Project Suggestions for OM Improvement

[InkyDarkBird]

Can the "Standard OMs" mega-rule include Evasion Abilities Clause and maybe Evasion Items Clause? Out of the 6 tiered and permaladdered OMs, 4 of them (Balanced Hackmons, Shared Power, Godly Gift, Mix and Mega) have at least some restriction on evasion abilities and items. I assume that the tiered permaladdered OMs represent the most popular OMs within the community, so having a majority of them taking action against evasion seems to me that neither OM councils nor the OM community really believes that evasion is ever healthy for an OM.

The argument by UT in #12 that "In most OMs, giving up your item or ability for a 10% chance is not worth it" is absolutely true, but this treats evasion more as a "broken" element, rather than an "uncompetitive" element. From the "uncompetitiveness" viewpoint, a random 10% or greater chance of your move missing can turn easy wins into ridiculously unfair losses, which is unpredictable and lacks any skill whatsoever. Furthermore, in OU, all forms of evasion are banned, despite the vast majority of Snow Cloak and Sand Veil users being unranked and Bright Powder being an obviously terrible item for most Pokemon. While you can argue "OMs are different than standard tiers so we shouldn't necessarily follow their rules", how exactly do the vast majority of OMs change/nerf evasion to the point where it should still be allowed? I don't believe they do.

I am using the permaladdered OMs as my evidence because OMOTMs rarely have evasion strategies develop severely due to their inconsistency, time restriction, and the general focus on more "broken" threats. However, the permaladdered OMs have virtually infinite time for any meta developments and are overall more balanced, which I believe allows evasion strategies to develop there more often.

 

[pannu]

From august -> november you are completely unable to sign up for tournaments to earn circuit points, i cannot phrase this better than FC did above, so i wont try to. But i will say that i think this is a major oversight with the 2026 om tour schedule. Yes we've got alot of team tours during this time span; but those are entirely different from indivs and especially circuit tours. Speaking from personal experience only i find the latter end of the year quite sparce IRT. tournaments, as if you dont give a shit about bh and aaa and dont make deep runs in ssnls (which, most people do not, statistically speaking) there is nothing for you to sign up for the latter half of the year.

I also think not having a single bo5 tournament is quite silly, bo5 is what om circuit champs is played in and unless youre one of 8 people making om slam playoffs you are not gonna have any bo5 experience without making slam playoffs.


OST is smogons biggest tour, single elimination ou bo3. obviously this doesnt work for oms, but i think single elim bo5 works for us. I propose we run a tournament of that style with a start sometime in september, assuming we get ~64 signups (what our seasonals usually get), this would put the tour ending sometime in november. This would be a Type A tournament, i also think we should bump HFA down to type B because we dont have any type b tours rn (lol) and its multimeta bo3, which just feels like watered down bo5 to me (albiet i think the homefield gimmick works great for om tours) Running a bo5 tour before circuit starts also lets people not used to the format who make/want to make top 16 warm up to the idea with 'less' stakes.

Speaking of the lack of type B tournaments, i also think having a "LCQ No Johns HFA" Tour (or something very similar) starting in october would be good fun, mostly to fill up the schedule and give people more chances to earn points in the latter half of the year.

cliffnotes; if aaa ends up doing its own circuit i think we could have 'their' tournaments reward type c points for om circuit maybe? also i wouldnt be OPPOSED to adding type-c 'non circuit tier tour', just because i think OMCL and HFATNJT went very well.

tl;dr: we need more circuit tours that start in the latter half of the year, some of my personal suggestions would be:
1. OM OST (Type A; multimeta bo5 selim, should also come alongside HFA being made Type B)
2. no johns LCQ (probably bo3? standard 4 day deadline no johns no extension type tour, Type B)
3. More Type C tours (including aaa indiv tours, maybe some non circuit tier tour asw?)

tagging this years top 16 (by seeding and by who played so its top 19 who gaf) because i want to hear your guyses (people who actually play om team tours) opinions on this.
SammyCe123 Icemaster TTTech Treeko928 QT Potatochan Osake R.O.F.N.A. Wonderwall Kinetic DeepFriedMagikarp Kaif Tbp24 Atha damflame 3 ghostlike lepton Greybaum

 

[UT]

if aaa ends up doing its own circuit

@betticus LordBox are we doing this or nah

 

[dhelmise]

From august -> november you are completely unable to sign up for tournaments to earn circuit points, i cannot phrase this better than FC did above, so i wont try to. But i will say that i think this is a major oversight with the 2026 om tour schedule. Yes we've got alot of team tours during this time span; but those are entirely different from indivs and especially circuit tours. Speaking from personal experience only i find the latter end of the year quite sparce IRT. tournaments, as if you dont give a shit about bh and aaa and dont make deep runs in ssnls (which, most people do not, statistically speaking) there is nothing for you to sign up for the latter half of the year.

I understand the issue with the giant time gap and missed the time between all of the tournament signup dates when reviewing earlier. The seasonals should be 3-4 weeks apart each and I will edit the OP to reflect that. For future reference, stuff like this is probably not intentional if there's no end of year tournament.

I also think not having a single bo5 tournament is quite silly, bo5 is what om circuit champs is played in and unless youre one of 8 people making om slam playoffs you are not gonna have any bo5 experience without making slam playoffs.

There is simply not a good format that we can utilize to authentically have a bo5 tour unless we did something short of a simple bo5 single elimination tour. I know you referenced OST as a comparison for this, but I don't think majority of people have the energy to prep that intensely for 5 tiers every week, especially if replays are required from r2 and on. Maybe a compromise is keeping it bo3 but I'm still not enthusiastic about that.

I am also very against the one tournament that has all of our circuit formats in it not being type A. Homefield I can see an argument for being type B since you can probably tactfully avoid some tier if you're skillful, but as a general rule I've always preferred majors/swiss/whatever goes here being type A.

re: end of year tour, I don't really vibe with last chance tournaments. I feel like people should be actively participating in the circuit year round to get to the circuit playoffs and have sorta stuck with that since I first started running the circuit back in the stone age. JUST MY OPINION THOUGH.

cliffnotes; if aaa ends up doing its own circuit i think we could have 'their' tournaments reward type c points for om circuit maybe? also i wouldnt be OPPOSED to adding type-c 'non circuit tier tour', just because i think OMCL and HFATNJT went very well.

regardless of if AAA does its own circuit I think this is a bad idea. Yes AAA has the largest playerbase, but a lot of the playerbase is still intersecting with the rest of OMs and AAA is still a part of OMs. Maybe down the line I could see reducing the points, but I don't think we're there yet.

 

[Betticus IV]

tagging this years top 16 (by seeding and by who played so its top 19 who gaf) because i want to hear your guyses (people who actually play om team tours) opinions on this.
@SammyCe123 @Icemaster @TTTech @Treeko928 @QT @Potatochan @Osake @R.O.F.N.A. @Wonderwall @Kinetic @DeepFriedMagikarp @Kaif @Tbp24 @Atha @damflame 3 @ghostlike @lepton @Greybaum

bro mass pinged over a clerical error

 

[Electra102]

Going to make this a quick one since I want to spend more time on my proposal for WH.

First off, there should be a rename of the Old Gen Hackmons thread to now be the "Old Gen Pure Hackmons" thread. The term "Hackmons" is normally associated with Balanced Hackmons, or both Balanced and Pure Hackmons simultaneously (such as in the Hackmons Premier League), so using the term to refer to just Pure Hackmons makes little sense at this point.

Now for the bigger of my two suggestions- that there be a new "Hackmons" subforum, containing threads for both Balanced Hackmons and Pure Hackmons. I'm still very new to the Balanced Hackmons community, but from what I know, it and Pure Hackmons both share a premier league (Hackmons Premier League), both originated from the same format all the way back in XY (Classic Hackmons) (edit: turns out this part isn't true), and a good chunk of the Pure Hackmons community originated from the Balanced Hackmons community (I could give specific names, but I doubt that is important). All of this is to say that Pure Hackmons is closely connected to Balanced Hackmons, so a specific subforum for only one of these formats doesn't make much sense. As for how OMs as a whole could benefit, I'll need to go on a bit of a rant, although please keep in mind I'm speaking as a Pure Hackmons main who is very new to the wider OMs community, so some of my conclusions and reasonings may be off, so please correct me anywhere I am mistaken.

For the longest time, the Pure Hackmons community has been almost completely isolated from the other OMs. The first-ever Hackmons Premier League was probably the best thing to ever happen to the PH community, since it encouraged the flow of players between it and Balanced Hackmons. Something like a Hackmons subforum would further encourage the flow of players between the Pure Hackmons and the Balanced Hackmons community, and we can look to the Hackmons Premier League as proof that this works. Once players are able to flow between Pure and Balanced Hackmons, making the jump to or from Pure Hackmons becomes much easier, since one can use Balanced Hackmons to make this jump much more manageable. With how tight-knit the wider OMs community tends to be, allowing for a better flow of players to and from all OMs seems like it would be beneficial for both our individual sub-communities and the wider OMs community.

So much for this being a quick one.

 

[aerobee]

Going to make this a quick one since I want to spend more time on my proposal for WH.

First off, there should be a rename of the Old Gen Hackmons thread to now be the "Old Gen Pure Hackmons" thread. The term "Hackmons" is normally associated with Balanced Hackmons, or both Balanced and Pure Hackmons simultaneously (such as in the Hackmons Premier League), so using the term to refer to just Pure Hackmons makes little sense at this point.

Now for the bigger of my two suggestions- that there be a new "Hackmons" subforum, containing threads for both Balanced Hackmons and Pure Hackmons. I'm still very new to the Balanced Hackmons community, but from what I know, it and Pure Hackmons both share a premier league (Hackmons Premier League), both originated from the same format all the way back in XY (Classic Hackmons), and a good chunk of the Pure Hackmons community originated from the Balanced Hackmons community (I could give specific names, but I doubt that is important). All of this is to say that Pure Hackmons is closely connected to Balanced Hackmons, so a specific subforum for only one of these formats doesn't make much sense. As for how OMs as a whole could benefit, I'll need to go on a bit of a rant, although please keep in mind I'm speaking as a Pure Hackmons main who is very new to the wider OMs community, so some of my conclusions and reasonings may be off, so please correct me anywhere I am mistaken.

For the longest time, the Pure Hackmons community has been almost completely isolated from the other OMs. The first-ever Hackmons Premier League was probably the best thing to ever happen to the PH community, since it encouraged the flow of players between it and Balanced Hackmons. Something like a Hackmons subforum would further encourage the flow of players between the Pure Hackmons and the Balanced Hackmons community, and we can look to the Hackmons Premier League as proof that this works. Once players are able to flow between Pure and Balanced Hackmons, making the jump to or from Pure Hackmons becomes much easier, since one can use Balanced Hackmons to make this jump much more manageable. With how tight-knit the wider OMs community tends to be, allowing for a better flow of players to and from all OMs seems like it would be beneficial for both our individual sub-communities and the wider OMs community.

So much for this being a quick one.

Seconding. The Pure Hackmons community has grown substantially to the point where the active Smogon-affiliated playerbase rivals that of BH, yet until recently it has been very isolated and has had little presence on this site relative to playerbase size, both on ladder and in the room/Discord. Of course linecount isn't everything, but the USUM PH channel has had 190k messages over the span of ~13 months (and the Discord itself has had 428k messages over the same timeframe), compared to the OM Discord BH channel's 50k and OMcord's 490k.

Aside from raw activity, these numbers show that the PH playerbase's activity is NOT centralized around just one specific metagame – the ORAS PH channel has had 12k messages over the same timeframe, SV PH has had 4.5k, and the collective RBY/GSC/ADV channel has had almost 7k, with most non-USUM metagames still undergoing significant metagame development. While much lower, these numbers were achieved in the absence of any long-term ladders and does not include discussion outside of the PH Discord, for example in team tour Discords or the private ones I am aware of. While in part due to greater emphasis on older-generation metagames from the Old Gen Hackmons Megathread's inception, the development of peripheral metagames is much more active in the Pure Hackmons community than it appears to be for most other popular OMs, making a subsection with different threads for individual metagames uniquely suitable.

Another somewhat related point is that the OM forum is honestly a little annoying to navigate. In general it is well-organized, but it is no secret that some OMs are much more popular than others and all OMs being lumped together in one list increases the annoyance of searching for specific metagame threads. The risk of additional clogging acts as an impediment to forum activity and projects for underexplored, currently played metagames (ex. BW Pure Hackmons, which has gained traction recently) by 1) incentivizing keeping most metagame discussion amalgamated into a singular thread, making navigation and conversing more difficult and 2) also reducing accessibility to many smaller OMs that tend to be relegated to the bottom of the first page or subsequent pages when searching. Of course that means I think core OMs should possess their own subsections as well, but Hackmons currently has the strongest case for that transition to happen.

Electra covered this already so won't go into much detail but the PH/BH communities are also much more interconnected than before, PH players originating from other metagames contribute to metagame discussion by introducing much more "radical" viewpoints (this is a good thing), and a singular Hackmons subforum greatly increases the potential for the creation and development of alternative metagames like Wondrous Hackmons.

tldr Hackmons subforum is a good suggestion in pretty much every aspect