my support since w1 and thanks to daniel too for coming in to help last weeks. im sorry for being such a disappointment
 

Fc

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Ubers Leader
Honestly I was super hyped for this tour, coming off Most Wanted where our broken ass team had a disappointing season and didn't have a chance to even clutch up due to the rules, this new format seemed super nice. Also my first time officially managing aside from just being a wcup captain, and after that finals tiebreak loss I was really motivated to win here. We went into the draft and our plan was near 100% accurate to who we got, and everyone played super well throughout this whole tour (aside from me at times :x).

For the format itself, I don't think anything really needs to be changed aside from maybe making playoffs 3 teams instead of 2. Keeps things close and teams like the Zacians this tour who needed to 12-0 to make finals coulda very realistically made top 3 given their week 5 score. I enjoyed boosts and think they made things super interesting. Wouldn't get rid of them just because it gives the tour more identity and rewards smart drafting / slotting from managers. Not a fan of the punishing certain drafts angle or anything like that but those are just my thoughts. Now, onto the shoutouts.

Lunala - Certified meanest user 2021 - 2022.

HunterStorm - I know this probably wasn't the season you wanted to have man, but knowing the outcome I'd still draft you. You had fun ideas and were great to prep and test with, one bad tour doesn't make a player and I know you'll keep doing great in the others.

Carl Murray - Edna really is the goat. Haven't teamed with you before this but really liked your bw play, and had a ton of fun watching all the ideas you had (except gar xatu that might not be it). I know you said you'll probably slow down w mons but I hope you stick around a bit, was great teaming and glad we got to end on a high note.

Amaranth - The GSC carry, honestly we were doomed if I had to do more work with my 0-7 lifetime record lol. You played great and were super enjoyable to have around in the chat, would love to see you in UPL and more ubers tours down the road.

xavgb - idk what it was but I couldn't give you a winning mu to save my life lmao, but you did super well regardless of that. Came through in a tier you don't play much in finals and that's all I could ask, nice 2peat from our OMPL win as well, let's go for some more in the future.

beatiful - when you remembered this tour actually existed you were on fire and that's all I could ask out of an absolute steal of a 3k. Everyone knows you're the goat at piloting in general, and would be super happy to team (get carried) again if you stick around ubers a bit.

obii - we were probably the least familiar going into this tour, but having you around was a blast and a huge relief whenever you loaded diancie ditto for the nth time and somehow pulled some miracles. Would be super down to team again if you sign up to play any more, actually made me enjoy some oras games lol.

eden - you easily had more lines than the rest of the server, I was super happy to see that and really enjoyed our tests in dpp. Thanks for giving the chat half its life lol and clutching up a lot of tight situations, enjoying dpp even more after this tour and wouldn't hesitate to draft you again.

mitana - I know I'm repeating myself from dms but you have a ton of potential in this tier, and honestly for a first tour it wasn't a bad showing. You helped the ADV slot a ton even when you weren't playing and that's more than I could ask for, hope to see you explode on the scene in the future.

InkPupil - Sorry about how this season went, probably wasn't how you wanted but everyone can take a few losses and always bounce back and I know you will. You're great at SM and a solid builder, good luck in future tours.

Torchic - MY GOAT. You carried so hard all season, clutching up multiple times and building / testing with you was so much fun. I love RBY and knew you were great after UU Snake, and now you're the goat of ubers too, would love for you to stick around and maybe we can team again another time.

Royal1604 MY OTHER GOAT. I know you woulda wanted to play your main tiers more and it sucks that it didn't work out that way, but you clutched up super hard in ADV twice and only really got unlucky to lose. You're super adaptable and play really well, and I know you're probably getting sick of me after the third ubers tour lol but I'm always looking forward to teaming together.

Holly - Sorry it didn't work out to get you off the bench, but I'd be interested if you stuck around regardless as the GSC lower tiers connoisseur to see what you can do with ubers. And regardless of playing, that green trophy looks good on everyone.

Aberforth ckw Enzo Gorlami Mr.378 London Beats johnnyg2 TSR The Strap Perry omi zf - You all helped more than we could have ever asked for as prep assistance and just chat activity, super glad to have had all of you in the cord at some point to help out.





Lunala - FINE, I'll be nice (unlike you). No matter all the banter I throw your way, thanks for managing with me. You carried my ass while I've been on a slump and I couldn't have picked a better co manager for this tour. #2trophygang, maybe we can go for a few more in the future.

And that's all, incredibly sorry if I missed anyone, but shoutouts the whole team for carrying and thanks for hosting Eledyr MrAldo, was fun as always and you guys did great.

summerchu.png
 
lazy a f for shoutouts but i will say i had a great time on my team. i usually sign up for these to play with my friends (aka whatever rendition of the durians is this year) but it was nice to team with people i didnt know and im glad we won. you guys are all super cool and id be happy to team again and load up diancie ditto
 
We won woo!! First i want to make clear that this wasn't any sort of larp or anything. I was feeling really down and wasn't confident in my ability at all. So i'll start with a big thank you to Fc. Thank you for convincing me to signup and buying myself, i didn't expect to come near best record in the tour but i got it. Thank you for all your help in prep not only for my slot but for every other slot in the team, your record is not the best but your effort helped the team in general a lot. You're great and i hope we can team more in the future.

HunterStorm InkPupil you guys had it hard and i'm sorry i couldn't have been of more help, you're great tho and i'm sure you'll bounce back in the next ubers tours if you decide to signup for those.

Carl Murray as Fc said, i genuinely hope to see you stick around, if you can afford obviously. You're a great player and the ubers would be missing out without you.

Amaranth i expected you to do great, and i have to say you surprised me even more. Your games we're all super great and your prep was also always on point despite not being active in the tier. Hope to see you play in ubers more in the future.

xavgb whatever happened in regular season doesn't matter, you clutched finals and that's all i need. You're a boss and one bad tour doesn't matter shit when you're winning everywhere else. You're a great player and i hope to see you stick around more as well.

obii as you said yourself, i wasn't too sure on how much active you we're gonna be, since you we're outside of your usual group friends. From our few interactions i knew you weren't the type of guy to not care cause of this tho, and i'm glad i was right. You're a really cool person to hang around with and a very nice player, if this ends up being your last tour too just know you ended with a banger.

beatiful always fun to team with you, hope you didn't get bored of me LOL

eden you we're the player with most logs in the discord, somehow above even me. The effort you put for this tour was legit always so nice to see and gave me confidence to do better as well. You're great and i hope we can team up more in the future.

mitana your adv prep was immaculate, and even if you didn't feel confident to continue playing just know you have what it takes. We talked a lot in pms so i'll leave it at this, you're great.

Torchic when we got you for 3k during the draft i knew we we're gonna cruise in this tour. You're a great player that always puts a ton of effort in every game and this easily reflects with your record. Great job bud.

Royal1604 i know you wanted to play other tiers, but thanks for picking up ADV and clutching both in Week 5 and in finals. You have great potential and i hope to see more of you in UPL, maybe in a tier you're more comfortable with :p

Holly sorry you never got the chance to play WOOOPS let's win UUPL tho

omi zf Enzo Gorlami johnnyg2 London Beats Perry The Strap Mr.378 ckw TSR Aberforth (i swear there's no order in this) this wouldn't have been possible without your help. A sincere thank you for all you've done and i hope to see every each of you play in the upcoming UPL.

Won't do a long post for my teams or prep like last time, so here's a lazy list of all i built:
Week 1
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5

Thanks Eledyr and MrAldo for hosting, appreciate it a ton. Thanks to the Lunalas again, i had a great time. See y'all for UPL.
 
Thanks Fc and Lunala for this tour, it was really fun!

As you mentionned, life for me is really busy, between work and wife, I couldn't test more than I wanted! I'm satisfied you wanted me to play tiebreak because I really like playing under pressure lol

Not gonna share all the teams I used because anyway people will scream, but this team was so much fun to use, half the techs didn't even get the time to show but it was a blast building it! https://pokepast.es/759ed6367bbdeb88

Congrats team, you carried hard this tour
 
Built some teams I liked for the first part of the tour so thought I'd share

W1 vs terra - :groudon-primal::magearna::giratina-origin::yveltal::gengar-mega::arceus-water:
honestly I hadnt seen terra play the tier in over a year so I just wanted to bring something generally good vs most playstyles. I went with dual status on my supportceus since it didnt need defog and it makes me a lot stronger vs sd necro and ferrothorn. From what I remembered terra wasn't a gengar spammer either so I didn't have to be quite so worried about trapping. Weirdly though, he brought sd necro and gengar so it kinda evened out.

W2 vs zesty - :groudon-primal::necrozma-dusk-mane::giratina-origin::yveltal::xerneas::arceus-water:
basically just used these 5 cause they're proven to work with just about any offensive arceus form you want. I chose water because it looked good vs a lot of zesty's teams. One downside to the team though is that it doesn't have any priority which make dealing with zesty's endure blaziken pretty difficult.

W3 vs gondra - :groudon-primal::necrozma-dusk-mane::salamence-mega::greninja::xerneas::arceus:
Didn't really know what to bring vs gondra so I just settled on making some ho. There's a lot of ways you can customize these sets (including giga impact mence for the flex) and the ones I settled on ended up being a bit worse against what I actually played against than what I probably should have run. Still though, I think this team is pretty cool and it gave me a good shot to win.

Something else I feel like I should include is this which I thought could be cool in a similar vein to some of the eject pack etern + dracovish teams that were seeing success in ss. Unfortunately though I didn't feel like any of the eject users were actually consistent enough because groudon clicks non attacking moves so often. If anyone can figure this out though I'd love to see it.
 
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Wanted to share some of my thoughts as an assman cause I think there's some takeaways that can apply to future editions and the upcoming upl.

There was a lot of apprehension going into this tournament which was reflected by the low signups. Honestly, I only participated cause I was asked to. However, contrary to expections, this tournament ended up being a lot of fun and I'm under the impression that is a sentiment shared by most of the teams/players. I think this tournament should come back next year and, if three team tours is excessive, I personally favor it over wcup since it's much easier for everybody to have a cohesive and competitive team.


Hopefully, next time there will be bigger signups and thus more teams. Being able to afford 4 team playoffs would give a lot of comeback potential to teams with rough starts, which is already something this format is really good at doing. Also, it would let the ultra stacked gsc/adv pools breath more since there's a lot of talent in these pools especially that kinda struggle with only 6 slots.


I liked boosts. It was fun to discuss as a team who should get picked. Some players really enjoyed having that extra confidence put into them for the week. I don't mind that boosts can be used to target a weak spot, that just emphasizes drafting a holistic team. Cursedstar was used frequently used as an example, he was the weakest player in a super stacked pool. Even then, he was legit one crit away from winning a majority of the boosts against him.

The scores before finals if all boosts were negated this tournament would be:
Qwillas: 31
Lunalas: 26
Monkeys: 26
Zacians: 23
Giratinas: 24
Litwicks: 17

Almost nothing changes without boosts besides us Giratinas being one point ahead of Zacians and Qwillas having a chance to win finals via tiebreaker. There would even still be the tiebreaker between Monkeys and Lunalas to decide who gets to finals. So even if we assume boosts are random, the impact is so small that I think the gain in having a fun unique dynamic makes it worthwhile. I'm not particularly attached to them, though, and obviously the tournament will function fine without them. Whatever the community wants to do is best.
I don't think it's fair to conclude that boosts are completely random just yet. If we assume there's skill involved in recognizing the strength of players with their support and then choosing the most favorable odds amongst the probable mus; then a sample size of 32 in our first attempt to emphasize that skill fails to account for the possibility that accuracy may improve as future managers better understand how to properly boost. On the other hand, if it's not feasible to accurately predict the outcome of a game of pokemon because of the large amount of random variance within the game; then I think that's a pretty damning conclusion about just how much of a crapshoot pokemon really is (especially since the boosted slot is supposed to be the easiest game to predict). In which case, does it really matter if boosts are random anyways?

Anyways, I think competitive pokemon is a crapshoot. I'm fine with boosts if other folks like them cause it's fun to collectively cross our fingers as we watch the dice roll. Obviously, if it's not something that people enjoy then there's zero fun in forcing it.



Despite being skeptical of RBY Ubers getting a slot in this tournament, I was very pleasantly surprised by how easy to draft it was and the enthusiasm of the RBY community. Even though our team had one of the worst RBY records, I would like to see the meta return next year as well as being featured in UPL. I don’t personally care if the meta is or isn’t too luck based, the playerbase is there to draft and they are hungry to play. (there’s bo3 anyways) Similarly, as I mentioned earlier, the GSC playerbase showed the fuck up this tournament and proved that last UPL was no fluke. There were plenty of viable draft options despite this tournament having weaker signups overall and coming immediately after the end of GSCPL. GSC should absolutely return in UPL if there was somehow any doubt still.


Lastly, I think we should seriously talk about whether ORAS and possibly BW should still be a part of our team tournaments. I'm going to focus on ORAS because it's the most flagrant but most of what I'm going to say applies to BW, albeit to a lesser degree. Anyways, it's been at least 3 years in a row now that ORAS Ubers has been awful to draft for. As a result, many (most even?) teams don't even have a viable draft option and are forced to improvise. You can't put the fault on managers when the viable draft options are less than the slots required to fill by the tournament, especially when there's retains AND the fucking stour slot. It's no secret that a lot of potentially strong ORAS players don't even want to play the meta and would rather be in one of the other slots that they are strong in, which means the pool is even weaker than what you (dont?) see in signups. It's not just team tournaments that we see an issue with signups, although I do want to stress that ORAS should absolutely never be cut from any individual tournaments. This has nothing to do with the metagame itself, if ORAS and BW could consistently field enough players to be mostly fair to the managers involved then I wouldn't have any complaints. Especially, if it means that actually active playerbases like RBY or GSC get shafted as slot space gets more tight. Hell, I'm down for a 20 slot UPL if it comes to it but, even then, I don't think it's fair to force managers to throw their hands up when they look at the playerpool.
Although, even on the subject of the metagame itself; ORAS recently had an invitational where Darkrai was banned. Does this mean that the metagame needs some sort of tiering decision to make it more "competitive"? Will a future ban or the lack of further split the potential playerbase? I didn't pay much attention to the invitational itself so I don't know how active/tryhard/generous the players were in it but I did hear that there was plenty of team recycling. I think team recycling gets a unfair stigma in the wider pokemon community, but that stigma + this invitational being a money tournament + a significant ban that changes the format = a red flag that there was a general apathy amongst the invited players.

Anyways, at the very least the stour slot should be chopped next UPL if you want to give ORAS/BW another chance (good luck to the managers). That slot directly drains from the ORAS playerpool as well as the general old gen pool to a smaller degree (think players like March Fires). The slot itself is also hell to draft for because there's very few players that like/want to play/are good at all three of ORAS + USM + SS. If we want to have a bo3 slot somewhere it should just be bo3 cg; there's no smogon tour for Ubers anyways, lol.

To end on a happier note, thanks a lot for this tournament and for the Giratinas being so dope. I hope to team with y'all again in the future.
 
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