With the whole USA vs The World thing seemingly becoming a tradition for players to have some fun and warm-up before SPL, it's gotten me thinking about the success we could have implementing this kind of pre-season, exhibition match type format in our other official team tournaments, WCoP and SCL. Now for SCL, I don't really have any good ideas, but for WCoP, I think this could be an opportunity to put on an event that I've wanted for a while now, that being some kind of Academy league where WCoP B-Teams play against each other.
One of the key, unique aspects of WCoP is the need to invest in regional talent. No team is going to have all their players forever so it's important that you have a pool of talent to pull from to fill the gaps where needed. The great irony of this however, is that (as I'm sure most people will tell you), one of the fastest ways to improve as a player is to compete in tournaments like this and collaborate with other talented and dedicated players. It's a little bit like needing experience for an entry-level job. Adding some kind of smaller-scale tournament like this would be a great way to introduce these prospects to the official team tour environment and hopefully galvanize their development as players with lower-stakes but still meaningful competition, without them having to achieve the often difficult task of making their main WCoP team by being one of the best players in their country.
This would also be a really efficient way to do tryouts. In Oceania, despite our small population, every year there's significant debate about who is going to make the cut and who is going to sadly miss out out of a decent sized pool of candidates, so I can only imagine what it's like for much bigger nations like France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Brazil, India, US Teams, Canada, China, etc, all of which I'm sure could field pretty quality B-teams. We are pretty rigorous with our process, but honestly tryouts as they currently work are imperfect, it's really hard to see the true potential of a player and no amount of test games can fully capture what someone is actually capable and how they handle themselves in a prep-heavy, team-focused environment. Having a proper tournament where rookies can actually prove themselves would, in my opinion, improve our tryout process and I'd be willing to bet the tryout process of many teams.
As for the format itself, eligibility-wise it's pretty easy to say only people who didn't play a game in the previous edition of WCoP are allowed, so benchers can be included, and hosting it concurrently with the qualifiers (during which main event teams kinda just sit on their hands and do nothing) would give us something to focus on and provide time for the results of the Academy tour to be factored into our roster selection. I think it's probably best to have the format be just CG OU for convenience sake, since the more niche tiers tend to be easier to know who will be playing them and their smaller playerbases make it less accessible to field rosters for. As for time, I'm not really an expert on how long these tournaments take but ideally you'd want it to be a few weeks at most, you might not even need to do a playoffs but it would probably be preferred. Give the team that wins a banner or something like the "World Defender" one. Also, if it wasn't clear, it would not be mandatory for main-event teams to participate if they don't want to for whatever reason.
Overall, I think this would only be a positive thing. It would help broaden the social aspect of Smogon's national scenes beyond centralised cliques, and there's a good reason this type of Academy structure is present in basically all competition, video games or otherwise. Messi did come from Barca B after all. Granted, you would need someone more experienced with this kind of thing to iron out the precise details, but this is something I would really like to see implemented this year.
One of the key, unique aspects of WCoP is the need to invest in regional talent. No team is going to have all their players forever so it's important that you have a pool of talent to pull from to fill the gaps where needed. The great irony of this however, is that (as I'm sure most people will tell you), one of the fastest ways to improve as a player is to compete in tournaments like this and collaborate with other talented and dedicated players. It's a little bit like needing experience for an entry-level job. Adding some kind of smaller-scale tournament like this would be a great way to introduce these prospects to the official team tour environment and hopefully galvanize their development as players with lower-stakes but still meaningful competition, without them having to achieve the often difficult task of making their main WCoP team by being one of the best players in their country.
This would also be a really efficient way to do tryouts. In Oceania, despite our small population, every year there's significant debate about who is going to make the cut and who is going to sadly miss out out of a decent sized pool of candidates, so I can only imagine what it's like for much bigger nations like France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Brazil, India, US Teams, Canada, China, etc, all of which I'm sure could field pretty quality B-teams. We are pretty rigorous with our process, but honestly tryouts as they currently work are imperfect, it's really hard to see the true potential of a player and no amount of test games can fully capture what someone is actually capable and how they handle themselves in a prep-heavy, team-focused environment. Having a proper tournament where rookies can actually prove themselves would, in my opinion, improve our tryout process and I'd be willing to bet the tryout process of many teams.
As for the format itself, eligibility-wise it's pretty easy to say only people who didn't play a game in the previous edition of WCoP are allowed, so benchers can be included, and hosting it concurrently with the qualifiers (during which main event teams kinda just sit on their hands and do nothing) would give us something to focus on and provide time for the results of the Academy tour to be factored into our roster selection. I think it's probably best to have the format be just CG OU for convenience sake, since the more niche tiers tend to be easier to know who will be playing them and their smaller playerbases make it less accessible to field rosters for. As for time, I'm not really an expert on how long these tournaments take but ideally you'd want it to be a few weeks at most, you might not even need to do a playoffs but it would probably be preferred. Give the team that wins a banner or something like the "World Defender" one. Also, if it wasn't clear, it would not be mandatory for main-event teams to participate if they don't want to for whatever reason.
Overall, I think this would only be a positive thing. It would help broaden the social aspect of Smogon's national scenes beyond centralised cliques, and there's a good reason this type of Academy structure is present in basically all competition, video games or otherwise. Messi did come from Barca B after all. Granted, you would need someone more experienced with this kind of thing to iron out the precise details, but this is something I would really like to see implemented this year.
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