Another tourney suggestion by melcakes: new tourney suggestion thread!

Question

Hey! I know what you're thinking, "this guy again!"

It seems like in the last tournament thread I made, people pretty much agreed on having specialized tourneys instead of regular tourneys with Smogon rules, to which I now kinda agree with. But I did bring up the point that the old tourney thread is way dated and the fact we're having to play tourney suggestions made by and voted on by users who were active 5+ years ago is kinda wack.

So what I'm proposing to the community is closing said old thread and starting a new one! Personally I think the best way to handle this would be:

• Same rules from the first thread apply to the new thread, the system still works
• Grandfather any top ideas. Perhaps any suggestion made by a currently active user that has at least 8 votes? This would probably only apply to KRLW's Polytype tour, sumwun's Monotype/move tour and Staka's Super Staff Bros. tour. Or we can change the grandfather clause as we see fit.
• Close the old thread but don't hide it until, if at all, all grandfathered tours have been played.
• Like an idea from the old thread that won't get grandfathered? Like a tourney that's already been played? Those ideas shouldn't be kept off limits! Put them back on the table, if people want to play them, they should suggest and vote for them.

Would really like to hear from people who plan to play in future tournaments & especially from members of staff.

PLEASE PLEASE DON'T JUST LEAVE A VOTE, LEAVE A COMMENT ON WHAT YOU THINK SO THE STAFF HAS FEEDBACK.

No need to be anonymous with your support <:D

Comments

I think this is a pretty good idea, ngl.

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Have no idea why this shouldn't work, the upvotes will now be fair for everyone and even if there was an old tour you liked you can just repost it.

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good

I think if people want, Standard Formats like OU and such can be suggested, or can be filler tours in between the suggested tours (or maybe even two tours going on at once if people don't want to play the gimmick tours?)

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agreed ppl should be able to suggest those types of tours as well if they get voted to the top that means ppl wanna play them,,,

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I also support the idea of redoing good tour ideas. We could also improve/update previous tour ideas when grandfathered, if necessary. :P

It might be worth setting new/more strict suggestion guidelines and hide more undesirable tour ideas to make the thread less cluttered with bad/unwanted ideas. :P

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something along the lines of no votes after 1 month or less than 4/5 votes after 6 months perhaps?

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or tour ideas in the negatives like what ninja enforced on the old thread

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this guy again!

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For real though this is a great idea, and I like the way you outlined it; we're definitely long overdue for a new tournament thread. I hope we don't grandfather too many tournaments, bc that would defeat the point of making a new thread, but it sounds like it's only a couple that we'd plan on bringing over, so it's chill.

If we do make a new tour thread though, I think it would be worthwhile to institute some type of moderation. Back when I first joined, I remember tour ideas would be regularly hidden after a while if they kind of stagnated in support; I had a couple ideas on there that met that fate. But nowadays, I think that must've fallen to the wayside, since we're almost at 100 ideas, some of which have been around forever. I definitely support putting in stricter guidelines for less clutter, but I think it would also be worthwhile to have a couple staff members specifically in charge of enforcing those guidelines instead of leaving it up to the staff as a whole to enforce it, so that the new thread doesn't become a repeat of the old. Maybe some of the existing staff members that are active in tours could be in charge of that (melcakes, KRLW, sumwun, PX, Staka)?

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what's the point of letting experts host when they can't even hide?

Answer 1

Yes, yes. Been on my to-do list for a long time. I have tons of threads I want to make soon and this is one of them.

I am personally not a fan of keeping the old votes system, though. Votes are swayed by how active the userbase is at any given point, and distorted by people who are no longer active. It will eventually cause a problem again and I want a solution that is permanent. You can share your ideas, or completely disagree with me and suggest we keep the current system anyway.

I think we can simply re-post any ideas we liked in the new thread, and perhaps run polls for which tournament we will run. Maybe votes can be used to see which suggestions 'qualify' for the poll.

Another part of the reason I/we haven't posted any thread yet is that I'm mulling over some systemic changes to the way we run tournaments, e.g. keeping to a real schedule. You can give us suggestions for that as well. I think the lot of it should be finalised all at once.

Comments

yea i think adding that 2nd round of voting, taking the top 3 ideas that are currently in the thread would be the easiest way to fix having extremely dated tours, at least for maybe like 2-3 years. not saying im going to moderate the new thread (bc no modding abilities) but i will def be active in the thread and will try to work with staff when necessary.

Also super down with overhauling tournament processes. stuff like seeding, staff only hosting and hiding entrant's answers after they've been knocked out of the tourney would all positively affect the tournament experience. maybe even staff/council organized theme tours (yes out there i know) for stuff like halloween or christmas

if u wanna bounce some ideas at me or need me to elaborate on anything hmu on my wall or on the server,,,

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Maybe we should just post a new tournament thread and close all the old ones every 1 to 3 years.

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@melcakes I pictured the poll as having a cutoff system, e.g. 'tours without 3+ votes after x period of time will not qualify' but the top three could work too. My main issue with that is it still has the problem of considering old suggestions with more votes before other, newer ones -- just at a lesser scale. I think the ease of getting the first few votes is relatively constant over time, but outliers like tours with 10+ votes are only possible in peak activity periods. I suppose we'd also have to be careful not to let the poll have too many options... maybe we just force it to include a set number of ideas from the past year or something?
Seeding is a really interesting idea, but it would come with tons of formality that I'm not sure our tourneys are ready for (or that is even their goal to begin with). I'd also ask questions about whether the Monotype LC tour could be used to make seeds for a standard OU tourney, for example -- how do we build integrity into that system?
sumwun made a thread a while ago about how tournaments can/should be officiated that also contained a 'code of conduct' for competitors. Any rules/standards come up with now could be added to that quite easily, and it could be advertised in the new thread.
@sumwun Yeah that idea is pretty much the barometer for any others we think of. It's not as permanent as I would like, but it's reasonable. I'd prefer that we didn't accrue many iterations of the exact same thread, but it might be the best option, seeing as many other forums do it anyway.

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what do you think of this ruleset:
- an idea with less than 2/3 votes after one month will be hidden
- an idea with less than 4-6 votes after 3 months will be hidden
- any idea that has 5/6+ votes when it's time to vote for the tourney will be placed on the poll with a max of 4/5 ideas (originally i was thinking 6 but 6 is a lot of choices for a poll that might get 10 minimum, 16 maximum votes)
- ideas that place in the bottom 2 twice in a row will be hidden and cannot be reposted for 6 months
- if an idea doesnt get picked after 3/4 times on the poll its dropped and the idea is hidden and the idea cannot be posted again for 6 months
- allow 2, maybe 3 suggestions from any one user at a time. i think 2 is better but it's pretty strict

think it's something you gotta just play around with and tweak to see what works

and as for seeding, i think you just have to go by logic. nebby won the last tour with kirbs the runner and krlw and jofly were 1/2 before that so they would all be top 4, its a little tricky to think about NOW but i think when the next tour sign ups fill up the host could figure it out pretty easily (again something i would be happy to help with). ALSO, it think best of 3's and 16 person tours should be standardized

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Sorry for being slow af replying to this. These are my thoughts, which you are very much welcome to contest/ disagree with/ prove wrong.
- I've really cooled off using PokeBase votes for this. I think their variable value over time means it can be tricky to make fair, real-time estimations of how many votes a post should have to stay up. However, I think the first two or three votes are fairly consistent and could be used in a cut-off system. In short, I think the first dot you wrote is good (maybe with the time period extended to two months?) but I think sorting the tours should be left to the poll after that point.
- I'm not really feeling the hide + re-suggest system you mentioned toward the end. I think any suggestion that qualifies for the poll once should stay public for visibility/discussion, at least until it becomes clear that it'll never get selected. However, we should absolutely have a separate system that determines when/if each suggestion will reappear on the poll (which, per the above, doesn't involve PokeBase votes). I think the only suggestions that should be removed on a timer are the ones that don't qualify for the poll.
- What's the goal of only allowing a certain number of tournaments from a person at a time? If the concern is centred around people spamming really badly thought out ideas, rest assured that the new thread will have its own regulations for suggestion quality. If we do this then I think there should be an exemption for re-posts of ideas from the original thread (which I think we should encourage).
- It'd be smart to limit the number of ideas on the poll. I think five or six is a good number. Precisely what goes on the poll could perhaps be determined by a descending 'tier' system, where suggestions that don't poll well will drop a tier and get lower priority for future appearances in the poll. The details of such a system would need to be thought out... we could design it to mix brand-new suggestions with past suggestions that have polled well, and fill the gaps with others when we're low on new/popular suggestions. I think it's important that new suggestions appear on the poll quickly, so whatever system we have in place can find out if they're a realistic chance of getting selected.
- None of our ideas address the likely glut of qualifying suggestions we'll get for the first poll that goes live after the new thread is made. (We will definitely get more than five or six qualifiers.) I think the best solution is to just include all the qualifying suggestions, and for the first few polls, be more sparing with which ideas we hide/drop a tier/etc so everybody gets a fair shot. It might be ugly, but it's better than the old system and we're doing this for the long run anyway.
- I 100% agree Bo3 (or simply first to two) should be the going format. That might help with a hypothetical seeding system too, since match differential can break ties. 16-player would be an ideal standard, but I don't think we'll always get that many participants.
- If we do start a seeding system, I'd want there to a consistent system in place for determining the seeds too. I wouldn't want tour organisers making it up on the fly every time. Maybe create a points system based off the results of the last three tours? Still begs the question of how the brackets would be arranged.

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Honestly I'll just go with whatever you're thinking atm, sounds like we've got a working plan and we should prob just pull the trigger at this point imo. Don't think it needs to be working perfectly at first as long as it works, we'll figure out what exactly to do a lot faster with a new functioning thread than just theorycrafting at this point.

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Just a quick update that I haven't forgotten about this, and I/we will be doing something about it when we've got some time. It's one of a number of things I want to be done by the year's end, not sure what will happen first.