All Gens 2024 Ruins of Alph Circuits - Feedback and Suggestions

[Vertigo]

Good morning everyone! With all our circuits coming to an end for this year, the RoA Tours team would like to open discussion for feedback on this year's circuits, as well as suggestions for 2025. It can be anything, such as tours you'd like to see (or would like NOT to see), suggestions about the time, anything really.

However, we would like to preface this thread by mentioning a few points:
- Keep in mind that the final decision regarding any given circuit is in the hands of the staff of that generation. Our team acts as coordinators, and we do not have unilateral control over the circuits. If you feel strongly about a specific point, reach out to them first.
- We design our circuits around the official circuit, so drastic changes to time periods might be a non-starter depending on what official tournaments are slated to run at that time.

Thank you for taking the time to respond, your feedback is much appreciated and valuable!

 

[leoperi]

Personally im not a fan of Last Chance (No Johns tour ) because can be really hard to schedule with opponents since is very likely both will have completely different timezones if they cant rfn. I get that these kind of tours arent made for everyone. Some suggestions i have 1st. would be award more points in other circuit tours and remove Last Chance tours . 2nd ive also thought on a bo3 LiveTours instead of Last Chance tours but that might be a bit too hard to host , has its own issues of being more rushed (and possibily less time , less people)
Edit: This is for all oldgens btw not speaking of just 1 in specific

 

[tofa]

Focusing on SS circuit only!

I think the variety in formats is nice -- the Seasonals, Global Championship and Cup tours give players with different levels of commitment / time a chance to qualify. I also think the Smogon live tour points give a nice little fun bonus that rewards quick prep and staying focused for a while which I think is fun, but these are unfortunately not as easy to commit to for Asia / Oceania and so are not as "fair" in that sense. Fortunately, the points from these are limited by a x1 multiplier and the activity / competition of the particular live tours you attend.

Some things I believe could be improved (and that I believe might already be looked into) are the point distributions of a couple tours, specifically Last Chance & Cup which are both single elimination. I like the idea of Last Chance, but I think it disrupted the point total of the whole circuit a bit too much which made a lot of players with plenty of points feel like they had to join just to "protect" their circuit ranking. Many also had to drop out / coinflip due to scheduling issues with half-week deadlines. I believe this problem was more noticeable for SS specifically this year, but not sure.

Similarly, I think Cup is a cool concept that allow players to qualify without committing to a longer tour, but it having the same points multiplier as Global Championship is a bit extreme in my opinion. They allow different kinds of players to qualify for circuit (some don't like the drawn out nature of Global Championship), but I think Cup should be at most on the same level as Seasonals, i.e from x8 -> x6 multiplier.
Other than the point distribution, I think SS circuit has been a fun experience

 

[melancholy0]

Personally im not a fan of Last Chance (No Johns tour ) because can be really hard to schedule with opponents since is very likely both will have completely different timezones if they cant rfn. I get that these kind of tours arent made for everyone. Some suggestions i have 1st. would be award more points in other circuit tours and remove Last Chance tours . 2nd ive also thought on a bo3 LiveTours instead of Last Chance tours but that might be a bit too hard to host , has its own issues of being more rushed (and possibily less time , less people)

assuming this is partially for gsc so quoting.
-Last chance is ok timing, but should be set to try and get at least one weekend day each round otherwise euro NA is nearly impossible to play during the week if employed
- live tours i liked too when they were a thing would not mind bringing them back in some capacity

Other GSC tours:
- winter ssnl, cup - good tours no notes
- global championship - really like this format, imo works well with gsc + gets you to good mus quickly
- swiss - for the amount of ppl that signed up it was nearly the same length as a double elim. i like people getting to play three round guarenteed but not sure if its worth the new format + single elim playoffs. Also seemed to give a relatively high amt of points compared to ssnl which is more difficult imo. thought it was the same thing about majors 2 years ago. Given sign ups fall tours and winter seasonals should have their points pyramids swapped as top 16 is much easier to get in the weaker fall pool (relatively)

Overall circuit is good for gsc, just rewards later activity a lot imo, when there are less signups.

 

[Slowpoke Fan]

Speaking for the generation that I'm staff for (SS) only, including a few responses to the points made above:

• I think that SS circuit this year was pretty good in terms of the tournaments - obviously there were complaints about the point rewards for some tournaments and I agree with those criticisms, but two seasonals, one knockout cup, one global championship and a Last Chance tournament to finish off circuit made this year feel a lot more exciting than the last one.

Personally im not a fan of Last Chance (No Johns tour ) because can be really hard to schedule with opponents since is very likely both will have completely different timezones if they cant rfn.

This is true, but the worst case scenario is that it goes to a coinflip, and I've scheduled with players across the globe (I'm not even joking, I played against people in Europe, Asia and the Americas throughout my Last Chance run and was only unable to make my Ro16 game due to sickness) without much issue. The risk with being unable to schedule in a No Johns Tour is real, but proper and responsible scheduling can mitigate most of the risk involved.

2nd ive also thought on a bo3 LiveTours instead of Last Chance tours but that might be a bit too hard to host , has its own issues of being more rushed (and possibily less time , less people)
Edit: This is for all oldgens btw not speaking of just 1 in specific

So your solution to players living in wildly different timezones is...to scrap the tournament where you can schedule a time with your opponent for a multi-hour affair that requires tournament hosts to coordinate every single timezone??? The same format that has led to two continents being left out in an official tournament does not sound like it should be anywhere near circuit unless you live in the Americas and are just annoyed about having to compromise with others instead of getting to play your comfy tournament game at 3pm even if it's 4am for the poor schmuck on the other side of the monitor. This will be rejected for SS OU, and I strongly urge my colleagues in other generations to do the right thing as well.

Focusing on SS circuit only!

I think the variety in formats is nice -- the Seasonals, Global Championship and Cup tours give players with different levels of commitment / time a chance to qualify. I also think the Smogon live tour points give a nice little fun bonus that rewards quick prep and staying focused for a while which I think is fun, but these are unfortunately not as easy to commit to for Asia / Oceania and so are not as "fair" in that sense. Fortunately, the points from these are limited by a x1 multiplier and the activity / competition of the particular live tours you attend.

Some things I believe could be improved (and that I believe might already be looked into) are the point distributions of a couple tours, specifically Last Chance & Cup which are both single elimination. I like the idea of Last Chance, but I think it disrupted the point total of the whole circuit a bit too much which made a lot of players with plenty of points feel like they had to join just to "protect" their circuit ranking. Many also had to drop out / coinflip due to scheduling issues with half-week deadlines. I believe this problem was more noticeable for SS specifically this year, but not sure.

Similarly, I think Cup is a cool concept that allow players to qualify without committing to a longer tour, but it having the same points multiplier as Global Championship is a bit extreme in my opinion. They allow different kinds of players to qualify for circuit (some don't like the drawn out nature of Global Championship), but I think Cup should be at most on the same level as Seasonals, i.e from x8 -> x6 multiplier.
Other than the point distribution, I think SS circuit has been a fun experience

Thanks for the feedback Tofa! I more or less agree with your points and have gone on record saying that I want to remedy them next year. I'm not sure how many points Cup should be reduced to (currently leaning towards 2000 for the winner), but I think most of us who play the tier can agree that it rewards a disproportionate amount of points for the amount of matches played. Last Chance probably needs a tighter distribution after the top few spots - I'm not sure how to make this work because I do think that the top 2 rewards of 3000 and 2250 points respectively is a good thing for the tournament (I do think that coercing players to 'protect' their ranking is a good thing, we don't want Last Chance to be a tournament with relatively little stakes), but the way the points trickled down this season was definitely a bit much. Hopefully Siatam can make the math work for Last Chance next year lol. As for STour points, I feel very strongly about not letting a timezone-locked tournament determine circuit placement as I believe that circuit exists for the entire site to participate in regardless of where they reside in. I hope this is a satisfactory answer to your post!

 

[Ruffles]

I'm not sure what the criteria is for what tiers get last chance, but i thought it was cool and I kinda wished ORAS had last chance. Posting for you guys to consider it for 2025.

Other than that I think these tournaments are fun & laid back & im a big fan

 

[leoperi]

So your solution to players living in wildly different timezones is...to scrap the tournament where you can schedule a time with your opponent for a multi-hour affair that requires tournament hosts to coordinate every single timezone??? The same format that has led to two continents being left out in an official tournament does not sound like it should be anywhere near circuit unless you live in the Americas and are just annoyed about having to compromise with others instead of getting to play your comfy tournament game at 3pm even if it's 4am for the poor schmuck on the other side of the monitor. This will be rejected for SS OU, and I strongly urge my colleagues in other generations to do the right thing as well.

if its impossible to pair 2 players on a similar timezone yes i belive livetours would be better and could have multiple livetours with different timezones to accomodate most regions so everyone can atleast play 1 although that might make some tours having less players overall. You are generalizing saying just about 3pm/4pm some people literraly can only play at night during the week. In the end its impossible to both players have a good time to play if they have huge gap on timezones

Edit: some ppl can only play at Night during the week because of work

 

[TyCarter]

Would like to advise the Swiss tours all to have a play-ins round because it is incredibly frustrating for players to be eliminated from top cut because of resistance % which the player does not full control over. (This was a notable issue in GSC and ADV Swiss) You can easily fix this by adjusting the tour start date to be a week or 2 earlier.

 

[dex]

I would like to advise against the addition of live tours and ladder tours to circuit, at least for SS specifically. There are a number of reasons why live tours are not a good choice for our circuit:

Live and ladder tours require a lot more host activity than the average tournament. While ROA has great hosts, hosting a live tour is a larger ask and one that I don’t want to put on people, especially because hosts most often come from outside the generation-specific community. Setting up multiple rounds, moderating games (as cheating is much easier and more rampant in live tours from what I have seen and experienced), and just making sure everything runs smoothly all take a lot more time and effort than I would be comfortable asking most people to devote.

Live and ladder tours are inherently unfair to particular time zones. There’s no pleasing everyone with cycle deadlines / round starts, and people will always feel like they are on the short end of the stick. No matter what. Especially for an ROA circuit which can very obviously not justify having the extreme number of rounds smogon’s official live tour has due to participation, people are going to get screwed, flatly. Best to avoid that.

Live and ladder tours are inherently unfair to busier people. It’s easy to make time for a game a week. It’s not always so easy to block out a predetermined section of your weekend to play a live tour or grind out the last hours of a ladder tour. Tournaments that let the players make their own schedule should always be preferred over ones that don’t.

For all these reasons, I would like for live and ladder tours to be off the table for at least SS’s circuit. They are fairly unapproachable at best and unfair at worst.

While I’m not a huge fan of global championship due to its higher time commitment, I know it’s a popular format, so I think our current circuit is great as is. I rarely hear complaints about it and I would like it to remain as intact as possible.