Implemented SPL Format Discussion

[DragonWhale]

What if there were 4 SV slots and some of it (1 or 2) banned tera? This would let many players better understand whether SV OU would be better with or without the mechanic, and also would help with the variety of games (and it's also a WAY better option than having blitz or no johns).

 

[Merritt]

What if there were 4 SV slots and some of it (1 or 2) banned tera? This would let many players better understand whether SV OU would be better with or without the mechanic, and also would help with the variety of games (and it's also a WAY better option than having blitz or no johns).

I'm pretty strongly against using SPL as a place to test out theoretical metagames. There's places and other tournaments where that can reasonably be done, but Smogon Premier League isn't one of them.

Even beyond that, nobody will be officially tiering "SV OU (No Tera)". It would be wildly unreasonable to put the burden of fixing a metagame with broken elements on the hosts, and expecting a metagame that's less than 2 months old and diverges from the SV OU metagame by fully banning terastallization to not have broken things is optimistic at best. Putting a metagame that has no chance of being balanced via bans should it turn out to be not fully competitive into SPL would be a bad idea.

 

[kumiko]

i seriously don't get why everyone has decided that 3 slots is the perfect number of cg ou. let's be real here, there are terrible games and players in the tournament no matter how many slots there are; it's always been an issue. 2, 3, or 4. i don't think the tournaments with 4 have been significantly worse than the ones with 3. just look at stuff like snake 4 for example. the 3 slot tournaments aren't always better at all. why do people want to include something extremely random to be shoved into spl just because they made up in their head that 4 slots is going to be such a significant downgrade to 3? do people seriously think the difference between the potential third cg ou is that much better than the fourth? i sure as hell don't.

i think the td team made the right decision with the poll, as these are the really only two viable options unless people want to totally redo the structure of the official tours circuit... again.

~experimental~ "4th" cg ou slots shouldn't be considered at all.

i voted for 4 because i think it's more interesting to have more cg ou, but don't really care between the two that much.

 

[TPP]

We ran a survey for participants and managers in the previous SPL, and the results are below:

66 votes x4 SV OU
56 votes x2 SV OU
42 votes not submitted/abstained

The survey results alongside the support of the TD team has led to our decision for the format of SPL 14. The format will be 12 slots with the following tiers:

SV OU
SV OU
SV OU
SV OU
SS OU
SM OU
ORAS OU
BW OU
DPP OU
ADV OU
GSC OU
RBY OU