Other 1v1 Tournament Policy Discussion Thread

I agree with Eli that there should be some onus on regions to get enough signups to field their own roster. I’d love to see for next WC we just set the regions in stone and if you cant field a roster, you dont play the tour. My only concern with this is how we handle an odd number of teams. Regardless of what we decide to do, it seems pretty clear that this arbitrary merging of teams based on signups has led to superteams time and time again, and quite frankly it goes against the spirit of WC.
Theoretically, let’s say we do unmerge the teams, and if you can’t get enough people you don’t play, I. not opposed to the idea and i’ve seen enough on this thread saying that WC is less serious than PL, and how there should a tour that is somewhat serious that could be open to new 1v1 players. This in a way should be less gatekeeping towards newer players and to not have ourselves a super team simulator.

I know jad opened the idea to have play ins but i people were against it due to it dragging out the tour even longer but I really don’t see an issue with it otherwise if wc takes a direction like this.

As the aforementioned point about not playing if you don’t have enough players, this could be a way for people to go scout out new blood instead of ONLY relying on your top tier/mid tier guys to sign up.


If we’re really bringing up the propaganda of wc being a not so serious tour compared to pl because of shit like west + central merge before sign ups closed (mfs like zio and blurb would not sign up otherwise) and how mfs like to play all their games at the last minute (i could go on but you get the point) we should just embrace wc just being a “new blood” tt or just structure wc a lot differently going forward.

i wrote this in the shower btw
 
So obviously this tour has been mismanaged to a beyond egregious degree. To recap the grievances:
  • Unanimous vocal support for Bo7 from the established ss playerbase (people who care about their player experience and the meta they play) unfavored over input from the captains (people who are seeking to maximize their chances of winning the tour).
  • Conflicting region info which lead to a player who expected to be on the roster of one region to actually be a part of another that they don’t make the cut for.
  • Signups going up late but also before slots were finalized, with no sort of accompanying announcement.
  • General lack of transparency on who was involved with making decisions for this tour and how they were made. It seems to be the case that luser, the host of the tour and receiver of the most flac, was kept out of the loop of region discussions/other key decisions while lost heros, who is playing in the tour, was involved(??)
  • And of course, regions getting announced before signup close leading to the creation of a team with, at the very least, more star power than any other team in the tiers history.
Roster posts have already been made and doing anything to the regions at this stage is a non-starter (the tour would probably need to be pushed back a week after a region redraw and then either a team needs to be Deleted or +1 more week for a play-in).

At this point there is nothing that can be done that won’t leave a participant upset and feeling like this tour was not a worthwhile experience. That is simply the reality of the situation. What we can do is:

1. Continue the show
2. Cancel the tour and there probably won't be another teamtour until next year

Option 2 is honestly probably better from the POV of unbiased arbiter but I dunno like, personally I just want to play at this point? Is that so bad? We have like 4 teams with a 15-30% chance of beating westrel in a playoffs scenario and the potential reward of infinite clowning on B-tier players/C-tier ragebaiters like Blanched. No one will ever take a west-central win seriously either. Sounds like a pretty good cost-benefit ratio to me.
 
I think cancelling the tour is a pretty preposterous idea. I don't really have anything else to say, this second sentence is just here so my post doesn't get deleted for being a one-liner.
no it is not unless they revamp the tour entirely or just replace it with something else, former would be good. 1-2 months of prep time for a tour like this is MAYBE feasible but the faith of the tour usually depends on how much people wanna win the tour and based on how this tour has gone by over the past few years, it isn’t too asinine in my eyes
 
okay so i also wanted to speak a bit about these superteams that are incredibly unfair like US West+ Central alone could sweep WC and win easily on top of that you have Team Europe with a bit less stacked team but still being able to win it all with their depth there are no other team that can possibly compete team parity between 2nd and 3rd is too big honestly and Europe and West+ Central should be seperated you cant tell me that the best from South Europe and North Europe and same with west and central are not the overwhelming favorites mistakes should be fixed and this is the biggest one by far... I agree with SuperMemeBroz with his takes, also remember that WC isn't PL, where even if there is a superteam, there is less parity, therefore let's look at this from a competitive standpoint.
 
On behalf of forum mods and wc hosts I want to acknowledge our mistakes and apologise for the situation. We know just as well as anyone that we dropped the ball, and you all are right to be upset about it. We decided to merge West and Central because the individual teams were difficult to justify. This would've probably still been the case had we announced it after signups ended, but releasing the regions early should never have been allowed to happen. Although some inherent region imbalance in WC is to be expected, there were several steps that went wrong on our end which negatively affected the balancing between teams.

The decision will not be reversed and the tournament will move forward as planned. Instead we, as the forum staff team, wish to learn from this and avoid making such a mistake in a future iteration of this tournament. The mistake in our process was largely the fault of proper communication between the team and staff, and the team is currently reworking our proceedings internally to ensure that something like this does not happen again in the future. In the future we will aim for more transparency from not just the hosts, but the forum staff team as well, to ensure that the correct decisions are made and that our tournaments become the best version they can be. In terms of any similar future decisions we will publicly release the information and deadlines for these decisions prior to the deadline itself. Our priority is always to ensure that everyone enjoys each aspect of the circuits we put forth as much as possible, while keeping it competitive for everyone.

Lastly I wish to emphasize that we truly appreciate the feedback of everyone who has been posting either on here or in the discord. We understand that the frustration comes from the expectations that we failed to meet. I want to firmly apologize again, and I hope that we all can still make the most of this year's World Cup. As always, if you have any concerns or thoughts you wish to share you can do so publicly here, through the discord, or privately to either of the hosts and / or the other forum mods and you will always be heard.
 
Parts of this post are a bit rushed due to my wrist, I'm recovering but I can't afford to spend an eternity caring about details and phrasing yet
The stars align for me to post about a bunch of stuff at the same time so bear with me, I don't normally get involved with tour hosting that much but that doesn't mean I can't have thoughts and ideas about policy!

Team tour precedent
The first thing I want to talk about is setting some precedent or ground rules for team tour hosting stuff. Some of these I've had on my mind since PL (and I think I had one of them codified aswell) but now with WC not going expected is a good time to get this all down in writing. None of these are rules, these are suggestions for rules but if people like them we can treat this as precedent going forward.

Captains not showing up for draft
I ain't making the rules for this but we are in dire need of a protocol for this scenario...

Lineups
  • Deadline for lineup submission is the same every week
  • Lineups must be submitted to a groupchat (discord or smogon DM) between all tour hosts and all of the team's captains
  • Teams that haven't submitted their lineup by the deadline have their previous lineup re-used
  • In the event of a re-used lineup being illegal, the illegal parts are randomised by the hosts
    • Week 1 that means a fully randomised lineup.
    • If a single slot is illegal (eg due to changes in flex slots and tier locks) only that slot is randomised
    • In the event that none of the benched players can legally play a tier idk man I don't wanna set precedent for that, someone smarter can handle that scenario

Deadlines for (hosting) decisions
This was already mentioned by Arai above but going forward we should all make a clear effort to make sure it's always clear when (hosting) decisions are going to be made before it actually happens. That means announcing "Hey guys we're gonna release WC regions on [date]" so people have the opportunity to comment on the procedure and review host and tour staff decisions

WC regions
There's been a lot of thought about WC regions and "balancing" throughout the years and I think we can codify at least a portion of it to reduce the strain every year. The below is assuming at least 2 weeks of signups.
  • For region boundaries, especially when it comes to US states, follow smogon world cup precedent over 1v1 world cup precedent unless we have a clear reason not to. Consistency across the site is important and if we have to choose between blindly following precedents then I'd rather people are able to play for the same region in every wc they join
  • In general, prospective teams should be decided by the host at least a week before signups close. They may or may not publish these, but it's important that regions aren't split too close to signups closing to make it harder to arbitrarily split teams for balance reasons
  • Then when signups close teams from the prospective list (which should have more than 12 teams btw) can be merged until there are 12 left, prioritising making sure that all teams can at least field a roster.
  • We should keep notes of what teams existed in the past or tried to exist in the past, more potential teams is better than less
I don't know if any of this sounds crazy but to me it makes a lot of sense to make sure you know what you want your regions to be, you give new regions (like italy or something) about a week of signups to declare "hey we want to be a team" then at the end of the signup period you merge them back into some European team if they don't make the signups. This seems like the most fair way to do things that doesn't require (or allow, depending on your pov) hosts to make arbitrary decisions on what a "fair" team is and split up regions or move states to a different region to avoid the creation of "super teams".

Yes, this means strong teams can be formed if a region happens to get a lot of signups, but that's the nature of world cup and I really don't think anyone should have the authority to arbitrarily decide a team is "too strong" and "nerf" it.

A possible change to 2026 circuit
You can also find my initial conversation about this in the #tour-discussion channel in the 1v1 discord (search "threshold to qualify for champs" and you'll find my first message on the topic)

Essentially I don't like the way champs and 1v1 circuit are structured right now, because you're competing for #1 there's a high potential for burnout as you essentially have to join as many indivs as possible to stay competitive with the other people doing the same. Interest in indivs is also pretty low because a lot of people are just going through the motions, and by the time champs rolls around people have mostly lost interest in what's happening in indivs unless they're one of the qualifiers, which sounds real backwards for a tour that's supposed to be the coolest of the year. Also, if you lose tours early in the year it's easy to give up and not join later ones because there's no way to reach top 16. But I have an idea.

Here it is: What if you don't need top 16 to qualify (I think it's 16 but if I'm wrong pretend I'm right for sake of argument). What if everyone who hits more than X circuit points (let's say 100 or something (that's low I know)) qualifies for champs prelims. The preliminary rounds would be a swiss or pools style tournament that is played until 16 people remain, bringing us back to the top 16 top cut we expect from champs. You could even consider giving the top 4 or 8 a free pass into champs and letting the other qualifiers duke it out in preliminaries.

What this would (ideally) do is make it easier for people to pick and choose their tours and give people less of a reason to give up just because others are pulling ahead. Got exams during LT? No problem, you can get your points from the other tours. On top of giving circuit points, LCQ in this system could also give you a free pass into prelims if you win so that even people who didn't manage to get enough points have a chance to make it still.

This also opens the door to smaller tours. We could have small live tours that give 10 circuit points every sunday if we wanted and instead of turning into a "grind live tours to keep #1 on the rankings" (which is an issue now, more tours in circuit just leads to more burnout) you're totally not required to participate at all and can instead just use the occasional live tour to try to pad your points so you're more likely to qualify for champs prelims at the end of the year. I'M NOT SAYING WE SHOULD DO THIS, I'm just saying it's impossible in the current system due to burnout, and in a different system it could be possible.
 
not to beat a dead horse but i wanna give my opinions as manager (and also some opinions as a current host of a world cup), not as 1v1 staff.

i would really like to emphasize more what some people said about lost heros' control over the tournament and luser's lack thereof.
this is, in my opinion, a tremendous mismanagement by the staff team and it shouldn't just go over as a slap on the wrist like a "oh just don't do this again". lost heros, as a Tournament Director, should have some overseeing in case things go wrong, like it happened here, but that's it. however they should be delegating this role to (the non-participant) Felucia, who isn't playing this iteration, whose injury is currently healing well at the moment and who could still write with her left hand in case of emergencies.
as for luser, it would seem that they're still trying to give him perms to write in locked threads (such as admin decisions), and ss has yet to respond, so this would be yet another callout for them to please do it.

furthermore i'd like to discuss SS7, a decision that was mostly made with the SS mainers in mind, and not the rest of new SS players or the WC managers. this is curious, i'm not necessarily against the decision because there was a loud call for it, however it undermines the deeper issue which is that this makes it more difficult for newer teams (ej. china, france, brazil, mexico) due to the logistics of having to build even more teams for their non-mainers. france has two known mainers in akeras and cdlc, none of which know that much about ss, and brazil has scizor boladao, and while he has good records, he isn't known for being an ss builder.

the creation of westral is whatever to me, superteams occur all the time, this just happens to be a different kind of superteam that's just way stronger than it probably should be (cuz we already have superteams like us south with pqs chimes squirtell itchy bird tort etc), central didn't have enough signups and there wasn't really any other way to go about it, some people suggested hosts made central + canada but that would make stuff more complicated fnr imo.

finally, i think regions getting revealed before signups is absolutely okay, the issue is the timing. you can't do it 3 days before deadline, you'd have to do it around a week before deadline and ask people to sign up quickly (also reveal captains quickly so people know who to ask when doing tryouts n other stuff), this is seen in many wcs but lost heros emphasized lcwc as a joke (i think??????) and i thought that was pretty weird so i put my opinion on it and then i got called dumb for not getting a joke.

aside from that, well, it's sunday so obviously the tour's not gonna get canceled, so yeah, that's about it for me.

last minute addressing felucia's recent announcement.
Captains not showing up for draft
I ain't making the rules for this but we are in dire need of a protocol for this scenario...
my fault chat, i mean yeah we had to improvise for ogpl3 but i don't think it ended up hurting the tour overall.
In general, prospective teams should be decided by the host at least a week before signups close. They may or may not publish these, but it's important that regions aren't split too close to signups closing to make it harder to arbitrarily split teams for balance reasons
correct! this is what i was talking about earlier in 1v1cord and usually a standard for other wcs such as (the previously mentioned) lcwc and (the one i'm hosting) rcop.
Then when signups close teams from the prospective list (which should have more than 12 teams btw) can be merged until there are 12 left, prioritising making sure that all teams can at least field a roster.
ideally this could be done earlier but i understand if it can't, in rcop 2025 for example we couldn't field europe or latam teams so we had the few signups that existed join neighboring countries (ej. colombians were asked to join venezuela, i think people from sweden were asked to join either uk, netherlands, or germany).

btw regarding what i said in 1v1cord about the signups into round 1 lasting 2 weeks instead of 3, i don't agree with that mindset anymore given that for rcop specifically the issue was that we were doing the qualifying rounds first and that's why we did 2 weeks of signups.
Yes, this means strong teams can be formed if a region happens to get a lot of signups, but that's the nature of world cup and I really don't think anyone should have the authority to arbitrarily decide a team is "too strong" and "nerf" it.
about time somebody said it, yes, teams get tons of signups and superteams happen, but that's just the nature of the game, if you don't like it don't play the tour, the issue would be if a superteam gets unintentionally structured by the hosting team, which is what happened with asia + pacific in wc7 and now is going on with west + central.

also i didn't feel like replying to it all since i have to go but i like the 2026 circuit idea.

ok that's it cya.
 
Here it is: What if you don't need top 16 to qualify (I think it's 16 but if I'm wrong pretend I'm right for sake of argument). What if everyone who hits more than X circuit points (let's say 100 or something (that's low I know)) qualifies for champs prelims. The preliminary rounds would be a swiss or pools style tournament that is played until 16 people remain, bringing us back to the top 16 top cut we expect from champs. You could even consider giving the top 4 or 8 a free pass into champs and letting the other qualifiers duke it out in preliminaries.
I like this idea! I would advise giving top 8 a free pass as it would encourage players to keep playing tours after they pass the threshold, otherwise they have no 'incentive' to.
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Based on this I would set the threshold at 200 or 250 if you're a bit meaner.

It does raise the question of what to do in case of a tie. I am in favour of making it a public tiebreaker bo5/7 personally.
 
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