Tournament 2021 DOU Circuit Feedback + 2022 Circuit Planning Thread

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Yoda2798

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As the 2021 circuit nears its end, it's time to start thinking about next years. As always, feedback from the community is much appreciated in the decision process, so we'd like to open discussion here. Here are some starting points of discussion to kick things off:

(2021 circuit thread for reference)
  1. Removing a tour - With the addition of OSDT (and DWCoP happening in a more official capacity), this year's circuit felt especially crowded. Removing a tournament is a clear solution for more breathing room, the only question would be which tour, likely either Majors or one of the Seasonals. Which also leads into...
  2. Doubles Majors - 2021 had the first ever Doubles Majors, an entirely new type of tour. How did you think it was? Should it be kept around? Replaced with something else like Swiss? Or perhaps removed entirely, sticking with more traditional tour structures. The exact format of Majors is also open for discussion, for example, one problem with this year's was the awkwardly sized 80 player bracket leading to a large number of signups who did not get to play.
  3. Official Smogon Doubles Tour - This year we had the exciting first rendition of OSDT, and it has been confirmed again for next year. As an official tournament it's not solely our jurisdiction to make changes, but any discussion about the tour is encouraged nonetheless.
  4. Points Structure - With two new tours this year (OSDT and Majors), there's room for points adjustments to be made (other tours are, of course, also open to change). One possible change brought up on Discord is a move to a more top-heavy points structure, which would place more emphasis on high-placing results.
  5. Best Finish Limiter - Currently there's a BFL of 2 on the 3 Seasonals tours. There's room for change in either direction, either having a BFL across all tours instead (which would also reward high-placing results, but disincentivise joining every tour), or simply removing it. Note that if we did remove a Seasonal, the current BFL would cease to exist regardless.
Feel free to discuss these or other topics, but remember that the formats for DPL and DWCoP will be discussed and finalised closer to the time.
 
first of all, a huge thanks to the various tournament hosts from this year. i played all 10 circuit and team tours this year and while it was a grind, i enjoyed them all.

for 2022, my number one preference would be removing majors. The introduction of OSDT brought one tour too many into the calendar in most people's opinion, and this is my top priority to remove.

as I said on discord, majors is just clunky. pools lead to uneven brackets, best of 1 is obnoxious, and the emphasis on symmetry for pools leads to a shooting for weird numbers like yoda outlined in the OP.

i really like seasonals. they're competitive, easy to understand, and fair. out of our three seasonals winners this year, two of them won other tournaments in the circuit while the third just finished top 8 overall in doubles circuit playoffs. coming from vgc where we prioritize simple and competitive tournaments over wacky formats, I would certainly prefer to not remove a seasonal if possible.

that being said, I would not be too upset with a calendar that abandons majors and a third seasonal for a swiss tour. Swiss is proven to be similarly effective in producing high quality finishers and seems to be a fairly popular format upon our tournament players.

re: points, I absolutely agree with top heavy structures. I think the points payouts for most positions were totally fine this year, but i think maybe a point or two higher for 2nd place finishers and 3-5 points more for tournament winners, potentially 30 points for the osdt winner. keep in mind that all other tiers have their cup/open/ost winner qualify comfortably for circuit playoffs without the need for other tournaments, where as an osdt win alone would not lead to any qualification in dou.

lots of people know I've been asking top players about their specific thoughts on OSDT, and I plan to present those at a later time, so no specific comments for now
 
I do think that having top-heavy CP payouts would help make late-tournament matches more hype. For specifics, I'd increase the CP for top four of seasonals to 20-16-13-11 (currently 16-13-11-10) and the CP for top 8 of OSDT to 26-20-15-11 (currently 20-16-13-10). I don't know about the other tours except that all the placements in DLT should get more CP (something that I advocated for last year).

I advocated for a swiss tour over majors last years, and I'm doing the same this year. Pools work well in a team tour like DWCoP but are much more awkward in an individual tour (too many chances for tiebreakers).

A more radical idea: what if invitationals increased to 24 players? I understand that this would dilute the achievement of qualifying, but we could reward the top 8 players a first round bye, which may incentivize those near the top of the standings to keep playing throughout the year.
 

SMB

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Removing a tour - If we need to remove a tour I definitely think spring seasonal is the move, I've always thought 3 tours with the same format throughout the year is too repetitive and tiresome. BFL is a bit silly concept as well, not making 1 of your performances count in order to qualify for a tour with the best players on the circuit. It's also a current gen tour that overlaps with OSDT so yeah I think this would be the obvious move to do. Majors gave some new air to the doubles circuit, gives a chance to unexperienced players to face veteran ones on a short period of time with higher odds of making playoffs due to the format. I think it should stay but with some changes that i will introduce on the following point.

Doubles Majors - As i said I really liked Majors and all the bo1 group stage into bo3 playoffs stuff because it gives more chances to newer player to make better performances than for example on a seasonal.

There were some issues that I didn't like tho:

- Group stage ties: I don't know how we should handle this, bo1 tiebreaks with 2 people are ok, but this approach can lead to tiebreaks with 3 (already happened) or 4 people which delays the tour (specially if people play their games on the last days) and are annoying. Again I'm not sure how we should handle this, or if there is a fair way to break these ties and make them a tiebreak with only 2 people or if everyone else is ok with 3-4 people tiebreaks.​
- Seeding was bad: I don't think picking the first seeds with circuit points is a good idea, first seeds should be picked only with the subjective opinion of a group of people (council, host, ...), I'm pretty sure most tiers do this, OR a mix between circuit points and subjective opinions of a group of people. Picking the second and third seed of every group with circuit points could be a nice addition too, specially if we have picked the first seed with subjective opinions. And finally the players number 4 and 5 are picked randomly.​

About the signups issue we had; we definitely need to try to fit as many players as possible, I wouldn't mind playing 5 or 6 games on the group stage instead of 4. Ofc scheduling is more annoying but everyone should be able to get their games done considering how many time we had to play the games.

Official Smogon Doubles Tour - Format needs to change. I've already talked about this on the council chat and on the dou discord. Trying to replicate singles ost to doubles is straight bad and one of the reasons why it didn't work out since it leads to having worse matchups on later stages. @ people that ask for a swiss tour, THIS is your tour. Smogon has already hosted big vgc swiss tours and we should do the same for dou. Also linking replays should be mandatory I don't care about official smogon tours rules, doubles has always worked like this and not linking replays is one of the things that made some people, including me, lose interest in osdt this year.

Points Structure - I think this has always been handled properly for the people that make points structures so i trust on their judgment. If OSDT format changes it should be the tour that gives more points (otherwise winning it is literally easier than winning a seasonal and shouldn't give that many points). Next tours that should give more points are seasonals and classic, and finally dlt, majors or w/e is added.
I don't really like the top-heavy points structure, not too friendly to newer players, top players won't have any issue qualifying, and it can lead to people only playing one and a half tour, making invitationals playoffs and then disappearing until December (lower quality for the rest of circuit tours). I'm open to trying it for a year tho.

Best Finish Limiter - Keep it for seasonals if we stay with 3 of them ig. But as I said before, silly concept, all tours should count for the circuit since we are trying to determine the top 16 players of the year.
 
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I don't think the CP allocation needs to be adjusted for tour winners. Right now winning a tour pretty much guarantees you a place in invitationals unless you stop playing completely, especially considering you are likely to get seeded a bye in seasonals after winning a tour earlier in the year. The top 5 invitationals seeds won all 6 SS tours between themselves this year, the system is working perfectly as is.

I definitely want to echo SMB (and many others) and say replays should be mandatory for ODST. I don't understand how anyone can get excited for a tour where the overwhelming majority of games aren't visible to anyone but the players. I would also be in favour of changing the structure of ODST, unseeded single elimination kinda sucks but I don't necessarily have a preferred alternative. Swiss would be fine but I wouldn't even mind just doing double elimination and making it a giant seasonal.

I don't like the idea of subjectively seeding players for majors. Hosts regularly play in their own tours (Yoda even hosted and played in Majors) and so would many potential seeding council members. I don't expect anyone to try to cheat/abuse their position but it's a clear conflict of interest that should be avoided. I also think it would be difficult to find a group of players that are both actively following tournaments enough give a fair ranking and don't want to play in Majors. I think objective measures, like CP or winrate in tour games are the only fair methods to seed for Majors/similar tours.
 
Removing a tour - I agree with smb in removing spring ssnls. DPL, DLT, and OSDT are tours that will be active while spring ssnls are going on. I know the dou circuit used to have 4 ssnls at some point and its 3 ssnls now, but with the addition of osdt, majors, scl, and dwcop, I think its best if we only have 2 ssnls for the 2022 dou circuit. Having tours overlap with each other doesnt sound like a good idea.

Doubles Majors - I really wanted to participate in majors this year but irl stuff got in the way. Being able to play 4 other players in a pool before playoffs is awesome. I had akaru and yoda in my pool and i wish i got a chance to play them. The structure for majors is great and it gives a lot of players experience they normally wouldnt get from playing in ssnls. Please keep majors around and just get rid of spring ssnls.

Official Smogon Doubles Tour - Make replays public! This tour couldve been amazing but the lack of public replays made this tour whack.

Points Structure - Keep it as it is. Like yobuddy said in his post, the system is working perfectly as it is.

Best Finish Limiter - I dont really care about this tbh.
 
[*]Removing a tour - I’d echo others here and suggest we remove the spring seasonal. It overlaps with a bunch of other tours, and a seasonal to start and finish the year feels appropriate.

[*]Doubles Majors - As someone who strongly supported majors, I think it would be better replaced by a Swiss tour. Swiss allows everyone to get multiple sets in against players of a similar skill level, which I think would be a fantastic way to get players newer to the doubles tournament scene opportunities to improve. I think the biggest disappointment with majors was the amount of people left out that signed up (which of course is of no fault to the organizers, just the nature of the tournament). The goal of the circuit tournament scene should be to try to include everyone who wants to play.

[*]Official Smogon Doubles Tour - I think the “problems” with this tour are pretty exaggerated. I’ve never been asked for team critiques or test games more than I was during this tournament, so I can promise you players involved cared deeply and were very excited about it. Yes it should require replays and I’m open to a format change (double elim or Swiss preferred), but the tournament was fine in my opinion. Really the biggest issue was that it occurred in a flawed metagame, but that’s since been resolved (yeah I was wrong, the meta has been much better off without Kartana).

[*]Points Structure - In theory I like the idea of making tournament point rewards more top heavy, but as others have pointed out in practice those that have a top finish or two do qualify for invitationals, so I don’t think there’s a need for change here.

[*]Best Finish Limiter - I wouldn’t be opposed to having a BFL of all the tournaments minus one or two, as that would allow people to take a tour or two off as needed, and would further reward high placements as opposed to average performances every tournament. I think if this is implemented, we should just do all tournaments minus one, and watch results closely to make sure this isn’t just incentivizing people to play circuit tournaments less.
 
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