Hello,
theres been a lot of points made in this thread and I just wanted to throw in my two cents cuz why not right.
On 10 to 12 slots :
While I dont really have a fundamental issue with 12 slots (to me its essentially the same as 10 slots), it becomes very different when those two new slots are newly added tiers. Wont develop on DOU and mono in this section since I will adress it in its own, but understand that this pl has a few recurring managers that know pretty much every metagame by now, so adding another OU or any existing lower tier slot would not be any issue at all. However adding tiers that are barely known by anyone outside of their respective community (simply look at the interactions between people wanting DOU/Mono in and those who dont) and that dont really interact with the BW community overall is really hard to justify.
On DOU :
Last year, there was a few people advocating for DOU (see
https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/bwpl-iv-format-discussion.3746943/).
This year, there's even more people. The tier was cut last year due to ZU being prefered over it. Despite this, I cant find any trace of the DOU community anywhere in BW spaces, which is the major issue to me. A couple of post every year and praying for the best when you dont integrate at all in the community seems like a dubious attempt to me. There is also this whole "DOU player island" thingy is apparently being an issue. I was co managing ORASPL last year (this tour was a disaster but well whatever),
zee was our player, I had no issue at all with the supposedly "island" that completely isolates DOU players from the rest of the world (supposedly). This seems like an non-issue to me, the real problem is you cant ask to get in a tour of a community you barely or dont ever interact with, the only person that comes to mind is
Tack which does a good job of trying to get the tier in while being a part of the community. As a previous manager for BWPL, Im not completely against it but a higher amount of efforts (more than a few posts when the format discussion comes up every year) would be appreciated.
On mono :
This is entirely new to this year. Just want to preface this by saying I have a very low opinion on non bo3 monotype as a slot (as a manager), afaik most mono players dont really care about bo3 but I just wanted to get this out first. Mono can be interesting and I know it received recent attention with a few people from the community trying the tier out (thinking of
Cow ). But again I didnt really see people ever talking about it before this thread came up. I didnt say it in the DOU section so I will say it here : do you people know you can talk about getting your tier in sometime thats not 2 weeks before the managers entries? Idk it seems so alien to me that these discussions have to happen here expecting any result. Digressing a bit but when the extent of your argument is "the community is active" and "we want the tier in" you're just saying nothing. Monotype on its own is always a mega flip but that is just the nature of the tier. Talking about ORASPL (again) but at some point our monotype player went MIA and we had to sub people in, lets say I was not a big fan of that. This is a consequence of communities being apart (I was just a co for ORASPL and didnt make a lot of the decisions but still) meaning you dont really know the extent of who is who. Having to draft two players simply for support or cuz one of your players might go missing/does bad is a big no for me (that applies to doubles as well in a sense).
Overall while I am against the addition of both tiers, I understand why people want them in. Im also in favour of
Dababy2 's proposed format (same as last year). Change nothing, format was great. I really welcome both Mono and DOU communities to just keep in touch with the BW community so that we dont get these pointless discussions going in circles ("we want DOU/mono" that get haha reacted by the those who dont want it and vice versa).
Prolly a lot of typo in this but whatever I hope i got my point across
Cheers
