At first, I didn't really think much of the official tournaments, but once we got into the later parts of the previous month where the ladders usually start to die off, it was refreshing to see the om's of the month getting some use.
That being said, this reward that I'm seeing for winning the most OT's is relatively disappointing. I know that it applies to a very small grouping of people, but still, I was one of them for a very long time :c What should happen if someone wins the most OT's and they happen to not use Smogon? Do they just get a pat on the back and bragging rights? I mean, I know that Custom Titles and Custom Smogon Avatars are a pretty big deal, but those are Smogon-based rewards, and these are Showdown-based tournaments, so wouldn't it make better sense that the reward be something that applies to the user on Showdown? in the OM room in particular, since om business only applies there
"Well then what do you suggest, ya dingus? We already have a star given out to the winner of the most Daily Tournaments."
I suggest that we give the way we enact tournaments a complete overhaul. Every time we have a tournament in the room, I always think to myself: "What makes this anything special over just challenging the people myself? Or better yet, playing on the ladder?", and after thinking about it, I ended up realizing that there is no point to any of the tournaments that we have in the room except for the 1-2 dailies and the official.
That being said, what if we give them a purpose other than just being for fun?
Going on a tangent to answer the above question
My first ever experience with Showdown was back in my high school days around the end of my junior year. I didn't have a computer of my own to use, but thankfully we had school laptops that the school lent to students for scholarly use; that being said, they still had filters that prevented us from entering any of the fun websites >w>, and Showdown was included in that list of fun websites, but surprisingly, the other servers weren't! A friend of mine introduced me to psims in general, starting with Pandora, the biggest server other than the main one, if memory serves correctly. My friends and I played on there ever since then, even forming teams amongst each other to take on the other teams, or "clans", as they were referred to; but I wasn't really interested in that, I was more interested in changing the color of my name, since I wasn't overly fond of the sexy teal color that my account "Glyx" has, back then. If I remember correctly, Pandora had a unique shop system involving "poke dollars" that were won in trace amounts for participating in ladder battles and in larger amounts for winning tournaments. The poke dollars, themselves, were used for various things in the shop that could be pulled up with a / command. It's been ages since I last existed on Pandora, and unfortunately, the computer I'm using currently isn't capable of loading any servers other than the main one, so I can't check for myself, but I recall the shop alleging that you could change the color of your name, get a trainer id card, add things to said id card, get a custom avatar, get a unique symbol of your choice by your name for a week, and likely other things I'm probably forgetting. Another server that has/had a similar feature is/was Frost, a server my friends and I went to whenever we all got banned from Pandora for all having the same IP address, though it was much less difficult to gather shop credits since there were also smaller rooms that had tournaments where we could gather tournament wins much more easily, though the system was on a lot smaller of a scale than what Pandora had. I'm rambling at this point, I should probably shut up :L
In short, all of this is meant to say that I think we should have a system similar to that, where all tournaments matter, and we can gather points to spend in a shop of rewards that AREN'T biased towards Smogon users, or at least for just the Official Tournaments, if doing it for all om tours is too much work. I have no experience or knowledge of the workings of Showdown's coding, so I don't really have any idea how big of a task what I'm suggesting really is, but I would love to know, if someone that does have knowledge of such things is capable of and willing to explain, instead of just getting a blunt response of the task being too difficult or something akin to that.
I'm terribly sorry if this isn't the place to post this, but I asked if it was okay in the om room, and didn't receive a "no", but if it's going to be deleted, at least tell me before doing so, because I wanna get this blob of text copied for future use ;X