Proposal Best of three in official team tournaments

bruno

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The community just isn't built for SPL to be like that. There's a huge lack of real motivation(like money) for a full on bo3 SPL to ever work. Most(obviously there are exceptions) of the top players of the community have already grabbed their trophy, and going through 2 months of full tryhard weekly bo3s just to have their trophy ungray isn't ever gonna do anything. Most people see SPL as a fun thing you play with a team where you focus all your efforts into this 1 specific game of the week, what we're thinking here would just be a completely different type of tournament.

You could say tripling the amount of work you'd need to put in weekly could be compensated with using other people's teams or recycling, but i believe that would just make the tournament less competitive if anything, which would be against the goal of all of this. Recycling in general will just never be actually efficient in a 9 week team tournament like SPL, because I promise you that the opposing team will have scouted the shit out of your replays and your opponent will have the knowledge of every single set you're using, which just means you're playing with a deficit from the start. RBY in this case has a big advantage because it's one of the only tiers where you will for the most part struggle to counterstyle(worst case being a good chansey/lax/elec vs rock/last mon) and knowing opp's sets doesn't do as much. You could change things from the team yourself to prevent any kind of counterteaming, but that just means you're weakening your tools vs specific things that make the moveset of your pokemon what they are, plus at that point you're already making a new team which obviously isn't actually recycling anymore.

And if you're going to go with the teammate makes teams/random team stealing argument, in my opinion you're having the tournament be less competitive because your big player that costs 5x more than your bench is stuck using teams from the bench instead of using his teambuilding prowess to continue making his beloved tier grow with innovative ideas. Instead, he has to worry about finding a way to be happy with 3 different teams in a week, which is just really stressful.
(I wanna make it clear my last 2 paragraphs are only because the tournament in this case would be SPL, a tournament where you have to worry about at least 9 different weeks with the prize being a pixelated trophy.)

Every time i've played SPL i felt extremely drained out after the end of every game, because of the amount of prep and focus i put into this one weekly game. I cannot for the life of me imagine going through an entire season with at the very least double the amount of games. It's just too much for too little.
 
I think bo3 is an interesting idea that has the potential to bring some good improvements to the tour. I don't think it should be applied uniformly across all gens or even necessarily include all of the old gens. I think False was right to raise the concerns that he did, and I appreciate that potentially playing 3 incredibly grindy GSC games in one sitting would make people reconsider playing pokemon at all. This is why I think the decision about whether each tier should be bo3 should involve the council and community of the relevant tier. I would suggest that voting for this would have similar metrics and requirements to a suspect test for each tier, rather than a TD/Host decision.

I think there are good counterpoints to this proposal, but I don't necessarily agree that bo3 is 3x more effort than bo1. In ADV for example, I would suggest that bringing similar variations of TTar Skarm Bliss teams is not only fine, but actually quite a good idea: the opponent is going to be much less comfortable bringing a dedicated (for instance) Magdol counterteam that's soft against other meta-relevant threats if they know that even if this is one of the teams you're intending on using, they only have a 1/3 chance of it landing on the target they want.

There are aspects of bo1 that are extremely draining. In no particular order, losing because you had X move instead of Y move on one of your pokemon is not a fun experience, neither is running into a brutal matchup on an important game, or having extremely improbable events affect the outcome of the week. Switching to bo3 is a good opportunity to make team tournaments more competitive, and I think the idea is that you will worry less about whether your specific tech will hit and more about whether the team is good in general.

I think this is a good discussion to have and BKC has raised it at exactly the right time. I'm not certain whether I'm in favour of this idea yet, but I am interesting in pursuing it, and I think it's worth seeing how bo3 will affect smaller team tours first.
 
This is a basic suggestion, but would it be possible to give players the option to choose best of 3 if they wish? That fulfills false's concern of not having enough time to prepare as if neither player can agree, it would default back to best of 1. It is possible that lower ranked players would reject this to increase their chances of winning, but I don't think its an awful decision as it would at least let those individual players decide. I think this format needs to be tested in a CPL style tour with 10 different tiers to see what the feedback is.
 
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Ununhexium

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This is a basic suggestion, but would it be possible to give players the option to choose best of 3 if they wish? That fulfills false's concern of not having enough time to prepare as if neither player can agree, it would default back to best of 1. It is possible that lower ranked players would reject this to increase their chances of winning, but I don't think its an awful decision as it would at least let those individual players decide. I think this format needs to be tested in a CPL style tour with 10 different tiers to see what the feedback is.
This doesn’t solve the real problem because you could still force a BO1 and go for a matchup fish
 

Finchinator

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I fully echo ABR's sentiments. I have taken official team tournaments seriously for many years right now and anymore Best of 3 slots would be unwelcome in my eyes.
bo3 does not mean you have to prepare three new teams per week, every week.
I disagree with this as a selling point.

There is a certain level of urgency that comes alongside tournaments like SPL, WCoP, or even SCL which means any lackadaisical or repetitive preparation will be exploited. The bo3 initiative will cause a larger strain on participants, who already complain about the length of tournaments and the general burnout.

So, as bruno alluded to, you are going to end up with people being completely overwhelmed and/or motivation dropping greatly over time due to the 3x as demanding workload.

Hypothetically if I started SPL, WCoP, and SCL and averaged 2.5 games per set, I would be playing 53 official team tournament regular season games over the course of the year, constituting 21 series. This does not count playoffs, tiebreaks, etc. either. Personally I spend multiple hours preparing for my games each week and I also spend hours working with my teammates on their games, too. Doing this would become impossible and the appeal of team tournaments would drop drastically to the point that I likely would limit my participation in the same vein as ABR. Finally before someone counters with the "we need less preparation and more focus on playing" retort, preparation is a part of the game that I enjoy thoroughly and it being present in tournaments has led to innumerable metagame advancements across all of our formats, so it's not like it can be alienated as a negative thing either, even if people throw the hurr-durr match-up card out there as a byproduct of preparation for specific opponents.

This does not even touch on the physical time constraints of series themselves like false highlights exceptionally well or the excitement/pacing factors Hogg outlines. Both of these are very relevant drawbacks, too. Please do not increase the amount of bo3 slots in official team tournaments.
 
This is a suggestion that has both strong pros and cons. I don't think there is an objective or clear right answer, and it seems pretty silly to deny that there are significant pros or cons either way.

Taking that into consideration, my suggestion would be to trial one or more of the more popular ideas in this thread. e.g. making more tiers bo3 on a case-by-case basis, introducing bo3 tiebreaks or finals, or trying a team tour with all bo3. If we try it and it turns out the downsides are too much, I doubt it will be a problem to change it back for the next year's edition.
 
Like, theres a clear issue at playing so many games in a full smogon team tour, which is very obvious to about everyone playing actively right now. It even applies to RBY, i genuinely still dont get why this gen is played under bo3 at all, and its a discussion we will eternally have until either 1) we delete it off the circuit or 2) we delete spl. However (and i dont know if anyone already brought up this idea till now), i get the whole bo3 argument, and wouldnt find it BAD if we started to play the whole playoffs (or even just like, the finals [which is prob even better than the first option]) under a bo3 format if you asked me. We all know playoffs are basically a different tournament anyway, so i can see it being fine for everyone to finish the tour playing just a bit more for the rings after so many months of work, wouldnt hurt if we always tried to make sure the best team won the tournament. Something we should take in account, though, is that theres a reason some players are better at individual tours or team tours separately, bo3 kinda drags series to different atmosphere when compared to bo1, and again, in the end we would still end up playing more than we are used to in a tour that doesnt reward anything relevant at all. Either way i think its a path we could go for, i just dont see many drawbacks in just keeping everything as it is right now.
 

Hipmonlee

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Just wanted to talk about the idea that RBYers all love bo3, cause I am pretty ambivalent about it. And most RBYers these days came into RBY after it was already bo3 in every tour, so its not really such a surprise that they like it that way.

But, honestly, while I dislike a lot about bo3s its not that big of a deal.

If it were me I would leave it up to the leadership of each tier to decide how series should be played.
 
Echo ABR and false. I would have no interest in participating in future iterations of SPL/WC with a best of 3 format.

I would not be able to make the time commitment* required considering the expectation/level of investment provided by the rest of the team. Presumably I speak for a few other oldies who have just enough time/muscle memory/guile to get through a best of 1 before forgetting a mechanic.

* with respect to both preparation and playing (waiting for and on your opponent between games) especially given my timezone forcing me to play 95% of all my previous SPL/WC games at the same exact (rather inconvenient) time.

If anything, I'd like the TD team to consider ways to make these tournaments maintain their competitive integrity without feeling like a second job.
 

Merritt

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As proposed earlier in the thread, I'd like to get some community opinions on having only tiebreaks in teamtours be bo3 sets, starting with this upcoming SCL.

My personal opinion here is that most of the arguments against bo3 that have come up in this thread don't apply nearly as much to a tiebreak series. The teambuilding burden here is significantly lower compared to regular season bo3, both because there are significantly fewer tiebreaks that are even possible (a maximum of 3, and it's not likely that any one team will have to play a tiebreak 3 times in a season) and only three sets are played, freeing up more of the team's building and testing resources.

The other classic argument - that teamtours are functionally a bo10 - also obviously doesn't apply to the 3 person tiebreaks. From a competitiveness point of view having a single game be marred by bad luck is significantly more impactful here than regular weeks, especially since tiebreaks are (in theory) between closely matched teams skillwise. For spectators, while you could say this 'reduces tension', there's also the point that making tiebreaks bo3 results in seeing more games from generally the strongest players on each team.

If it wasn't clear, I'm personally in favor of having tiebreaks be bo3 sets and believe there's no reason to not have it go into effect for SCL.
 

Hogg

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Support, definitely. I'm opposed to Bo3 overall but none of my concerns apply to the tiebreak. Also, can we just go ahead and make tiebreak deadlines in team tours across the board week while we're at it? If we're prepping 9 games instead of 3 it makes sense, and awkward mid-week deadlines don't really do anyone any favors.
 
I, too, love the idea of tiebreaking a bo10/bo8 with a subsequent bo9. Very hype, efficient, concise, and not time consuming at all. Maybe we can eradicate that gross zoomer prep culture too. Bravo.

Again, I sincerely have no interest in participating in a tour that features this proposal. And again, I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Please stop trying to fix what isn’t broken.
 

Star

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I'm pretty strongly against the idea of bo3 in tiebreaks. First of all the prep load is pretty stupid when you consider that in WCoP for example, the regular week is 8 games, but you'd have to prep 9 teams for a tiebreak (also in a shorter time period). That brings up the question of why the fuck tiebreaks have Friday deadlines for absolutely 0 benefit but that's a separate issue I suppose. There are also scenarios like the one US West and Brazil were in, where they had to play 2 tiebreaks within a week. That's 18 fucking teams in a week which is obviously ludicrous. You could say to stretch that out over 2 weeks, but hanging up the whole tournament for a 2 week tiebreak just get into playoffs is equally terrible

As someone who's actually played in a few tiebreaks this year, coming up with one team you like for a game where the entire season is on the line is difficult enough. Tripling that load really isn't feasible for most people and will inevitably lead to lazy prep which nobody wants to see in the most important games of the tour.

Maybe people that aren't actually competing in team tournaments, let alone tiebreakers, shouldn't be proposing poorly thought through proposals such as these in the first place.
 
Having played and won in both tiebreak series for my world cup team i'm heavily against bo3 in tiebreaks as well. If you're seriously giving it your all the preparation that goes into a single match is mindblowing. Whatever free time available is already used to figure out the one team, if you're gonna go ahead and make it three it will simply result in quantity>quality.
 

mael

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i would support bo3 in dpp at the very least. makes it significantly more competitive and the added effort is not that big. if you can't bring up a little more effort for spl and official tournaments then your initial availability and commitment are questionable anyway. not gonna comment on other tiers and overall ruling.
 

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