Other PMPL Post Tournament Lookback thread

[Gekokeso]

With the ending of the Pet Mods premier league and the victory of the Dave's Dachsbuns it is time to look back at the tour. While this tour didn't turn out to be as I hoped, I like to believe there was enough positive stuff to take away from this tournament, as well as a lot to improve so that the next editions of the tour can be as good as possible.

This thread will be reserved for criticisms and ideas of how to improve the tournament for future editions. What went well and how to repeat it. What went wrong and how to fix it going foward. This can include criticisms towards the way us hosts held the tournament as well, to see what we can improve on as hosts as well. While I won't outright ban discussion about the tiers themselves in this thread, I heavily recommend voicing concerns or ideas of how to improve a particular metagame on their respective threads, you can find them linked in the posts that appear here.

With that I am tagging all managers of the tour Larry Mana Quinn teamo Beaf Cultist anaconja Zpice JeoZ Concept Orangesodapop RL Cao Jie and encourage them to get their players to comment as well. Please keep posts serious and as respectful as you can.

 

[Beaf Cultist]

literally just wrote that i don't wanna spend more time on this tour and i meant it, so i'm just gonna spitball talking points and let other ppl expand on them

1. tournament rules should be updated to apply more specifically to pet mods (mainly relating to simulator bugs and glitches).

2. tier selection should include a playtesting process from tour hosts themselves and/or a group of trusted individuals, since mod leaders are incentivized to gas up their own mods and downplay any issues when making submissions.

3. we need to focus on bringing back popular metas from previous tours. while i love showcasing new mods, i think this year has shown that new mods with limited playtesting are always going to be wildcards, and it's better to leave metas like that for smaller tours with lower stakes for the most part. also ppl are starting to legitimately come back for some of these metas year-to-year and i think we should be encouraging that.

4. there should be a more formal bug reporting system so bugs can get fixed as soon as players find them.

5. free solgaleo in vape

 

[Tapler]

Haven't really been involved in the PLs since PMPL1 but there's one thing I'd like to echo here that's been discussed in the Discord a fair bit. I think splitting our tours by full Pet Mods and Solomods rather than having our main PL be able to pull stable metas from both sides is a mistake, and is the reason we've had to gamble on wildcard slots in every one so far. I do think it's very good to be able to test and bring attention to some of these more experimental metas, but I think a separate tour for that would be far better, for both the players and for the perception of Pet Mods generally.

 

[anaconja]

3. we need to focus on bringing back popular metas from previous tours. while i love showcasing new mods, i think this year has shown that new mods with limited playtesting are always going to be wildcards, and it's better to leave metas like that for smaller tours with lower stakes for the most part. also ppl are starting to legitimately come back for some of these metas year-to-year and i think we should be encouraging that.

definitely agree with this, past metas like gen 8 feuu, jolt and alternatium(ex) were all good metas and id like to see them again

4. there should be a more formal bug reporting system so bugs can get fixed as soon as players find them.

this would be great - as a coder it can be hard to fix bugs if ppl just ping me somewhere random and point to a battle that doesnt give me the specific thing that caused the game to crash. to specify it would be useful if the bug reports channel was made into a forum of threads for ppl to post in, with the following information given:
- what the bug is
- whether its a bug or a crash
- replay, along with relevant set info
- if it is a crash, what error printed in the lobby

Haven't really been involved in the PLs since PMPL1 but there's one thing I'd like to echo here that's been discussed in the Discord a fair bit. I think splitting our tours by full Pet Mods and Solomods rather than having our main PL be able to pull stable metas from both sides is a mistake, and is the reason we've had to gamble on wildcard slots in every one so far. I do think it's very good to be able to test and bring attention to some of these more experimental metas, but I think a separate tour for that would be far better, for both the players and for the perception of Pet Mods generally.

i dont think this is a bad idea either, instead of pmpl and solopl it could be like goodpl and experimentalpl lol (or smaller tours like ghosting tours, spotlight trios, etc)

 

[RL]

Mitigated feelings about this tour, second year in a row co-managing it and it was fun for sure I love petmods, but this year felt like just a fun moment to me, not as magic as last year felt.

Not a specific tier but just the overall tier list. Last year every tier felt interesting, Mrev and m4a more classic, rest was different from the classic game, it felt like discovering an entire new game. This year it felt way closer to the classic mon tier, A fusion tier + vapo and teramax is a solid base, Iron Fist tbh it's impossible to help in this but it was a ton of fun to watch so good tier for the pl. Mrev LCLC it's a classic tier + fanmade edits to mons, 2 of them is alright, I would personally trade one for another fusion of fakemon tier but that's preference ig, I'm here for the fusions the fakemons the weird new types and rules like token, not for the classic game with edits on mons and surely others share this feeling too, 1 is perfect 2 is alright more is bad imo. Blank Canvas was a bad choice to me, the tier was boring spikestack stall, the strength of PMPL to me as I said is rediscovering a new game like mons, I priorize enjoyment playing building and watching, and no 100+ turns of spike switch heal spin isn't fun to me. Not much to say abt paleo, I like this kind of tier in PMPL, a few fakemons + already existing ones, not impossible to get into, not boring. To me the main bad point is tier selection, no the ones choosen specifically just the concept.

As a co-manager not rlly into petmods rest of the year it felt difficult to get used to the tiers/building just a few weeks before the tournament. If the goal with PMPL is to open it to the average smogon user I think format discussion should happen way before actual auctions, so that managers have some time. If goal is to keep it mostly to petmods mainers keep it like this but ye a little disavantage.

Stop with auto updating sheet, it changes W-L-T while week is being played, headaches to figure out.

Keep vapo next year, I'd love to see Iron Fist again, probably paleo too

I still enjoyed it though, huge thanks to the hosting team and to the petmods community. See you next year!

 

[Quinn]

1 tiers of this year

First off, even tho I didn’t really try in regular season, in playoffs I played/built in 6 tiers, only skipped iron fist and teramax. So I ended up getting a good feel for pretty much all the metas. And honestly, this year’s PMPL tiers were way better than last year’s.

Some people say Blank Canvas was a bad meta, but I think by the end it was just boring, not actually bad. Paleo Vaporemons and Little Colosseum (biased obviously) were super fun and actually felt unique.

The new tier picks are totally fine, I’d even say the VGC mod got kinda robbed. But yeah, bugs and balance issues are gonna happen in these kinds of tournaments, it’s almost impossible to avoid.

My mod didn’t have any bugs, but that’s mostly cause everything got tested by me or geko. Plus I always had the goal of getting lil col in PMPL, so I had that clear direction from the start. Most other mods probably didn’t have that. What I’m trying to say is if a mod is made with the intent of being played in a tour, it's way more likely to be tested and balanced better. You can’t really expect that from every tier.

2 my format suggestion

To follow up on what I just said, I think it’s better to go with Tapler’s suggestion next year. If you combine the options like that, you end up with more proven/tested metas overall.

I’d also suggest keeping some kind of format structure. Something like:

1 OM mod (like Little Cup BH or similar)
1 Old Gen mod
1 Doubles mod

And then 5 fillers, which can include repeats from the above.

That way we bring in more communities and maybe even get players to stick around after PMPL.

Something I was thinking about too is leaving the last 1 or 2 slots open for voting. I know that kinda goes against what I said earlier about tested metas, but still mods like Iron Fist almost got left out by Geko and only made it in because the community really likes it.

I think having 1 mod voted in by the community isn’t a bad idea at all, as long as the vote happens after 6 or 7 mods are already locked in. Maybe to get into the voting pool make the requirements harder to be part of like having multiple play test tournaments with x amount of games in it. So the untested shit gets wielded out.

3 bugs

I think the current rules are fine, but if you want to really encourage people to report bugs, just keep it simple and add a “bug = rematch” policy. Yeah, I get that it might backfire in some cases like if a full game gets played out and a bug shows up near the end. But it still pushes people to not abuse stuff and to actually report bugs when they find them.

Right now, if you find a bug, it’s better to keep quiet and use it in playoffs, because of how the rules are set up. Having a clear, set-in-stone rule like this avoids that.
(A bug should count as anything that doesn’t work as intended based on the spreadsheet)