Suggestion for the community: Regular Smogon rules for tourneys

Question

Hey DB!

So now that we've got the server up to date and working properly, I think it's time we try to ramp up a more battling-centric userbase. Using the dedicated DB Showdown server, a lot of us have been playing the smogon standardized tiers that Showdown offers, mainly OU, for fun. Every now and then when we have enough users, we'll run single elimination tournaments for the more random metagames too, you should log on, it's lots of fun.

Anyway, the point of this post is to poll the community, do you all want more standardized tournaments with tiers such as OU, UU, Ubers, Monotype, etc.? Or do you want to continue with the old tournament suggestion thread (currently we're on old suggestions from 2014, all of which were voted on by inactive users who will never log in here again). Last time we did something like this was just under 2 years ago in the UU mini-tour, which was a pretty big success having 14 players.

Leave your thoughts, opinions, suggestions below! We're (me <:I) listening.

Comments

great idea pal

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A combination of both seems good to me.

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I personally like the non-standard rulesets that we use for our tournaments. Their unpredictability makes them more enjoyable for me. But having some more standardized formats like OU and VGC would probably help attract more serious competitive crowds to the site, which would be very nice.
In particular, I can certainly understand the complaint about all of our tournament ideas coming from a 6+ year old thread populated mostly by posts and votes from long-inactive users. Maybe it would be better to retire the old thread and make a smaller tour idea thread every season, which is then hidden when the next tour has been decided. This way, tournament ideas and votes are always coming from active users, and if we make popular formats like OU and VGC default suggestions on these threads, it’s likely that we’ll see those going through more often.
Idk, just spitballing here.

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I agree with KRLW; the unconventional tours we have here are pretty charming, and make it a lot more interesting and personalized than just doing standard rulesets. I also agree that the tournament section is pretty outdated; I think only one suggestion that made it to the first page as of now was made recently, and the rest are relics of like 5 years ago (though that's probably in part due to a general decline in membership over the years, which means less people are upvoting new suggestion, as well as newer suggestions getting buried since there's just so much to go through), so I think a new tournament ideas thread would be a good idea, if nothing else.
I'm not necessarily against the standardized tournaments though, since they have their benefits too. What we seem to be doing currently is having specialized tours about 4 times a month, so maybe in the off season between them we can host more mini-tours like the UU one you mentioned, so people that want to battle on here still can under a tournament setting, as like a way to reset in between all the specialized rulesets

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(PS if we end up doing away with the current tournament format at least let the one currently in progress (the Avatar Tour) go through before we're done entirely bc I'm really excited to host that one please please please)

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To to be clear - it's not one or the other. We can have both

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I see no good reason to play with Smogon rules here when I can play with Smogon rules on Smogon.

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I think this can be accomplished by having tournaments with the /tour command every once in a while when there is an abundance of people on Showdown!. This happens a lot in Showdown! chat rooms anyways, and it is fulfilling enough, to me at least, that a tournament is held like this. :P

I think the biggest thing here is that while the server is getting more activity, as it still is pretty small in that regard. It is entirely your choice to be active on the server or not, but I want to encourage and promote hanging out there more; while you play Showdown!'s main or other times that you'd want to join. If we boost the amount of regulars, activity, and vitalize the server a bit more (which will better reflect the active userbase here), we can have more involvement in our wacky tourneys and more /tour command mini-tours, which should more than satisfy everyone involved. :P

Just my opinion, though. :P

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Lotta great points made ya'll
I'm thinking the right move right now would be to reform the old tourney thread or just completely make a new one and let people pretty much suggest any tour idea, even if it's a completely standardized smogon tier instead of something wacky. That way when people want to play something like an official DB OU tier, they'll just vote for it.

Might reform the question to say this, but... LMK

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I see no good reason to play with people from our db-community here when I can play with randoms on Smogon.

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Are you implying that the randoms on Smogon are not a community?

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You completely misunderstood and what was being said sumwun

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In that case, what was being said?

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That we wanted regulated tournaments in OUR community, not A community. Playing against people you know and being able to exert a greater influence and be more likely to be heard in decisions and also just be different from smogon has its appeals separate from just fighting randoms on ladder or whatever. Saying the smogon ladder or tours exist is missing the reason why we want these tours here

Answer 1

Alright, I thought about this and have prepared a different kind of proposal. If you don't like it, that's fine; this doesn't have to be the answer. :P

Firstly, we will hold the next tourney regularly so that Felix doesn't have to miss out on being the host of a cool tour (Kinda funny that the Avatar Tour is going to be held with the popularity of Avatar on Netflix going up).

Second, the main problem that has surfaced is that the people who wanted to participate in the tours aren't and the people now may not want to do so. So, my solution is to have voting and choosing the tour at signups, so that whoever participates wants to play whatever tour it becomes. This is a bit more complicated than it sounds, so here comes the long posts guy ™ explanation. :P

We can do this 2 ways: Loose or More refined. Loose is where you can vote for any tour on the designated thread when you signup like so:
^{Taking a note from Smogon's book here}

Trippy Soup
GMT -4

First most Preferred
Second most Preferred
Third most Preferred

(you can vote for tournament thread formats and Smogon formats) 1st most gives 3 Points to the format, 2nd gives 2 Points, and 3rd gives 1 point. Whichever format is voted for with the most points wins. If there is a tie or all of the points are too spread out, the host can choose what regular format tour to do since the voting wasn't great.

The Refined version has the host pick a few formats (some from the thread and some normal) and have those as the only choices and have a format chosen as the default in case of a bad vote spread, so that the participants know exactly what to expect and still have freedom. An example with 6 choices may look like this:

Available formats:
I will Follow You e.e
The Avatar Tour
Super Staff Bros Brawl for DB
The Polytype Tour
[Gen7] Battle Factory Tour
UU Tour
(Default) OU Tour

Other than that, all of the hosting and participation rules apply. We also might want to make a new, fresh thread for tour ideas and not hide any tour ideas anymore. Or, alternatively, hide all of the bad tour ideas and un-hide good ones like I Will Follow You e.e and Maybe Mono-Arceus. And not hide ideas after they've been used. Cool tours deserved to be played every once in a while. :P

Hope I Helped!

What's your thoughts on this? Hope it wasn't a waste of your time. :P

Comments

I think the host shouldn't be allowed to repeat past tournaments.

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What happens when all tournaments are past tournaments? What happens when all participants want to play past tournaments? :P

People don't stop having OU Tours because they had an OU Tour. I just feel like if participants want to have an old tourney they should be able to. :P

I guess the voting list should favor more new tours than old. A ratio for old to regular format to new tours on the list could be 1 : 2 : 3. :P

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That tournament ideas thread isn't going to run out of ideas anytime soon.

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That's not to say that it will run out of good ideas that people want to do. :P

I'm just saying there is a lack of regular and redone tour ideas and that might be something worth looking into. :P