ORASCL II - Format Discussion

[Cow]

i used to think oras monotype was really bad, but after playing a full season of it and also discussing it with other people i've came to the realisation that the tier is actually alright. theres quite a lot of room for some creative innovation and i rarely found myself straight up losing or winning a game from preview unless i specifcally teched for a certain matchup.

This is up there for one of the worst posts I have ever seen, you want to remove Monotype because some types are considered better than others...? Just like every tier has some playstyles and some Pokemon that are better than the others.... I guess we should remove every tier then and be left with nothing? If you want to make a case for AG, do it on the tier's own merits instead of nothingburger arguments.

agree with this point from dugza. centralisation in a tier is probably better than having none at all. im not super bothered either way for or against monotype but i do think it should probably be included again.

 

[mixnite]

hey all, here's a condensed version of my thoughts from reading this thread and regarding this tournament in general:

1. removing mono is always a bad idea. i don't want to see any more "remove mono" posts in the future; either here or in the oraspl discussion thread.
2. in the case that we do add suspect ou as one of the slots, i think it should be focused on unbanning ubers rather than banning ou pokemon. volcarona/manaphy/etc. aren't so oppresive that their bans would be felt in the 8/10 ou games that week.
3. we should consider adding 1v1 to this tour. it's a very unique format that i think would be a really good edition alongside other oms like potential cap and draft.
4. if dou stays, it would not be a bad idea to pair vgc 2016 alongside it. this tournament is still in its fledgling stages so i see no issue in experimenting with the pool of tiers and finding out what works.

 

[a fairy]

Gonna make a quick post advocating for AG - conversations about how people don't like playing it or whatever are pretty overstated and blown out of proportion, my view of it is that there are legitimate reasons why that perception exists, but the reality of the situation is much closer to "ORAS AG is an accepted and competitive tier in the AG roster" than "ORAS AG is widely disliked and uncompetitive as a format"

Also I'd be remiss to not +1 Draft obviously, and +1 to ZU though I don't think anyone's really considering giving it a second look, rightly so.

 

[LittEleven]

we should consider adding 1v1 to this tour. it's a very unique format that i think would be a really good edition alongside other oms like potential cap and draft.

i would say that however fun it may be, in a tour format where you have certain people who would be much "better" at building for a tier like oras 1v1, it is going to be polarizing to be able to pick it as a flex slot. the skillset for builder-intensive 1v1 vs generalist slotting 6v6 formats doesn't overlap well enough and either you will pick it as a flex slot for your premier player to just pick every week to try and secure a win, or not at all; and this probably will lead to the slot being resented in a sense. skills are just not very transferable when a format demands you to have like 75%+ of your contributions in the builder and otherwise you are forced to steal teams from someone who knows. disclaimer: i will attest to it being a fun tier to build and play, it's just a poor place to start here because it just doesn't have a guaranteed slot and that sucks for a niche format.

i generally think flex-only formats are kind of garbage because you want to buy specialists to pick tiers for, for the most part; spending midrange prices is usually not fun and its extremely unviable for more niche tiers where some people may be good enough to play if the slot was fixed, but are not good enough to pick the tier as a possible flex slot.

e.g if A is decent at monotype and not that pickable into other formats they would not be bought for like 13k to bench every week mono is not picked; and they themself discourage mono from being picked against you. when flexing you kind of want to pick the 4 most one sided matchups and that sucks for niche tiers

here, if draft or a similarly niche tier was added it should probably not be added as a flex option but as a full slot for it to be worth drafting people for tbh. things worth thinking about.

 

[bumboclaat]

Initially I was just going to DM Ruffles on discord since a forum post felt a bit much considering I’m not a part of the ORAS community, won’t sign up for this tour, and wouldn’t be drafted anyways if I did. Since then there has been a bit of discussion about what I was going to say so it feels worthwhile making an actual post.

Re: Mono

Most of what I was going to post in response to that comment was covered by DugZa. It was a headscratcher to read and is the same shit Mono players have to put up with in every section on Smogon. Even without going into the specific details, the premise is baffling. If you look at essentially any tier on Smogon you’re probably going to find a similar if not greater disparity between the top tier Pokémon and the C rank shitters. That is just how things work and I’m not sure why it is continually used as a cudgel against Monotype. This is also coming from someone who has never played a game of Monotype in their life. Seeing the same recycled talking points got old a while ago and I’m happy Mixnite nicked it in the bud.

Re: Draft

This is the main reason I wanted to reach out initially. As Hacker mentioned, Draft has been tried in a few smaller tournaments and NDCL is one of them. Hacker helped us set everything up and has been nothing short of fantastic! To say it has been a successful experiment would be an understatement. If anything, I’ll be advocating for Draft to be included in more of our tournaments in the future. NDCL does not feature flex slots and this one does which is a differentiator worth mentioning. I don’t have the experience with Draft to know how well it would do in a flex slot, but they should definitely be considered.

Re: Suspect Slot

These are always a bit of a meme, even more so when it isn’t even guaranteed to be played every week. Given the prize associated, this appears to be at least a somewhat serious tour. I struggle to see how one justifies a suspect slot over the multiple formats mentioned in this thread, of which at least one won’t make it in. Non OU formats compete heavily for limited representation as is, and saying there is going to be a meme slot that people are not going to take seriously over a format that has a developed metagame and passionate playerbase is shitty. I don’t have any comments on the specific metagames mentioned.

 

[Steam Buns]

Would like to advocate for CAP being included in this tournament, ORAS CAP is incredibly underrated metagame, I think most OU players that have tried in recent years has seemed to enjoy it. For a very long time its been held back by the fact that it gets at most 2 tournament a year and the pool of cap mains that play it gets diluted as many of us play multiple gens. So I think that a tournament like this one is very much the perfect setting. It also shouldn't cause any headaches for managers whether or not we commit to flex slots, having considerable overlap with ou makes it a lot easier to field and support for.

Besides that I also think expanding to 8 team is the right call given the ca prize.

 

[LBN]

I support the above for CAP not much else to say

 

[Ruffles]

Hey everyone,

The moderators have settled on the following changes for now:
- 8 Teams
- 2 Managers
- 2 OU slots, 8 Flex slots
- 8 Flex Tiers: Ubers, UU, RU, NU, PU, ZU, LC, Monotype (DOU & Suspect removed)

We are still discussing if Draft and/or something else should be added.

As we are re-structuring this tour entirely, we do not want to add too many variables. We are somewhat averse, this year, to adding something we have never tried before like Draft, AG, 1v1, etc. We'd rather this tour focus on the new format of flex slots, as many of the playerbase and managerbase have little or no experience with it, and that way we can get better feedback. That being said we are still thinking it through.

Next year, and depending on the feedback, we'll look into making it 12 slots with more flex tiers available and trying new things such as maybe Draft, CAP, AG, bringing DOU back, and so on.

I'll lock this thread for now as we heard the community and the rest of discussion is internal. Feel free to reach us out on the ORAS discord though.