'Tournament Priority System' Poll / Applications are now open!

[Sonuis]

I don't particulary like the tournament system since it can lower the quality of the participants because usually the better players last longer in tournaments. I think it would be fairer if after 36 hours all people who signed are entered in a random draw and the first x number of people revealed get into the tournament (this isn't my idea someone on stark said it and I liked it).

All of you should read the hosting rules. There's nothing saying that you cannot do anything like invite only, lottery, etc. However, certain entry types (By that, I mean Invite Only or Extremely Crazy Requirements) do influence the chance of approval.

Maybe it's because I had a lot of later influence because I was the first to write up a major rules thread. It probably made people follow my approach on playing tournaments rather than their approach. Then later on we got the new one. Unfortunately, some people seem to not understand it entirely still, or rather, don't read it at all. ESPECIALLY PLAYING IN ONE!

I'm actually debating on whether or not to bring up something to the other TDs soon on variety+.

: )

 

[The SPrinkLer]

I know I don't play in tournaments very often, but I do play in mafia games a fair amount and I am fairly familiar with the priority system. The priority system seems good until you notice its biggest flaw:

Some people will be inclined to throw games so that their priority will be raised for another tournament. This forces the system to be very restrictive when it comes to people who have lost. Making people wait three weeks or two whole rounds after a loss is a necessary restriction to stop people from throwing games.

This actually makes the entire system unfair toward people who have lost and did not throw their games (i.e. 99.9% of all people who lose in tournaments). It allows in more 10 post people (who are more likely to be inactive) and leaves out more of the distinguished battlers in the community. Even those 10 post people, many of which will lose in the first round, will have trouble getting into their second tournament.

So yeah, I voted no, and that's why.

I agree wholeheartedly. I'd like to beat someone who wants to play to get noticed, not playing someone good who throws a match.

 

[Blue_Tornado]

No, definitely no. There are many users that are extremely new and know almost nothing about competitive battling, and those users usually rush off to sign-up threads expecting to do good and/or get noticed. Well, if the priority system goes about, tournaments will eventually be flooded with these users, and they won't be so enjoyable with their quality in such a drop. I know people have said it already, but there seems to be people that simply don't care. Hell, I've ripped my hair off several times while reading this thread. Why are non-official tournaments created? To have fun. Usually, the quality players make the tournament fun and interesting to watch, not only to play, while if tournament quality goes down, it will be unenjoyable, resulting in the tournament host's efforts completely wasted. Is this what we really want?

I know a lot of people will now go "oh, so you don't care about newer players? You judge them by join date and post count?!"; and this is false. It's a fact that there are some new players that are really good and will contribute to a tournament when in it, but it's also a fact that most people that sign up to the Smogon Forums have just started competitive battling, with Smogon acting as their ticket to getting better and learning the game. When applying this new system, there will be more loss than gain, if you see where I'm going with this.

I can talk about this for hours, but to cut it clean -- no.

And now let's see how the time zone problem can be fixed. I think Phil's idea is one of the closest ideas there is to satisfaction -- it is extremely hard to find one to solve this problem, as most of the sign-ups are affected by the time the tournament is posted, and you can't do so that there will be a fair ammount of players from each area of our world without modifying the sign-ups. Handpicking them will be a bit unfair, so just choosing them from the time they posted after a set ammount of time is probably one of the closest ways to make things fair.

 

[WECAMEASROMANS]

I voted yes. I think its unfair to let the same people join tournaments over and over again and that we should start letting some newer players get a chance. I also agree with the 36 hour minimum wait. Too many of us have stuff like school and other extracirrcular activities that when we sign in on Smogon the signups are already closed or filled up. I think this will be a very fair way to do the signups from now on.

P.S. 41 to 39 damn this is a very close poll lol.

 

[eric the espeon]

Adds unneeded complexity for players, tourney mods, and hosts, discourages applications (on the grounds that you may want to enter a different one more) therefore reducing tournament size and overall activity, makes it harder for active tournament players to get into tournaments even though many of them are exactly the people we want in.

I think that something needs to change about tournament applications, but this is not the answer. If we find that many people are missing out on getting into a specific tournament, then make that tournament bigger. Encourage hosts to use slightly unusual player numbers to make tournament size more flexible (96 and 48 are actually great numbers, just play it normally down to 3 players and have a three way face off). Force people running tournaments to keep sign ups open longer. If repeatedly there are 64 player tournaments that are oversubscribed, open tournament applications and let a more tournaments in.

Unlike with mafia (which this system is based off) you can easily expand the number of players in a tournament with almost no effort on the host's part. You can also make new tournaments to spread the players more thinly very much easier than you can make new mafia games, if you think that tournament size is getting over the top.

Maybe the biggest problem with this would be that certain players are likely to think "if I enter tourney x, then I may not get into tourney y", and so not enter tourney x at all. In most cases this will give an extra space for another player, however sometimes it will bring the tournament down a size level, and make less places available. As an example lets say 10 players decide against joining tourney x because they want to get into y, and tourney x ends up with 55 people (not enough for 64) so the host cuts it down to a 32 player tournament, there will actually be 23 more people who sign up and miss out, and over 32 who actually wanted to play who won't.

Edit: As for the "this helps newer players" argument, as it stands newer players are on a even footing with the best. Right now the EWs and Goukis have the same chance of getting into a normal tournament as everyone else, except maybe they check this forum more often. This would actively discriminate against top notch tournament players who enter as many tournaments as they can.

tl;dr: Not a good way to approach the problems, won't help much, makes extra work, puts people off joining tournaments, a not insignificant portion of the time will lead to more players missing out. Lets not.

 

[RBG]

Simplest method I can think of is limit people to like 5 or 6 tourneys, and instead of first come first serve, leave the thread open 24/48 hours and randomize the list.

 

[locopoke]

I think you are going about this wrong. I actually think everybody is going about this the wrong way. I do not like any of the ideas proposed to far. The priority system will force players who enter many tournaments to choose between certain tournaments, which means that if one tournament is more important or has a better theme, other tournaments will probably not get as many participants, or not get any good players.

As for the ideas that suggest that we randomise half of the participants, I think that this is a terrible idea. Mainly because we have no way to check if the tournament host actually did randomise the participants or not. My guess is that for the most part, all tournament hosts will just handpick the participants (choose only the good people) and say that they randomised it, which means that the newer members who live in a bad timezone will still not be able to get into many tournaments. Not only that, but if the participants actually are randomised, what happens when good players constantly end up getting unlucky and hardly ever get to enter tournaments. I for one would be very upset if I didn't get into a tournament that I was looking forward to playing in because the participants were picked randomly.

I think that something needs to change about tournament applications, but this is not the answer. If we find that many people are missing out on getting into a specific tournament, then make that tournament bigger. Encourage hosts to use slightly unusual player numbers to make tournament size more flexible (96 and 48 are actually great numbers, just play it normally down to 3 players and have a three way face off). Force people running tournaments to keep sign ups open longer. If repeatedly there are 64 player tournaments that are oversubscribed, open tournament applications and let a more tournaments in.

I was actually thinking the exact opposite of this, and I have been for a very long time (if you frequent IRC, then you've probably heard me mention this before). The problem may not be the way participants are being picked, but maybe it's the fact that there aren't enough tournaments. Now, this doesn't mean that we should start having 15 long gimmick tournaments being hosted at one time, contrary to 7 or 8. I think that live 32-man tournaments (standard OU or Ubers) should be hosted constantly at different times of the day, instead of gimmicky tournaments that last for months. This will give everybody a chance to play more overall, and it will give them a chance to play real metagames instead of gimmick metagames for a change. The tournaments forum has been getting pretty stale lately, and I think it's because of tournaments with boring themes that drag on for months. Not to mention that the standard metagames have been overlooked a lot in the tournaments forum for a long time. Tournament participants hardly ever get a chance to play real metagames, which doesn't make any sense to me since Smogon is supposed to be a competitive Pokemon community.

Even if people don't like the idea of live tournaments, I think tournaments definitely need to be shorter. The deadlines need to be shorter and maybe the participants should be cut down to 32 instead of 64. This way tournaments will take a month to finish at the most and other tournaments can be posted more frequently. In the end, people get to play more often which is what matters.

tl;dr: Less long, gimmicky tournaments that drag on forever and more live 32-man tournaments with real metagames.

 

[DJXO9]

I definitely agree with loco that more standard tournaments be implemented. I think though, that they shouldn't necessarily be cut back in length. I think that the tournaments need to have much stricter rules about deadlines and such. Just about every deadline is about 2 weeks long, at least for the earliest rounds. That is plenty of time, quite frankly, too much. Unless you're in a tournament that differs enough from the metagame, like Fuk Dragon, you don't need much time for team building. As for setting up matches with opponents, an actual time needs to be set not just, "If i see you on, we'll battle." It gets tournaments done much faster. Really, a week is plenty of time. If you know you won't have much time, don't sign up.

So, basically, what I'm saying is, having more standard tournaments is a much better way of getting known, as opposed to say, winning the Metronome Tournament. Also, the rules on deadlines need to become much stricter, which will allow tournaments to finish in double the time, rather than 3 months.

 

[eric the espeon]

Having stricter limits on deadlines is a very good idea, even 2 weeks is much longer than you really need. With 2 weeks+ most players are just going to sit back and do other things until the deadline approaches. Encouraging hosts to actively disqualify anyone who is not active, and maybe making it so that a host must contact a Tournament Director before granting any extension would cut down the wasted time in tournaments dramatically.

However, limiting the number of players is imo a bad idea. Halving the size of a 64 player tournament only reduces the number of rounds by ~17%, but reduces the number of players in it by a huge number. With the current trend of sign ups, it's not that hard to get 64 players so who disappoint so many people by cutting down numbers dramatically and artificially (making more tournaments to players spread out would not be artificial).

Running more live tournaments makes sense if we've got people to run them, but it needn't have any impact on the larger and longer tournaments which this proposal relates to. And as for large standard tournaments, I'm sure that if we allow more large tournaments overall they will come back.

 

[locopoke]

I agree with you that long tournaments shouldn't be effected by live tournaments, but I definitely think that some live tournaments should be hosted soon. I've been wanting to host some for a very long time, but usually either LNT or Smogon Tour got in the way. I'm still planning on hosting one of these days though.

 

[tophway]

As an example lets say 10 players decide against joining tourney x because they want to get into y, and tourney x ends up with 55 people (not enough for 64) so the host cuts it down to a 32 player tournament, there will actually be 23 more people who sign up and miss out, and over 32 who actually wanted to play who won't.

The priority system will force players who enter many tournaments to choose between certain tournaments, which means that if one tournament is more important or has a better theme, other tournaments will probably not get as many participants, or not get any good players.

I don't think there will ever be a case of not having enough willing participants unless the number of tourneys at one time drastically increases. For example, FUK DRAGON singups quickly exceeded the 64 man cap, and then even the 128 man cap. I know it was the only tourney open, but I still think its a sound indicator of the large pool of people ready to keep every 64 man tourney full.

Live tournaments would be great and I think a nice complement to the priority system, even though I don't think thats locopoke's intention.

Also, if people like those ideas about shorter deadlines and not granting extensions without contact, why not just immediately adopt them? Per Sonius' post theres nothing stopping upcoming hosts from straying from the standard setup.

 

[-Mind-]

it's funny to see that all the better players voted no(there are a few exceptions)

 

[Corndog]

I voted 'no' because while fairness seems like a good policy, there's just too many problems with any way of implementing it for the system to really work. The drawbacks of a plan like this greatly exceed any potential benefits.

One thing I would like to ask, though, since 'yes' is currently just ahead in the polls - should invitation-only tournaments affect your number of active tournaments? My answer to this would be no -- it would suck to have invitees reject because they're trying to keep their priority low, and it's not unfair to others if those tournaments do not count, because they weren't invited to the tourney in the first place.

 

[Hipmonlee]

The 6 hour chunks system gives an unfair bias to people in unusual timezones.

Missing out on a tournament because of randomisation isnt any worse than missing out on a tournament because signups closed after 4 hours..

And reserving places in tournaments is inherently uncompetitive.

Reach's opposition to priority is a good issue I think. Unless we can come up with a solution to that then I dont think we should go with priorities.

One thing you could do to get around some of these issues is make it that p1 only has priority over p5 or something.. It wont eliminate the problems entirely, but it probably would make them rare enough that no one will ever care.

Also if you dont trust hosts to randomise fairly, why would you ever join their tournaments?

Have a nice day.

 

[jc104]

The 6 hour chunks system gives an unfair bias to people in unusual timezones.

As long as we can gauge the numbers of people in each time zone, we can allocate the places accordingly; for example, we can make more places available for those in EST, since a greater proportion fall into this timezone. This would have to be standardised, however.

 

[Dragonknight!]

I voted yes on the poll, but after putting more thought into it, I have changed my mind.
I think it would be better if it were like this:
we accept everybody within say, 24 hours, and put them into pools of 8 or 16 based on how many people we have, and put out 3 matchups for each pool.

so if we get 288 applicants, we put them in 36 (random) pools. and put out three matchups for them, and have all players play each match best out of three. The top 2 players (which are judged by records and possibly how much they won by, etc.) of each pool will then be put into a standard 64 man single elimination tournament. More pools can be added, some pools will just only advance one person, or 64 of the say, 67 people are randomly picked. This is a very long tournament, but it is not as tedious as one would think. Players do not report scores until all matches have been done, and everything is done in one thread, maybe on a spreadsheet.

I do not know how well this would work, put on it looks good to me on paper

 

[tophway]

Reach's opposition to priority is a good issue I think. Unless we can come up with a solution to that then I dont think we should go with priorities..

While I'm sure he has others, the concern reach posted about having to wait months would thankfully never happen. The longest amount of time a tourney can affect your priority after exiting it is 3 weeks, straight from the OP.

 

[Game Freak201]

Frankly, I think that the priority system would be an improper use if we were to use it on our Pokemon tournaments. Mainly due to the fact that it was meant for mafia, a completely different game from Pokemon.

In Pokemon, we can easily increase the size of the tournament while mafia hosts have to worry about balancing the roles in the game. I think we should make the number of people who can participate in tournaments larger, like making the standard tournament size 128 instead of 64, and having stricter deadlines. This would increase the amount of people who can participate while also increasing the amount of tournaments available due to not having a tournament lasting half a year with their 3-5 week deadlines per round. This would also make it so that good players to join in tournaments consistently while not giving the new players the shorter end of the stick with the amount of spots available to join; thus increasing the quality of the tournament. If I were hosting a tournament, I would certainly want it to be good and fun, especially if it were an interesting gimmick tournament.

 

[cantab]

I'm refraining from voting because I don't actually play tournaments, but IMHO it should be up to the tournament host how to choose participants. While a certain method (whether this one, or another) can be recommended by the directors, even considered the default that applying hosts should give a very good reason to deviate from, I do not feel it should be mandated.

Indeed, simply encouraging variety in participant choosing would probably help. Some first-come-first-served, some randomised, some mixed, some priority to those not in tournaments, etc. Let many methods will be tried, and it will soon become apparent by actual experience, instead of hypothesising, which are better.

Just my 2 pence.

 

[pastel]

I totally voted against this.
Maybe letting it open for 36 hours, and only let a certai number of people per hour join could work, but not this way, if you play tournaments alot, it's because you are active and deserve it, if you don't, it's because you don't want to, or can't.

 

[Dubulous]

Cantab, why would people want to use a variety of methods when they could simply just choose the best players for their tournaments? I know that if I was hosting a tournament, I would want only the best players in it and fill in the rest of the spots from there. Everyone wants their tournament to be the one that everyone remembers, and those usually have multiple spotlight matches in them. If your policy was implemented, we wouldn't be getting any variety at all. We would, in fact, be getting less variety. While this is good for the good players in bad time zones, the "average user" from those same time zones would be jipped time and time again, which, all in all, will lead to less site activity.

 

[remlabmez]

no, but there should be a penalty of dropping out of a tournament (I am guilty of this heh)

 

[Hegna]

I agree that there should be a way to allow people who just aren't on at the right time into tourneys, and as such I voted yes.

However, though the system seems good in theory, I can definitely see many completely new members who know almost nothing about battling getting into tournaments easily and ruining what could otherwise be a good tournament.

Granted there has to be way to allow people who aren't on at the "right time" to join the tournaments they want in on, and this seems like it could work, but I'm not too confidant that it'll be perfect.

 

[Engineer Pikachu]

like Dragonknight!, I voted yes on the poll, but after mulling it over, I'm really not sure anymore. Like I previously stated, this system is better than no system, but as I said in zarator's "Tournament Size" (or something like that), tournament hosts can easily change around how their tournament works. if the OP states "64-man tournament" and 133 people sign-up, it's easy. Just change it to 128. If 100 people sign up, make it 96-man, where the last round is round-robin. so yeah.

 

[ck49]

People keep talking about how people would neglect joining one tournament because another is coming. This is a good thing, because then not only will more people have a chance to join the tournament, but you will only join a tournament if you really want to. People shouldn't join every tournament for the sake of joining a tournament, and this prevents it.