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Correct games are public but I requested alts to be public (you have to sign up on a public alt so people know who you are). Public alts were not enforced last year (I actually PM'd the host but received no response when I brought this up).
Some ladder tours already have public alts. The logic is that the onus should not be on the player to decide whether to hide their games, and tournament games should be completely public.
The rules were ambiguous in my eyes - the rules said you had to sign up on an alt that was close to your Smogon username or an abbreviation.
Some people just abbreviated their username to a single letter so you couldn't tell who it was. I thought the point of the rule having an alt close to your Smogon username or an abbreviation was so your alt would be known so this is why I thought it was ambiguous, at the least, I think it should be made clear whether you're allowed to play on a hidden alt.
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!
Been regularly discussing this internally but forgot to originally post on this thread, but gonna offer my opinions on the points Lily summarised as the person who hosted most of the 2021 Circuit.
- Masters as Delim: Definitely in support of having this Masters/ssnl whatever you wanna call it slot here as a delim tour, adds a nice bit of variety and delim has obvious benefits in terms of competitiveness / hax or mu mitigation etc. Definitely think we should limit to only ever doing one delim tour in the circuit though, they take up an absurd amount of time and end up running practically b2b when there's multiple of them (not to mention they aren't necessarily always super popular cause of this).
- Keeping UULT: Not a fan of UULT as a Circuit tour personally, the qualifying rounds for this tour just demand so much time and effort in a format that's already pretty disliked (laddering) by a lot of people, and its very noticeable when you look at all the strong players that aren't even attempting to qualify for this tour each year. Given the support for it in this thread my opinion on this would definitely be to follow a Swiss playoffs route akin to OLT, as Lily states its hella demotivating to spend an absurd amount of time qualifying to be able to be knocked out in one round, and offers both potentially higher quality playoffs, an opportunity to run Swiss format without constant cancering, and helps make qualifying more appealing when you have more of a lifeline against being knocked out immediately.
- Removing Majors: Absolutely yes. This tour is a bit of a nightmare to host in stage 1, and pools formats just suck a lot, between awful scheduling situations, constant act wins/flips, people dropping out after losing in middle of pools etc, and has proven itself to be a meh format repeatedly.
- RBY in Classic: I've been a huge supporter of including RBY integration within the tier in general and its inclusion in UUSD, and think its great that it had that chance to be included in one of our team tours. Saying this I think that's where it belongs currently, and would rather add it to UUPL than Classic currently (although that could present issues with whether BO3 slot or RBY slot is preferred). Couple of reasons for this for me personally. Not super fond of increasing our Classic to 7 slots, and do think 5 slot classic was most ideal before this gen started, working best in playoffs especially as it ensured that you'd have the expectation of having to play all tiers in any potential matchup and disscouraging skimping on oldgens as much, would definitely explore a best finish route instead of allowing points from all 7 cups if we do include RBY though.
RBY definitely had integration in UUSD, but I feel its still very much a stranger to most of the community in terms of actual experience with it, most of these players have had zero history playing the tier before the tour, and will have not really got involved with their RBY slot in UUSD beyond just watching their players play their games, and have gained no real practical experience playing in it. I don't think its particularly an easy tier to learn and pick up for most players either, with a wildly different skillset to other generations, and think its very much going to just offer an autowin matchup to anyone who's had prior experience with the tier in a Playoffs situation, while bringing the amount of tiers expected to be played at a solid enough level to not auto-forfeit games in playoffs to an even higher number where two or more tiers won't even be played in any particular series, leading to RBY most likely only being picked in situations where there is actually a clear advantage on one side, which is less than ideal compared to a situation where you go in expecting to have to play all 5 tiers like we did in SM or they do in OU.
Saying all of this, I feel like we should have the expectation of including RBY in Classic down the road still, but I'm just not sure that this year is the year yet under our current situation. I'd like to see more opportunities for the general playerbase of UU to get involved with playing it first preferably before its involved in a Playoffs situation for Classic, whether this be via including it as a cup this Classic but not in Playoffs, or by getting the UU community more involved with specific RBY UU tournaments, tour nights etc with the expectation of it being included next year and offering them the chance to learn it knowing this.
Definitely think the Best Finish system is ideal in general, 6 cups is already quite a lot and most people qualify off 2-3 cups as it is, it rewards deeper runs better over someone who goes to like r3-4 in every cup but doesn't have any standout performances.
There's 3 realistic solutions I see to this here atm for Classic in 2022:
-> Don't include it in Classic but continue to integrate it in Team tours for this year, with the expectation of potentially including it in 2023
-> Include it as a Classic Cup but don't include it in playoffs for 2022, whether it counts towards points for qualifying or not idk but counting it would probably encourage more signups
-> Include it in Classic as a 7th tier
One option I think could be worth exploring though to include RBY with this Classic idea is to make it more akin to how OU Classic is run, Include RBY in our Classic but make Classic just gens 1-5, this keeps it at a much cleaner 5 tiers, with the expectation that all of them can appear in any playoffs series. This then offers a nice replacement for Majors with an Stour style tournament. Ideally not a live tournament probably, but just an ORAS + SM + SS Bo3 style tournament, to add more variation to our circuit and an interesting replacement for Majors, keeping Classic cleaner and more in line with OU while still giving ORAS/SM a place in the circuit tours, and reflecting their situation as more modern generations.
Correct games are public but I requested alts to be public (you have to sign up on a public alt so people know who you are). Public alts were not enforced last year (I actually PM'd the host but received no response when I brought this up).
Some ladder tours already have public alts. The logic is that the onus should not be on the player to decide whether to hide their games, and tournament games should be completely public.
The rules were ambiguous in my eyes - the rules said you had to sign up on an alt that was close to your Smogon username or an abbreviation.
Some people just abbreviated their username to a single letter so you couldn't tell who it was. I thought the point of the rule having an alt close to your Smogon username or an abbreviation was so your alt would be known so this is why I thought it was ambiguous, at the least, I think it should be made clear whether you're allowed to play on a hidden alt.
Yea this year the way we dealt with the situation was that we had PS enforce that all games involving a UULT alt were forced to be public, and all players were expected to sign up *at some point before deadline* for their alt to count.
Dealing with a situation of forcing alts to be created after (or like 5-10 mins before) they've already signed up is a little messy, requiring manually checking every account for their creation time (Something I couldn't personally do last time we hosted this tour and can only do now that i have global driver perms as I would only be able to see the day not the time previously) [I may be missing something here that made it possible b4 for me that i'm not aware of]. While its certainly a possibility to enforce, it'll likely end up with a lot of people unknowingly breaking the situation and basically forces that a global staff member work alongside to manually check 100s of alts each week to potentially disqualify people, and comes up with little discernible advantage given people will have to signup eventually anyway to have their alt count.
Maybe we should be more strict on abbreviations for the usernames. The problem with this is defining a clear set of parameters for what we deem acceptable here, as we'll likely end up dealing with annoying cases of telling people they have to choose a different alt after they've already played a bunch of games. Suggestions on this front would definitely be good.
I agree in general that it would be helpful if we aren't forcing people to sign up before they start playing that people be recognisable though, by their UULT alt being clearly identifiable to their smogon account. I'm not really sure what you mean about Hidden alts, unless you just mean say someone being called UULT rhyperior, where you have no idea who it is, as all games with them will be forced to be public not hidden because of the prefix.
One option I think could be worth exploring though to include RBY with this Classic idea is to make it more akin to how OU Classic is run, Include RBY in our Classic but make Classic just gens 1-5, this keeps it at a much cleaner 5 tiers, with the expectation that all of them can appear in any playoffs series. This then offers a nice replacement for Majors with an Stour style tournament. Ideally not a live tournament probably, but just an ORAS + SM + SS Bo3 style tournament, to add more variation to our circuit and an interesting replacement for Majors, keeping Classic cleaner and more in line with OU while still giving ORAS/SM a place in the circuit tours, and reflecting their situation as more modern generations.
I personally think this is a great idea, although I sense the larger community would not like it, so maybe people are not quite ready for this to happen. But it should be highlighted here so that people remember this suggestion for 2023, especially with the possibility of a new gen coming out sometime then. Having a "classic" be gens 1-8 or 2-8 when a Gen 9 comes out is a bit chaotic and not really "classic", and I think the UU community needs to prepare to have formats like this one outlined above to reserve the "classic" for true oldgens of mons past, and then have a different tour to fill in the gaps with gens 6+.
As for RBY inclusion, I think the tier is going in a great direction in getting RBY more involved, and I hope to see it in more team tournaments. I seriously doubt it will be in UUPL, as I predict this will be the final year that Bo3 is included but do think it will stay (will wait for the inevitable UUPL discussion thread in March, but that's how it will probably end up and I'll pay 5 Smogon coins to someone if it doesn't). UUSD was a big success for RBY inclusion, as was UUFPL before it, and we should really consider including it in whatever replaces UUWC (or just put RBY and GSC in UUWC if it doesn't get replaced), and maybe have another side team tour as well with RBY. I still think it's a fine addition to classic this year, and I don't think the learning curve is very high (I'd say there's more people than you expect that can play RBY UU at a competitive level just by watching UUSD games), but whether or not it's in classic this year or next year is less important in my opinion than making sure it has a place in future team tours here. Having a team of UU players watch and learn RBY being played has really helped more people understand it in my opinion. I still support putting it in classic anyways though, especially if you alter classic to be a sort of "best finish" system. You can axe it from the classic poffs if you think that's much of a problem, but I think it's still fine there too - I've seen non-RBY UU players play RBY UU just fine. It's not very popular, but I think it's fun, not that hard, and I have fun playing it, and I think about just as many others have fun playing it as they do some other oldgens (like GSC and BW).
agree with pokemonisfun that there needs to be tightening up on the alt rules for UULT, there were several people who "abused" the system by utilizing some combo of an ambiguous nickname and not posting on the thread until the last minute. it's not the biggest deal but it is by definition uncompetitive -- if the ambiguous nickname user knows the person they're facing but the person they're facing doesn't know who they are, they can use that to their advantage.
in terms of an elegant way to solve this, I think it can be as simple as "alts should either be your smogon username or your smogon username + additional numbers at the end". this should give plenty of options for everyone while making it relatively difficult to game -- as an example, i could make my nicknames "UULT4 KM3", "UULT4 KM37294" or "UULT4 KM". outside of a few hypothetical edge cases where one person is named Monky and someone else is named Monky25 there shouldn't be any issues with this in practice afaik
agree with pokemonisfun that there needs to be tightening up on the alt rules for UULT, there were several people who "abused" the system by utilizing some combo of an ambiguous nickname and not posting on the thread until the last minute. it's not the biggest deal but it is by definition uncompetitive -- if the ambiguous nickname user knows the person they're facing but the person they're facing doesn't know who they are, they can use that to their advantage.
in terms of an elegant way to solve this, I think it can be as simple as "alts should either be your smogon username or your smogon username + additional numbers at the end". this should give plenty of options for everyone while making it relatively difficult to game -- as an example, i could make my nicknames "UULT4 KM3", "UULT4 KM37294" or "UULT4 KM". outside of a few hypothetical edge cases where one person is named Monky and someone else is named Monky25 there shouldn't be any issues with this in practice afaik
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.
I'm unsure if this is the right place to write this because I'm not proposing something related to the circuit, but this thread best fits what I want to discuss and since its about replacing majors its somewhat related (kind of?). Since we nuked the UUWC as well as UUFPL I'd like to suggest adding a Best Leaderboard Tournament to the tournament schedule.
What is a Best Leaderboard Tournament?
While you can read a more in-depth description as to what I'm suggesting we add to the schedule here, for posterity or whatever I'll summarize it here as well. Essentially, players will participate in scheduled room tournaments in order to earn points each week. Placing within the top 4 grants you the following points: 1st place - 3 points, 2nd place - 2 points, 3red place - 1 point each. At the end of each week the top 12 players will have their names entered into the pool as players who have qualified for the tournament, and are guarentiied to be drafted on one of 6 10-player teams. If someone places in the top 12 for more than one week, they will not be counted twice. In other words, 12 unique players will be counted each week. In addition to the 12, there will be 4 substitutes each week, so if one of the 12 qualifying players shows no interest in participating in the tournament there will be replacements.
Why do we need another team tournament?
I firmly believe that we need a team tournament dedicated to allowing newer players to showcase their abilities and, after nuking UUFPL and UUWC, that no longer exists for UU. An example of newer players that were discovered thanks to these tours are xujing691691 and Scalescale, both players that were on Team China for UUWC and, due to their excellent showing, were drafted in UUSD. I hope this idea is received well among the UU community because I genuinely believe that it would help to showcase newer talent within the UU community. Thanks for reading!
Honestly it would nice to hear an explanation as to why UUFPL is cancelled. Obviously there were issues pertaining to one team in particular last year, but there’s such an easy solution to avoid that from happening again (don’t allow banned users to participate). I’d argue this tour had an extremely positive impact apart from the Malamars problems. It’s worth giving newer players a chance to prove themselves and honestly BFM was a more engaging host than anyone else I’ve seen.
please don’t kill a good thing for this community for no reason
idk where the breakdown in communication occurred (probably me) but uufpl is certainly not "cancelled" in its entirety. it's just getting a new coat of paint and some other changes that aren't decided yet, assuming someone's interested in hosting it still
this thread can substitute as a place to talk about it for now i suppose since we don't have a full one yet but the only team tour that's getting nuked is world cup (it might get a replacement but honestly our schedule is so strained with three yearly team tours that i'd rather not). anything else is either still happening or still up for discussion
I don't care about whether it's UUWC or something else but I don't think we should be getting rid of the third team tour. Not every team tour needs to be the epitome of competitiveness or whatever we want to call it, and some are there to be an entry for people into the community. I think UUWC was the best showcase of that. It's at a time where people are somewhat busy with other tournaments, and it shows a lot in who plays (and who cares even if they play), and gives people a ground to try out things they usually aren't familiar with. I do see some concerns with our tournament calendar being "full" but I don't think it's that full, and not having every top player in every tour is honestly fine by me.
In a similar vein, despite UUFPL's issues, I hope there will be a replacement because it was really fun to watch and also gave a lot of people a chance to play that usually don't get said chance. That said, I do believe that the teams ending up the way they did coupled with BFM's hosting created a very unique experience, so whatever replaces it, even with similar engagement from the host, is unlikely to create the same experience, and I hope that won't cause people to dislike the replacement because I certainly don't think it'll live up to the hype and expectations.
Going to reply to Aqua Jet as well since I was thinking about implementing a BLT-like tour a couple years back: I don't think it will work for UU, sadly. It works for the tournaments room due to the room's sheer size and activity, being centered around room tours and all, and it worked in Monotype due to also being a huge room with a very strong room tournament culture. I have participated in BLT and can say it's a really fun tour, but I don't think it's the solution we're looking for regarding a third team tour.
While individual tournaments are competitive and fun, they do not necessarily provide players the exposure players need. Everyone, even the best, lose round 1 of tournaments. The great thing about tournaments like UUPL is it allows a greater pool of players to participate and it gives them more ways to participate (building teams, offering tests to starters, scouting, etc). UUPL is entertaining to watch, but at the same time it tends to be a very similar pool of players every year, and not many new players get drafted and even fewer get good starting time and experience.
I'm going to go ahead and agree with pretty much everything that's been said about UUFPL. While I created it as an unofficial Discord tournament and ran it decently well, BFM transformed it into a legitimate, enjoyable, smooth, and well-run tournament on the official UU forums. My philosophy behind creating UUFPL--and I know BFM shares the same one--was to give exposure to lower level tournament players, but mostly nobody’s. UUFPL isn’t UUPL 2.0, it’s an entirely different idea. It's UUPL that gives so many newer faces to the community a shot to play tournament games in a serious tournament. It's the tournament for the little guy.
Additionally, last year We had a decent amount of big names involved as well. This created an incredibly unique experience whereby lesser known players get to team up with certain UU superstars working towards the same goal. It actually gives a huge opportunity for up and coming stars to learn from experienced veterans. And so long as the veterans have certain playing restrictions (e.g. last year people in UUPL were prevented from playing SS UU, and there's other things we can do as well), the tournament can still be run from the ideology that it is intended for unknown players to prove themselves; while veterans can still enjoy in it and bring the little guys along for the ride. In fact, the tournament last year drew some players from other tiers into UU to play SS, some of which stayed playing and further diversifying our UU community, and the same can happen this year and in the future. UUFPL last year was also able to experiment with RBY UU in a UU team tour environment, and the success it had was able to pave the way to a little bit of community integration with RBY UU, and it even was able to earn a slot in last year's UUSD. I am not sure if there are other things that UU wants to try out in a similar environment, but there is possibly no other tournament besides UUFPL where this can be done with very little risk.
Last year UUFPL had some controversy others have mentioned, but that was largely overshadowed by how well-run and entertaining it was. I want to play a role in this years UUFPL in some way, as does BFM. While either of us are willing to host, we can also help out whoever else may want to host it instead, whether by co-hosting, giving general/specific advice, or anything else they need. I hope UUFPL can be a consistent tournament which can happen every year and give all players something to look forward to. The UU Community is pretty big, and pretty great, and between UUPL and UUFPL you will end up getting most everybody in the community involved in the team tournament environment. I think it's a fantastic tournament and can continue to be under the proper management.
So I've had 10000 things on my plate but I've finally finished up my plan for the 2022 circuit. All feedback is appreciated.
The new system - not really new, but new to UU - is as follows; we will have three types of tournaments, Type A, Type B, and Type C.
Type A tournaments will be the flagship tournament that earns the most circuit points. These will be UU Masters (ongoing), UU Open, and whatever we replaced UU Majors with.
Type B tournaments will be for tournaments that are slightly more "gimmicky" for lack of a better term; basically, Classic (which does not have current gen representation, awkward considering champs is all CG) and Ladder Tour (which has a much bigger barrier to entry).
There will only be one Type C tournament; I haven't decided on a name for this one. Basically it gives minimal points to all but the top 4 placers, but I think that's fine? The goal is moreso to shore up your points if you're close to qualifying, not to actually be qualifying solely off a win here. It'll be a single elimination tournament that runs just before champs and after whatever replaces majors.
This is the proposed points distribution! (Or 0) is for when a tournament gets <256 signups - basically always, except for Open.
TLDR; new points system, one more single elim circuit tour, still need to replace Majors with probably another delim tournament.
Please let me know if you have any questions / what you think in general bc this shit is frying my brain and math is hard
Are there still “bonus points” for some tours? For example, in classic last year you got +10 points for winning a cup. Not sure if uult had anything similar.
I'm not sure I understand why Type A and Type C winners have a 2000 point difference, why the winner of Type A is weighted x3 more than Type C if they have the same number of signups.
Assuming it takes roughly the same effort (by which I mean assuming you need to win roughly the same # of rounds), I don't think it's fair that Type C winner should get a third of the points only.
If you want to go for a tournament that only "shores up" the number of points and won't let you qualify, might I suggest UU blitz tournament?
The logic is it's still gen8uu, but not as serious since you can't play as well in fast timer. So you shouldn't get as many points.
Also if I understand correctly, masters (type A) will have:
1st place - grand finals winner
2nd place - grand finals loser
3rd place - losers final loser
4th place - not sure how this works
But based on this, it's clear there is a 3rd place that is not the same as 4th place so the point system for this will have to be reworked somehow.
Perhaps keep 4th place at 2000 points and make 3rd place something in between 2000 and 2500?
Does this also apply to 5-6 place, and 9-12 place, etc, since those are different from 7-8 place and 13-16 place, for Masters specifically since it's DE.
Does this also apply to 5-6 place, and 9-12 place, etc, since those are different from 7-8 place and 13-16 place, for Masters specifically since it's DE.
Totally understand (and would not be surprised) if LCQ format is decided but just raising again I would LOVE for it to be like a blitz tour. No johns would be great too.
on another note: I’d be happy to help update spreadsheet for circuit since it needs classic still if you want to tell me instructions. I’d be happy to do other stuff for our busy mods in case you just don’t have time for it
Totally understand (and would not be surprised) if LCQ format is decided but just raising again I would LOVE for it to be like a blitz tour. No johns would be great too.
on another note: I’d be happy to help update spreadsheet for circuit since it needs classic still if you want to tell me instructions. I’d be happy to do other stuff for our busy mods in case you just don’t have time for it
I just wanted to give some thoughts on the UU Circuit this year, in hopes UU management takes it into consideration when deciding how to arrange the circuit next year. I'll start with the straightforward ones:
UU Masters: Best circuit tour for multiple years now, it's the fairest, no nonsense, straightforward tour and nothing about it should change imo.
UU Open: This is just a product of a larger Smogon circuit so not much to even consider changing with this.
On to the more controversial ones:
UU Ladder Tournament: I've always loved this tour, and I think it is very polarizing because people love it or hate it. But to me it's the most entertaining to play and watch, and gives every player a great opportunity to play against other great UU players on the ladder. You also make friends while grinding along in the spectator room, and watching games at the deadline is exhilarating and playing in them is so intense. I think changing the amount of people that advance per cycle was the correct call and that should be the same format moving forward.
There was one specific issue that I think could change, and it was people trying to override their previous cycle scores with better scores, which kinda screwed around with the standings a bit and who would advance. I think this is an easy fix though with the following rule change:
1) If you have already qualified with a bye, you cannot "re-qualify" in a new cycle, but you can override your previous score with a higher score and apply it to your previous cycle. Example: Jimmy Joy has a bye in Cycle 2 (got 2100 score), but wants a better score so he gets 2423 in Cycle 3. He does not suddenly qual in Cycle 3 instead, he still quals for Cycle 2, but his score for that Cycle changes to 2423. Doesn't matter if you were #1 or #2 seed for that cycle. 2) If you have already qualified in a previous cycle without a bye, you cannot qualify in a new cycle with a higher score unless you get a bye for that cycle. If you play anyways and get a higher score but not enough for a bye, your new score just gets transplanted to the previous cycle you qualled in, but cannot acquire the bye even if it's higher than the other byes that cycle. Example: Sally Soup quals with #5 slot in Cycle 1 with a score of 1701. She tries for a bye in Cycle 4 but misses it with 1788. She still quals in Cycle 1, not Cycle 4, but her score for Cycle 1 changes to 1788. Fred and Jed still keep the bye for Cycle 1 even if their score was lower than 1788.
It sounds very wordy but it's really quite simple in application, and there should not be any more issues whatsoever with that whole dilemma if implemented as so. But let's keep UULT for sure and keep finding ways to improve it, it's a promising tour for sure and most definitely one of the better ones in the circuit. Also sorry I yelled at you Lily during Cycle 4 I was stressed out with no sleep.
UU Classic: This one is hard because there's a lot of gens now. I obviously really enjoyed Classic this past year, and I think a lot of others did too, and it's also very fun to watch the poffs. But now that there's 8 "classic" gens, I think it's up to people more important than me to figure out how this is all going to work. One thing that I think should be considered is to have UU Classic be its own sort of "mini" circuit, with various UU Oldgen Tours happening throughout the year, culminating into a UU Classic Poffs in August. I think that would be a lot of fun, and would take some of the stress away from trying to cram all the classic gen tours into one month. It really isn't necessary to do it all at once, and this allows you to still have all of the oldgens available. You could even add in RBY if you wanted. But again, this is just a suggestion I thought of, I don't know what UU Management is planning but I'm sure whatever it is it will work out fine.
And now to the newcomers:
UU Swiss: Honestly this tour was kind of a big mess, moreso than any of the other circuit tours this year. You had people dropping left and right, players going like 5-2 playing 3 total games because of byes and drops (that's good for 1000 circuit points btw for 3 games played going 1-2 with 4 byes), and the circuit point distribution wasn't even decided until AFTER the tour ended (and was still contradictory to the sheet). Despite all of this, I think this is very easily fixable by just making it Swiss into Playoffs, with only Playoffs giving circuit points. That prevents drops from significantly impacting circuit point distribution, and it's also significantly more hype to watch a playoffs for any tour. This is probably the best option here, as people really don't like Majors so going back to that is probably a no-go. But I think this would by hype with a poffs so maybe that can work out next year.
Last Chance Qualifier: It's not over yet, but I think this one is going really well. I don't really think anything needs to change about it, the format and stakes and points all seem fairly on point (+250 pts for going to Round 2 might be a lot but that's only because of the low signups, otherwise it would have been 166 which is fine and I think more signups will happen next year with new gen).
That's all. Very fun circuit everyone, looking forward to next year.
Disclaimer: This post is purely my opinion and not speaking on behalf of the moderation or circuit host teams.
UULT
Shit tour imo that has real issues with a limited section of the overall UU tour players community actually taking part due to the considerable effort of qualifying. Saying all of this I believe it should be ran for at least one more iteration as the next one will coincide into quite early SV UU, and these ladder tours are one of the best ways of rapidly developing a metagame with the sheer volume of high quality ladder games it generates, I believe this will make it really valuable for pushing SV UU forwards in early 2023.
There are a few ways to improve the tour imo. The first thing I would do is make playoffs a Swiss style. This has a big benefit imo of helping with the issue of how you can get knocked out in one round of playoffs despite the insane amount of work to qualify for playoffs, giving all players more of an opportunity to overcome an initial loss. It also takes 1-2 less rounds to complete than a double elimination tour, while still being highly receptable to seeding, and removing the byes to limit the amount of requalifying hassle, and limiting the amount of waiting between rounds.
On the topic of the requalifying issue that we had with last UULT and that Mantis brought up, I definitely agree that we should remove the requalifying. We could still easily maintain seeding in a swiss format to determine brackets each round, and then use mantis's solution of newer weeks being able to change your score but not effecting the newer cycle's qualifiers, or remove seeding entirely to fix the lineups. I would also suggest going to a 32 player playoffs over 24 for the new generation for the projected massively increased amount of participants, would also hopefully encourage more people to get involved in general.
Swiss
Delete this imo. Its a fine format to use for playoff stages such as UULT or even the ribbon playoffs, but really sucks as a whole tour considering the amount of early drop outs, and the bye issues that mantis and others have brought up. Don't bring back majors or anything either though thats just as bad, would recommend swapping it for something else, my idea for this will come in a next section though.
Classic
Fantastic tour that should stay in the circuit imo but we're coming up to having a total of 7 generations included now in this tour. Tbh the number of generations was already getting a bit extreme with 6 and the discussions for including RBY too, the amount of prep work it takes to prep for that many generations gets a bit extreme and it'll be annoying to see multiple generations get left out of each playoffs game now. Imo my favourite solution would be to actually split this up into two different tours,
UU Classic (GSC, ADV, DPP, BW, ORAS) UU Generations (SM, SS, SV) [Placeholder name lol i suck at naming things]
Classic would follow same format as before, new tour would be a swiss replacement and basically follow kinda the following structure:
Single Elimination Tournament
Bo3: Start SV, loser picks out of SM/SS, 3rd game if necessary plays the other
This would be like a single elimination allegory to Stour but without the live tour aspect, following our modern generations and helping to keep classic to a 5 generation tour still so that there is more emphasis put on needing to be good at all of the gens and preventing less popular gens from just being disregarded entirely in most playoff series.
Mantis's Suggestion and Other stuff for Classic
Alternatively, if wanting to avoid having two tours featuring oldgens (albeit sm/ss are realistically pretty modern), can either make classic a tour that doesn't reward points (or just making it give very few points so it doesn't have much of an impact as of how it kinda is rn, or take mantis's route. I quite like the idea of making the tour take place throughout the year instead for the individual cups leading to a playoffs, it would give people more opportunity to put more focus on each individual cup than they do right now because having 6 cups overlapping becomes overwhelming to put any real effort into more than 1-2 and just leads to reusing and lower quality tours.
My issue: This would have to overlap with a lot of circuit tours due to spreading out, would this cause basically the same issue of people being demotivated / not wanting to join or putting zero effort in?
How should we deal with playoffs if Classic stays 2-8?
I would highly suggest we take one of the following approaches for the playoffs stage to limit the amount of prep players would have to do each week to purely 5 preselected tiers.
One way we could do this is that we take a similar approach to how NU classic dealt with the playoffs stage In essence each player would suggest a ranked order for their preference of tiers to play, eg.
The 5 tiers would then be chosen from the preference order, starting with the higher seed and alternating to generate the 5 tiers, skipping any duplicate tiers, this hypothetical matchup would then result in the tiers being,
GSC (#1), BW (#16), SM (#1), ADV (#16), DPP (#1)
With ORAS and SS being skipped, noting that we skipped duplicates on SM and ADV. The higher seed in this scenario would pick the first tier, which would then be GSC, with the rest of the games being decided by the loser of the previous one.
What if we instead decided to let players pick tiers they DONT want to play, to better reflect the players disinterest tiers? We could decide that each player gets to lock in one tier they will definitely want to play, therefore locking in GSC and BW. We could then look at which tiers players prefer the least, noting that their last picks aren't allowed here, and therefore we see that we don't play SS or DPP, making the selection,
GSC, ADV, BW, ORAS, SM - GSC first game
Which is preferable? The latter reflects the preference order more at the bottom end while protecting a players strongest tier. Imo the first is preferable though, it rewards players being able to play all the UU oldgens sufficiently without giving them a get out of jail card for a generation they hate, which they will otherwise not have to play unless their opponent chooses it as their lock in. Would personally choose the first way of dealing with this.
This method doesn't really solve the issue with unpopular generations being skipped over a lot like the Classic + Generations split I suggested would do, it does however limit the amount of preparation each player would have to do any week to also make it more chewable at only 5 tiers instead of 7.
Should we have a second SSNL?
imo no. Seasonals are ideal from the perspective of protecting players against one bad round and offering an opportunity to recover from it, and I think us having one of them is really desirable. Two of them is too much imo though, seasonals take twice as long to complete as a single elimination variant of them, or Swiss in this case this year, and this becomes a real issue with having little to no break between tours at all, making it hard to fit our schedule around team tours, official tours like SCL, and importantly giving us less opportunities to run stuff like suspect tests too without overlapping in tours.
My ideal scenario would be the classic split with generations replacing Swiss, otherwise I would prefer just adding another single elimination tour to a second seasonal personally.
That pretty much concludes all my thoughts, if there is anything I forgot i'll add this in later but hopefully this might spark more discussion. Ty BigFatMantis for bumping this topic with some interesting suggestions!
Alright so I'd like to give my two cents on this while also trying to not do a useless one liner post.
UU Swiss / UU Majors = cursed tours
First of all, Swiss was ass, we can't lie about this. This was a nice try to replace UU Majors but it didn't worked. People dropped a lot like in Majors but it was infinitively worst this year mainly because people were dropping after several rounds which impacted the overall W/L of many people, thus points awarded. Unlike Majors where people were dropping during the pool stage, when it wasn't that really important and impacful on the overall point rewards, I feel like it mattered way more this year with Swiss. Not to mention that we had to re-think about the whole points system during the progress / ending of the tour.. yeah this wasn't a great at all on many aspects. But at least we tried.. failed.. but tried !
However, we can't just nuked it for nothing and I'm actually shocked about the option proposed by Estarossa because it's something I also thought about. With that many "old gens" I trully think that we could split them in two differents and independents tours. I even think that if RBY playerbase keeps growing we'll be able to to something like :
Some people (especially in OU) are agreeing that BW was the "last true old gen" (the last OG one), so doing another Classic based on "new old gens" (basically 6-7-8) could be something really great imo. Estarossa's idea to make this new tour a BO3 is also great because it sets it apart of the current UU Classic. I think we'll have to think about UU Classic as a whole even if we don't pick this option because this tournament is going to be too stacked and time consuming for players if we're adding another old gen to it.
UU Ladder Tournament
I don't have a lot to say about UULT. I hate it but I also now it's a great tournament for many players which tend to struggle in tournaments with more traditional formats so I don't think we should change anything about it. Estarossa's proposal about doing a 32 players playoffs is kinda fire tho, not gonna lie as it could allow more players to reach PO, a really nice thing to motivate people, especially with a new generation.
Just a short post to give my own thoughts; I'd planned to try removing LCQ (good tour but the circuit is too squished rn) and Swiss (flop!) next year and replace them with a 2nd seasonal akin to Masters, which does make the circuit a little more "boring" I suppose, but it's more competitive that way. I said this to IP though and we didn't necessarily agree so we're still looking at new options, ty for the great posts above. Unsure what to do with Classic going into the new gen but the rest can stay as is.
There will be a new thread for this stuff when the new SV UU forum goes up btw - I'll try merging old posts there if ppl want.
UU Masters: Best circuit tour for multiple years now, it's the fairest, no nonsense, straightforward tour and nothing about it should change imo.
UU Open: This is just a product of a larger Smogon circuit so not much to even consider changing with this.
UU Ladder Tournament: I've always loved this tour, and I think it is very polarizing because people love it or hate it. But to me it's the most entertaining to play and watch, and gives every player a great opportunity to play against other great UU players on the ladder. You also make friends while grinding along in the spectator room, and watching games at the deadline is exhilarating and playing in them is so intense. I think changing the amount of people that advance per cycle was the correct call and that should be the same format moving forward.
UU Classic: This one is hard because there's a lot of gens now. I obviously really enjoyed Classic this past year, and I think a lot of others did too, and it's also very fun to watch the poffs. But now that there's 8 "classic" gens, I think it's up to people more important than me to figure out how this is all going to work. One thing that I think should be considered is to have UU Classic be its own sort of "mini" circuit, with various UU Oldgen Tours happening throughout the year, culminating into a UU Classic Poffs in August. I think that would be a lot of fun, and would take some of the stress away from trying to cram all the classic gen tours into one month. It really isn't necessary to do it all at once, and this allows you to still have all of the oldgens available. You could even add in RBY if you wanted. But again, this is just a suggestion I thought of, I don't know what UU Management is planning but I'm sure whatever it is it will work out fine.
UU Swiss: Honestly this tour was kind of a big mess, moreso than any of the other circuit tours this year. You had people dropping left and right, players going like 5-2 playing 3 total games because of byes and drops (that's good for 1000 circuit points btw for 3 games played going 1-2 with 4 byes), and the circuit point distribution wasn't even decided until AFTER the tour ended (and was still contradictory to the sheet). Despite all of this, I think this is very easily fixable by just making it Swiss into Playoffs, with only Playoffs giving circuit points. That prevents drops from significantly impacting circuit point distribution, and it's also significantly more hype to watch a playoffs for any tour. This is probably the best option here, as people really don't like Majors so going back to that is probably a no-go. But I think this would by hype with a poffs so maybe that can work out next year.
Last Chance Qualifier: It's not over yet, but I think this one is going really well. I don't really think anything needs to change about it, the format and stakes and points all seem fairly on point (+250 pts for going to Round 2 might be a lot but that's only because of the low signups, otherwise it would have been 166 which is fine and I think more signups will happen next year with new gen).