Complaints regarding the current rule about forming player lists

There have been numerous complaints and criticisms regarding the current rule about forming player lists:

All non-official tournaments that don't have a specifically approved signup method will use First Come First Serve for the first half of the players, and then the host must randomize amongst the remainder of signups.

Basically the complaint is that while this rule allows the diligent watchers of the Tournaments forum to have a guaranteed entry into most tournaments, as well as giving people from timezones on the other side of the planet a chance to make it in, it does not allow good players that do not have the time to sit watching the forum all day a solid opportunity to get the spot they have earned through proving themselves to be good players.

A proposed solution to the problem is to change the rule so that in addition to the FCFS spots and the random spots, a certain number of slots should be allocated to people the hosts select themselves.

I personally am not opposed to such a change as I agree that the better players in the community have earned their positions in tournaments and shouldn't need to rely on a RNG if they miss the start of signups. What does everyone else think?

All non-official tournaments that don't have a specifically approved signup method will use First Come First Serve for the first half of the players, and then the host must randomize amongst the remainder of signups.

Wait, when did this happen again?

It happened a while ago, and I agree that it is rather uncompetitive. I would rathers see the first half as FCFS and the second half as handpicked by the host. (or if the host wants just the full thing as FCFS

Well, frankly, already hosts can handpick whoever they want and say it was "random". Who the hell knows what they are doing? If we decide to actually, out loud, permit the handpicking of players, it should be done by a TD not participating in the tournament and not the host since it seems to me very common for hosts to participate in their own tournaments.

I would like to say, however, that I think the current system is just fine and people need to quit their bitching.

Sonuis said:

All non-official tournaments that don't have a specifically approved signup method will use First Come First Serve for the first half of the players, and then the host must randomize amongst the remainder of signups.

Wait, when did this happen again?

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http://www.smogon.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2464201#post2464201

For a while there was a trend where the hosts used a 62.5% FCFS and 37.5% handpicked signups method. There were complaints that tournaments were filling up in less than a few hours meaning some timezones had no chance to get in. That was why the randomness was introduced (to give them at least a chance while still giving the people that are diligently waiting to sign up their spot).

Aeolus said:

Well, frankly, already hosts can handpick whoever they want and say it was "random". Who the hell knows what they are doing? If we decide to actually, out loud, permit the handpicking of players, it should be done by a TD not participating in the tournament and not the host since it seems to me very common for hosts to participate in their own tournaments.

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As Hip said in the original thread, we already trust them to randomise brackets, so it's not too huge a step to trust them to randomise signups too.

This is inherently uncompetitive any way you look at it. You can justify it by saying the best players will be the ones invited, but what will actually happen is the friends of the hosts will be invited. Unless you have some objective measure of deciding who the best players are.

Just for example, if I had a tournament and was going to invite the best players who didnt make the signups, I would be much more likely to invite players from oceania than someone like hanke because I had never heard of him before st6..

Essentially we are giving players within the smogon clique a better chance of winning our tournaments than outsiders. It weakens our claim to being the premiere competitive site for pokemon when we dont give outsiders a fair chance to compete.

Yeah, if its only one or two slots per tournament its not going to have a big impact, but it's still a step in the wrong direction. Basically it's a question of our integrity here.

The point of the randomisation was to be fair to people in other timezones. Half handpicked and half fcfs seems like its even harder for a person in an unusual timezone to make it into a tournament, which they are going to have to do at some point to prove themsevles deserving of being handpicked I would think..

Have a nice day.

Hipmonlee said:

This is inherently uncompetitive any way you look at it. You can justify it by saying the best players will be the ones invited, but what will actually happen is the friends of the hosts will be invited. Unless you have some objective measure of deciding who the best players are.

Just for example, if I had a tournament and was going to invite the best players who didnt make the signups, I would be much more likely to invite players from oceania than someone like hanke because I had never heard of him before st6..

Essentially we are giving players within the smogon clique a better chance of winning our tournaments than outsiders. It weakens our claim to being the premiere competitive site for pokemon when we dont give outsiders a fair chance to compete.

Yeah, if its only one or two slots per tournament its not going to have a big impact, but it's still a step in the wrong direction. Basically it's a question of our integrity here.

The point of the randomisation was to be fair to people in other timezones. Half handpicked and half fcfs seems like its even harder for a person in an unusual timezone to make it into a tournament, which they are going to have to do at some point to prove themsevles deserving of being handpicked I would think..

Have a nice day.

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Friends of the host can get in easily anyway as long as the host lets the friend know when they are posting or even posting at times it when it's convenient for the friend.

There is no way to objectively determine who is a better player, and there will probably be favouritism, but I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks in this case. It may be a step in the wrong direction from a pure fairness perspective, but on the other hand, we do want the better players in the community to play in our tournaments, and like you said it will not have a big impact if the number of handpicked players is small. If we really wanted to be completely fair and give everyone an equal chance to play in every tournament, we could force randomisations of the entire player list from the signups, but I have no doubt that would piss a lot of active players off, including players that I would say deserve to be in the tournaments more than unknown people.

So basically I think it comes down to whether we want to reward active members of the community (and by extension kick out a couple of people that might have gotten in), or provide tournaments that give everyone an equal chance to get in regardless of whether it is their first post or their ten thousandth. What we have right now is kind of a middle ground (since the more active people will get into the tournaments fast), and the proposed change will practically keep it the same with a minor difference.

Well, if the hosts can already tell people when sign ups are going to be then what is the problem..

Honestly though, if the problem is people are missing out on tournaments, then the solution ought to be have bigger or more tournaments. The only thing I can think of that makes this suggestion fair, is that these people might be more active.

One thing that might help, is if signups were announced before they opened. So if people who dont know the hosts can be ready to sign up ahead of time if they really want to be in a certain tournament..

Also, when you have the SPL and the World Cup there are already tournaments catering to well known players specifically. How much is this really needed?

Have a nice day.

I know this topic is for TD's, but I figure there's no harm in making suggestions, so here's mine:

Why not open signups in chunks? In other words, for a 64 man tournament, allow 16 people to sign up immediately, then another 16 people 6 hours after the signups thread opens, then another 16 people 12 hours later, and the final 16 can sign up 18 hours later. It doesn't have to follow this exact breakdown, but I think you get what I'm saying. This solves the issue of time zone disadvantages, and allows users to also prepare for signing up if they REALLY want to join. This way, if "good" players want to join a tournament they no longer have any activity excuses. I think I made this suggestion in the past somewhere, but I don't remember. Just food for thought.

Ok, I've been thinking a lot about this, and I really wish I could start this topic over with a clean slate, because I want to list things that are (debatably) desirable for signups methods and things that aren't, e.g.:

• Fairness and give all types of users on the site the opportunity to participate
• Simplicity
• Good players should be able to play
• Reward the more active users on the site for their activity
• Allow those in distant timezones to play

and then I would list methods that have been brought up:

• First Come First Serve
• Entirely Handpicked (this was only used in one non-official tournament iirc)
• Based off no. of posts / Join Date (ST6 and iirc ST5)
• (large) x% FCFS, (small) y% handpicked
• 50% FCFS 50% random
• 100% random selection
• Letting everyone in and handing out byes in Round 1 to make up for bad numbers
• The time split FCFS method Philip7086 just posted about
• (large) x% FCFS, (large) y% random, (small) z% handpicked

The status quo is "50% FCFS 50% random" and the previous standard was "First Come First Serve". FCFS is very simple, random is more fair but annoys people more, the last option seems to deal with most cases but is kind of contrived and not really simple. Entirely Handpicked is a pretty dumb option since the same people would play in every tournament. I don't like the no. of posts / join date option either since I'm sure some people sign up here just to play in tournaments. Handing out byes is not fair to the people that have to play, and boring for the people that get the byes. I do like large x% FCFS small y% handpicked but it's not really fair to unknown people in bad timezones. Phil's is not too simple and I think pretty error prone until we get an automated system. It also means people have to refresh and delete and repost a lot around the set times which doesn't sound like much fun. Other than that it's not a bad idea.

What do we want? I'm not opposed to changing the status quo since I've observed that plain FCFS kept more people happy.

Like I said before, I think the status quo is just fine. FCFS for a portion and then randomness for the remaining portion favors is fair for active players since they will likely make the FCFS crowd and then randomness for the second half is generally fair. If someone wants an exception from this for a particular tournament, then I think that can be considered on a case by case basis.

edit: I know there are people who cannot access this board that would want to have a say on this, perhaps it should be moved to IS or PR? I would like to get a wider range of opinions before I take my final stance.

Yeah I would prefer actual policy to be discussed in PR. Just bear in mind that the people in PR are mostly the same people who are going to benefit from having places reserved for them in tournaments.

Have a nice day.

Hipmonlee said:

One thing that might help, is if signups were announced before they opened. So if people who dont know the hosts can be ready to sign up ahead of time if they really want to be in a certain tournament..

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I like this idea!

ideally, the reason we want to put good players in tournaments in the first place is because they would be motivated to do well and provide good competition. if sign-ups are announced, say, a day ahead of time, it would provide those who are extra motivated or interested an incentive to make themselves available at the right time the following day.

it also is another step towards addressing the issue of timezones. it's not a complete fix because no one will want to wake up at 5 am to sign up for a tournament, but it does mean that if you live in some random time zone and the signups are scheduled to open at 6 am and you usually don't check smogon before you go to school or go to work, you'll know ahead of time to do it on the day the tournament sign-ups open.

the final reason I like this is that it is very simple to implement, since it doesn't involve any fundamental change in the current process. the initial method I imagined was mod lock + unlock at the desired time but then I realized it might be unrealistic to expect mods to unlock the thread at exactly the right time (being 20 or even 10 minutes late could mean someone who planned to signup before school misses it, for example). we could just use timestamps instead - the host could just say "signups start 24 hours from the time of this OP" and any signups made before that time is up don't count.

As much as I agree that preemptively opening signups 24 hours before signups actually began would be great to inform users, I think there would inevitably be people that would try to sign up early, complain about not getting into the tournament when they were the first to post, and create a general headache for the tournament hosts. Maybe this is worth it, though. I think having the thread locked initially and then unlocked by the tournament host would be the way to go. This requires the user to be badged, though, which sucks. Maybe in the case of an unbadged user, they could post two threads: One to announce signups beginning soon and one for signups when they start. The TDs could lock the announcement thread when the signups begin. Anyway, this is just some food for thought; I like the idea of the preemptive signup announcements at large, I just think that leaving it open the whole time would be a real mess.

On the whole, for the main topic of this discussion, I agree with Hip and Aeolus in that I would prefer it not get changed. I think the current system of 50% FCFS and then 50% randomization is both the most-fair and most-unbiased way that tournaments can be run while still allowing people to get in if they are prompt. Should we include some sort of signups announcement as Hip and then whistle suggested, I think it would further benefit the community by letting them know when to expect signups to begin.

I have a few questions:

1. How many "good players" are missing tournaments? Examples of good players, the tournaments they wanted to get into and were unable to, and the number of other tournaments they did get into would be data worth analyzing. There's a small chance this whole thing is a non problem drummed up by an outspoken, unlucky minority.

2. Why do we give preferred admission to "good players" on a competitive website? In a competition, everyone needs roughly the same opportunity to compete in order to be fair. If you take that away, isn't it yet another competition for a few friends who just want to play under cool rules? Related: Are these good players not getting into ANY tournaments, or just missing one or two?

3. How would an average battler become a "good player"? They can't win tournaments as easily if they're less likely to be admitted, so it becomes a bit of a catch 22: Good players get in, bad players can't prove themselves because they can't get in as easily as a good player (yes they can come early but why don't the good players have to do that?)... This is particularly important because you can't use ladder ratings to rank player quality with a lot of the exotic tournaments we have. The metagames are often completely different, and emphasize different skills. I know personally that I do a lot better in tournaments that emphasize teambuilding under unique parameters than I do in "standard OU" tournaments.

In short, I agree completely with Hipmonlee and I love the rule as written. I think the random rule is a great way to get people into tournaments who aren't lucky or constantly checking the site, and it's completely fair to everyone.

I agree 100% with Hipmonlee and Chris is Me. There is no way that making a rule that explicitly supports biased signups is a good idea. The fact that there are already biases does not make that any less true; it just means that there are already biases. We should think about what could potentially be done about those biases, not use them as an excuse to make things worse.

Ideally, signups would be determined completely randomly and we'd just have more signups per tournament to make up for it. The current rule seems like an okay solution because it isn't considered terribly feasible to host very large tournaments. Many of the players who sign up for tournaments aren't that invested anyway, so it seems fine to give some preference to players who are more likely to care.

Rising_Dusk said:

As much as I agree that preemptively opening signups 24 hours before signups actually began would be great to inform users, I think there would inevitably be people that would try to sign up early, complain about not getting into the tournament when they were the first to post, and create a general headache for the tournament hosts.

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You could avoid this by putting the announcement in the tournament listing thread.

Have a nice day.

I also agree with CIM and Blame Game. Also, "good" players will never miss important non-ladder matches, since "good" players are theoretically the only ones who are going to play in things like SPL, OST, World Cup, Smogon Tour, Frontier, etc. It's pretty ludicrous to suggest that good players are somehow missing out on a ton of opportunities to prove their excellence.

Hipmonlee said:

This is inherently uncompetitive any way you look at it. You can justify it by saying the best players will be the ones invited, but what will actually happen is the friends of the hosts will be invited. Unless you have some objective measure of deciding who the best players are.

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I don't see how it is uncompetitive for people to want more skilled players in their tournaments. I don't believe you need an objective measure; you just need smart hosts (that is on the TDs to pick the right ones) with good judgment. I don't understand this obsession with "objective" that we seem to have...why is that necessary?

Just for example, if I had a tournament and was going to invite the best players who didnt make the signups, I would be much more likely to invite players from oceania than someone like hanke because I had never heard of him before st6..

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This is why I am proposing only a SMALL percentage of the signups be handpicked...arbitrary user x who may have a lot of skill will still have a great chance to make the tournament if it is a lot X fcfs, a lot y randomized, and only some z handpicked.

Essentially we are giving players within the smogon clique a better chance of winning our tournaments than outsiders. It weakens our claim to being the premiere competitive site for pokemon when we dont give outsiders a fair chance to compete.

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I don't get this at all. "Smogon clique" ??? What? There is no "smogon clique" anymore. People who are good battlers are recognized right away, regardless of site affiliation. This has been going on since Iggybot in libelldra and hector / stone_cold in TU. We are absolutely giving outsiders a fair chance, you're just assuming that outsiders implies unknown. If a user is completely unknown btw, I would argue it is uncompetitive to give him a 100% shot due to the uncertainty in completing matches that seems to be such a prevailing problem in this community. If completely unknown, I don't see any problem with just slightly lowering his chance to get in; we're still giving him a shot with the fcfs and the randomization.

Yeah, if its only one or two slots per tournament its not going to have a big impact, but it's still a step in the wrong direction. Basically it's a question of our integrity here.

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How? How is it a question of integrity to want good and known and active players in your tournament? Unknowns bring literally the "unknown" factor into the equation; it is entirely uncompetitive to have uncompleted matches.

The point of the randomisation was to be fair to people in other timezones. Half handpicked and half fcfs seems like its even harder for a person in an unusual timezone to make it into a tournament, which they are going to have to do at some point to prove themsevles deserving of being handpicked I would think..

Have a nice day.

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I agree, fcfs and randomization should remain the majority of the sign ups, but I don't agree at all that having a few handpicked questions our integrity. We're simply making a more competitive tournament by using sound judgment to determine better players, and history to determine activity.

Blame Game said:

I agree 100% with Hipmonlee and Chris is Me. There is no way that making a rule that explicitly supports biased signups is a good idea. The fact that there are already biases does not make that any less true; it just means that there are already biases. We should think about what could potentially be done about those biases, not use them as an excuse to make things worse.

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Um, why is biased towards COMPETITIVENESS and ACTIVITY ever not a good idea? Biased? Of course it is biased. So what? It biased towards skill and activity. Isn't that you know...what makes tournaments relevant? Why would we possibly remove bias towards skill and activity I just don't understand this at all.

Ideally, signups would be determined completely randomly and we'd just have more signups per tournament to make up for it. The current rule seems like an okay solution because it isn't considered terribly feasible to host very large tournaments. Many of the players who sign up for tournaments aren't that invested anyway, so it seems fine to give some preference to players who are more likely to care.

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Actually, not sure what site you're on, but since smogon.com is competitive, we should make sure our playerbase in tournament is as competitive and active as possible. Randomization is a fair compromise to potentially get unknowns who are good and be fair to people in non ideal timezones.

mtr said:

I also agree with CIM and Blame Game. Also, "good" players will never miss important non-ladder matches, since "good" players are theoretically the only ones who are going to play in things like SPL, OST, World Cup, Smogon Tour, Frontier, etc. It's pretty ludicrous to suggest that good players are somehow missing out on a ton of opportunities to prove their excellence.

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What does this have to do with anything? I don't give a flying fuck about "missing opportunities" to prove my excellence. I just want a small # of spots in a tournament, say, 10 out of 128, to be set aside for players who maybe work full time, who have a history of success in tournaments, and who for some reason weren't able to sign up right away. OF COURSE these players should be allowed in a tournament.

In summary, I argue that there is nothing wrong with a subjective standard in determining player skill, that there is nothing wrong with slightly biasing tournaments to increase overall player skill, and that with a system of say, 45% fcfs, 45% randomized, and 10% handpicked, you are satisfying every potential issue.

FCFS rewards those who are active; randomization doesn't punish those in unideal timezones; a small # of handpicked battlers over users who are COMPLETELY unknown will improve tournament relevance since we will be choosing activity and success over uncertainty.

Even if a small percentage of the tournament player pool was handpicked, I think it wouldn't make a difference and would help make the tournament more competitive. A lot of the better players make sign-ups anyway, but there are always a few that miss a sign-up topic due to simply not having time or being in a wrong timezone. In this regard, I feel like allocating a small percentage (somewhere between 10 and 15) to the tournament host is a smart idea.

It is slightly possible to have bias in this, but you could also make it so that a different tournament director than the one hosting the tournament chooses the 10-15% of players, to ensure that what Hip said with his OCN buddies for example doesn't happen.

FCFS and randomization should be the majority, but if you really wanna make these little tournaments mean something (aka make them competitive), then the 10-15% hand-picked selection idea should be implemented to at least bring better-level competition to the table. You play tournaments to play the best players, not to simply cruise-control like you can on the ladders for example.

I think you guys are using a different version of "competitive" than we are.

I'm saying a competitive game (in this case, a tournament) is not fair and thus uncompetitive if the barrier to entry is not even to all.

Random Note: Once this is finished, the next thread regarding tournaments is: "Applications, how should the TDs really accept them?" Then base rules on hosting/joining, some other things.. Unless there's some disagreement from the other TDs that is.

Also, once everything is set and done, I'll be purging the stickies and creating a super thread on tournaments. The following will be in the thread

• How to host a tournament.
• How to submit a tournament application.
  • This includes the process of how tournaments are chosen. Of course, this is up for question since the TDs feel the queue system is sort of broken.
• How to join a tournament.
• Tools (Mekkah's Bracket Maker/timw06's Bracket Maker)
  • • End post 1.
• Participation rules.
• How to get BANNED from hosting and/or joining a tournament.
• Banned list.
  • • End post 2.
• Active tournaments for quick and easy access on the forum. Not just the website (Thanks to Umbreon Dan by the way for the Active updates).
• Tournaments waiting and being processed.
• Completed tournaments.
  • • End post 3, locked topic.
  • If there are any changes in the rules in the future after the new thread is posted, the thread title will be updated, and changed rules will be in bold. A month or two after the change, the thread's title will be reverted to normal, and the new rule will not be bold anymore.

Of course, this is all until chaos gets the magical tournament forum script ready for the forum. It's a nice thing it is.

Opinion: I actually was fine when it was FCFS, but then the change to FCFS 1/2 then random came in and I was sort of iffy on it, and then this. So let's have fun since I can't really get a hang of it.

Edit: Also, about setting times to starting joining, it's harder for members who can't close their own threads to do this without people deciding that they'd post because they can.

With the time thing, you could set a permission for only the Tournament forum that allows registered users to close their own threads. Personally I don't see the harm in that.

Aldaron said:

Um, why is biased towards COMPETITIVENESS and ACTIVITY ever not a good idea? Biased? Of course it is biased. So what? It biased towards skill and activity. Isn't that you know...what makes tournaments relevant? Why would we possibly remove bias towards skill and activity I just don't understand this at all.

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Activity? Why are you talking about activity? That is exactly what makes this idea terrible. Activity is not relevant to competitiveness. Neither is like, charisma, or how much you agree with Aldaron, or how easily your username rolls off the tongue, or whatever other possible biases are introduced by having handpicked signups.

The point of tournaments should be to have as serious an environment as possible, while also being totally fair to all potential participants. Players should be able to forge their own paths in this game, and they should have to do so by being good at the game and nothing else. Reputation and personal friendships are rewarding enough without us stepping in and enforcing rules that explicitly give them handouts.