2022 PU Circuit Feedback & 2023 Circuit Discussion

[Chloe]

Art by LifeisDANK​

Hi! I'm generally pretty happy with how the circuit turned out this year for PU. I didn't feel like we had too many tours, and it's generally been the sameish format for a few years now. This thread is to discuss what you thought about it. Did you like it? Did you hate it? What should be changed about it?

Here is what we had in 2022:

• PU Classic: SM, ORAS, BW, and DPP
• PU Open
• PU Swiss
• PU Ladder Tournament
• PU Fall Seasonal

Seasonal and Slam were Type A tournaments, PULT was a type B tournament with slightly less points given out compared to our 2019 circuit, and Classic was a type C tournament. Swiss was whatever termi came up with at the time, which ended up working well!

scoring

seasonal and slam:

swiss followed this format, despite the unconventional points system it definitely helped in the end since we didn't need to do any tiebreaks for circuit playoffs :D we could definitely change this though.

ladder tour and classic (only people who qualify for playoffs get points in these tours):

To address the elephant in the room, we won't have SV PU until March 1st. This means we have to fit our schedule around this. That's not a huge issue though. We can have classic prior to SV dropping, and then follow with our regular schedule. We didn't have any current gen tours prior to PU Open last year and we definitely have the room to fit our schedule in the same fashion this year. There will be a kickoff tour once the format releases but that won't count for circuit points (the format will probably be broken).

Some sample questions to answer:

• Did you like our circuit this year? What would you change if not? Anything that could be done better?
• Do you like Classic with four tiers? Should we add a 5th to make playoffs more ideal? SS PU is now technically an old gen, we could include that. Maybe ADV PU, now that the format is garnering more and more support? RBY PU is super popular right now, do we want to include that?
• What did you think of the inclusion of Swiss?
• Any issues with the current point system?

This thread isn't to discuss PUPL / PUWC. We'll address that down the line!

Thank you for your comments in advance, I'd appreciate them a ton!!!

 

[gum]

adv and rby have active enough playerbases for classic inclusion imo. to keep it at 5 gens (oras, bw, dpp, adv, rby), i think it could be fun to have some sort of stour tournament. it was around before and it was called bo3 tour, and it could just be sv swsh and sm. that way we include as many gens as possible in classic without the number being too much either, which makes the point system easier

i think? slam is this summer, so pu open should b around mid-june or so. imo the kickoff tour should b single elimination no johns (last gen was double elim) to speed up the tour, so it'd be possible to fit something between end kickoff and beginning of open. swiss would be nice to keep but only if there's a playoffs phase, otherwise there's no real incentive to continue playing after losing once knowing u cant win

pult was extremely dead this year w ppl qualifying by not even reaching 1500 on ladder. i think the format is mid and it also awards less points than ssnl and open, so there's less of a reason to go through ladder just for a tournament. i think it should b replaced by the bo3 tour

 

[termi]

i agree with gum that ladder tour is unviable. aside from being quite dead this year, there are innate problems with the format as such, which i will just quote from a post i made about this years ago:

The first is that "the metagame" as it exists on ladder tends to diverge wildly from the metagame as people understand it in tournament play, and as a result the kind of teams that do well on ladder, the way one plays etc is quite different from what is ultimately expected of you in playoffs. The other reason is that in ladder tournaments, the amount of time you can afford (and want) to spend on Pokemon becomes a much bigger factor than in other tournaments, since in most cases you'll have to play what is colloquially known as a shitton of games in order to qualify for playoffs, which seems to preclude a lot of people with busy schedules from qualifying while privileging people who can afford to play like 150 games within a week.

i think their proposition of doing a bo3 tour of sv/ss/sm + a classic tournament is workable, except i would not include adv and rby in classic. the barrier of entry to these metagames seems quite high to me, especially in the case of rby, as they have not seen anywhere near the amount of tournament play as other pu metagames and function differently enough from the rest to where idt you can feasibly expect people who are not already intimately familiar with these metas to pick them up and know what they're doing. it's more likely than not that including these metas would have a detrimental effect on the overall level of play in classic and idt the benefits of representation for its own sake outweigh the potential costs.

swiss is not ideal as a circuit tournament bc of the way points are distributed (we sorta made it work but it was kind of an ad hoc solution) and bc of the many deadgames that end up happening later into the tournament. granted, the deadgames are only so much of an issue since they happen in the lower regions where people are not likely to get more than a few points in the tour anyway, and we could restructure the points system to where below a certain threshold you just don't get points at all (or even change the format to where an x amount of losses knocks you out of the tournament perhaps). while usually i would not really entertain these options and would prefer replacing swiss with a seasonal, it's a bit awkward to try and fit two seasonals and open into less than 3/4 of a year (since pu enters alpha in march and only becomes a viable tier for tournament play in april when it enters beta). i think we should consider either another type of tournament, preferably one that does not take as long as a double elim seasonal, or we should give swiss another chance but revamp it somewhat based on our experience with it this year.

 

[Shaneghoul]

re: classic
I haven't fully gathered my thoughts on this but ultimately I'd be in favour of including as many tiers as possible (and yes that means rby). We haven't traditionally done an amazing job at supporting our old gens but we ended 2022 with two big steps in the right direction with the adv and rby swiss tours (even if we weren't responsible for the rby one). It would be a shame to ignore that work now and would send a really poor message to those communities since, if we're not adding them now, when would we ever add them. I don't think it has to be an all or nothing thing though, the simplest solution to me would be to ease rby and adv in by having a cup for them but not including them as tiers in classic playoffs, restricting that to a bo5 with ss, sm, oras, bw and dpp. At least that way we keep the integrity of classic playoffs by utilising the 5 well developed gens we have, and are still building towards fleshing out all our old gens by continuing to give rby and adv some tour representation. I also wouldn't be against a gsc cup if we were to go this route since it doesn't really matter if the meta is developed or not anyway but I think support for that tier has been somewhat lacking and we might be best off doing something like what adv did with a swiss tour first to get itself a bit more established.

Also not super against gum's idea of splitting classic up but I'm just concerned about how we'd fit it in. Whatever way you do it you'd be decreasing the number of SV tour games we get which in its first year of being current gen I don't love as an idea.

re: ladder tour
I think it would be a big mistake to remove ladder tour, especially this year of all years where we expect ladder activity to be at its peak due to the release of the new tier. I think you could make an argument that it shouldn't have been included last year due to how inactive the ladder was, and maybe we should remove it next year, but using last year's activity as a baseline to predict activity for the coming year is unfair. Ladder tours helps us form more of a connection to the PS! server and the PU room and opens the floor up to players who may not have been involved in tours previously. It's very much a community tour and a way for players to get their name out there and I think removing it would be a big mistake. If we want to cut anything for another seasonal I think swiss should be the one

re: swiss
I enjoyed this rendition of swiss because I had something to play for the whole way through, but if I had lost early I think I would've ended up with a lot of coinflips, and that's the big issue with swiss. I like the idea of it as a format since you get more games in but I always felt it was better served for new metagames where the goal is to have people playing every week to try and develop the metagame and showcase some stuff. ADV and RBY PU tours recently were good examples and it might have made sense for the Gods Among Us tour we did recently too. If we do decided to keep it I think we should definitely be using the swiss as a qualification round into maybe a top 16 knockout tournament so that it doesn't drag as much and you're not making people play (or not play as is usually the case) meaningless games. Going back to gum's idea on splitting classic up we could also do something like what OM Swiss did this year and have 5 weeks of swiss with a different gen each week, leading to a bo5 playoffs. That would allow us to split up the team preview gens from the no team preview ones. Not an idea I'm super fond of but just throwing it out as an alternative in case we do decide it's best to split them up.

Open is obvious and Fall Seasonal is fine.

Edit:
Also I should've known this ahead of time but didn't. Classic is currently included in circuit seeding and I think it should be removed. Keep classic as its own thing and let circuit be specific to sv pu

 

[termi]

I think it would be a big mistake to remove ladder tour, especially this year of all years where we expect ladder activity to be at its peak due to the release of the new tier. I think you could make an argument that it shouldn't have been included last year due to how inactive the ladder was, and maybe we should remove it next year, but using last year's activity as a baseline to predict activity for the coming year is unfair.

this is a fair point, combined w/ the fact that having classic + bo3 tour would put an excessive emphasis on oldgens in our circuit im fine with removing classic from circuit (which would also leave me without objections against including adv and rby in it) while replacing it with sv/ss/sm bo3 tour and keeping ladder tour in for at least this iteration of circuit. i do think however that ladder tour should be a c-tier tournament because of aforementioned issues with the format (which still leaves the top 4 of pult playoffs with a solid amount of points)

 

[TJ]

TLDR:
- dont ruin classic by adding meme tiers like rby/adv pu; SS may be ok if you wanna make poffs more ideal
- remove swiss for a bo3 stour tiers tour (sv/ss/sm) or a second seasonal
- keep ladder tour

-pop smoke

 

[Lily]

please add adv to classic!

the tier has seen a lot of development for years now and is very enjoyable to play and build. the recent shifts have led to a fun new metagame that could do with some exploration and it's not like pu classic is the most important and esteemed place that needs this massive barrier of entry, especially if you're considering removing it from the circuit overall (please don't do this, nobody will play it - just lower its point weighting if anything).

i've played a lot of pu oldgens and think i count as fairly qualified in adv, dpp, bw by now. i can say with confidence that all of these metagames are still being explored and new discoveries are being made all the time - none of them are more deep/prestigious/whatever than the other, they're all great in their own ways and tbh pu is lucky to have the community support that leads to the development of these tiers to begin with. it doesn't send a good message to the playerbase to ignore all the work that's been put into adv pu. you have literally nothing to lose by adding it, please give it a try! it's really good!

anyway i don't have the qualification or really the interest in talking about rby / swiss / whatever but i will say @ ladder tour that i also considered removing it from uu circuit some time ago and was convinced otherwise because it's very true that it's one of the best ways for new players to get a foot in the door and also completely disregarding your ladder leads to unhealthy/toxic tiering processes. it's ok to adjust the weighting of it if you don't want it to be super duper relevant or anything but it would probably be a bad idea to remove it altogether.

tldr classic is great! add adv to make it more great! don't nuke ladder tour! thanks :D

 

[Hera]

Don't add ADV and RBY to Classic. Not because they're uncompetitive or bad tiers or anything like that (they're not), but because they'd get like 32 players and would count the same amount of points for qualifying for classic playoffs (if you win) as cups that get double or triple the amount of contestants. Barring a drastic change to how Classic counts points, I really don't see how to include ADV and RBY without making it fairer for contestants, but if this issue were fixed, I would be extremely supportive of including them. Also GSC PU not being included at all looks weird aesthetically even though I understand it's not a major concern of mine. Something else that's been brought up elsewhere is reducing the amount of points Classic gives you, with the underlying logic being that someone who doesn't play a single game of CG PU should qualify for circuit playoffs playing only old gens, which I would quickly like to iterate my support for.

Personally I did not enjoy the Swiss format, but I can't really see a better alternative. The Seasonal double elimination format is cool but takes twice as long, and one of the boons of Swiss is that it doesn't overlap with PUPL while offering a similar amount of points. The STour idea with SV/SS/SM is just horrible imo (hm yes I sure do enjoy building and prepping for 3 different tiers every week without team tour support! very cool and fun) and having a major PU tour give similar amount of points as seasonals even only 1/3rd of the tour is CG feels off to me.

I hate Ladder Tour and have not had the best of experiences with it, but again, I can't really see a better alternative. The disparity between ladder meta and tour meta is a fair point but that's not something you can really fix. Making it a B- or C-Tier sounds like a better option if we want to do something about it.

This is a bit off topic but is a send-off tour currently being planned? Preferably sometime after playoffs end would be nice if it ends up happening.

 

[2xTheTap]

I thought things went well this last year, all things considered. Some small ideas for change - I like the idea of having games that count toward Circuit be relegated to current gen, and tours for old gens be split up as follows:

Old gen stuff:

- Run Classic I with gens 6 - 8 in a Bo3 format. Do not count toward Circuit

- Run Classic II with gens 3 - 5 in a Bo3 format. Do not count toward Circuit

- Run individual gen 1 and gen 2 PU forum tours to generate interest and meta development. Do not count toward Circuit

Splitting up old gens in this way might be one possible avenue to allow those who want to play some ORAS/SM/SwSh without being force-fed formats that they're totally unfamiliar with and/or have no exposure to due to ladders not having been available for those formats, like adv pu or rby pu. There are also varying degrees of meta development between each gen of pu here, so if you had to group them together, it might make sense to group the ones that had active ladders (6 - 8), those that were created retroactively and are relatively well-developed / being actively played in various tours (3 - 5), and those that probably need more exposure before being included in Classic (1 - 2).


SV stuff:

- gum's idea for single elim for Kickoff is good. It went a little long imo. Do not count toward Circuit

- Keep ladder tour. Very fun toward the beginning of a new gen, good for new blood like Lily and Shane already said, but ladder tours kind of suck later in a gen's lifespan after interest in laddering has declined. Count toward Circuit, but weigh it less than other current gen tours for those who can't afford to spend all week laddering

- If squeezing in all of these isn't feasible, or if there's some problem with scheduling them that I haven't thought of, then potentially cut out Swiss

 

[sugar ovens]

personally i really like the circuit as it is and would not change any of the tours, but i do think the points distributions are kinda messy and could be improved? I remember whining about points a couple of times to various people so i'll try to be more useful this time and, like, actually suggest something instead of just being annoying

Particularly the swiss tour. Of course, i understand that it was done in rush and stuff and you totally should have thought about it way before the tour started, but as it is now, there are far more points distributed in swiss overall than in any other tour, and mediocre performances are heavily rewarded compared to other tours. It's fairly visible if you look at the circuit sheet. The thing with Swiss is that the distribution of records between players is completely different to what happens in elimination tours. The records are misleading - while winning 128-player Swiss tour is about as difficult as winning a 128-player elimination tour, a somewhat impressive-looking 5-2 is roughly equivalent to a 3rd round elimination and 4-3? Half of the players get a positive record - in a way it is like getting a round 1 win in elimination. The bottom half of the players - with a negative record - would not get anything from an elimination tournament.

Why does this matter? Well, even though Swiss is supposed to be worth about as much as seasonal and open, it matters far more for qualifying than any of the two. Right now it is an easy way to get a fairly free boost for qualifying, as you can get a hefty amount of points for a middling performance, and it's the most rewarding tour to join. Also, the winner of Swiss gets less points for no reason - 7-0 is the same performance as winning a single elim tour of the same size.

Swiss rn rewards points on an entirely diferent basis compared to other circuit - and smogon - tours, that is, on the basis of number of wins achieved or score, as opposed to top-x reached in most tournaments. Let's try applying the point distribution of type-A tours to swiss, using the number of players who reach each respective record:

first column is status quo, second column is rigorously applying the type-A tournament point distribution: top1 pt for top1, top8 pts of top8 and so on. I think it makes for a good comparison, and if it wasn't for the differences in numbers in tour stages vs records, like top32 vs top29 it would be the "cleanest" approach, but it admittedly looks - and in fact is - too stingy, as in it results in less points being distributed overall. The third column is type A points, but amended so that the same amount of points is distributed overall as in a double elim tournament. going by the logic that after achieving for example, top8 in swiss you don't have the chance to get extra points by getting to stages like top2, top3, top4, top6 that you would have in elim, all points that would have been awarded to players "above" top8, but "below" top1 will be evenly distributed to players in swiss top8. It's also a simple way to address the issue that the top-x stages that swiss format produces are different than those in elim: to get points for top29 we just take the average amount that the players "between" 9th place and 29th place would get according to the type A point distribution. For example: for the top29 here it's 4*105 (top12) + 4*75 (top16) + 8*55 (top24) + 5*32 (five from top32, points from the other three wold go to our top64), /21 = 65 (rounded). Like, maybe this stuff is unnecessary but it just seems to me like the most straightforward way to make the type A tours equivalent - so that players get rewarded equally for equal performances.

*The records might not exactly match the predetermined top-X stages, but the differences won't be that big and i still think that having some sort of.. reasoning is better than just making up some arbitrary numbers. Also you might notice with the distributing-points-for-stages-that-arent-in-the-tour thing i did above that hey, single elim tours award less overall than double elim. While open giving less than ssnl is a fun fact.. for a 128-player tour, the total amount is 3965 for single elim, 4545 for double elim, not that huge... 8744 for swiss as it is right now. Elimination tours don't grant points to "bottom half" of players, like top96 and top128 in a 128 player tournament, which is showcased by the red numbers for records that would not get any points for the same performance in an elim tour. Either keeping them or having a cutoff is alright, i suppose, though a cutoff is useful for activity issues.



Alright, now as for the rest of the points system, it just.. feels messy, you know? It's not that it "looks bad", there are oddities like that you get the same amount of points for reaching semifinals in type A and type B tournament (250), and for top8, you even get *more* in PULT - 150 compared to 140 in type A tours. Which is i think against the point of having different tournament tiers. Plus - this might be a nitpick, but - even if you don't change anything about the system, have either "top-x" or X-th on the tables, not top-x on the type a points table and x-th on type-b and type-c table - it's confusing. I'd suggest just picking some base point distribution and then a ratio of how much are the tournament types worth compared to each other: let's say 5:4:3 for type A : type B : type C, that's similar to what there is now. Using the point distribution from PU circuit before tournament types started to be used here, and the conversion thing that i very clunkily explained for swiss, plus a cutoff after 4 losses:

So that's my suggestion, of course a different point distribution could be picked as a base, a different ratio can be chosen, some rounding can be done to make it look nicer (tho that means ties might be more likely). Or just adjusting the existing distributions so that pult doesn't give more for quarterfinals than open and using some arbitrary numbers for swiss would work too i guess. I apologize for the very bad job i did explaining, it's difficult for me to do in english.


tldr: Swiss right now gives out disproportionally more points than ssnl/open for mediocre results, which is the consequence of how the format works with player results. Make the tour equivalent to other type A tours by converting W-L to a top-X record and awarding points based on top-X, or just make the reward for X-2 about 3-4 times lower than the X-1 reward. Clean up the point distributions and fix some oddities by picking one point distribution and applying it to type B and C tournaments with a chosen ratio.

 

[Shaneghoul]

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback! We've nailed down the format we plan on moving forward with and are just working through a last few details before we post the thread. Expect to see it within the next few days.