Tournament PUWC V - Format Discussion

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DugZa

DugZa

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PU Leader
Hello, PUWC is back for its fifth iteration and we would like the community's feedback about certain things.
  • How many teams should we have this time? We had 14 teams last year, should we have more, less, or the same?

  • Should we stick with the pools format or try weeks again? Pools were generally well-received last year and drastically reduced the tour length, so do we stick to that again or go back to weeks?

  • Regarding tiers, the forum mod team strongly prefers all SV with 8 slots, similar to last year but we are open to changing to 6 SV + 1 SS + 1 SM or 5 SV + 1 SS + 1 SM + 1 ORAS if there is sufficient enough support for it. Any generation older than ORAS is unlikely to be considered and 8 SV remains the default option if there is no overwhelming support for a change.
Share your thoughts or proposals about the above and anything else you'd like to add; don't use this thread to suggest different tour ideas and keep the discussion civil, thanks!
 
8 sv sounds like it would get stale really fast but I’m sure the pool of good oldgenners is pretty small so teams would be pretty unbalanced if you go that route, but it’s wc so they’re always gonna be unbalanced. I would include oldgens in this personally and I agree that anything older than ORAS is really bad
 
I loved 8 sv personally, last year it was nice to be able to help out everywhere and it all being the same tier made me feel more a part of a working unit than an individual working on my record to benefit the team. I think all cg in world cup is usually what’s most fair, especially in smaller world cups like this one, and adding oldgens would likely take away some of that balance. these tours are inherently unbalanced i know, but i don’t want to tip the scales in favour of teams with more deep pockets of players to choose from - just doesn’t really make sense to me. also big fan of pools too
 
I honestly see no reason for a 8 SV tournament.

PU has been established tier since almost a decade ago. It became official and got its first grand slam appearance in oras. I don't get why it has to be the official singles tier with an only current gen world cup.

I think Picking 8 SV limits way more the depth of teams than 6+1+1 or 5+1+1+1. The argument of lack of balance doesn't hold itself, it literally limits the number of teams because where do you find 8+subs competent sv pu players? Most weaker slots will be players that barely played the tier and will be given teams, they will not be sv pu newcomers improving at the tier. As I mentioned earlier PU has been official for almost a decade, most countries will have someone decent at each old gen or at worst some player of that gen filling the slot the best they can. There will be probably countries with a weak gen but that's no different from a weak SV PU slot. It limits the amount of tours ss, sm and oras pu players get per year for no real gain in favour of slotting 8 times current gen.

I'm in favour of 5+1+1+1.

Although I wouldn't participate in it I'd still favour 6+1+1 over 8 SV.
 
I want to preface by saying I have not played in puwc before so my opinion may not be as nuanced as those with experience participating in puwc.

Anyways, I don't really care about round vs pools I'm fine with either! I do think 6+1+1 makes the most sense for 8 slots, because SV historically has been the slots in this tour from my understanding, and this is the middle ground option of introducing oldgens and keeping tradition. Oldgen representation benefits the tournament and tier as a whole because this tier has honestly a large pool of oldgen players in essentially every generation at this point. I don't know location of every oldgen player, but I feel like for at least 2 slots there is going to be enough oldgens for a highly competitive and fair tournament still. PU has existed for a long time at this point and should showcase what our old generation metagames have to offer in the current day. The current generation is important and should he the focus still, so 75% representation makes sense to me. I'd be happy with 5-1-1-1 due to oldgen representation still but think it is more ambitious of an ask if a large amount of people want 8 sv.

As for which generations, that is tough because all the generations have enough players for the most part and feel deserving of a slot. I would either do
1. SS/SM because most recent two oldgens
2., players sign up with what generations they would be willing to play and generations with most countries having a player for it gets chosen. If there are multiple generations with a player for every team, the ones with the most players signed up are chosen as the oldgens for the slots.
3. Community poll because fairness? Idk

These are all options in my mind that would be reasonable, but I am just some guy that's never played puwc before!
 
agree with others that 8sv gets stale really fast and wc is inherently kinda skewed anyway so who cares if the oldgens pools are kinda rough. i think not allowing oldgens in the tour at all also definitely makes a lot of people not wanna sign up which can suck for some regions. 5+1+1+1 is my preference but 6+1+1 is also fine, i really would not wanna see all sv in this tour again
 
Overall, I'd say that polling everyone per Spiderman's suggestion seems like a fine way to see which formats people would like to see included here.

I myself am for a 5 SV / 1 SwSh / 1 SM / 1 ORAS spread at a minimum; SwSh, SM, and ORAS in particular are very well-developed and would more than likely not have a shortage of players with strong teams.

Consider also that one of RoA's ladders this month is BW PU - this is great testing ground for the format, so you could very easily include BW too and see a nice burst of meta development there as a result. This ladder and potential inclusion in this tour together may lead to an influx of new players interested in the meta, incentive to build new teams and additional opportunities to test them out, and consequently, higher levels of BW game play and greater meta development. tldr: 4 SV / 1 SwSh / 1 SM / 1 ORAS / 1 BW gud.

If you think people would be too hard-pressed to build something new for old gens every week, then simply keep the tournament shorter by opting for pools over weeks. These team tournaments are just a great time to push meta development, and the new team configurations and techs that come out of these tours are bountiful, especially when you bring in fresh faces from different regions. The more you feature old gens in these team tours, the better in my opinion.

Lastly, PUWC with all SV slots running concurrent with Swiss and SCL could be overkill to some, and while I understand the meta is fresh with recent shifts, that is more than likely enough SV to keep any current gen enthusiast satisfied.
 
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spell said:
I loved 8 sv personally
Click to expand...
WHAT

Anyways, I felt 8 SV gets super boring super fast. Playing and managing last year, i did really feel like a lot of people (myself included) really got bored of the mindless building and gaming of just sv, although tbh that's partially because of how dogshit that metagame was during wc. Either way, I just find more oldgens more interesting and honestly on the "well, but actually having oldgens is unfair and makes certain teams better / worse..." take... is this not true for 8 sv too to an extent? Obviously oldgens will have a higher issue but certain teams like LATAM, East, and South off the top of my head will have more mainers than other teams like Oceania for example, and WC is kinda unbalanced and unfair anyways so that is not really going to change.

Im personally more of a fan of weeks, but thats just me. I'm fine with either and i don't really care at the end of the day. Pools just feels more unfair imo.
 
Played and won last year. Also the tier is named after me so u know I am correct

Having read the above posts, this is some of the worst logic I have seen on this site (respectfully). Adding oldgens with 5 viable mainers in a wcop makes teams even more unbalanced than what wcops usually tend to be. Most teams simply cannot build/find players and the tour will just be reusing of public teams with players having no idea what they are doing.
"The weaker old gens slots will be weak at SV too".
This is just not true. It's much easier for a newer player/non mainer to learn and adapt to current gen because of more resources, discussions, "active" ladder etc. Also do we really want more SS PU? Definitely no.

Regarding the tour getting stale, trust me if you even try a little bit that won't be the case. SV with tera and a constantly changing meta gives so much room for creativity. There are so many viable playstyles ,team structures and mons. Do checkout some SCL replays to confirm that

In favour of Pools over weeks. Having played multiple tours of both formats, pools has been way more enjoyable (shoutout UWC).
Amaranth post highlights some very good points
Amaranth

Post in thread 'WCOP Format II (Pools v. Groups)'

the group format has many flaws that are really hard to overcome.

1. it's very easy to have situations where the third week is completely irrelevant (for example: weeks 1 and 2 have teams A and B beat teams C and D, then it's A vs B at 2-0 when they both already qualify, and C vs D at 0-2 when they are both already out).
this is not a problem in professional sports because of the word 'professional', but here people really have no reason to care (unless they are obsessed with their sheet record i guess). we will see a lot of farcical week 3s.
i would pick low interest at the start (pools)...
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TLDR: In favour of 8 SV and pools
 
I think with how drastically the meta may change with so much leaving the tier after these shifts (maybe I'm being dramatic, I'm not sure) I would be in support of 8 SV but 4-6 SV slots should be enough for development anyway, would lean towards 5 or 6 slots, 4 seems like too little at the moment.
 
Hello, Parental Unit tier. I am here to comment a little bit on our initial proposal of all SV and to answer some of the inquiries about it that have come up. First of all I wanna address the topic of potential staleness when it comes to all SV cuz I believe it's the argument with most merit even if I don't fully agree with it personally. All SV allows all of the players in the team to work together, come up with good ideas, and to hopefully elevate the level of play. Our last year pools phase involved a suspect test that definitely affected the overall development of the tier, but still managed to push it forward and give us a really clean perspective on the meta by the time teams got to playoffs. CG is what you make of it, so working together, as the teams that qualified and won last year were able to do, should showcase a great level of play and competitiveness.

Next up I wanna comment on the point that was made about teams with more SV options to be above ones that have more specialized people in old gens. As is commonly the case, the teams which have these higher numbers of old gens players, are also the teams with the overall highest in general. This means that teams like US regions and Europe are definitely NOT disadvantaged in any way. They have more numbers and talent than most regions combined and this simply allows other teams to have a shot at beating them, which is often not the case when old gens are included, due to the quality of the mainers. I fully expect these naturally strong teams to make great strides if they want to this year, even if they missed playoffs last year.

On the topic of including old gens, I would personally like SS, SM and ORAS if we went that route, since I believe that fairy gens are a good delimitation, as they're easier to pilot and learn for current generation players. With that being said, I heavily favor all CG, and believe that last year was a great success in showcasing the different type of talents that can come across the globe into our lovely tier. I've also heard of complains of people in WCs playing old gens that feel isolated from the rest of the team, due to the fact that they do not have the same amount of people to work with. All CG allows everyone to work together and progress the metagame at an even field.

Also this has barely been mentioned, but I believe pools is vastly superior to weeks in this format. Thank you for reading, Parental Unit tier playerbase!
 
Posting for the support of 8 sv slots. Most stuff that I have to say has already been echoed so I'll keep it short. WC is a inherently unbalanced tour and so to make it more balanced with 8 sv slots instead of of making it more unbalanced with old gen slots feels like a no brainer to me especially in a lower tier wc where the sample size of ppl who play those tiers is just not enough unlike in ou.
Would also prefer pools over weeks.
 
team benelux member here,
we made poffs last year despite having little to no experience for the majority of the team, this could not happen in an oldgens variant ill tell u that for sure. if you want to make the playing field less even go ahead and include oldgens, but i assume that is not the goal. between pupl and pubd for teamtours and also the generation pl's nowadays like SSPL and SMPL etc + pu classic i think oldgens have a good amount of representation. I think especially with the extra dynamic of tera, SCL being ongoing (which usually accelerates the development of a lowertier) and there recently being a tier shift a week ago i dont think this tournament gets stale very quickly.

just realised while reading other posts that some of these points have been mentioned before but w/e this thread needs more representation for pro-fullcg.
 
I was a big fan of the all SV format last year. I very much enjoyed having the entire team being able to work together on builds rather than having a few guys on an island scrambling to find testing partners from different teams due to them being put to play an old gen. Something I very much believe will be an even bigger issue for smaller nations. I also don't think the meta got stale one bit but I instead enjoyed how the amount of games pushed the meta further in a rapid pace forcing you to keep up.

For pools vs weeks I think most people will agree that the weeks of the tour cut with using pools over weeks is something that was a welcome addition last year.
 
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