Tournaments BWPL IV Format Discussion

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Monai

Monai

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There's been a lot of shakeups with the generational premier leagues, so I wanted to open a thread to discuss potential format changes for BWPL IV as well. 5 week tours can feel very short and a bad week one loss has many teams throwing in the towel from the getgo. In my opinion an 8 team tour with the same number of slots would improve the tour greatly and cuts out the nasty week bye for the first seed, which has been commonly cited as a disadvantage due to curbing momentum.

I don't believe signup quantity will be an issue, there is normally a large surplus of players, even in the niche lower tiers, so putting together another 2 teams of ~15 players shouldn't be an issue. While there might be a slight quality reduction, plenty of capable players were simply never given a shot in a tour with only 6 teams. Overall, I don't think quality will be an issue for 8 teams at all.

Regarding the slots, I personally believe that our previous setup of 3x OU, Ubers, UU, RU, NU, PU, ZU, and LC has worked very well for 2 years going, and I see no reason to change that. Filling tiers like PU and ZU hasn't been a problem since the communities are usually very excited to see them included and rush to sign up, not really detracting from the quality of other tiers, I'm also just a fan of random ass lower tiers and would think it is a shame to exclude them for no strong reason. If we were to change the format though, people have surmised options like 5x OU or 4x OU + suspect, which I don't think is a bad idea necessarily but would obviously cut out the unofficials if the number of starters wasn't increased.

I would love to hear thoughts from the community, especially prospective managers and people active in any BW metagame. My personal opinion is of course keep the format but increase teams to 8.
 
8 teams is solid, and BW has the amount of support to slot that many teams. For tiers I believe it would be cool to consider a “Suspect OU” slot which can be used to test various things either being removed or reintroduced within the tier, as recent suspects have been reintroduced into the metagame this can help players distinguish how they’d feel about a certain metagame with or without certain Pokémon.

There wasn’t really an issue with player signups last year, so I don’t realistically see this years being much different, if a suspect slot is included we could increase the slots by 2 to stay away from removing one of the lower tiers.
 
There's really no need for 3x OU, there are so many BW OU tours around and it's just unecessary, you guys can play this tier in a billion different places. Please do at least 2x OU 1x Suspect OU. My nostalgia fibers do want 1x OU 1x BW1 OU 1x Suspect OU, but I'm not sure how much support and interest BW1 OU has. At least a Suspect OU to test shit out would be really nice to have.
 
i think bw1 ou would be more entertaining than bwou suspect — feels like the suspect options wouldn’t be as interesting compared to the other generations unless suspect also includes stuff like banning some tier staples. i think last years format was good, i liked the tiers and the tour felt smooth so adding more teams is fine too. i think interest in suspect would probably be lower than bw1 just because its a much more interesting concept. i also think their purpose is kind of dubious because sm has been doing them for three years and no one is seriously trying to make changes based off these small sample sizes. darkrai was freed in part because of its performance in oupl but i think that should remain a cautionary tale about taking suspect slots seriously given how controversial darkrai is rn in sv. not related to bw but thought it’d be worth mentioning since i am kinda tired of seeing these slots crop up and i think a more novel idea would be better. or just same format as last year
 
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Since there's a couple people talking about BW1 OU being in BWPL on this thread, I felt like it was best to throw my 2 cents into the ring considering im the soul reason for the format being revived entirely after 12 years of it not being playable to the public. Keep in mind that I don't really voice my opinions much on Smogon since I'm normally quiet about discussions like this so feel free to disagree with me if you feel like I'm in the wrong.

It would be amazing for BW1 OU to be playable in the pool, genuinely speaking at least. BW1 OU is completely different compared to BW2 OU(or current Gen5 OU in the eyes of many) which as a whole would be very fun and interesting to watch/play, especially for older players that want to play this format again just to revist of what the metagame used to be. With that being said, I'll be going over why it can genuinely be very fun and interesting to watch/play in this post.

A handful of the best Pokémon in current Gen5 OU such as Excadrill, Garchomp, Keldeo, LandoT, and Thund-T simply are not present in this format due to them all either being banned or not existing at all. Already this is quite interesting to see it playout as these Pokémon completely shape and define so many of the best team archetypes in the Metagame which means that sand, rain, and weatherless will look different compared to current Gen5 OU. Ontop of this you also have Chlorosun being legal alongside Dugtrio, and to a lesser extent; Wobbuffet. This is completely non present in current Gen5 OU as Sun has been nerfed into the ground, thus making the metagame very unique if you think about it since Ninetales is actually much more viable due to it enabling one of the most powerful archetypes in the metagame. Gems are also very similar as they completely shape Offense in general and thus weatherless, as well as some sand teams that want to run wild with Gems on Terrakion or Flying Gem Acrobatics Gliscor, become even more stronger in BW1 even with Technician Breloom not existing as well as Garchomp being banned from the metagame.

Several movepool changes on Pokémon with Dream World abilities aren't present in this format too. For instances take Gliscor, arguably an insane good rocker in BW2, and suddenly it can no longer run rocks on poison heal sets because of the fact that rocks + pheal are illegal together. The same can be said for Dragonite's Choice Band set no longer being able to Superpower anymore. You can also extend this to Pokémon that have unreleased Dream World abilities too, such as Regenerator Amoonguss and Technician Breloom, same concept but they can't run their HA instead. All of this in additions to previous banned Pokémon being unbanned, such as Landorus Incarnate, Deoxys-Defense, and even Cloyster all gives BW1 a very unique feeling in comparison to BW2 and thus it would be very fun as well as interesting to watch and play as a whole.

Now with all of this said there are some things to take into account. For one, having a BW Suspect slot may draw more interest and demand due to the last few suspect so genuinely people might want it more than BW1 OU since they want to see the improvement on BW2 OU as well as the potential future of the metagame as a whole which to me is completely fine, furthermore i agree with Rewer in that we don't know how much support and interest BW1 OU has, as it is a sort of newer metagame despite it being revived for the first time in 12 years since this is the first time this has been playable in said years. However, from what we do know, as if right now at least, is that there has certainly been good interest lately considering that the first 2 tours had over 80 sign-ups in total and the RoA ladder for BW1 has had over 500 players laddered, which aren't like insanely high nor is it something that you would brag about but it certain shows that the metagame has some good enough interest from the playerbase as a whole. At the end of the day tho it is completely up to the person in charge of running this if they want to bring BW1 OU into BWPL!

I apologize If this was very long but i just wanted to get this out there, i hope everyone has had a good day and I hope y'all enjoyed reading this. Again please let me know if you disagree with me or not if you want at least, as I don't really voice my opinions that much but I thought this would've been good to talk about as a whole.
 
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- I'm supporting 8 teams, we have a really good playerbase and some very good undrafted player that deserve to play/participate and a good way to develop our community.

- If we want to improve the BW OU (and it's definitly something we should do ) we must include Suspect BW2 over the BW1 slot, let's be honest.

- With more BW OU Suspect slot ( if we have 8 teams ) its also the best move to do if we want to see the metagame without x mon.

- BW1 a nice idea with the recent revival, it's fun to play but im more concerned with the current BW state.
 
It's a bit of a shame that BW DOU, the original Smogon doubles tier, has never been in this tournament. It feels quite unusual given that DOU has been in at one point or is still currently in most oldgen pls (ADV, SM, SS, previously in XY/ORAS, and DPP DOU is a relatively new tier). It was commented on many times by various people over the course of the Doubles Premier league from the outset that BW was one of the most, if not the most competitive field and it definitely did end up being the case with everyone being very close in records.

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While I don't expect any tier or slot to be removed for DOU to get in, nor do I think that should necessarily happen - if adding slots is a possibility, (i.e. BW1/Suspect) or or if another tier were to be removed for other reasons, it would be an exciting and competitive addition that enriches the tour.
 
I also think BW DOU should be considered, the tier is in a really good place where there’s been some metagame development recently (rise of CB Genesect & slight fall of Thundurus) so that people absolutely can build new teams even for a metagame that’s a decade old. As Smudge mentioned it’s pretty balanced and there’s a lot of good players to consider, and they all likely have a pretty good understanding of the tier to be self-sufficient.
If managers need ideas of who to draft, they can use either DPL results, or there is the currently ongoing BW Swiss tournament.
 
8 teams and 10 slots is the way forward and the OU tiers will not suffer quality wise; additionally there are many eager players in the lower tiers who are quite proficient and competent players who have not gotten a chance to shine before whom will have a better shot now. I also don't mind BW1OU being included if that is an option.
 
I also support BWDOU being added to BWPL. As a manager for the last DPL and a member of the DOU community, I have actively seen that there is a great amount of BWDOU players that increase the innovation of the metagame and make a great competitive pool, making it a great tier that can raise the competitiveness of this tour.

I personally think that a suspect test OU slot would be cool, as the council for Bw is one of the most active councils I’ve seen for oldgens. I think the formats that would work out the best would be either adding a suspect slot and DOU to make it 12 slots per match or to replace one normal ou slot with a suspect slot and replace ZU with DOU, mirroring formats similar to SCL and other oldgen tours like sspl, advpl, and sspl.
 
2X OU
1X Suspect OU
1X UU
1X RU
1X NU
1X PU
1X LC
1X ZU or DOU

this seems good to me, would only need to decide on ZU vs DOU and what to test on Suspect.

On the suspect slot, I would like to see a rotation or some daring changes so people don't get lazy and just use legal meta teams. Some ideas that have been thrown out in policy threads that could rotate (maybe together):
Ban Reuniclus
Ban Excadrill
Ban Latios
Ban Thundurus-Therian
Ban Magic Guard
Ban Spikes
Combinations that makes sense (like Ban Exca+Reun or Ban Latios+Thundt+Keldeo)

Don't think there's anything else ban worthy, other than Keldeo being probably broken without Latios

Possible unbans in order of brokeness (in my opinion)

Unban Chlorophyll (without dugtrio and sleep this is a meme)
Unban Reshiram (not broken at all, its like a B tier mon, similar to hydreigon but stronger)
Unban Lugia (likely not broken, pretty passive mon. subcm can be a deadly wincon and roost ice beam helmet stuff can be obnoxious, my guess is like an A- or B+ mon)
Unban Cloyster (lol)
Unban Gems (same as above)
Unban Zekrom (basically just kyub with better typing, could be broken but maybe not, has coverage issues and everything in this tier has earthquake, would really like to test this actually, i think it's a solid A+ or A mon)
Unban Kyurem-White (probably broken, faces the same problems as slow dragons but its the most broken out of them, no hope of switching against this guy without chansey/bliss, 170 satk is too much)
Unban Thundurus (its thundt that outspeeds latios, probably broken)
Unban Darkrai (likely broken, maybe manageable without sleep but np darkrai still rips through everything)
Unban Deoxys-Defense (broken and cancerous but we can try, hop on bw1 ladder it will be a good reminder that this mon should not be legal)
Unban Manaphy (fuck no. broken. hydration is just cancerous as fuck)
Unban Tornadus-Therian (you need to be locked up if you think this mon is even remotely balanced)
Unban Blaziken (from here and on it's just trolling)

On ZU vs DOU I don't know much about either community so I'll just leave that to those who do to comment.
 
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The BW mods have decided that we're going with 8 teams 10 tiers. We aren't committing to what tiers if any will be changed, but since there's pretty notable support we are currently leaning DOU > ZU and considering a suspect slot. BW1 probably won't be considered, especially because we're already strapped for slots and if an OU is replaced, it would be for a suspect slot if there's enough support.
 
My very biased opinion is ZU > DOU, the tier receives very consistent praise and retains a solid playerbase since breadwinners. The pool of players is also usually strong with players such as SEA and TPP signing up just to play it.
 
BW ZU has a pretty solid and active playerbase, and if you look at signups from past year, it has similar numbers as other lower tiers. I don't really have a horse in whether DOU should be included or not, but its inclusion shouldnt be at the cost of ZU which proved to be a very valid slot on past years. That feels realy unfair for the ZU playerbase which did nothing wrong. Removing a slot from past seasons should only be done if there was a problem with it, which isnt the case with ZU. Deleting ZU just because it is the lowest tier is dishonnest, as it doesn't have anything to do with the quality of its pool. BW PU is also unofficial so it is not like ZU is the only unofficial tier in BWPL.
 
2X OU
1X Ubers
1X DOU
1X UU
1X RU
1X NU
1X PU
1X LC
1X ZU

At the cost of one OU slot, every lower tier player is happy. If three OU slots are an absolute must (suspect or no), then I prefer DOU to ZU and I prefer ZU to PU.
 
Would like to possibly suggest ZU > PU in terms of what should be at the chopping block. I believe that DOU absolutely deserves its own place in the tour. PU rn is not looking too hot, a glance at the PUPL playerpool will tell you that - its mostly filled with new players looking to pilot existing teams, with self sufficient ppl like lpz/tack easily switching over to ZU if thats there. As monai mentioned, ZU would entice other tour players to sign up because of it, so keeping aesthetics aside I think ZU makes comparitively more sense.
 
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