Tournament CAP's Winter Teamtour

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Alrighty folks, we're two days done with CAPPL and the amount of people asking "when WCAP" has already exceeded critical mass.

For those who aren't aware, CAP and other communities now have a third custom avatar to give out during the year. Our first two CAs go to CAPPL and our Circuit Championships (this won't be changing). But, now we have a new one to give out. What in the world do we do with it?

Well, we have a few options. Technically we could hand it out to a large-scale competitive individual tour, like a CAP Classic or Invitational or something, but my opinion (and from my estimation, the community's opinion as well) is that it should go to another teamtour. So, that's what this thread is about.

The main options I see are giving it to CAPCL or the speculative WCAP. These are the options I'd like this thread to revolve around. CAPCL has historically been an experimental "for-fun" tournament, although how "fun" it actually is is debatable. Due to the fact that there's no real prize other than bragging rights, it's easier to shove random formats into the tour, give less experienced managers a shot, and so on. The tour isn't as competitive as CAPPL and in my opinion is a very low-quality tour overall. But! If we gave the third CA to CAPCL, it would no longer be a goofy experimental tournament. It would turn into a real 8 team/8 slot tour with real stakes.

The alternative is, of course, WCAP. Many people want this. Many people have wanted this for a long time. Who doesn't like the idea of fighting for their country with their dear comrades? Sounds pretty friggin awesome to me.

So: should we give the CA to CAPCL, or create WCAP? If we go with WCAP, should we kill CAPCL altogether? If we give the CA to CAPCL, should we restructure the tour so that it's not just a CAPPL clone?

If I forgot anything important then yeah just post about whatever else too. This thread will be loosely moderated but please try to stay somewhat on topic. Shitposters be warned.
 
I think we should try the WCAP this year. If this tournament doesn't produce the desired results, it's simply dropped and we add the CA to Capcl.

But I'd really like the WCAP to have its chance at least this year and by adding the CA, we'd see how much attention a tournament like this can attract. Knowing in advance that the WCOPs are always packed, I doubt adding a CA will leave anything to be desired compared to WCOP-type tours in other communities, so it may be a complete success.
 
for the love of god dont do WCAP. Funny name aside, frankly the game quality will be fucking atrocious. If there are people in CAPPL getting first in the PRs not knowing what rebound does, or a player finding out revenankh gets shed skin in REAL TIME in CAPCL, what makes you think the random ppl ebegged to get drafted for #COUNTRYPRIDE will be like? The games will genuinely suck, and it's not like CAP tournaments tend to get high player turn-out anyways. It'd also have to be all CG too cuz lord knows 90% of countries arent gonna be able to field old gen players so that's another strike against it.

I'd vote for like, just about anything else besides that god awful 32 man shit Ubers did that basically became custom laundering. Just, for the love of god, no WCAP.
 
Agreeing with LBN above as someone who learned Miasmaw got Neutralizing Gas in realtime during CAPCL - WCAP, despite how hype it'll be, is simply going to be concentrated into a few key regions while the rest have people learning how to drive at the wheel of a Ferrari. I support adding the custom to CAPCL to both increase its prestige and its turnout.
 
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Free wcap. All the arguments against wcap are the same arguments used against any small-scale wc, which is that historically strong regions will naturally be more viable than smaller regions. Duh. But people still enjoy those tours. If this argument held for every wc on the site then pretty much the only wc left standing would be wcop.

I also don't get the purpose of tryna predict what the turnout will be like. The haters may be right, it could be lacking. Or it could surprise us and be far more than expected. Why try and guess when we could just do a trial run? Does it really hurt to run the tour once to see how it goes? As olk said, if the tour sucks we simply don't run it again. But I think dooming before giving it a chance when so many people are interested in it doesn't make much sense.

If you have to, just combine regions. Do a north and south europe. A cone team. A catch-all asia team. There are solutions in place here to make the tour viable. And if for nothing else, it may introduce new faces to cap which is always a net positive. I already know some established northeast players who have never touched cap that I'd try and scoop up. Just do your research, get big names, help them learn the meta. Let's give it a shot.
 
Seconding the freeing of WCAP. It doesn't matter if a team is steamrolling or being steamrolled, wcup has moments when that occurs. There are numerous other versions of world cup inspired tournaments that get dominated by the same region for various years in a row and they still keep on going. There's little reason to not give it at least one chance for people from different countries to prove themselves on the big stage. Split regions like USA or Europe in half or quarters or whatever, it really does not matter in the slightest. What matters is givng the tour a shot, you can tell that there's significant push from the community to get it done, even people from regions where they would susposedly be in disadvantage of numbers wanna give it a try to represent their country / region.

Besides, its near the end of the year and we still haven't found a use for the remaining avi, might as well use it in this edition even if its the last. If not, CAPCL gets the avi.
 
potentially hot take: we should do wcap even if its not a custom tour. If we're that worried about competitiveness I think its still worth running it even if its a "4fun" event- I think CAP in general needs more of those! We have CAPPL as the big event of the year, and then I feel like its super easy to fall off the face of the earth once that's done, especially if you're not doing the circuit tours/wash out early in the circuit tours. I've been mulling stuff over and I think my perspective on stuff atp is "Let People Play More CAP." We're probably never going to pull insane signup numbers, we're realistically a niche community that will turn off a lot of folks who just don't want to pick up a fakemon tier, but a lot of players give it a shot and like it enough to stick around year in, year out for our big tour(s). Maybe its the allure of being a big fish in a small pond, maybe its a one-sided attraction for Jumbao, maybe its the community overall, doesn't really matter- lets give the people who want to play the tier do more regularly than room tours and three ladder games a day. More games also means that we're getting into more situations, growing more general knowledge (stuff like the mias/rev ability anecdotes from higher up thread, for example) and pushing the meta forward a whole hell of a lot more. This, in turn, benefits pretty much all the other stages of how CAP functions tour-wise and process-wise, too.

(sidenote going off the above- we should run a Cyclohm Cup v soon, and I should really get off my ass and actually start Toddvitational(s). Also gonna bring back BOTF after this post)

My biggest worry right now honestly is CAPCL. I think we would have to walk a pretty narrow line here to fit everything we want out of it. CA tour points it in the direction of being CAPPL 2, which kinda sucks? I mean, I love CAPPL, I would be super fine with CAPPL 2, but I feel like we could lose a lot of the selling points of CL in the process. I'd argue its a lot harder for new managers to get spots, and if we already have complaints about game quality, playing in... less-explored tiers feels like a bad option. This probably speaks more to the fact we should really push harder for stuff like CAPUU or NDCAP or w/e else to get better dev instead of "its ok it'll get a year in CL," but it definitely points to a happy medium between these two that's harder to find.


CAPFL I just straight up don't think we have the players for, if I remember how those work right? Teams built off of undrafted players from the PL pool? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but if that's the case we're gonna have teams of like 6 lol.

I think if I had to lay out my thoughts re: the last CA right now, I'd probably say that if we're strictly caring about the best competitive experience, a revamped, more CAPPL-like CAPCL is the best call. If we're looking for the most fun and arguably the biggest, giving WCAP the juice might be the right call? I'm not nearly as strong on that as I was a while ago, after thinking about it.
 
SHSP said:
My biggest worry right now honestly is CAPCL. I think we would have to walk a pretty narrow line here to fit everything we want out of it. CA tour points it in the direction of being CAPPL 2, which kinda sucks? I mean, I love CAPPL, I would be super fine with CAPPL 2, but I feel like we could lose a lot of the selling points of CL in the process.
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On this topic specifically, I want to reiterate something I said last year. While there are a lot of positives to CAPCL distinguishing itself from CAPPL and offering different things than a CAPPL-lite, it doesn't change the fact that the CAPPL-lite niche is still very valuable and valued. The things that such a tournament bring are very important, notably cultivating a playerbase for old gens tiers, contributing to their development, and allowing their existing playerbase to play these tiers in a decently competitive environment, among other things but I mainly want to talk about those.
Right now we are in a middleground between CL being experimental and including totally new tiers, and CL being more serious and an opportunity to play past gens tiers. We only really get one experimental tier that risks being shelved soon after, and we have to exclude a tier that other people might want to play or see played, which causes controversy.

To come back to the topic of this thread, while I am currently not sure if I'm pro WCAP, I do think we shouldn't leave the role that CL currently fills empty, whether that is through the specific format and slots of WCAP or through introducing another tournament to fill it.
 
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