2021 UU Circuit Feedback & 2022 Circuit Discussion

Lily

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Recently there’s been internal discussion about changes to the circuit. This would likely include a complete overhaul of the current points system and potentially a change in format to tours like Masters and Majors. Ideas that were thrown around included reverting the Masters format back to single elimination and a complete change to Majors format wise (or perhaps replacing it altogether). In addition, we will be considering putting UULT on hold for this year in order to possibly attempt a live tour in its place akin to a UU clone of Smogon Tour. Let us know what you think!!

This thread is for anyone who would like to post their thoughts or suggestions for the 2022 UU Tournament Circuit. Please post seriously; one-liners and shitposts will be deleted. Happy posting!
 

Adaam

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My thoughts:
  1. Abolish the Majors/Masters titles and rename them to Winter and Fall Seasonals. Make them both BO3 double-elimination. Pools format falls apart when players start dropping out and giving game changing wins away to other opponents, which punishes those who play early. Also, making one single elimination and the other double for the sake of relieving burden is a hacky way to address burnout. Double elimination is the objective more competitive format, and I dislike adopting an inferior one just because some people want a shorter tournament.
  2. The live tour idea is interesting, but they're going to bring the same issues Smogon Tour has wrt time zones, and I question if we have the playerbase size to make up for it. I also find dedicating 1-2 hours every weekend to play a tournament more intrusive than even UULT (I prefer laddering on weekdays for the most part)
  3. Keep UULT. It's the most exciting spectator wise since people can't hide games anymore, and it offers a unique element in counter-teaming other active ladder players during peak hours. I understand why many dislike it due to the volume of games required to qualify, however.
 

Moutemoute

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Hey there, heres my thoughts (edit : sniped while writing by Adaam, fuck) :

  • I'm personally not a hater of Majors and I think the pool format is actually quite nice. One of the reason Majors was criticized is because some people tend to drop of the pool once they're starting to lose (0-2 or 1-2) and know they'll not be able to make it to the next round which directly impacts the remaining players on the pool since they can be granted a free win while another player before could have lose etc.. Overall this leads to akward situations. I think that if we need to change something in this situation, it's how we handle people who are leaving mid-way the pool phase. I trully think those players should just be infracted. Make people understand that if you join a tour, do it for real or don't do it. Yeah it's pretty harsh but I think it's a good option.
  • I think double elimination tours are actually wack as fuck and I think this format should be exclude from any official tournament. Yeah it gives an opportunity if you fucked up your R1 but hey that's part of the game, you'll do better in the next circuit tournament. I know it's a rather counterflow opinion but hey, we're here to talk about those things. I definitively understand why it's a great option for a lot of people but still, ain't a big fan of it.
  • If you want to do a live tournament, sure go ahead this could be nice but I trully don't think this should be done to the detriment of UULT. I don't like UULT because it's a grinding thing but I trully think it allows some players to shine outside of the classic tournament formats where they would be in more trouble. Also this could be hard to schedule with all timezones etc..I don't know..
 
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I like Majors and the pool play and think it offers a really cool and unique experience for some lesser known players to sort of make a splash here. We had some cool results this year with people like xujing691691 popping off, etc, and it’s pretty exciting to know you are going to play 3-4 games for sure including one against a household UU name. I can understand why it may be less appealing to those that end up being “group leaders”, but I think it’s a lot of fun for everyone else. Not opposed to changing it up a bit, but I definitely don’t think we should axe the pool play. It’s fun for a lot of people and if it’s not working for everyone then surely there’s a way to make it better instead of axing it.

UULT was incredibly fun and engaging to watch and participate in and I definitely don’t think we should touch that.

Masters is whatever, it’s basically just Open but double elim and no overall Smogon point rewards. If there’s room to change something, it’s here, but I also think it’s fine as is. It’s just a basic tour, nothing particularly exciting or bad about it unless you hate Double Elim.

Add RBY to classic, it’s ready for it and it’s like 9 months away.

Re: Points - anything is fine IMO, if you do well throughout the year you’ll get points regardless of the system.
 

Expulso

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I think that due to UU Open's really high participation, it should award more points than any other UU tour. I might have been biased because my only UU circuit points all came from open, but when I looked at the sheet near the end of the year I thought UU Majors had too much influence on the standings relative to its size and difficulty. UU Majors had 137 participants, UU Masters had 154 participants, and UU Open had 466. This means the former 2 tours are much easier to get points in, making them act as a bit of a "shortcut". You could get 30 points from this year's UU Open only if you make it to Round 6, winning 5 straight series in the process. In Majors, you could get 30 points by making it out of your pool (3-1 in the 4 Bo1s, and for many people this was effectively 2-1 after one person gave a win) and then winning 1 series.

Other tiers like RU do give the same number of points to Open and their seasonals, but UU's Open is bigger than their Opens and the "seasonals" are a bit smaller. For instance, RU Open had 393 people and the RU Winter Seasonal had 256; it isn't too much of a stretch to give them the same point distribution, but UU's gap is bigger.

I'm proposing that we make the point distribution for UU Open more generous, giving 125 points to the winner and lifting the points associated with the other places accordingly.
 

pokemonisfun

Banned deucer.
I'm giving this advice assuming a few things:

1) In 2022, we will still have multiple (at least 2 and probably 3) UU team tours: UU premier league, UU world cup, and UU snake draft or substitutes of them).

2) The team tours will have roughly 50% of sign ups unable to play because of constraints

3) We're trying for the most competitive tours but they are all open to anyone who wants to sign up as long as they have a Smogon account

So here's some scattered thoughts:

1) Why are we considering replacing UULT? The reason wasn't mentioned in the OP. I think we should keep something with laddering considering how open and fair laddering is (anyone can do it, fewest barriers to entry)

2) The point system should be released for each tournament **before** it starts. UU majors had a messed up point system that was apparently only first commented on by me after I asked to see the circuit point distribution which apparently wasn't posted on the forums until I asked. It definitely gave too many points this year.

3) Pools format is horrible unless penalties for quitting is enforced, and I can understand why penalties are not really frequently enforced.

4) I dislike having leaders in pools. It seems to give an advantage to the leader since they don't have to play another leader. I believe all of these circuit tournaments should be completely open to anyone with a Smogon account and nobody should get an advantage.

5) If we keep a format with leaders, for transparency criteria to determine a leader should be posted at least after pools are made, if not before

6) If UU open has like 400, 500 or whatever number of players, it should have significantly more points awarded than tournaments with 100 or 150 sign ups. I think it should be more than 125 points which is what Expulso suggested, 150 or even more seems reasonable.

7) If UULT is kept, we should enforce the rule that you have to sign up with your alt and post it **before** starting your laddering run. That way, everything is completely public and it's not on the onus of the players to decide whether to play on a hidden alt or not.

8) Players like Torchic are pretty much coming into the community now purely because of their RBYness. I think this is good. We should add gen1uu to UU classic.

9) Adaam made a point of "Double elimination is the objective more competitive format, and I dislike adopting an inferior one just because some people want a shorter tournament." Which sounds nice but also, there is a limit (we can't do best of 17 for every tournament match which should be more competitive than best of 1 or 3, there is always a trade off and Adaam's post wrongly suggests there is no tradeoff here). That said, I think this trade off is worth it and support having a double elimination tournament

10) I don't think we should add another tournament without getting rid of one. But I propose getting rid of UU classic instead. The only reason I have is that it is not a gen8uu tournament (current gen) and I would like to unify the circuit under the current gen banner. It means it's easier to learn (one tier for the whole circuit). We should still keep UU classic but make it a UU subforum tour that doesn't award circuit points

11) Even if we don't add a live tour, I still support 10)

12) We should probably do more homework before deciding to do a live tour or not, compare playerbase sizes of Smogon Tour and our own playerbase, look at timezones, all of which can be roughly estimated by looking at signups for our team tours


Scattered thoughts...thanks for your consideration and making this thread
 

Moutemoute

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5) If we keep a format with leaders, for transparency criteria to determine a leader should be posted at least after pools are made, if not before
As the host of the last year UU Majors I can tell you what I've been told. Leaders of the pool must be trusty players among the community. They don't need to be good players or well known within the UU community, just to be trust worthy and able to support the host of the tournament in order to get all the matchs of their pool done. As such, you can have multiple good players within a pool.
 

Lily

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1) Why are we considering replacing UULT? The reason wasn't mentioned in the OP. I think we should keep something with laddering considering how open and fair laddering is (anyone can do it, fewest barriers to entry)
UULT actually has significantly more of a barrier to entry than any other tournament in our circuit. Yes, anyone can do it, but anyone can post "in" on a signups thread as well since none of our tours are invitational. UULT on the other hand requires not only that post but also many, many hours of laddering for the average person, which is weighted wildly in favour of those with the free time to do it. This has resulted in complaints to me that the playoffs phase ends up being much less competitive than the average tournament because most of the stronger players we have don't bother laddering for hours on end.

6) If UU open has like 400, 500 or whatever number of players, it should have significantly more points awarded than tournaments with 100 or 150 sign ups. I think it should be more than 125 points which is what Expulso suggested, 150 or even more seems reasonable.
I don't really want to weight Open this hard; I'm planning on redoing the entire points system but Open shouldn't be higher than any other tour (i.e. it should be tied for the maximum points available with our own delim tours). I don't think it's fair to attach such a high point number to any single elimination tournament.

10) I don't think we should add another tournament without getting rid of one. But I propose getting rid of UU classic instead. The only reason I have is that it is not a gen8uu tournament (current gen) and I would like to unify the circuit under the current gen banner. It means it's easier to learn (one tier for the whole circuit). We should still keep UU classic but make it a UU subforum tour that doesn't award circuit points
This is not something I'm willing to do for two main reasons:

- Classic already gives a minimal amount of points compared to all other tours
- Not giving Classic any points will just kill the tour, unfortunately. Signups will decrease hugely and the amount of people playing our oldgens will drop hard, which I don't want at all considering how much we're struggling to gain new players in those tiers already.

I agree with pretty much all of the rest of your points, just wanted to clarify these three. I intend to make a separate post later with my own thoughts too.
 

pokemonisfun

Banned deucer.
As the host of the last year UU Majors I can tell you what I've been told. Leaders of the pool must be trusty players among the community. They don't need to be good players or well known within the UU community, just to be trust worthy and able to support the host of the tournament in order to get all the matchs of the pool done. You can have multiple good players within a pool overall.
Thanks.

If this is true, it clearly doesn't work because I'd say (someone can double check on this if they want), that perhaps a majority of pools or close to it had someone drop out anyways in the middle of it. And the host was reluctant to make subs this year, I believe there were only 2 subs and only after they were requested by another player.

My larger point stands: these pool leaders, intentionally or not, are very good UU players and that they don't have to play each other gives them an advantage. I don't think anyone should play with an advantage in UU circuit which is why I dislike this.
 

pokemonisfun

Banned deucer.
UULT actually has significantly more of a barrier to entry than any other tournament in our circuit. Yes, anyone can do it, but anyone can post "in" on a signups thread as well since none of our tours are invitational. UULT on the other hand requires not only that post but also many, many hours of laddering for the average person, which is weighted wildly in favour of those with the free time to do it. This has resulted in complaints to me that the playoffs phase ends up being much less competitive than the average tournament because most of the stronger players we have don't bother laddering for hours on end.
Random thought to solve this issue, which I didn't notice before, thank you:

Cap the number of games to 100 or 150 (or something similar and ask Zarel or whoever is in charge to prevent decay for a week so people who ladder on Sunday aren't given an advantage over people who are only free on Tuesdays/Mondays).

Make it a rule that you can only use 1 alt per week.

Seems to solve the issue you pointed out...although I guess I just made another issue without realizing it
 

Moutemoute

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By the way, talking about UU Majors V & VI, there was 32 and 24 pools those years and out of the 32 and 24 pool leaders, this was their results :

For UU Majors V :

• 14 pool Leaders qualified for R2 by being 1st seed of their pool
• 7 pool Leaders qualified for R2 by being 2nd seed of their pool
• 11 pool Leaders did not qualified for R2

For UU Majors VI :

• 6 pool Leaders qualified for R2 by being 1st seed of their pool
• 8 pool Leaders qualified for R2 by being 2nd seed of their pool
• 10 pool Leaders did not qualified for R2

Overall stats :

35.7% of pool Leaders qualified by being 1st seed of their pool
26.8% of pool Leaders qualified by being 2nd seed of their pool
37.5% of pool Leaders did not qualified for R2
 
By the way, talking about UU Majors V & VI, there was 32 and 24 pools those years and out of the 32 and 24 pool leaders, this was their results :

For UU Majors V :

• 14 pool Leaders qualified for R2 by being 1st seed of their pool
• 7 pool Leaders qualified for R2 by being 2nd seed of their pool
• 11 pool Leaders did not qualified for R2

For UU Majors VI :

• 6 pool Leaders qualified for R2 by being 1st seed of their pool
• 8 pool Leaders qualified for R2 by being 2nd seed of their pool
• 10 pool Leaders did not qualified for R2

Overall stats :

35.7% of pool Leaders qualified by being 1st seed of their pool
26.8% of pool Leaders qualified by being 2nd seed of their pool
37.5% of pool Leaders did not qualified for R2
I was actually going to make a similar point using this - I don't think there is a super significant advantage that a "pool leader" has compared to other advantages that other players would have in totally randomized pools (there are bound to be certain "hell" pools with 3 well established players through randomizing). Overall, whether you have group leaders or not, someone is always going to have an advantage, but that is also the case in tours generally - rolling into pif first round of Masters already puts you at a disadvantage compared to rolling into NewUserSignedUp2021. Doesn't mean you can't win, or that you can't lose to newuser, but there is a clear advantage and disadvantage there. It's just the way these things go.

That being said, whether you have pool leaders or do something totally different, I definitely think it's important to keep the pools format. It's unique enough to offer a different feel than a standard tour, and pool play guarantees several games against different opponents and many (though not all) find it fun and rewarding, especially a newer user that gets to fight a more established UU player (it can be very exciting). So, please keep pools. Reorganize it however you see fit, but I would really hope you do not get rid of them.

Also UULT is fine - it's the most exciting tour to watch for several weeks. It doesn't need any fixing, and you should definitely have a tour that centers on laddering in some way. It's a grind yeah, but so is life. Matching up against other UULT players on ladder while laddering is also very cool and exciting from both a player and a spectator point of view.
 

Amane Misa

Bring Them Home Now!
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I don't think we should get rid of UULT, which feels like an integral part of Smogon to me.

While the free time argument is valid, I am feeling like it's being exaggerated here because you don't need that many hours to qualify; the more you win without losing, the fewer wins you need to get to a qualifying position, and the more time you save. In the last UULT I qualified, I only played from my phone while answering calls in a covid hotline and I don't even think I was that good of a player.

Cap the number of games to 100 or 150 (or something similar and ask Zarel or whoever is in charge to prevent decay for a week so people who ladder on Sunday aren't given an advantage over people who are only free on Tuesdays/Mondays). Make it a rule that you can only use 1 alt per week.
I am not an expert in how the ladder works but I thought of potential issues that may arise from this:
  1. Wouldn't this give an advantage to people who ladder during dead hours? As someone who usually plays during dead hours, I constantly face people around 1300-1500 while being 1600+. Technically, if I tried to qualify, I could grind during the dead hours, and while I would get little points from every win I still think I'd have a really good shot at qualifying while avoiding a lot of other UULT players and high-ladder players in general. I am not even sure this is a decay-related issue, though, so please correct me on that one if I am wrong.
  2. Limiting players to ladder on only one account is mandatory, but once a player meets the games cap I think they should be allowed to sign up once more in the cost of having their previous account not be considered. Tilt is a big factor in laddering and the punishment of not being able to qualify for a whole week just because you're tilted is too much.
With that said, I really like the idea and I think that if executed correctly, it could revolutionize ladder tournaments.
 

pokemonisfun

Banned deucer.
I don't think we should get rid of UULT, which feels like an integral part of Smogon to me.

While the free time argument is valid, I am feeling like it's being exaggerated here because you don't need that many hours to qualify; the more you win without losing, the fewer wins you need to get to a qualifying position, and the more time you save. In the last UULT I qualified, I only played from my phone while answering calls in a covid hotline and I don't even think I was that good of a player.



I am not an expert in how the ladder works but I thought of potential issues that may arise from this:
  1. Wouldn't this give an advantage to people who ladder during dead hours? As someone who usually plays during dead hours, I constantly face people around 1300-1500 while being 1600+. Technically, if I tried to qualify, I could grind during the dead hours, and while I would get little points from every win I still think I'd have a really good shot at qualifying while avoiding a lot of other UULT players and high-ladder players in general. I am not even sure this is a decay-related issue, though, so please correct me on that one if I am wrong.
  2. Limiting players to ladder on only one account is mandatory, but once a player meets the games cap I think they should be allowed to sign up once more in the cost of having their previous account not be considered. Tilt is a big factor in laddering and the punishment of not being able to qualify for a whole week just because you're tilted is too much.
With that said, I really like the idea and I think that if executed correctly, it could revolutionize ladder tournaments.
If I understand your 1. correctly, you're saying that people who ladder during dead hours can farm easier, lower rated people and that will let them qualify more easily than people who ladder during active hours who have to play harder, higher rated players.

In response,

1) I don't know if a cap on games really affects this. I.e., even if we had no cap, doesn't your point hold true?

2) I don't think this is actually a big advantage or any advantage at all. The mathematical nature of Elo means you get fewer points for beating lower rated players (I know you know this already). I just don't know if it's correct that you rather play a a random 1300-1400 or a god like Sage, Frozen Man, Corperate N, etc.

Regarding your other point, I prefer to only give 1 shot per week since you have 4 weeks. If you don't make it, tough, obviously not everyone can make it (or else it wouldn't be a competition).

Another idea to finesse this tournament:

As stated previously, I support forcing players to make their alts and post their alt before laddering, so we know who is who (all games are public) and it is not on the onus of the player to decide whether they hide alts or not. Some tiers already do this.

To make this better, we could just have a sign up week like normal tours. It would go like:

Week 1: Sign up for week 1 of UULT. At the end of week 1 but before laddering starts, a mod would go through to verify all the sign ups have 0 games played.

Week 2: Sign up for week 2 of UULT goes up and concurrently laddering for week 1 starts.

And so on and so forth.
 
I don’t think we need to cap the number of ladder games or limit it to one chance and one alt to ladder. If someone wants to play a bajillion ladder games I say let them, no big deal.

I agree though that players should be required to post their alts publicly before starting to ladder. I actually think this is already the rule? I’m just not sure it’s enforced, but we should start enforcing it and verifying the players so we don’t have another situation with bad alts playing.
 

Plague von Karma

Banned deucer.
Add RBY to classic, it’s ready for it and it’s like 9 months away.
8) Players like Torchic are pretty much coming into the community now purely because of their RBYness. I think this is good. We should add gen1uu to UU classic.
I agree with pretty much all of the rest of your points
Holy based, sign me up

Super down to see RBY's continued inclusion in tours, especially given the explosive growth it's been seeing for pretty much a whole year. I think my past arguments for its inclusion largely make up the arguments I would make, so go here, here (this one was iffy), and here for that. This tier is seeing more entrants than some of the other UUs in past old gen-applicable tours, and now that they've been given the chance, players are also establishing themselves. I strongly believe that these past few tours and their large entrant counts have shown that this is not simply a bolt of lightning; I hope this momentum allows the tier to stick around for a good long time.
 

pac

pay 5000, gg?
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I would like to also show my support for RBY in UU Classic. As an avid member of the RBY Lower Tier community (moreso UU these days though, have basically quit NU altogether), it has been an extremely nice experience being able to participate in UUSD. Overlapping into the greater UU community has done nothing but good. From everything I've heard, most people thought the tier went rather smoothly in UUFPL and UUSD. Due to this, I don't see why we couldn't be allowed to be in UU Classic. We get more signups than half the oldgens anyways.
 

phoopes

I did it again
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Basically just here to +1 RBY UU

I think if you look back at the last few tours, you’ll see there’s a wide variety of top players to fill slots.I think the tier is the perfect balance between “the people who are supposed to win win most often” and “the talent pool is deep enough that you’ll see a good variety in results.” We’ve had lots of tours recently and I think they’ve all went pretty smoothly, plus bridging the gap and making our communities intertwine a bit more is always great. The more the merrier!
 

Notily

dirt rich
i think UULT is valuable as a funnel to grow the community. idk about actual statistics but it makes sense in my head that ladder tours are probably one of the more effective ways to introduce more casual ladder players to the uu tour scene / tour scene in general. also, for people looking to improve, ladder tours make it so much easier to get a lot of decent quality games vs established players which can be difficult sometimes for newer faces to the community.

i think i would prefer a regular single or double elim tour with stour tiers (ie ss / sm / oras) as opposed to a live tour format. i agree with adaam that we probably dont have the playerbase to make the live tour format work. at the same time, think that classic is a bit out of place as the only circuit tour with old gens, especially when circuit playoffs are current gen only. idk it feels that if we're going to include classic in circuit then i think we should have more tours that feature old gens, which im assuming is why an stour-esque tour is being proposed to begin with. i think it strikes a good balance between keeping the focus on current gen while still involving older gens. i also personally would like to see circuit playoffs be bo3 w/ stour tiers, game 1 always current gen, loser counterpicks tier for next game. in my head thats the best way to keep things balanced between people who qualified mainly through points acquired from cg tours vs those who got them through old gen tours. but i also didnt put a ton of thought into that so idk lmao

edit: also want to suggest running a proper uu stour clone as a one-off, not for circuit points tour with a small cash prize. i wouldn't mind throwing in a couple bucks to hopefully attract the playerbase needed to run it properly and i'm sure you wouldn't be hard pressed to find others. most mons players are dirt poor kids / college students who'll gladly spend an hour playing the game every weekend for a shot at $50 i feel like
 
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Lily

wouldn't that be fine, dear
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UU Leader
Signups for UU Masters IV are up! Given this I'd really like to sort all of this stuff out within the next week. Also, I'm looking for a host since I don't really wanna take this on - if someone feels like it please PM me here / on Discord (Lily#0568) and I can transfer the OP to you.
https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/uu-masters-iv-signups.3695989/

Anyway, from what I've gathered so far:

- I made masters delim. Whatever replaces Majors doesn't have to follow this format but I think it just makes the most sense to have a delim tour since Open is single elim.

- Keep UULT, fair enough. Don't really like the idea of a game cap or anything and would rather keep the laddering portion the same if we do wanna keep the tour. Thoughts on a swiss / maybe delim format for playoffs? I feel like it'd help with one of the main reasons I personally dislike it (spending hours laddering to be knocked out in a single series) and makes the tour nicer overall but maybe it's just me. I do think it'd help though. Doesn't solve the issue of laddering being a requirement that I think is not a great thing to include in the circuit, but that's okay. Alts are still forced to be public btw as far as I'm aware so idk where that came from.

- RBY in classic? I personally don't mind this although if it were solely up to me I'd wait until 2023; more of the general UU community is likely to be familiar with the tier at that point and it also gives the meta - which is still quite new all things considered - some time to develop. Would like to hear more opinions on this from both the RBY mains and non-mains. I personally thought our experimentation with RBY in UU Snake was a huge success; we saw a lot of high-quality sets, a bunch of new faces have popped up in the UU community from the RBY community that have made for great presences and overall most managers seemed to get along great with their RBY slots, so minimal hiccups overall.

- Majors has gotta get replaced, everyone hates it. Nightmare to host and the format just kind of sucks. Not personally one for gimmicky tours where the circuit is concerned - homefield advantage a la Ubers / NU is something to consider but we do already have Classic in the circuit so idk. Otherwise a no johns tour is something I'd love to explore since whatever the tour ends up being should ideally be quite short.

- Still gotta work on points, I'll have an update on that whenever I get the time.

Anything I've missed? Pls let me know, this is a lot to take in at once lol. Thanks for all the responses so far!
 

Plague von Karma

Banned deucer.
- RBY in classic? I personally don't mind this although if it were solely up to me I'd wait until 2023; more of the general UU community is likely to be familiar with the tier at that point and it also gives the meta - which is still quite new all things considered - some time to develop. Would like to hear more opinions on this from both the RBY mains and non-mains. I personally thought our experimentation with RBY in UU Snake was a huge success; we saw a lot of high-quality sets, a bunch of new faces have popped up in the UU community from the RBY community that have made for great presences and overall most managers seemed to get along great with their RBY slots, so minimal hiccups overall.
RBY UU is about as old as SM in its current state, with its initial resurrection on Smogon coming up in 2016, and some of the key players like Lusch, Enigami, and Khaetis can be seen in that thread: the players here have at least paid it mind since then! This would actually put modern interpretations on the tier in line with GSC UU, to my knowledge, but don't take my word for it and absolutely correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway, on Pokemon Perfect, RBY UU's modern interpretations date back a bit further, 2014-2015ish I believe. The tier as a whole technically dates back to 2005, though as is commonly known, it was functionally changed when the entire BL was removed in 2011, and it saw minimal exploration until Pokemon Perfect picked up steam. While significant metagame developments have occured since 2016 and the playerbase began exploding in 2019, the general feel and function of the tier has not changed much. You've still got the Wrap play, the Pokemon from B and above are pretty much locked into the tier never to come down, so on, so forth. It's definitely new to the greater UU playerbase, but "modern RBY UU" is reaching 6 years old this year!

All-in-all, if age is the sole issue, I think that RBY UU in Classic is a perfectly viable option.
 

phoopes

I did it again
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Mostly here to piggyback off May but…

personally thought our experimentation with RBY in UU Snake was a huge success; we saw a lot of high-quality sets, a bunch of new faces have popped up in the UU community from the RBY community that have made for great presences and overall most managers seemed to get along great with their RBY slots, so minimal hiccups overall.
If this is true then…

I personally don't mind this although if it were solely up to me I'd wait until 2023
I don’t really get why you’d wait another year!

You’re right, I suppose that does give the general UU community to become more familiar with the tier, but I’d argue an even better way for the communities to come together and become more familiar with each other is more inclusion sooner (this year). We’ve just had a good amount of tournaments for RBYUU that went well and there’s more coming up too, so there’s plenty of chances to look back at some replays, join the Discord/get involved that way, keep up with upcoming tournaments like the pacvitational… it’s a good time for RBYUU. Oh and by the way RBYers love content creation, we have people like Amaranth and May that have made videos before but I know there’s more people like me and pac that have expressed interest in it too (I actually just posted my first ever recorded live set commentary the other day and plan on doing more) so yeah. I feel like between the great resources we have with the smogdex having been worked on a ton, the Discord, videos, etc. it’s easier than ever to get into the tier and waiting until 2023 isn’t necessary. Let’s get it in in 2022!

As for the age thing May already covered it but yeah, I don’t really see age as an issue. There have been significant meta developments but that’s just because we have a super cool, super fun, super active playerbase rather than it being too new of a meta or something like that.
 

Aqua Jet

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Heya, you wanted some opinions from non-RBY mains on the subject of RBY inclusion so I figured I'd give my two cents. I support RBY being included in Classic, for the sole reason that they were part of UUSD with relatively no hiccups, as well as the fact that I view RBY to be just as much of a UU oldgen as any other. This means that they are as deserving to have representation in UU Classic as tiers such as SM or ORAS. In addition, I think that phoops raised an interesting point while talking about why RBY should enter classic in 2022. They mentioned all of the resources that are available to newcomers to the tier. As someone who, during tour nights, had to learn the tier from the bottom up, I can testify that they were extremely helpful and because of them, I was able to learn RBY much easier than I was in other tiers, such as DPP. I don't really see a need to wait until 2023 in order to include RBY because again, I was able to understand the fundamentals of the tier within a month of playing a few games/day.

On the topic of UULT, I really like Lily's idea of having a double elimination or Swiss format finals. I think this would enhance the experience for those who are able to qualify since they wouldn't have hours of laddering riding on 2-3 games, and would also bring more hype to the tournament. In addition, it would also bring more games which I know the greater UU community would appreciate.

TLDR: Add RBY to 2022 Classic, Make UULT playoffs Double Elimination or Swiss
 

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