Tournament Battle Spot Premier League III - Commencement Thread

DragonWhale

It's not a misplay, it's RNG manipulation
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Welcome to the third installment of the Battle Spot Premier League! This is a team tournament where managers draft players and compete as a team to become the next BSPL champions. Winners will get a "BSPL Champion" role in the Battle Spot Discord.

Basic Info:
  • All games are going to be held on Pokemon Showdown and general tournament rules apply.
  • Each week, teams get the following points depending on the result: Win = 2, Tie = 1, Loss = 0
  • Teams with equal points are ranked according to their differential (# of sets won - # of sets lost)
  • Teams that are completely even at the end of the season for a playoff spot will face each other in 3 sets: one format is selected from each team and the third set will be SM Battle Spot Singles
BSPL III schedule:
  • Manager Signups: July 8 - 15
  • Player Signups: July 14 - 27
  • Draft Auction: July 28-29 (will be scheduled further so all managers can attend)
  • Week 1: July 29 - Aug 5
  • Week 2: Aug 5 - 12
  • Week 3: Aug 12 - 19
  • Week 4: Aug 19 - 26
  • Week 5: Aug 26 - Sep 2
  • Semifinals: Sep 2 - 9
  • Finals: Sep 9 - 16
Use this thread to talk about some discussion points listed below, or just to meme. I guess some of you will probably do both.
 

DragonWhale

It's not a misplay, it's RNG manipulation
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Some improtant discussion topics. Use this thread to give your opinion on what you would like to see in this tournament, both/either as a spectator and/or as a participant.
  • FORMAT and SLOTS: Which Battle Spot formats do we want in the team lineup, and how many? Will we #FreeGBU?
    • Keep in mind that the only available formats for discussion are standard BSS and BSD formats from gens 5-7. I am VETOING all other formats (Special, Online Competition, Triples, and VGC if it isn't BSD). Mention these in your post and I won't bother reading what else you have to say.
    • The number of player signups for the format will also be a factor in deciding what format to include in BSPL III
  • Teamlock and Best-ofs: Do we want games to be a best of 1 or 3? If it's a best of 3 do we want to teamlock the players during the set?
    • In past BSPLs, Battle Spot Doubles has been teamlocked to resemble VGC tournament formats. Whether or not we do for Singles formats is probably the biggest question.
  • Manager Players: Can managers play, and if so do they need to draft themselves, and if so for how much?
  • Other thoughts: Schedule, Scoring, Tiebreakers, League structure, Change the host, whatever else you want to tackle.
Just to avoid confusion, talking about the points above in this thread isn't mandatory. They are just to get things started.
 
Formats: USUM BSS, USUM BSS, USUM BSS, ORAS BSS, (GBU BSS), USUM BSD, ORAS/USUM BSD
(this assumes there's 7 battles so no tiebreaks...if 6, then sorry GBU)
Teamlock and Best Ofs: Bo3 in BSS, no teamlock, Bo3 in BSD teamlock as in VGC
Manager players: Yes, 10k, at most 12k
Other: I'd have player signups for a week, move everything forward a week

^ opinions are here
 
Free GBU with 1 BSD and 1 oras BSS

Keep all the bo3 rules and such the same as last year

Let managers play for 10k

edit: I'm also keen to moving everything a week earlier cause as it is rn it's cutting into the school year a hefty amount.
 
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My ideal format is USM Singles x 2 / ORAS Singles / BW2 Singles / USM Doubles / ORAS Doubles
With the possibility of swapping BW2 Singles for another USM Singles. This is under the assumption that we're not pushing it up to 8 games a week.

Team lock in singles, I want to try it. It's seriously exhausting building and testing a million teams each week. Especially so for the top builders who help with the whole team's building efforts. The bring6pick3 nature should make teamlock far more viable than it ever could be in 6v6, as it does with BSD/VGC in comparison to DOU. The naturally built-in 'sidedeck' allows for a significant, and interesting, degree of adaptability between games.

Managers should play, I don't want to remove 6 good players from the pool. I haven't given any significant though to cost, I may come back later with comments on that.
An adjacent point that was brought up last night on PS is whether DW (generally the host) should play, as the tour host. I was opposed, as it would require a 3rd party to handle lineups and activity calls that affect your team and as a general thing across games TOs usually don't play in their own tournaments for confilct of interest reasons. I am however open to hearing arguments to the contrary. Of course, if you (or possible other host) don't want to play then none of that matters anyway.

Something I want to bring up is playing on-cart. It's a somewhat common occurance in NPA for players to play their games on-cart and in most cases stream it, otherwise post Battle Video Code as replays are ofcourse required. I know it wouldn't be used much, but it can be nice for those are capable of streaming cart play to have the option. I could also see limiting it to just streams as BVCodes are at best inpractical for spectating.
 

Psynergy

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I'm with Jhon that I think teamlocking would be good to try from the perspective of the more serious player. I've built so many teams that I've only used once and it's tedious building a whole team with the knowledge that you're only going to use half of it at most. It might be too experimental to try it in a BSPL setting but otherwise I'd be in favor of this.

Managers playing for 10k is probably also fine, I think it's hard to put a price on that until we see who signs up but I would rather it not be too much that only the "best" managers will want to buy themselves. By now I think it's clear that the better managers aren't necessarily at an advantage for buying themselves for a perceived "steal." I personally don't consider myself at an advantage when buying myself even if 10k is definitely cheap, so I say that price point is fine unless the playing quality of all the managers turns out to be high enough to justify more than 10k.



Now for the controversial point. Sorry. Coming off of DPL as someone who played BW DOU and enjoyed it, I'm still not in favor of GBU this year unless we really have enough players for it. To give more context, BW DOU was a great format, but most of the people who played it in DPL only did so because nobody else on their team wanted to and the slot needed to be filled, rather than because they wanted to play BW. Now most people who did play it actually enjoyed it, but I don't think a format is worth having if most of the people playing it are doing so primarily to fill an empty slot. There were still plenty of "please remove BW from DPL next year" comments throughout DPL.

More relevant to us, I believe this applies to GBU even more so because it's a format nobody played other than for BSPL1 or BSS Classic. I can only think of maybe 2-3 people I'd consider drafting for playing GBU, otherwise I'd probably end up just slotting in a good player that I couldn't fit into USUM or ORAS that week. This isn't inherently a bad thing but if the player pool is being stretched to fill a format then I don't think it adds enough to the tour. I also personally don't think GBU so great of a format that we need to find a way to fit it in, I would rather have an extra USUM or even ORAS slot there if we're struggling to fit enough GBU players in. I'm not against GBU being included if we really do have the player support for it though, I just don't think we have it.
 
I like what Jhon's saying about team lock, I'm definitely all for giving it a try.

Also it does seem a little much to have 2 weeks for player sign-ups, moving everything forward a week should make it so that finals end just as the new school semester starts up for most people.

As far as GBU goes I'm personally not a huge fan simply because there's no real way to practice, and no "meta" so to speak because literally nobody plays it outside of this and BSS classic. Without GBU my ideal line-up would be SM x 3 / ORAS / SM BSD x 2 / ORAS BSD.

10k seems to be the consensus for managers to buy themselves, which I agree with as well.
 

DragonWhale

It's not a misplay, it's RNG manipulation
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The two week player signup is because I most likely won't be having any access to a computer between 21-24 due to travelling, so unless there's a good way around this administration-wise for this tournament I can't really shorten the player signups.
 
The two week player signup is because I most likely won't be having any access to a computer between 21-24 due to travelling, so unless there's a good way around this administration-wise for this tournament I can't really shorten the player signups.
What if we overlapped manager & player signups? Schedule week 1 the week you are away for those couple days and try to get a volunteer to manage the week 1 thread while you're gone, and you'd be back before the week ends so there's a good amount of time to manage conflicts if any.
 
So I wrote a whole paragraph about the slots and then I realized that I can't count to 6.
Now that that's cleared up, I completely agree with Jhon with the slots because there's really no better way to go. Of course we should keep in mind that the GBU slot should really just be a tossup between USM BSS and GBU in case GBU attracts too little interest (dangit I thought I was writing an original opinion, but it looks like that's not going to happen).

So: USM BSS x2 / ORAS BSS / GBU BSS / USM BSD / ORAS BSD

Teamlocks: I think that BSD should probably have a teamlock because that's what has been normal. As for singles I'm pretty torn because personally I think I feel better when I can change teams in case I have a trash matchup (even thought I feel like I have a bad matchup in any game I play lol). I also am hesitant with changing up the rules from every other BSS tournament that I've been a part of. That said with school starting up near the end of BSPL I don't know if I can go build / playtest a bunch of teams every week so really I don't care either way (I also support moving everything up a week if possible).
BO3 or bust!

What do you guys think about covering matches throughout the tour either through twitch streams or YT videos? A random idea I had was to make a scheduled stream or a weekly video that had people analyzing a couple of matches and then giving a quick recap of the standings or something. Think of it as a little news show.
 
So I wrote a whole paragraph about the slots and then I realized that I can't count to 6.
Now that that's cleared up, I completely agree with Jhon with the slots because there's really no better way to go. Of course we should keep in mind that the GBU slot should really just be a tossup between USM BSS and GBU in case GBU attracts too little interest (dangit I thought I was writing an original opinion, but it looks like that's not going to happen).

So: USM BSS x2 / ORAS BSS / GBU BSS / USM BSD / ORAS BSD

Teamlocks: I think that BSD should probably have a teamlock because that's what has been normal. As for singles I'm pretty torn because personally I think I feel better when I can change teams in case I have a trash matchup (even thought I feel like I have a bad matchup in any game I play lol). I also am hesitant with changing up the rules from every other BSS tournament that I've been a part of. That said with school starting up near the end of BSPL I don't know if I can go build / playtest a bunch of teams every week so really I don't care either way (I also support moving everything up a week if possible).
BO3 or bust!

What do you guys think about covering matches throughout the tour either through twitch streams or YT videos? A random idea I had was to make a scheduled stream or a weekly video that had people analyzing a couple of matches and then giving a quick recap of the standings or something. Think of it as a little news show.
I like the idea of a weekly recap type of video. I was actually planning on doing something like that on my own, but I don't have any experience recording and editing videos yet so it probably wouldn't be too professional if I did it alone. If there's a group of like 3 or 4 people who want to do this every week I'd be down to contribute as well.
 

cant say

twitch.tv/jakecantsay
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I think the lineup to go with is SMBSSx3 / ORASBSS / GBUS / SMBSD for 6 slots. If we want 2 doubles slots then I think we drop a SMBSS slot for a second SMBSD slot, however we have less regulars who main/play BSD than people who can play GBU. The last two BSPLs, doubles slots have been filled out by random VGC players who sign up under usernames only 1-2 managers know.

I think we absolutely include GBUS. It was great in BSPL1, it was sorely missed in BSPL2, and it was great in BSS Classic. In fact, the GBU games in Classic were all really good. People seemed to enjoy it and it brought quite a bit of discussion to the PS room and discord.

I'm mostly fine with managers playing if they buy themselves for 10K, I think I will want to play as well as manage so I'm a little biased. I don't think I'm worth too much more than 10K, Psynergy and Jhon arguably get a big advantage though getting themselves for 10K as they're both easily worth 20K+. I think we have to ban chemcoop though, he mentioned he's interested in managing this year but getting a 30K value player for 10K is broken as hell.

Teamlock BSS seems interesting, but since we haven't tested it in a proper tour yet I'm against it for now. I also think bad matchups are far more punishing in singles compared to doubles, so I'm not sure the format is suited for it.

It would be cool to have DragonWhale play, but he obviously can't host in that case, and he's a way better host than player :bloblul: td when?

I'm pretty against allowing games to be played on cart. People are already going to be building teams most weeks, having to actually prepare those mons on the games just adds extra work. You can also hide your team of 6 because replay codes only show the 3 that were brought to the game. I think only myself, chemcoop, and xeroslash can record 3DS games as well, so it's not enough to be worth it.

If people want something like a weekly podcast I'd be interested in doing that if it fits around work!
 

Darkinium

the mighty nuaguunibi
So far in terms of managers being able to play, the most discussed option has been giving all of them a 10k price tag; however, that also leads to certain managers being really easy steals for their own team.

A solution I think can fix this problem is assigning each manager their own price. Although getting a specific number will be hard, for a good amount of dudes we can definitely say that they'd at least be worth 20, 30, or whatever k. Another issue is who would decide the price on the managers. I was thinking DW, since they're the host and neutral party here, and I think it wouldn't be too hard to get a price range that most people, including the manager themselves, can agree on. Like I said, most people can agree that certain guys should be worth at least "x"k, so with this we can a more accurate price than a blanket 10k for each manager. What do you guys think?
 

Ullar

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So far in terms of managers being able to play, the most discussed option has been giving all of them a 10k price tag; however, that also leads to certain managers being really easy steals for their own team.

A solution I think can fix this problem is assigning each manager their own price. Although getting a specific number will be hard, for a good amount of dudes we can definitely say that they'd at least be worth 20, 30, or whatever k. Another issue is who would decide the price on the managers. I was thinking DW, since they're the host and neutral party here, and I think it wouldn't be too hard to get a price range that most people, including the manager themselves, can agree on. Like I said, most people can agree that certain guys should be worth at least "x"k, so with this we can a more accurate price than a blanket 10k for each manager. What do you guys think?
I agree, but we should be conservative when assigning prices in this way. while it shouldn’t be a steal to draft oneself, it shouldn’t be highway robbery either.

I vote for a ‘tier’ system of self-drafting, the placement if each manager as decided by DW. Tier 1 (hella swank player of 360noscopeosity) would cost 30k, Tier 2 (damn son, where’d you find this?) would cost 20k, and Tier 3 (alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright now ladies) would cost 10k.

maybe shitty players like me who want to manage could cost 5k :psyduck:
 

Darkinium

the mighty nuaguunibi
Oh well :blobsad:

Depending on who's going to manage, we could also just raise the blanket price tag from 10k to, say, 20k, or to whatever is the most accurate, conservative general representation. That way most if not all managers are going to get closer to their actual worth without anyone having to give other people a designated price. This might face some issues if we have some new managers or people who haven't made a great splash in the tour scene, but if we're going to see the same managers and players as usual, bumping up the price tag from 10k would probably be more representative of the skill of most managers. Seeing who's likely going to be managing, 10k is just a pretty damn good deal, perhaps a bit too good.
 
Managers have other responsibilities besides just playing too. Given what they have to balance throughout the season I feel like 10k is a fair enough price. Considering it's the "average" player price it seems the least arbitrary to go with. 10k also isn't that small if the manager also wants a shot at grabbing a 25-30k+ player. In all past BSPLs we've had great players manage & buy themselves for 10k, and it never broke the league. I don't see why it would be an issue now. Yes it's a steal for almost every manager but I'd rather give managers the higher incentive to join in than make them think twice about playing to save cap space.
 

MZ

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If the average price of managers is deemed to be above 10k, there is no reason not to raise it. 10k managers don't break anything outright, but they do give certain managers an inherent advantage. Buying any player should be the risk reward of spending your money on them, buying Chemcoop for 10k is inherently far less risky than if some pleb like myself were to manage, where "is mz worth 10k" is a legit question.
e: the below only makes sense if we're assuming Dragonwhale is randomly choosing managers who aren't experienced members of the community
 
Managers have other responsibilities besides just playing too. Given what they have to balance throughout the season I feel like 10k is a fair enough price. Considering it's the "average" player price it seems the least arbitrary to go with. 10k also isn't that small if the manager also wants a shot at grabbing a 25-30k+ player. In all past BSPLs we've had great players manage & buy themselves for 10k, and it never broke the league. I don't see why it would be an issue now. Yes it's a steal for almost every manager but I'd rather give managers the higher incentive to join in than make them think twice about playing to save cap space.
I agree with the above.

Having a lower price tag on managers encourages more experienced members of the community who still want to play to step up and manage. Otherwise it does encourage people who are valued at practically nothing to manage and not buy themselves. Individual valuations are subjective also and basing on history is also pretty bad as it may not be indicative of an actual valuation. I don't think it is overall that big a deal and it is only one player. I think the current meta is very much so at least in USUM BSS, where most of these managers are likely to play, that anyone can beat anyone anyways.
 

Mr.GX

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I think having both ORAS and USUM BSD would be preferred. As cant say said, most of the BSD players are from the DOU/VGC community, and not everyone likes USUM BSD as much as ORAS thanks to the matchup roulette and tapus.
 
however we have less regulars who main/play BSD than people who can play GBU. The last two BSPLs, doubles slots have been filled out by random VGC players who sign up under usernames only 1-2 managers know.
Among the regulars: myself, DW, Psynergy, Demantoid, mishiimono, Sam, kami, marilli, qsns, and Auraray are all very talented doubles players (sorry if I missed anyone from the list). There's a strong and sizable cross population between BSS and DOU/VGC.
VGC mains are picked because they're both strong players and friends of ours. Similar deal with filling singles slots with OU mains or solerme picking someone from the italian ps room, as an example.
Anyway, where I was going with this is, there are more regular BSS players ready to play doubles at a good level than there are for GBU, and the metas are certainly at a far more developed point. That being said I'm really not opposed to having GBU, even if it's my least prefered by some margin. However, I absolutely want two doubles slots. And as I suggested would be more than happy to not have 3 USM Singles to do so. So many of us love doubles, and I don't think it's ever failed to not be an exciting format to spectate.
 

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