All Gens 2025 Ruins of Alph Circuits - Feedback and Suggestions

[Hiro']

Hi everyone, now that circuit championships have begun, the RoA Tournaments moderation team is looking to collect feedback as well as suggestions for the 2026 circuits. Feedback can include anything, although we're particularly interested in hearing your thoughts about:

• New team tour mimicking RoAPL and featuring Masters generations (format, timing for the tour, etc.)
• The return of Summer Seasonals for all generations
• Ladder tournaments
• Last Chance deadlines
• Subforum World Cups

Please keep in mind that while our team is organizing and coordinating circuits, the decisions regarding a specific circuit are in the hands of the moderation team of the corresponding generation as well as RoA leadership. Moreover, the design of our circuits hinges upon the official circuit, so drastic changes to time periods might be a non-starter depending on what official tournaments are slated to run at that time.

 

[DKM]

Last Chance deadlines

Please change these to a one week deadline, or atleast allow extensions.

Many of us have work or school which means people with different timezones get matched up and just can't find a time during the week. This should not be a potential barrier to competing in the circuit and we should value getting as many of the matches done as possible instead of coinflips or act calls.

The return of Summer Seasonals for all generations

Yes please.

 

[Iguana]

Hi! Thanks for this thread, Hiro. I have a few thoughts I wanted to share.

~I would definitely like to see the return of the GSC Summer SSNL this upcoming year. I felt that there were too few tournaments in GSC over this year. Overall, the return of Summer SSNL tours across all Gens sounds great.

~As for the ladder tournaments, I would greatly prefer a change in the playoffs format. It takes a long time to qualify for these tournaments, and having single-elimination playoffs can be frustrating. A round-robin-style system akin to OLT would be preferable.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

[TyCarter]

Masters Generation tour can be feasible. But it would probably require reworking roapl slots and slotting ORAS over to this new tour. From what I am aware of, "slot inflation" as a conversation is gonna be inevitable with roapl being gens 1-6. Reworking roapl to be focused on gens 1-5 should be feasible as if that tour is still doing 2 slots per tier, i think 10 slots is ideal for RoAPL.

I am working under the assumption that the tour is separating the classic gens from masters gens identity wise. If you do masters gen (6-8). You can prob still do 2 slots per tier. It would be something like:

2x SS OU
2x SM OU
2x ORAS OU
2x Masters Bo3?

As for the timing of the tour; You can have the timing be around that spring period after SPL ends and before wcop main event starts in terms of start time. As it is right now we have no shortage of tours for Masters in the late summer to fall period whether its the actual Masters tour itself or OUPL etc. Also yes I'm aware it would be around the same time as STour but that tour as it is right now is suppose to be spontaneous anyways so I don't think its that big of a deal.

An aside but if this hypothetical masters tour were to actually occur, whether it should be double bo3 for each gen or 1 bo3 and 1 bo1 can be at each gen's respective communities discretion.

Summer Seasonals are fine.

Ladder Tours are fine but number of cycles and all that should probably be dependent on ladder activity. A tier that lacks in sufficient ladder activity probably should not be running a ladder tour. I'm sure there is probably some kinda benchmark u can look at. Personally am indifferent to the playoff format.

Last Chance as it is right now format wise is a meme. Either A.) Start the tour much earlier so that u don't need a 3-4 days deadline and have it be a 1 week deadline. B.) Nuke it altogether.

Subforum world cups is prob fine for classic gens but again should be at discretion of each old gens respective mod team and dependent on signup numbers.

 

[jus]

• The return of Summer Seasonals for all generations

I think everyone can agree that more tournaments = the better. There is no downside to having summer seasonals for every generation and would just be overall well received by many

• Ladder tournaments

Strictly speaking on the GSC Ladder tournament, I like the idea since it encourages more ladder activity and of course more .. “quality” games. Overall step in the right direction

• Last Chance deadlines

They should just remove the “No Johns” flat out from Last Chance. A week deadline won’t kill anyone’s time for the holidays (surely ) and for a “Last chance” tournament having 3-4 days to play your game is, in my opinion, way too little all things considered. Either change the deadline to a week or allow extensions to be had, not having either of them makes no sense for this kind of tournament

 

[summer islands]

2 seasonals

 

[Slowpoke Fan]

Going to speak on a variety of topics so please bear with me a bit.

1. I would like to add SSLT to the circuit next year - it will be held in the early spring months (say February or March) and the SS subforum moderators can host it like how it was held last year if need be. The more important thing is that I would like it to have a wider points distribution at the bottom due to a couple of reasons:

• It would be a bit unfair to circuit participants (especially those who are employed) who aren't able to set aside the time required to ladder if the tournament gives a lot of points to the champion.
• A 'normal' Type C/Type B distribution would probably be too little of a reward for those who qualify for the playoffs but get knocked out early as qualifying for the top 32 bracket is usually more difficult than say making the top 32 of a random circuit tournament (e.g. you can't get act calls in SSLT and will have to play against a bunch of people vying with you for ELO numerous times).

Proposed SSLT Points Distribution

top 32: 310 points
top 16: 600 points
top 8: 900 points
top 4: 1200 points
runner-up: 1500 points
winner: 2000 points
Adds up to what a normal Type B tournament would give in terms of points, but more evenly distributed to all playoff participants for the reasons outlined above.

Note: SS Trios will essentially swap start dates with SSLT if this proposal goes through. Also thinking of implementing a mini group stage (groups of 4, top 2 in each group advance to the next round) for the round of 32 - as Iguana said, qualifying for LTs take a lot of time and it would be nice to give players who qualify for the playoffs more opportunities to play high-level sets.

2. Our third CA will probably go to a team tournament from next year onwards - dex and I floated the idea of SSCL with the following formats in the SS Discord server and it received pretty positive feedback:

Proposed SSCL format

SS OU x2
SS UU
SS Ubers
SS RU
SS NU
SS PU
SS ZU
SS LC
SS Monotype
SS CAP
BDSP OU

I think having BDSP OU in the tournament would be a nice way of being inclusive to the BDSP community that resides in our subforum. While I am aware that they have their own subsection, circuit and subcommunity, I think this would be an interesting first step in integrating them with us without rocking the boat too wildly for the time being.

Note: SS Invitational will include a cash prize to compensate for it losing the CA prize if this proposal goes through, please contact me if you're willing to contribute to next year's prize pool .

3. The community has also expressed interest in setting up a SSWC team tournament in the future, but it will likely need to take a backseat if it's competing with SSCL for the third CA prize from the subforum. I would appreciate it if users in the SS community can take the time to inform me whether they would still be interested in a SSWC without a real prize .

4. As for the Masters equivalent of RoAPL, I don't think there should be any reason to not hold one - an easy solution to the questions TyCarter brought up would be to axe ORAS from RoAPL (let's not act like there wasn't any pushback against in inclusion of ORAS in RoAPL anyways) and have the new Masters generations team tournament follow the format of Masters League this year: 3 slots for every generation and a Bo3 slot.

 

[violet river]

i would heavily support making a masters team tournament follow the format of masters league, cut oras from roapl and either run 10 slot roapl or add classic bo5/whatever.
ladder tours aren't particularly unfair to people who are busy - having to schedule 11 rounds of an individual sucks equally hard just in different ways. please keep ladder tour single elim though, if you make it swiss or whatever then it truly does become a big time/investment sink.
keep rbylt for certain, advlt dpplt bwlt all fire, maybe cut gsc due to issues w the gsc ladder.
bdsp in sscl sounds good