UUWC Format Discussion Thread

[Monky25]

Hello everyone. The results of the survey on the UU summer team tour are in, and by a landslide UUWC won the vote. Results from the survey are down below. To ease out any issues before the tour, a format discussion thread is open to discuss some topics. There will be no survey, but rather discussion in this thread will be used to help the hosts make an informed decision. Note that this tournament will have all current gen slots. This is not negotiable.

Our first topic is teams. Last edition, which was 2 years ago, we had the following teams:

• US West
• China
• US East
• US South
• US Midwest
• Latin America
• Brazil
• Europe
• United Kingdom
• France
• Germany
• India
• Asia + ROW
• Canada

With some time since the last tour, we ask a few questions. First, are there any regions that can be made into a team that are not included on the list? Additionally, are there any ideas for merges? For the latter, a topic of UK merging with Europe has been brought up and we’re curious to see other merges as well as if there is support from representatives of these regions. We’d like to bring back most of these regions if possible, and having an idea of team numbers can help with the below point.

Our second topic is tournament structure. Last time, we had qualifiers with the two new teams + the bottom ranked teams from last year into a pools stage, but with tournament structure being completely different featuring all current gen as well as players coming and leaving across two years, it wouldn’t be fair to use past records for qualifiers, thus setting the stage even. Another topic is the actual regular season stage. Pools and weeks are both possible ideas and we’re curious to know how the community envisions the structure of the tournament.

Please share any thoughts, proposals, or ideas you have for UUWC and keep this discussion thread civil. Thanks!

 

[Estarossa]

Qualifiers kinda suck, absolutely just in favour of merging two sets of teams so we don't have to do them. UK has had awful performances last two instances of this tour and been fairly devoid of UU community side players in the last one too, speaking as the manager for the team the last two times I'm absolutely in a position where I'd say the team should not exist this time and should be merged into Europe, which gives just one more merge to need to be done to facilitate this unless we get new teams desiring to happen.

Prefer weeks to pools personally as I felt PUWC especially showcased the format really well and was typically very popular for choosing weeks too with a fair bit of support for it. Prefer that you actually get more games in general out of it, especially as pools tends to involve a lot of dead games too once games stop mattering so ur unlikely to even get 3 games out of it, and more games the better for post home meta pushing etc.

 

[Sylvi]

I will try to create / help build a Team Germany since Germans playing SV is quite rare, so I will try to avoid that merge with Europe.

I agree with Estarossa on the matter that weeks are better than pools. The tournament should showcase as many games as possible for a great experience of POST Home SVUU.

Edit: free oras uu

 

[BigFatMantis]

I just want to lay out a few ideas/comments I had about the format, but want to preface it by saying I'm good with whatever is decided:

• I don't think we should pre-determine teams/regions based on what we "think" will get a lot or not a lot of signups. It's very possible we don't think a specific region gets much but then when sign ups open they have 12+ players. Additionally, as seen with China last time, a region can pop up out of nowhere with a dedicated and enthusiastic player base that has every right to have their own team, so pre-determining the teams beforehand is just not the way to go. Let the sign ups open, see what teams are getting players, and then can decide what regions are in based on that and what merges are necessary. You don't absolutely NEED a nice pretty number of teams also, there's always formats that can be implemented to address a non-divisible-by-4 total team situation.
• Is all CG basically decided? I ask this because I think 8 total slots is a good number, but 8 SV UU slots seems like extreme overkill and may negatively affect the experience if it's making it stale. I think 6 SV UU slots is good if it's all CG, but I don't think 6 total player slots is enough for a WC format and would leave out too many people. Personally, I'd like to see 10 total slots with 6 SV UU, 2 SS UU, 2 SM UU, as I think that preserves the spirit behind the CG focus, while also provides interest to many players that may not be all there on the CG train, and it gives enough diversity to make the tour generally more interesting to participants and spectators. Any other format that has more than 6 total slots but no more than 6 total CG slots is also fine, but I don't think we should totally commit to all CG if there are other more interesting options available.
• As for qualifiers, I think all teams should immediately start playing in whatever stage is first - having the bulk of the teams sit out 2 weeks doesn't serve anyone as realistically we all want to play and play now. As Monky said in the OP, there's no real basis for qualifiers anyways with a brand new gen. Just put all the teams in qualifiers to start, or in an actual pool stage that acts as qualifiers with multiple pools of 3 teams or however many teams works depending on signups. Not sure if weeks is ideal because of the large number of teams, so it'd be a bit skewed towards certain matchups, though "weeks" in a "qualifying" stage at the start in "pools" could work (no idea how other tiers did this but I imagine you could have, in an example with 16 teams, 4 groups of 4 that play against each other in weeks format for 3 weeks, and top 2 from the pool after the 3 weeks advance to final stage or something).

That's all, let's have a great World Cup.

 

[Ferenia]

^

 

[Dj Breloominati♬]

Regarding Timeline : Would like this to start after the pool stages of the main WCOP -- India in particular has a lot of overlapping playerbase for both these tours, and im sure this is also the case for a lot of Non-American teams, so it would be in the competition's best interest to postpone it until pools finish. Ensures the best quality of games.

Regarding Tiers : On one hand, 8 slots of SV sounds particularly good given if we follow this suggested timeline, the tour would start just as we'd get our first drops from home, so lots of games would mean better metagame development. On the other hand, uuwc has historically been the only place for "new" oldgen players to prove themselves (Chinese players like scalescale, wuqianying, and xujing broke into the scene after uuwc and have become mainstays after that). Thus, I think more consideration should be given to include some (if not all) oldgens while deciding the slots.
Something like 5 SV, 1 SS, 1 SM, 1 ORAS strikes a good balance -- There is representation for oldgens, and it wont be difficult for regions to field a starting LU given fairygens are slightly more popular / similar.

Here's to a good tour

 

[Melt Gibson]

Agree with not making all 8 slots SV and just making all of them fairygens, also agree that we should decide how to handle teams and merges AFTER signups take place. Outside of that, not much to say, would gladly manage/play for US East.

My optimal setup is probably along the lines of 5/6 SVUU slots and then the 2/3 remaining are comprised of some combination of SS, SM, and ORAS

 

[Askov]

Make it full CG or all gens (or at worst case SV - ADV), as much as i'd like a SV - ORAS tour it's too arbitrary and yall are just cherrypicking gens based on an alternative that shouldn't even exist in the first place

Just to not make this post an empty complaining, i'd support a full CG UUWC since it's the current SWC format and is a good opportunity to push up the meta development, considering that new home pokes and most likely a decent amount of old pre-home pokes will be dropping in July, and since it'll be a wild meta it'll favor whoever is keeping up with the new trends (or find out the brokens first)

 

[pokemonisfun]

It’s a long shot but could we make one of the CG slots blitz? UU could be herald a new future where blitz is common in team tours. Would definitely be interesting for variety but keeping the all CG focus (come on guys Monky said this was non negotiable...)

Maybe best if 3 blitz but tbh best of 1 is fine too and needs less teams.

I think we could even make an argument to stream these without delay for more viewing fun.

 

[pokemonisfun]

If Meru haha reacts my post you know it's a good idea guys come on

Also - maybe consider like a blitz tie break every week? If we're doing weeks like UUPL where the score can be 4-4 or 5-5, then a blitz tiebreaker to give an extra point or something to the winner would be cool

like a win is 3 points, tie with winning tie breaker is 1.5 points, tie with losing tie breaker is 1 point, losing is 0 points.

Apologies for spitballing a bit but I think we should try new things here seeing as it's a bit of a free tour (we didn't even have it last year) and gives us chance to experiment and prove UU can do cool new things

 

[PandaDoux]

All CG sucks but if you do that do at least like a lot of slots where a mon is banned / retested to make the tournament not boring to watch but all CG still sucks

Skyrio me haha pas

 

[Aqua Jet]

• Weeks > Pools
• Agree with the above, Would be open to a suspect slot if the council is looking at testing a bunch of things, would also prevent people from being boring and recycling teams in all slots
• Quals suck, if you're going to do them do it BFM's way
• I'd be open to Canada merging with other places, but would rather merges be decided a bit into signups because Idk how many Canadians will even sign up, I doubt several of our players from last year will be playing due to being banned or other reasons but am open and excited for newer players to be able to participate in their first UU team tournament

 

[spell]

suspect slots are, frankly, atrocious and should not be included in any tournament IMHO. weeks > pools i agree with because pools just suck all the fun out of the preparation phase and also are just impractical. anything else is just memes (especially blitz tiebreak). all cg is better than weird halfway between sv and oldgens like askov said as well

 

[pokemonisfun]

suspect slots are, frankly, atrocious and should not be included in any tournament IMHO. weeks > pools i agree with because pools just suck all the fun out of the preparation phase and also are just impractical. anything else is just memes (especially blitz tiebreak). all cg is better than weird halfway between sv and oldgens like askov said as well

I totally understand that blitz is more unusual but I was serious when I suggested incorporating it into the tournament in a slot or some tiebreaker system - I'm not just talk I swear, I have hosted a couple blitz tours in UU subforums before and it went fine. It's still totally fine if you don't like blitz and don't want to include it though.

But I just hope we all keep an open mind in our tournaments and see them to grow our community, I think UU has been getting bigger with every passing gen (UU discord went from 1650 people at the end of gen8 to 1950 today, competitive mons in general is growing on YouTube at least with freezai regularly getting over 100k views per video now, UU is certainly going to get a ton of attention in July with home) and I truly think there are a bunch of untapped sources of growth and news ways to grow we haven't started yet for no good reason. We don't have to do blitz and we don't even have to change wcop much from 2021, although I guess we seem to want weeks now, but we should definitely be willing to try out new things

 

[BigFatMantis]

UUWC

 

[Monky25]

Hello everyone, the UU tournament planning team thank you all for the great discussion both on forums and discord. We have determined our plans for the upcoming UUWC and will share in this thread. We can’t please everyone but we feel that most of the community in addition to ourselves is satisfied with this.

Regions: Out of the 14 prior regions, the United Kingdom has been removed, as it is a region that hasn’t done well in prior years and the captain doesn’t intend to pick up the pieces of a limited and unsuccessful team. As such, UK will be merged with Europe. Meanwhile, other regions in contention such as Canada and Germany are dependent on signups as to whether they are in the tournament. Regions not on the list of prior regions can make a team during signups. The different teams for the tournament are decided at the end of the first week of signups alongside managers for each team, so be sure to sign up as early as possible to have your team in UUWC.

Signup Date: We have the UUWC signup date to be July 3. We intend to wait until WCOP pools are done before beginning the tournament. Additionally, by running signups by July 3, it gives the UU council 2 weeks to fix the metagame and handle urgent quickbans. To reiterate, signups for UUWC will go up July 3.

Tiers: Despite saying the tiers for the tournament were non-negotiable in the OP, as there was no mention of the idea of a mostly current gen UUWC rather than an all current gen UUWC in deciding the theme of the summer tour, we have noticed significant support for some old gen inclusion in UUWC. As such, we have come to a conclusion to feature the following tiers lineup in UUWC

6 SV / 1 SS / 1 SM

This way, the regions are still balanced out featuring mostly current gen slots as we are all navigating new waters with the tier changes from Pokémon Home, but also appeal to those who desire old gen inclusion with the two most recent generations that can be easy enough to pick up for newer players and not have an intense experience gap between regions.

Weeks vs Pools: We have come to the conclusion to feature pools in the tournament rather than weeks. The main rationale is the idea that prep with 6 SV teams per week can be considered very intense on players and pools help teams navigate at a better pace with the extended time period. Rules will be in place to keep scheduling issues from arising and are similar to how WCOP functions.

Ideas such as a suspect slot, blitz slot, ghosting slot, or Bo3 slot were all talked about but none got the support to be included in the tournament. As stated earlier, not everyone will be satisfied, but we do truly hope that our decision was the best possible one that makes the tournament a fun and positive experience for the UU community. Thank you all for the great feedback both on this thread and discord and we are all looking forward to a great UUWC!