Ok time for some of my thoughts here!
We expected these formats to be janky. (We literally called if "Godless Objectively Overcooked Formats Yeeted At Helpless Humans... its very much in the name!) Part of the vision here was to try new things and have fun. Not being well balanced was ok here imo specifically because these formats were only intended to be played for a single week. If its bad we just move on! These formats also don't actually exist outside of this tour, so it is really hard to get a feel for what is broken or not in an unplayed meta. Things like electrode-h in aaa and goodra in full potential are more obviously problematic in hindsight. Which again I think is ok because we are only playing it once. Part of the "skill" of this tour imo is figuring out what the broken things are! Of course some formats worked much better than others, but I don't really think there is a way to find that out without trying them! I am definitely pleased with some of the creativity we saw here! If we do this again we would likely play a lot of new formats, but if things are repeated (everybody liked aaa I think lol) we could add some more bans with the knowledge we gained here which could help for sure.
Format Ranking:
S: AAA, Alphabet Cup
A: Camo Mons, Revelation Mons
B:
C: Full Potential
D: Mix & Mega
This is my personal rankings for the tiers we chose this time. I think the AAA ranking goes without saying, most people enjoyed that one and it was both accessible and fun. I'm personally a big fan of alphabet cup because I enjoy building in it and figuring out all of the cool sets that you can make. We were deciding between Alphabet Cup and Stabmons because they both felt fairly similar to each other, but I just personally like Alphabet Cup so I advocated for that one. In a future version I could definitely see Stabmons being included. Camo Mons was kind of a sleeper hit I think, was definitely a fun meta to play. I liked that we added type preview to this (thanks Shen!) but that does also remove an element of the original OM. Revelation mons is cool and was fun to play. Full Potential is the start of the bad metas I think. While I did have fun with it, it was way to easy to get swept. Even taking a turn to set up hazards could be bad if something like duraludon uses iron defense then spams draco and iron head into your team... I don't think there is a good fix here we would really need to ban a lot of mons to make this meta playable (and isn't worth the effort idt.) I advocated for Mix & Mega because I both love megas (started on smogon during XY) and because I thought it would be really fun to try out some of the new ZA megastones... Issue is that OM isn't very accessible. Understanding what each stone does takes a lot of reading/research and it was confusing to build in. On top of that the balance wasn't great either but I do think this part was also a bit overstated at times. It wasn't good but the biggest issue to me was the accessibility wasn't there. So my bad on that one lol
My biggest gripe with this tour was the activity issues. The point of the tour isn't really to win -- its to goof off and play some jank. This is why we made it swiss -- that way everyone who signed up could continue to participate and play the later formats even if they had a bad start. Problem though is that the people who weren't motivated stayed in the tour and there were just too many act wins given out. Which also deprives people of the chance to play these formats which is the entire point of the tour. It just also requires effort because we are breaking new ground every week. I think the fixes here are to include more hosts who make sample teams each week (shoutouts to everyone who posted their teams after they played -- this helped a lot I think for the people who weren't building) and to maybe do something like double elim instead of swiss in the future. Basically towards the end only the top half of the bracket actually got to play games which was frustrating. I do think this type of tour should include a big safety net because again the point really isn't to win it is to have fun playing the games. I just think a 6 week swiss was too much commitment for a lot of people (even though it is exactly what they signed up for and this was clearly stated in the OP lol.) We could also do something more custom like swiss but eliminate players at 3 losses (which is essentially triple elimination but everyone would play every week instead of having the "losers bracket only" weeks in between.) We could also do things like shorten the number of regular season weeks potentially... a lot to think about there.
The other consideration was not doing a playoffs stage. It does kind of stink for the 1 loss crowd, but at the same time I think people were getting fatigued and we had a natural 1v1 in the last week. In hindsight maybe we should have done a top 8. (It was mentioned in the OP that we may or may not do a playoffs stage, so it wasn't promised) When talking to people before that decision was announced people seemed ok with the natural ending, but then the feedback here has been a bit different. Theoretically we could still do something, but I've also already announced that Tuthur won and it wouldn't feel fair to take that away from him lol
Anyways, overall I had a great time here and I am glad we did this! There were definitely some things I think we knocked out of the park (art on signups was great and as were the vibes here lmao) but there were also a lot of kinks (certain formats, activity, lack of playoffs stage) that could be improved upon for a future iteration. Thank you for everyone who supported this, played, posted teams, and had fun with this in any way! Good goofs all around
