Other 2025 DOU Circuit Discussion Thread

[zoe]

Thread title really says it all: Feel free to discuss anything pertaining to either the main circuit or oldgens circuit here, whether it be points, format, etc (this also includes any teamtours, although those will get individual format discussion threads prior to their start), and I'll ensure as much of it as possible gets brought up when deciding the final schedule for 2025.

The 2024 schedule for both the main and oldgens circuit is below

Doubles Ladder Tournament January 1st - February 25th Official Smogon Doubles Tournament February 19th - May 27th Doubles Seasonal April 29th - August 4th Doubles Swiss Open July 29th - October 20th Doubles Last Chance October 7th - November 24th Doubles Invitational December 2nd - December 29th Other Major Doubles OU Tournaments Doubles Premier League X January 15th - March 10th Doubles Derby II May 27th - July 28th Smogon Champions League September 9th - December 1st Doubles World Cup V November 4th - December 8th

ADV Swiss January 8th - March 10th DPP Swiss January 29th - March 31st Doubles Classic March 25th - May 26th BW Swiss May 20th - July 21st SS Swiss June 10th - August 11th SM Swiss July 1st - September 1st XY Swiss July 22nd - September 22nd Doubles Vintage September 23rd - November 24th Doubles Oldgens Invitationals December 2nd - December 29th Other Major Doubles Oldgen Tournaments Doubles Premier League X January 15th - March 10th Doubles Derby II May 27th - July 28th

go wild

 

[Schister]

There was an idea mentioned in discord to swap the placements of DPL and Derby, and looking at the schedule I think it's a good idea overall. It puts more space between the two big CA team tours and OSDT without massively overhaulling the structure of the circuit and just generally relieves players from the heavy saturation of SV gaming that happens with ladder tour -> OSDT running into the tour. I do think DPL overlapping with BW and SS swiss (and SM and XY soon after) while derby overlaps with ADV And DPP swiss would be unoptimal for the oldgens circuit and necessitate the need for those cups to be switched around a though, so oldgens players shouldn't be forced to cram their favorite tier into one time of the year so further discussion of how the oldgens circuit should be tweaked would need to take place.

 

[zee]

On SV Circuit:

Replace swiss with another seasonal and the calendar is about as perfect as it can be imo. I don't really mind running b2b seasonals but if for some reason in the name of optics you'd rather not do that I think DLT -> OSDT -> SSNL 1 -> SV DOU Cup -> SSNL 2, where SV DOU cup is functionally the same as last chance but rebranded since it isn't the last tour in the calendar. Also, please seed this tour. Seeding works great for seasonals, and yes I'm still salty about how my round 1 was Act while other people got act wins.

5 tours feels great. Also DLT felt like a huge step up this year with the ladder room and such. I think this pool of tours is just a lot better than the other options we've tried like Swiss (OSDT is already DOU Swiss.), Homefield Advantage (I think this format is just messy and there's plenty of oldgen opportunities in this tier), or Majors (Pools format means we can only have very specific sizes and inactivity in any pool massively screws things over).

On Oldgen Circuit:

Regurgitating what I said in the old thread but make cups Double Elim over Swiss. We are all very tired of Swiss. Makes every game matter and still gives new players a minimum of 2 sets to build experience on. If we need to swap the order of cups around to accommodate the team tour schedule I think that's fine. Over the course of the year I think as long as people are getting to play their gen of choice and it doesn't overlap with the respective team tour then all is good.

In the old thread I posted that I don't think we should do autoqualifiers again but I've changed my mind on that, autoqualifiers are pretty based and I don't think being top 5-6ish in circuit points is that hard when all the tour winners are really gonna be the ones farming the points anyways.

On Team Tours:

Overlap with OSDT wasn't really an issue to me this year but I played an oldgen in DPL so maybe that's part of it. Down for whatever the consensus is between having DPL or Derby first, just like mentioned in my post and the one above let's make sure the oldgen cups aren't overlapping.

Derby really needs to be a six team tour regardless though. I think two 8x8 PLs b2b is just a lot, and some of these tiers definitely don't need to have pools expanded this deep, especially when you consider that there is a lot of overlap between the players that enjoy the niche formats featured in Derby and they can only play one slot a week.

I think we should probably stop having the anti-tiebreaker discussion. We tried it in some form for every team tour we had in 2024 and ultimately we couldn't reach a new idea. There are probably more productive things we can spend time doing in tournament discussion threads, but at this point I'm going on a tangent and not suggesting feedback so I'll stop here.

 

[srvoltmike]

Could we please have the autoqual for indiv tour winners this circuit (like the new vgc circuit)? For a newer player like me it felt kind of a waste of time/effort making a deep run into an late circuit tournament like last chance knowing even a win wouldn't get me into top 16. The upside of more competitive tournaments/more incentives seems worth it considering I can't really think of a downside for this.

 

[qsns]

don't have much to add besides agreeing with zee and srvoltmike

- most of the issues with both SV / oldgen circuit were things I wanted pushed through and I have seen the error of making everything a long swiss tour lol. seeding would be nice but understand that it's a colossal pain in the ass for the host + we have a lot of people who only sporadically sign up for circuit tours

- advertising it as a "last chance qualifier" and then having to switch the name because it didn't qualify you was a bit silly (whoops on me as well). Would prefer an LCQ that qualifies the winner but cup option is totally fine

- swapping Derby and DPL is ideal for less SV DOU slots near OSDT. Agree that 6 teams would be ideal for Derby, I think DPL can support it as our flagship team tour but 2 7-week tours a year is brutal.

 

[Sunrose]

Agree with srvoltmike!
Regardless of how well i did in the last chance tour, my results didn't matter because I wouldn't have enough points to make invitationals. I dont think it was a waste of time though. I was able to play against a lot of strong players(Sealife, eragon, Staraptor, bagel, and Ann) and you don't really get opportunities like that unless you perform well so the winner of the tour should autoqualify for invitationals. It's just feels right to include the winners of every individual dou tour for invitationals

 

[zoe]

Wanna bring this up before I forget (kinda responding to zee's post, but it isn't a rebuttal moreso it put this thought in my head), but how would everyone feel about a draft tour in the circuit? This is by no means an idea I'm pushing - if the support is not there, it'll stay separate, but its something people like (given the reception to the ongoing one, although it can certainly be polished a bit more, and I absolutely intend to do that regardless) and its different, there's not really anything like it in circuit (you could argue pools makes it similar to majors though, but the two don't feel nearly the same to me ngl).

One issue I could see is if people don't like the idea of byes just not being possible due to how drafting works, but there should be a good amount of subs that need to be made regardless if the tour is fairly large so it may not being a massive issue (also this wouldn't be the first tour that we ran which wouldn't be able to use byes). There could be some others that I just haven't thought of, but off the top of my head that's all I can think of.

Genuinely curious as to what everyone thinks about this idea. I'm not going to go forward with this without gauging opinions on it, as it would absolutely be the biggest difference we've had in a circuit and I don't know if another official tier has even entertained the idea before.

 

[Amaranth]

the whole point of splitting oldgens off into their own circuit was that the DOU circuit should be CG DOU only. if we're having other stuff that isn't CG DOU (such as draft), then why not readd Classic and probably some DUU/DUbers shit in too?

it seems to me that the community decided the ribbon circuit is best off being pure CGDOU with no side formats. if we decide side formats are actually good to have that's fine by me, but if we decide that they aren't I don't see why draft would get a sole exception to that

 

[Actuarily]

Wanted to take some time to post thoughts on the discussions in this thread and the other tournament feedback thread. (Why we have two threads for the same purpose I have no idea.)

1. Swapping DPL & Derby - I’m fine with this since I’m pretty indifferent as long as both tours occur, I just don’t understand the point. This year the tours were the same length, so it’s not like swapping them changes much, unless we prefer the tiers played occurring at the swapped times?

2. Replacing DOU Swiss with a second seasonal - I’m cool with this. The idea behind Swiss was hopefully to guarantee more play for newer users, but I don’t know how fruitful that’s been.

3. Replacing Oldgens Swiss with Double Elim Tours - This can definitely be done, but I do think there’s some drawbacks. #1 being double elim takes longer, (even after we fsr added an extra round of Swiss mid-circuit), so to run 6 cups + Vintage & Classic will have some serious overlaps, but I guess if it’s just at the end of the previous double elim tours where there’s only ~8-16 people remaining in the previous tour it wouldn’t be too bad.

4. Adding auto-qualifiers to CG Circuit - I’m cool with this as long as it’s just winner only (and not second place gets it if winner is already qualified), and not from team tours. Historically auto-qualifiers wouldn’t have mattered much since winners would basically have enough points to qualify, but since in 2024 we increased circuit point rewards at the top of the biggest tours, this has left winners of things like DLT & Last Chance in a spot where they’re not even close to qualifying after winning, so I’d be fine giving the winners of those tours auto-qualification spots. That would mean like typically 3-5 people out of 16 auto-qualify, which I think is fine. We should still seed invites based on circuit points though, to give some small encouragement to qualified players to continue participating in the circuit.

5. Adding DOU Draft to Circuit - I don’t know how this would work, and I don’t really think this should happen, as it’s a very different way of playing DOU than the rest of the circuit. DOU Draft is free to make their own circuit if they’d like.

6. Expanding invitationals for DOU/Oldgens: There was some discussion about this on the previous thread, and I just want to say, I think 16 is plenty. Once you start getting into 24/32, there’s a few problems. First, the ties start to get quite massive, like ~6-10 ways, which is a mess. Second, the qualification starts getting very easy, to the point you don’t even need decent results. 32nd place in the 2024 cg circuit was 12 points, which doesn’t require much performance-wise. This should be a tour of the year’s best performers.

Lastly, there hasn’t been much discussion on tournament point rewards, which I think means people were generally pleased with it? In 2024 we increased the point output for OSDT to even more heavily weight it, and I think that showed as 2nd place qualified for invites without participating in another circuit tournament. (3-4 place just required two more circuit points to meet the 16th place tiebreaker, though they both got way more than that). Is there any further feedback on the circuit points?

 

[eragon]

generally agree with above ideas but after some discussion in doucord I figured I'd make a proposed schedule to see how dates could line up with some of the proposed changes (further discussion to follow)


Current Gen Circuit + Team Tours:

Tour	Start	End	Notes
Doubles Ladder Tournament	January 6	March 2	personally I thought early DLT was good, don't really see a reason to change this
Official Smogon Doubles Tour	February 17	May 24	we don't control this, idk if these dates will be completely accurate but just went off of the tour starting on the third monday of february this year
Doubles Seasonal (summer)	April 28	August 3
Doubles Seasonal (fall)	July 21	October 26	are back to back seasonals unoptimal? maybe- if this is illegal then prob have to move DLT to around this time
Doubles Last Chance	October 13	November 30
Doubles Invitational	December 8	January 4	keeping same gap between end of last chance and invites
Doubles Derby	March 3	April 20	Assuming 6 teams- see below
Doubles Premier League	May 26	August 10	Hopefully would start right after osdt
Doubles World Cup	November 3	December 7

Oldgens Circuit- Format and Lengths of tours could change depending on whatever gets decided here but just assuming about the same length per tour as this year

BW Swiss	January 7	March 9
XY Swiss	January 28	March 30
SM Swiss	February 17	April 20
SS Swiss	March 10	May 11	Moving all the dpl tiers up as to not overlap with dpl
ADV Swiss	May 5	July 6
DPP Swiss	June 2	August 3	moving the derby tiers down as to not overlap with derby
Doubles Vintage/Classic	July 14	September 15
Doubles Classic/Vintage	September 22	November 23	I think it makes sense to have the tours towards the end of the year + this seemed like the solution with the least overlap with the dpl time i put above
Oldgens Invitational	December 1	December 28

On swapping DPL and Derby:
I really didn't like what OSDT and DPL overlapping did to the circuit last year- these are our two biggest tours and them happening concurrently just isn't ideal. Personally, I really wasn't in the mood to play mons earlier this year so I missed out on both these tours simply because there was a two month period where I didn't want to play (so I'm a bit biased but I think this is one of the pitfalls of them overlapping). I genuinely think like any other individual + team tour overlapping would be preferable to this, it just really doesn't make sense to have both of them happening at the same time and then a bunch of way smaller tours for the rest of the year. We don't control when OSDT happens so the only solution here is to move DPL. The DPL timeline was also just scuffed this year, I think pushing it to May-August helps future-proof it a bit more and ensures we won't be scrambling to start the tour while we're still deciding the circuit like last year.

On swapping the swiss tour to a second season:
Double elimination is probably the cleanest tour format for a community of our size + we had a LOT of swiss tours already in the circuits. I'm not sure I really like the schedule I came up with the now two seasonals back to back but idt it's that crazy, might just need some rebranding to differentiate the two. Alternatively, one seasonal would be at the start of the year and DLT would replace the second seasonal. I didn't do it this way because early DLT felt like one of the best parts of this years circuit to me but realistically it can go anywhere.

On autoquals:
Yes. Oldgens circuit already has them and there's not really a downside to this at all imo- the players winning the tours should be rewarded for it

On Oldgens circuit tours:
I didn't play in any of these except vintage so I don't have strong feelings but the consensus seems to be that there were too many "meaningless" rounds in the swiss portion. I think maybe making it so x-1 moves on helps fix this problem? You lower the round number while still allowing for a loss in the swiss portion. Alternatively you could maybe just go back to the previous format from like 2023 and prior where it was just single elim. I don't really see how double elim (like a ssnl) would function in this circuit at all since double elim is a really long (albeit good) format and there's just so many of these oldgens tours.

Draft:
I think including draft in CG circuit would be super out of place, it just doesn't fit. Could be interesting to have a small DOU draft circuit based on draft tours throughout the year if people really like it tho? (This would require maintenance I'm not sure we have the manpower for but I think this would be a better way to formalize DOU draft than slapping it onto CG circuit)

On Teamtour formats (this will obviously get discussed later in more detail but a few things to mention here):
Derby:
Most important: Revert Derby to a 6 Team format- we had some issues with inactivity from a few players and some playerbases were really stretched thin with 8 teams. 6 Teams worked fine in the first iteration.

Last year the format was SV/SV/ND/ND/DUU/DLC/DPP/ADV. I think this is mostly fine to run back, we could potential replace the second natdex slot with Natdex dubers/Dubers/something else but I don't think major changes are needed here. There was some concern over the LC winter tour overlapping with derby and having DLC only team tours at like literally the same time but I think with the delayed derby start in March this should mostly be a nonissue. DOU can't really be expected to adjust its circuit and schedule around other forums but having tours split across two forums does negatively impact the DLC/ND DOU playerbase so we should do our best here to minimize overlap.

DPL:
Can probably just keep this the same, the DPL format of SV/SV/SV/DUU/SS/SM/XY/BW has been fine the last few years. Personally I think the tour gets objectively better if we limit the oldgens to just the fairy gens (no BW, which could be moved to derby) but that discussion goes nowhere every year so unless there's a broad consensus DPL should stay the same- idt changing anything else makes sense. 8x8 good, every tier except for BW good

 

[Schister]

I was going to do a large post individually voicing my support/concerns on each topic raised in the thread so far but honestly, I would just be parroting what Eragon just posted. I've been over the benefits of swapping DPL and Derby a few times already and with the schedule Eragon suggested to accommodate for the primary concerns of that swap I see no real reason to dispute it myself. The circuit schedule suggested by Eragon

• Eliminates overlap between DPL and OSDT, the two largest tournaments of the year for the SV circuit
• Eliminates overlap between tours in the oldgens circuit with the suggested placements of the oldgen cups and Classic/Vintage
• Spaces out our trophy tours to take place in Fall, Late winter/Spring and Summer as opposed to Fall, Winter and Early Spring, keeping the year as a whole more competitive throughout.
• Avoids overlapping derby with LCBC (a concern raised in discord)
• Avoids overlapping the oldgen cups with their respective Premier leagues controlled by other forums (ADVPL, DPPPL, ORASPL, SMPL, SSPL), Unless these tours change when they are scheduled for in 2025 compared to where they were in 2024 none of the cups will overlap with their respective PL. DPL would end up overlapping with SMPL and SSPL, and derby with ADVPL but well, gotta pick your poison I guess.
• March start time for Derby allows more time for discussion to finalize Derby's format, as opposed to the mad scramble to get formatting correct we had this year with DPL as Eragon mentioned.

Overall I think there is large upside to this schedule and very minimal downside. I will also mention that I too played in a few oldgen swiss tours this year and I agree that x-2 elimination left for a lot of rounds that were taken unseriously by both myself and others I played against in those tours, so a change to x-1 or altering the format altogether sounds good to me.

 

[sir jelloton]

Suggesting making a change to the point disparity or the format of DLT this year. It's the only time of year the DOU ladder is really competitive and the actual ladder portion is way more exciting and arguably more impressive then the bracket succeeding it, but the rewars for the best performing players is just better seeding which is kind of silly. Tyo was the first player to brake 2000 in dlt and got 4 points as a reward which i think is a little silly.
Something like byes or a 2 Point bonus for the top of each week or top 4 overall Could be cool. Or even simpler i think moving the points from 4-6-8-10 -> 6-7-8-10 would be a great improvement. The qualifying portion of the tour is probably the 2nd most difficult individual only bested by OSDT and I think qualifying should give out a little more reward

Sidenote:
+1 auto quals
+1 x-1 oldgen swiss( keep x-2 for vintage and classic)

 

[GenOne]

I don't have much to add that others haven't already said more articulately, but my thoughts are specific to the oldgens circuit.

I had a lot of fun playing in the oldgens circuit this year and ended up making invitationals via circuit points, but it came at the cost of me being mostly absent from the current gen circuit because I felt I didn't have enough time to schedule weekly games in both the oldgen and current gen circuit tours (plus team tours like Derby and DPL etc which I DID participate in).

In the oldgen circuit, consider that there are eight oldgen tours in total!! (including classic, vintage, and the 6 swisses) spread across six different metagames that players have to build and/or maintain a working proficiency of, as opposed to just five tours in the current gen circuit (ssnl, ladder, swiss, osdt, last chance) where you just have to know SV. For me personally, I went into the oldgen circuit this year feeling reasonably confident with my skills in XY, SM and SS but definitely had to spend some extra time learning ADV, DPP and (to a lesser extent) BW which I felt much more like a novice in. And that takes time outside of just playing your weekly scheduled games if you're not a DOU oldgens veteran.

All this is to say, I definitely agree with other posts above who are saying that the current x-2 swiss format needs to be adjusted somehow to shorten the oldgens tournaments. I think x-1 swiss sounds like a reasonably solid solution but I'm curious what other solutions people might propose.

 

[Lemurro]

Regardless of whether we have one or two seasonals next year, I'd like to propose changing seasonals to be seeded based on the past year's circuit results rather than the current year’s. The point of seeding based on circuit results is to use an objective metric for how good the player is, and I think we can all agree that a whole year's results are a better indication of this than 2 tournaments’. Seeding based on the standings of the current year's circuit also leads to an unideal positive feedback loop where getting points makes it easier for you to get even more points.

 

[srvoltmike]

Regardless of whether we have one or two seasonals next year, I'd like to propose changing seasonals to be seeded based on the past year's circuit results rather than the current year’s. The point of seeding based on circuit results is to use an objective metric for how good the player is, and I think we can all agree that a whole year's results are a better indication of this than 2 tournaments’. Seeding based on the standings of the current year's circuit also leads to an unideal positive feedback loop where getting points makes it easier for you to get even more points.

If you have 2 seasonals it would make sense to seed off of the last seasonal (so 1 ssnl off of last year standing and one off of current standing). Gives both the structure from the last circuit, while not using too much outdated data as the season progresses.

 

[Genesis77]

the idea that both invitationals run at the same time leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, considering that if one were to qualify for both they either have to pick one or be divided between the two.
That being said I'd like to forward the idea of condensing the oldgens circuit to have invitationals run during November, just so the two most important individual tournaments of the two circuits don't overlap and potentially detract from each other.