The Tournament Tier Representation Survey

Quite Quiet

why fall in love when you can fall asleep
is a Site Content Manageris a Member of Senior Staffis a Community Contributoris a Tiering Contributoris a Contributor to Smogonis a Top Smogon Media Contributoris a Top Dedicated Tournament Hostis a Tournament Director Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnus
TFP Leader
I sorta-but-not-really promised I would show some results from this, so I suppose I'll hold myself to that.


Let me preface this by again saying the rest of the TD team didn't have much input on this; it was something I did on my own for my own curiosity so please don't take anything I say as hard facts.

With that out of the way, the general responses kind of surprised me. Beside the obviously impossible requests (fairer picking of TLs / more OU suspect tests / giving 1v1 a room on PS) that I have no control over, most of the replies were fairly reasonable and brought up some good points. I had over 150 replies so this isn't going to be any individual replies to comments, but I'm open to dicussing if anybody wants to open discussion about some answer in this thread (but be reasonable, I'm just one person). Instead of individually adressing answers, I will put forth some of the more interesting trends I've observed in the answers.

First of all, since I had questions about why DUO was in the survey: I only valued individuals when I did that list, and with DUO not being in Slam it doesn't have an official indivudla tour. So for those who asked me, that's why.

Now on to the other stuff. Unsurprisingly there's a rough 50/50 (not exact) split between less lower tiers and more lower tiers. I don't think this is surprising in the slightest. This comes up every time that a lower tier s being discussed, and I really don't think there's anything to do about this particular point. Lower tier players will obviously value lower tiers higher than people who doesn't play them. It's an attitude issue that cannot be solved without the community at large doing something drastic. None of this was in any way new though, so I'll just leave this here.

More surprising though, at least for me, was the replies asking for less CG OU representation. Admittedly some of this was directly in response to WCoP being all CG OU, so I can kind of see where this is coming from. I'm not sure how much can be done about this for now though. WCoP won't follow that format for a while yet, and as far as other tours go the only way to lower CG OU representation would be to remove OST/OLT/one Smogon Tour season or something along those lines. I'm not sure if this would make things better though, so I'll leave it at that.

Next on the list is what I expected the most going in to this. Doubles OU not having its own trophy tournament beside SPL. This is something I've thought about too and would like to see changed. I've personally brought up the topic before among TDs but for now this doesn't seem to be an obtainable goal. It's still something I would like to do at some point in the future though.

For the people who called the TDs biased for not including PU or Monotype in anything, please keep in mind the Core Metagame Policy exists and including either of them would, to the best of my knowledge, make that entire policy null. It's just not something doable in the short-term, as much as you would like it to happen.

Last thing I'll touch on, even though there's way more in the comments that I could say something about: more old gens representation (and lower tier old gens). I'm honestly not sure how much more representation for older gens (bar RBY but see current WCoP discussion) that is even possible. SPL, 2x ST seasons, Classic, and WCoP all feature an not-insignificant number of older generations of OU. That's five of the nine official tournaments that runs in a single year featuring older generations (of OU at least). Maybe you could argue for which older gens are featured, I suppose, but in general I don't see how this could be increased even more. Older generation lower tiers are on an entirely different level though. While I'm aware they don't have any official tournament representation, I also don't think it's possible to give them any, or that that should neccesarily have any either. While that might be something others disagree with, and while I like some of them a lot, I think it's fine the presence they have in things like Ribbon tours or XPLs. They're featured in semi-official tournaments of the respective tier, and to me, that's good enough with the lack of other reasonable alternatives. Admittedly I know not every tiers ribbon circuit includes all of their older generations, but that should be someting that you should forward to the tier leaders of that tier if you want to get a tournament setting for it.

Considering how many other things I could touch on, I'll leave it at that. I'm surprised, and very glad, that people took this as seriously as they did and can only thank all of you for taking the time to reply, even if some of you gave very short answers that's entirely fine with me. I'll leave this thread open for any form of discussion, because I don't know where I would take this myself and I think it would be good to give a public outlet to discuss these results. So, word is open for anybody who wants to take it. But be respectful to others and don't fish for who replied what.



I've taken some freedom to delete some of the non-serious answers (making fun of other users, -, ., no, etc.) but otherwise I've kept everything as they were written. If you think your reply was completely justified feel free to post it again here, but that's on you and I would advice against it for some of those responses.

The complete results, names removed, can be found: Here.
 
Last edited:

Arcticblast

Trans rights are human rights
is a Forum Moderatoris a Tiering Contributoris a Social Media Contributor Alumnusis a Senior Staff Member Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnusis a Past SPL Champion
Add 1v1 to SPL. It's a metagame that is evolving rapidly with a large player-base, and has a high ceiling for top tier gameplay. Also -- remove doubles from SPL. That tier has no business being grouped with the most popular team tournament, being that it's too exclusive and doubles players are too isolated.
someone's trying to catch these hands

I'm curious about this person's reason for calling DOU exclusive tbh, I'm pretty sure this isn't Lavos (who still hasn't explained why he doesn't like DOU) so I'm sure we could have a reasonable discussion. Glad to see the other support for DOU in the results though, and I think I agree with a large portion of what people have said in the poll results (although obviously we can't have it all).
 

Users Who Are Viewing This Thread (Users: 1, Guests: 0)

Top