CAP Leadership Compendium
Over the past several months, I have been concerned that the CAP project has "lost its way". Not that the project is dying or lacking participation, but more that we have moved in a general direction that I don't think is in the project's best interests, as it pertains to our original mission. Perhaps the original mission should be changed, but I don't think so. I think the mission still applies and is the right foundation for our thriving community project.
I'm not exactly sure why we have ended up where we are now. Some of it is just natural drift that occurs over time. But I also think there are probably too many things unstated when it comes to CAP operations, and many people just don't know how Create-A-Pokemon should be led.
People jump into the CAP forum, participate in a few projects and then assume they are a "CAP veteran". Some of those people end up on the PRC, as Topic Leaders, or even CAP forum moderators -- and they actually know very little about CAP operations and CAP principles that drive those operations! When you combine that with a relatively short contribution lifetime for most project participants and leaders, that's a recipe for wandering direction.
When reading this post, keep in mind that I am not just referring to project moderators when I mention "CAP Leaders". I am referring to everyone who helps influence decisions and direction on Create-A-Pokemon -- moderators, topic leaders, server mods, IRC ops, PRC members, and even active users that influence the community with their posts in CAP threads. All these people collectively "lead CAP", and we need to have a better concept of the direction we are headed.
So in this thread I want to make explicit some of the key operating principles that we have encouraged over the past several years, and explain the reasons they are good principles for leading the project. Some of this is common sense. For some of you that have been around for a long time, you may know this or you have heard me mention it before. Some other stuff may come as a complete surprise to you.
All of these principles have been bedrock for me running this project since it's formal inception several years ago when the CAP subforum was created and organized from CAP's beginnings as a loose confederation of threads in Stark Mountain. At that time, I did not just throw together some forum rules and process guides on a whim. In real life, I am a businessman, so I treated this project like I was starting a business. I looked at what we had been doing and tried to identify the core of what made CAP a compelling project, and set down a few basic goals. Then I wrote a mission statement to capture the essence of those goals, hopefully in such a way as to inspire others to accept and support the mission. I also came up with a set of operating procedures designed to achieve the mission and wrote the first process guide to act as a How To Manual for us to reproduce organized projects over and over successfully. As we executed projects, we learned many lessons in how to keep the CAP project moving forward efficiently, and how to make a self-sustaining community. Over the history of the project, the core mission has never changed, even though our specific process rules have changed quite a bit. What I plan to do here is explain many of the previously unwritten principles that have driven the decision-making of CAP over the years.
I am not writing this down here just for fun. I'm writing this down because I think we have collectively forgotten it, and for many of you, you probably never knew it in the first place. I'm also writing it down as a baseline, because I will be proposing and implementing some changes to the CAP project in a few PR threads immediately following this one. This is a very long post, and I understand that most people won't bother to read it. But if you do read this whole thing, you will have a much better idea of where I am coming from on those upcoming PR threads. You'll also get some insight into some of the not-so-obvious drivers contributing to the project's success for so long, and you'll get a better idea of how to support the project as a present and/or future leader in Create-A-Pokemon.
Leadership
My Role
I think this is probably a good time for me to describe my role in the leadership structure of CAP. I tend to assume everyone just sorta knows this or picks up on it by hanging out around the CAP project. But in recent months there have been some occurrences that have made me realize that it is not very clear how CAP project governance is structured. So I'm going to lay it out clearly for everyone, and also explain some of the reasoning behind the current structure, and give some CAP history at the same time.
I (DougJustDoug) am the head leader of the Create-A-Pokemon project and community. This is not some vague tradition we tend to collectively respect when it is convenient. It is an explicit condition of the original agreement that led Smogon and Create-A-Pokemon to partner with each other (yes, they are technically separate entities, but more on that in a minute) and it is not subject to your interpretation or your vote of support. If you don't like the way I run things here, there is no recourse for you. Deal with it or leave, it's that simple.
I'm not trying to be a jerk by throwing this in anyone's face. In fact, my tendency to NOT put myself in front of every decision for the project or constantly remind people of my leadership role, has led to some very nasty power struggles in CAP's past. In those cases, some people have assumed if they yell louder than everyone else, that they can somehow become the de facto head person in charge here. Combine that with some privileges inside and/or outside the CAP project, a few misguided assumptions about the project, and a few brash personalities -- and you get ugly power wars in CAP. In those situations in the past, I tended to be a bit too nonchalant about it when it was happening, and probably let the struggles go too far before I stepped in and squashed the conflicts. But contrary to some ridiculous rumors I have heard in the past -- I have been the head of the CAP project since it's formal organization many years ago, and I have never "stepped down", "abandoned the project", or otherwise removed myself from my role as head of this project.
I am not the only person who acts in a leadership capacity on CAP. We have forum moderators, we have server moderators, we have IRC ops, we have topic leaders, etc. Without the contributions of all those people, there's no way we could operate efficiently. I believe responsibility and control should go hand in hand, so when we make someone responsible for something in CAP, I tend to let them have complete control over that thing. My job is to oversee that things are being done in accordance with CAP rules and goals. Sometimes I have to step in and "pull rank" on a CAP leader, but I really don't like doing that. It tends to discourage good leaders and limits their growth. Since most CAP leaders are much younger and less experienced than I am, I accept that most CAP leaders are "learning on the job". So I try to act as a mentor as much as possible and offer advice, not issue commands. But when problems escalate in CAP, they usually end up in my lap. And when it comes to passing the buck in CAP, the buck stops here.
Leadership History
Some of you may ask, "Why are you in charge, Doug? What gives you the right to be the ultimate authority on the CAP project?" Good question, particularly considering that I'm not the "founder" of the project. Let me give you some relevant history, as it pertains to project leadership and my role in CAP.
Create-A-Pokemon was started in November 2007 by a guy named Cooper. He thought it would be cool to have a big group of people make a fake pokemon via a series of steps, and then send all the information about the fake pokemon to Nintendo and ask them to put the pokemon into a future version of a real Pokemon game. The thinking was that a bunch of community posts and community support would be like a big petition to convince Nintendo to do it. The appeal to Nintendo would be along the lines of "Look at this great pokemon we made, and look at all the work that went into it!" I have serious doubts as to whether such a thing would have actually convinced Nintendo to make a pokemon. My guess is that Ninty doesn't give a shit about fan projects like ours, and they certainly wouldn't be interested in opening up their multi-billion dollar Pokemon franchise to characters made on some random fan site with dubious copyright ownership and all sorts of other problems. But hey, it was a noble goal, and many of us were interested in making a fakemon, so away we went.
Cooper asked a moderator of Stark Mountain (the DP pokemon forum of Smogon at the time) if it was OK to make threads for the project. I don't know who that moderator was, but supposedly the project had the Stark mods approval. Cooper made all the threads, and the rest of us posted and voted as we made the pokemon you now know as Syclant. The process was a wonderful mess. We were making it up as we went along, and we all deferred to Cooper to call the shots. We called him the "mini-mod" for the threads. Fortunately for the project, several creative and intelligent posters joined in the fray and we somehow completed the project with a pokemon that we were relatively proud of.
Cooper was trying to compile the information to send to Nintendo, but was having trouble figuring out how to actually accomplish that. In the meantime, many CAP posters had grown attached to our little Ice Bug, and really wanted to see how it performed in battles. People tossed around ideas of making a ROM hack. Other people mentioned the new Pokemon simulator that had recently come online -- ShoddyBattle. Someone reached out to Colin, the programmer that made Shoddybattle, and asked him if he would add Syclant to his battle simulator. Colin told us to fuck off, or something along those lines. To be fair to him, he was up to his ears in getting ShoddyBattle stable, and really had no interest in our stupid fakemon project. So the project was dejected and floundering a bit as to what to do.
Then I went and opened my big mouth...
I mentioned that ShoddyBattle was open source code and written in Java. So "somebody" should just make their own custom server with Syclant in it.
At that time, I had no time or interest in doing the programming myself. And I definitely had no interest in being responsible for leading anything. I had posted a lot in the Syclant threads, but so did a lot of other people. I think it's fair to say that by the end of the Syclant project, I was somewhat influential in the nascent CAP community. But I was not the "top guy" on the project, and I was almost a complete unknown in Smogon as a whole. Up to that point, the only real involvement I had with Smogon and Smogon leadership was in the DP Battle Tower threads, where I took Jumpman16's team and actually bested his BT streak at that time. Since Jumpman was such a BT junkie, he took notice of my streak (which was the all-time 2nd or 3rd best streak at that time) and also liked the way I helped other players with advice on how to play certain battles and general battle strategy. I can't say I was "friends" with Jumpman or anything, but he was part of Smogon senior staff and he knew who I was.
So I had posted that someone should do the programming to make a custom simulator with Syclant in it. I just assumed there were lots of programmers around, and that someone would take up the task. No one did. So I decided to dig a little deeper and see how hard it would be. One thing led to another, I got interested in the programming challenge, and I ended up untangling a bunch of Shoddybattle code and I successfully made a custom CAP server with Syclant as a "real" pokemon. I had no idea what I was in for the minute I brought "Doug's Create-A-Pokemon Server" (Yes, that was the name, not to be confused with all the other Create-A-Pokemon servers out there! ;-) online and open to the general public.
My server instantly exploded in popularity. It was a total shock to me, but in retrospect, it now makes sense why the server took off so quickly. There was a ton of interest in simulator battling in general, and at the same time the only server that was stable and popular was Colin's server called the "Official Server". Colin and his server staff could be brusque with users, and there were some people that didn't like battling there, but did so because there was no other viable choice. So when I made my server there was not only interest in this "new pokemon" we made (and everyone wanted to see what the fuss was about), but some people just wanted an alternative to the Official server. So almost overnight, my CAP server had hundreds of users and the pokemon community was buzzing with excitement over it.
I had no previous experience leading a battle simulator, but I had a ton of experience leading companies and other groups, so my "take charge" instincts kicked in immediately. I had worked very hard to do the programming, and I ran the server on my computer (I ran it in my home office!), and I paid the bills for bandwidth and everything else. When trolls, spammers, and hackers started piling on and tried to ruin the fun -- I moved into "manager mode" and started establishing rules for how the server would be operated. It was unquestionably my server, and unquestionably my problem to deal with the madhouse. So I laid down the law, and people followed. I enlisted the help of a small cadre of users that had participated heavily in the Stark Mountain CAP threads, and they became the first moderators of my server. I called them "The Blue Team", because on ShoddyBattle moderators names were in bright blue at the top of the user list, while everyone else's name was normal black text below. So me and The Blue Team established some order, had fun, and tried to encourage everyone to play nice with others. A community of regular users quickly developed on my server, and we used my CAP server as the all-purpose place to hang out and conduct CAP business.
Although Cooper started the whole thing (and he was a member of my server's first Blue Team), Cooper wasn't too interested in all the work that went into running the show. Although he never said it to me directly, I think Cooper was kinda sick of dealing with all the headaches and drama. After we did the Syclant project, Cooper picked Hyra to be the mini-mod for the second Create-A-Pokemon project. We were all fine with his decision to appoint Hyra the next mini-mod, although it's not like he bothered to ask any of us. He just did it. So Hyra started the first threads for what eventually became Revenankh.
I was the owner of the CAP server which quickly became the centerpiece of the CAP universe, mainly because it was drawing so much attention from everyone inside and outside the project. The CAP project began deferring to me for my opinions on what we were doing in the forum threads, because the ability to play with the pokemon in real battles became the most important aspect of what we were doing. All the key project participants were mods on my server, so a "leadership hierarchy" emerged in CAP. I found myself somehow responsible for all the big problems that were cropping up related to the CAP project. Most people in CAP were just posters who really had no desire or vested interest in dealing with problems. I, on the other hand, began to realize that there were all sorts of nasty issues that came with letting a bunch of kids play pokemon on my server. This includes monetary fines from my bandwidth provider who really didn't appreciate hacking attacks that the CAP server attracted, COPPA issues with underage kids, blatant pedophiles trolling mainchat and then me being threatened with lawsuits by angry parents, threats of copyright violations and trademark infringement by people supposedly associated with Nintendo/Pokemon, and a whole slew of things like that. Since the CAP server was considered by the public to be the "home" of the CAP project, all fingers pointed at me whenever the shit hit the fan. So, whether I liked it or not, I was increasingly being required to act as the leader and spokesperson for Create-A-Pokemon.
Within Smogon leadership, things were getting ugly as it pertained to CAP threads in Stark Mountain. Smogon was getting annoyed with CAP, and many Smogon higher-ups felt like the spam of CAP threads were a distraction in Stark Mountain. Many badgeholders and serious battlers thought CAP was a silly fanboy project that had no place inside a serious battling community like Smogon. Smogon leaders were pointing fingers at each other as to who allowed these stupid fanboys to make the eyesore of Create-A-Pokemon threads. And due to the popularity of my CAP server, more and more attention was being paid to the project, which was bringing the controversy to a boiling point.
My CAP server was getting a lot of traffic, much of which was from Smogon battlers. At that time, Colin did not agree with Smogon's tiers, and he steadfastly refused to honor them on the Official Server. On my server, I implemented Smogon tiers with the addition of Syclant, since Syclant was designed to be played alongside Smogon OU pokemon. So if battlers wanted to play Smogon tiers, they had little choice but to play on my server. When Smogon badgeholders and senior staff showed up at the CAP server, they expected to have some clout, and didn't take kindly to being told what to do by the CAP server moderators. They considered themselves to be senior Smogoners and serious battlers, and we were just a bunch of clowns that were spamming up Stark Mountain with stupid fakemon threads. When the CAP server mods refused to treat Smogon staff any different than other users, that just added fuel to the fire. So behind the scenes at Smogon, there were ongoing discussions about kicking CAP out of Smogon, and terminating the whole thing.
Keep in mind that I was not a badged user in Smogon at that time, so I had no proof that such discussions were taking place. But based on the demeanor of posts in Stark Mountain, comments made in mainchat on my CAP server, and other remarks -- I knew something was brewing and that it probably wouldn't be good for the CAP project. Most other hardcore CAP participants, including Cooper and Hyra, were almost completely oblivious to what was happening around us. I think some people sensed something was wrong, but they had no clue how to deal with it. Since I was the owner of the CAP server, which was the cause of most of the attention and disruption, I felt like it was my job to smooth things out with Smogon. So in February 2008, I wrote a long PM to Jumpman and X-Act, who were the only badged members of Smogon that I felt like I knew at all. Here's the text of that fateful letter: click here.
Now that I am a Smogon admin, I can see the threads that were made behind the scenes, and yes they were exactly as I feared. Some members of Smogon staff wanted to get rid of the CAP project and make us move to our own website or shut down completely. They felt like the CAP project was littering up Smogon's forums and causing problems. Jumpman posted my letter in that thread, and told everyone, in essence, "This DougJustDoug guy has a good point." Jumpman advised Chaos (the owner of Smogon.com) to get in touch with me and work something out.
So Chaos and I chatted on IRC and came to a compromise. I was the owner of the CAP ShoddyBattle server, and Chaos liked the idea of using my server as a draw for sim battlers to come to Smogon, and he also wanted me to help him with programming at Smogon. I liked the endorsement of Smogon, because it legitimized the project and brought users to my server. But we both agreed that CAP threads were a mess in Stark Mountain and pissing off the Smogon old guard. So Chaos and I agreed to the following terms:
For the record, those "programming projects to be named later" that I agreed to do for Smogon turned out to be:
Over time, my role in Smogon changed considerably, as I moved from just leading the CAP project to be a Supermod and to my current role as an Administrator for Smogon. CAP and Smogon have become very intertwined over the years, to the point where most people think CAP is pretty much the same as other Smogon projects like The Smog or Battling 101. It isn't the same at a fundamental control and responsibility level, but I prefer to not emphasize the fact that CAP is actually still an autonomous entity, unless it is absolutely necessary to raise the point.
Now you know the history of how the project came to be, how it was organized in its current form, and where I fit in to the CAP leadership mix and the Smogon leadership mix as a whole.
Leadership Style
CAP leadership is a "Benevolent Dictatorship" if we describe it as a form of government, although I cringe every time I see that phrase used to describe it. But it is an apt description. I enjoy seeing the project succeed, and I like to work behind the scenes to make this an interesting place for us to participate as a community. Hence, the "benevolent" aspect of things. I take that very seriously. Sometimes to a fault, I try to keep my ego out of things and I try to act in the best interests of the project as a whole. But I am far from perfect, and I hope no one expects me to be. I have plenty of annoying personality quirks and I make mistakes all the time. But I truly enjoy working to provide things for others.
I do my best to be fair, even in cases where manipulative assholes use my sense of fairness against me. Some people have learned how to exploit the rules we have established here, and then also exploit my tendency to give contrary opinions due consideration. In those cases, some observers and project newcomers conclude that all CAP decisions are subject to a community vote, or that if someone can establish enough popular support, they can do whatever they want around here. That is certainly not the case. That's where the "dictatorship" side of things comes into play. I don't play that card very often, but it's not uncommon for me to do so when ending arguments with some indignant wannabe-lawyer types who are dissatisfied with the way I have handled a situation and they are directly or indirectly threatening to "go above my head" or otherwise attempt to overturn my decision. In arguments like that, I sometimes make the comment, "You seem to be under the mistaken impression that this is a democracy."
I like to encourage others to be leaders here in the CAP project. When I first organized the CAP forum, everyone assumed that I would lead every CAP project since I was put in charge of everything. I didn't want that then, and I still don't want it now. I like the idea of CAP having a broad distribution of leaders of various aspects of the project, and a rotation of responsibility to shepherd each pokemon from start to completion. Although I am sometimes very involved in certain decisions, and sometimes I will flat out "put my foot down" and make a decision by executive fiat -- I usually try to manage by consensus building. I also try to promote others and watch them reap the satisfaction and glory of successful leadership. I've never really been interested in running an individual CAP project, and I've always felt it wouldn't be right for me to do so. The way I see it, I'm responsible for the framework and foundation of CAP. But when it comes to individual projects, I prefer to be a regular contributor and enjoy participating just like everyone else.
I try to look at the big picture when it comes to CAP. That's the reason I'm making this thread and others right now. I'm trying to get more of you to see the bigger picture as it applies to CAP, with the hopes that perhaps we can turn this thing around and get on a better path forward. I'd also like to start grooming a new set of up-and-coming CAP leaders, because right now I feel like the well is running dry. That's one of the warning signs that we've gone astray, because many of the people that are currently active and influencing CAP decisions seem to have no clue about the underlying drivers that make this project work. Which brings us full circle to the point where I started this post! So now that we have a ton of backstory out of the way -- let's talk about operating principles, shall we?
Fundamental Operating Principles
Dichotomy Part A: This is a terrible way to build a good pokemon
If you really want to make a good pokemon, don't invite a few hundred people together to make decisions in a rigid step-by-step manner and use majority vote for every significant decision. Design-by-committee sucks. If you want to make a good pokemon, get a few talented people together in a room, and make it an iterative effort. Building a pokemon en masse waterfall-style is fraught with problems and is virtually guaranteed to have many stumbles and mistakes along the way. Popularity voting is a horrible way to get anything of quality, because propaganda and bandwagoning tend to overshadow "doing the right thing" almost every time. All in all, the CAP process is pretty much the worst way to make a high-quality pokemon you could possibly conceive.
So get used to it.
We are NEVER going to encourage a few supposed "experts" to go off in a private room and make their own wonderful pokemon, and then reveal it to the CAP masses and expect the rest of the community to call it "our creation". It is not going to happen. If you even imply it -- you are threatening the community aspect of this project and you are missing the whole point of Create-A-Pokemon. If we don't do this thing as a big collaborative group -- then we are not doing "Create-A-Pokemon".
The internet is filled with thousands of fakemon created by individuals or very small groups. It is so common and uninteresting, it's not even funny. Do a quick Google search on the term "fakemon". Do you honestly give a shit about the stat spread or movepool of any of the thousands of pokemon you see in the list that comes up? Do you have even the slightest desire to actually work to implement any of those pokemon and use them in real battles? Don't get me wrong, some of those fakemon look cool as hell and you'd probably try them out if you could easily battle with them. But would you actually expend any of your personal time and effort to determine if those pokemon were competitively viable, and then work to implement them on a simulator to use them in battle?
Hell no, you wouldn't.
Because all those personal fakemon creations are a dime a dozen. They saturate pokemon fandom so completely that they are irrelevant at best, and annoying at worst. That is not the goal to which Create-A-Pokemon aspires.
I don't care what you personally know about making awesome pokemon, and what kind of amazing pokemon you might make if you had a chance to do it on your own. Let me repeat that for emphasis -- I DON'T CARE. And neither does anyone else. And that is exactly the point and key differentiator between your perfect personal creations, and our horribly flawed group creations. People CARE about our pokemon creations, and they don't care about yours. And if ours is flawed and yours is perfect, what does that tell you about how quality relates to interest and involvement? END RESULT QUALITY DOES NOT MATTER MUCH AT ALL. What matters is that we all get to play a part in the creation of our pokemon, and we all feel like we own a little piece of it.
Create-A-Pokemon gets many people invested in the creation process, and it is precisely because of that investment that our project stands head and shoulders above all the other personal fakemon projects out there. Yes, our process makes it very hard to make a good pokemon. But it is the ONLY way to get everyone involved, and THAT is the reason the project exists.
So when I see individual CAP participants getting pissed off about our pokemon being "ruined" by people that "don't know what they are doing"; or when I see individuals trying to hog threads, manipulate polls, or otherwise short-circuit the community in order to make what they consider to be a "better pokemon" -- those people just don't get it. In fact, as a community leader, you should see it as your job to protect the community from the influence of people like that. So if you really can't stand to be part of a project that knowingly and consistently makes less-than-perfect pokemon -- then get out of here and don't come back. Because you are not going to be happy here, and we're not going to be happy with you while you are here.
On the other hand, if you like being part of big groups, if you like pitting your ideas against others and vying for your ideas to be selected over others, if you enjoy the crucible of creating something and exploring ideas with others -- then the CAP project is the place for you.
Dichotomy Part B: CAP pokemon are important and our decisions matter
This may seem completely contrary to the point I just made above, but CAP pokemon are "important" and our decisions have important consequences. I put the word "important" in quotes, because I don't mean they are literally important. We are just making fake pokemon for crissakes. But we need to treat each step of the process as important, otherwise everyone will make a half-assed effort on the project. Although we must accept that the result of all our hard work will likely not be very good, we still need to encourage a project where everyone gives their best effort.
People don't work hard on anything if they don't feel like the results of their effort have any real impact. So it is imperative that CAP takes each project seriously and we consider each decision carefully. We encourage participants to make good arguments. We encourage submitters to work their ass off on their submissions and to put their best foot forward. We celebrate winners, and we console losers. Each step of the CAP process is treated with gravity and importance -- and that is BY DESIGN. It makes everyone step up their game and work hard to make the best possible decision on every step. It's what makes each CAP pokemon as good as it reasonably can be.
Deal with the dichotomy
If you want to be a leader around here; if you want to truly "get it" in terms of the inner workings of Create-A-Pokemon -- you need to synthesize the two principles I just presented above. On the one hand, you have to accept that our creations will most likely never be very "good". But you must also be absolutely committed to encouraging us to make it as "good as it can be", taking into account the considerable limitations imposed by the project structure and community creation process. Most people tend to fall in one camp or the other, but never really figure out how to promote both principles. If you understand the importance of both, then you are well on your way to being a true CAP leader, and not just a person who posts a lot in CAP threads.
This is a "serious" project, which is what makes it "fun".
(Warning: I tend to overuse quoted words and phrases all the time, but I will be using them even more than usual here, because I really don't want anyone to make strictly literal interpretations of phrases with the words "serious" and "fun" in them.)
Create-A-Pokemon is sometimes derided with comments like,
"CAP takes itself too seriously. They need to lighten up and have some fun. After all this is just Pokemon..."
No doubt the CAP project has a lot of rules and process and structure, and all that organization can be very stuffy and oppressive at times.
But as a leader, you need to always remember that the organized, analytical basis of CAP is one of the key differentiators between CAP and every other fakemon project on the internet. The "serious" orientation of the CAP project is also the only reason CAP exists in partnership with Smogon. Although Smogon has plenty of "fun" aspects, the main appeal of Smogon is that it takes the game of Pokemon "seriously".
Pokemon is a silly little kids game, whose main purpose is for exploring a simplistic fantasy world, collecting cute characters, and solving puzzles aimed at elementary school children. Within the game of Pokemon are some interesting battling elements that we take "seriously" and we analyze it from a competitive standpoint on par with many other "adult" games. Smogon basically wrote the book on taking something intended almost purely for "fun" (the game of Pokemon) and making it into something "serious" (competitive battling). If you don't want to think of Pokemon as a "serious game", then you really don't need to be hanging out here in Smogon. Go to any one of the DOZENS of big websites aimed at the average pokemon player that is interested in purely fun pursuits like "Catch 'em all!" Smogon is aimed mostly at people that find it enjoyable to analyze the game of Pokemon. And CAP is the same way -- we have fun being serious about creating Pokemon.
So when people throw around ideas for CAP that are intended mostly "just to have fun" -- that should raise a warning flag with CAP leaders. Not because having fun is a bad thing -- but it almost always has the unintended side effect of marginalizing the "serious" aspects of the project. I can't say categorically that anything proposed as "fun" will be bad for CAP. We've seen all sorts of great projects from Cartoons' Battle Capacity fighting game to wacky tournament formats on the CAP server -- all initiated as "fun projects", that worked out great for us. We will continue to do things for fun. But as a leader of the project, be wary of anything suggested as a "fun project". Most of them are attempts to apply CAP community principles to something mostly related to Pokemon flavor, and that just isn't a good match.
The CAP community and process is rooted in analytical discussions about competitive pokemon. When a project gets centered on flavor, it takes the teeth out of any attempt at engaging discussion. There is simply no way to argue over flavor in Pokemon. There's no way to determine who has a good point and who has a bad point. So basically, if we do flavor projects (ie. "fun projects") we have nothing really to talk about. And if we don't have something interesting to talk about -- then why are we hosting it on an internet discussion forum? And why are we doing it within a community geared towards serious analytical discussions?
Don't get me wrong, CAP sometimes goes a bit overboard and gets "too serious" at times. At the end of the day, this is a leisure time activity for everyone on the project, and levity is a good thing for all of us. But always remember this essential truth about CAP participation -- if you don't think it is "fun" to have "serious" discussions about creating fake pokemon -- then CAP is not the place for you, and you should NOT be wasting your time trying to make CAP into a place you consider "fun".
Defend project legitimacy and resist fanboyism
Fanboys. Pokemon geeks. Pokenerds. You know who they are. Heck, I AM ONE. If you are reading this, then you are too! But hopefully you are also serious about competitive Pokemon.
The CAP project is a magnet for fanboys and fanboyism is a black hole for the CAP project.
If we want to be a pure fan project, then we don't need to be doing this project in Smogon. In fact, if we want to be a pure fan project, then we won't be able to continue here at Smogon. Smogon is first and foremost a competitive battling community, and the CAP project needs to align with that.
It is impossible to be a competitive project if the project does not have the participation of good competitive battlers. In general, competitive battlers do not like to participate in forums dominated by little kids and pokemon noobs who talk endlessly about whether Bulbasaur is cuter than Squirtle, or brag about how amazing Hyper Beam is on Snorlax. You can call competitive battlers elitist or snobs, but the fact remains that most people that play pokemon know very little about the "serious" aspects of battling. It is incredibly annoying for the people that know about competitive battling to hang around with the average pokenoob. So we have to do our best to make a project that is exciting and enticing for knowledgeable battlers, and that means we have to discourage the project from being overrun with fanboys and fanboy concerns.
If you look at the CAP project and most of the participants are pokenerds that don't battle competitively, have no knowledge of competitive battling, and no desire to learn more about competitive battling -- then would you conclude that CAP is a "competitive project"? If you were a typical good competitive player, would you want to jump in and be a part of the project? No. If that was the case, and if you did want to be part of the project, you would not be doing so as a competitive battler. You would participate as a fanboy too and you would do it "Just to have fun".
For individuals and their motivation level, there is nothing wrong with that. But for the project as a whole, it is a terrible influence. If it goes unchecked, the project is doomed.
Unfortunately, when the average new pokemon player comes to Smogon they are somewhat intimidated. All the serious battle strategies, lingo and acronyms, organized tournaments, rules and tiers -- the whole thing is kinda scary to new players. But as they survey the forum listing, they come across a phrase that resonates with them instantly -- "Create. A. Pokemon."
Halleluyah! Something that makes every fan's heart sing -- a place for pokemon fans to make their own pokemon! "OMG, I have the greatest idea for a pokemon! I know so much about Pokemon, I beat the Elite 4 ten times in a row! I will instantly fit right in here!"
Ugh.
So they come in droves. And they don't bother to read rules or learn what the project is all about. They assume they know the game of Pokemon and they dive right into the CAP project. When they see a bunch of competitive mumbo-jumbo being discussed, they bypass that and focus on what they do know about -- which is flavor. And they do this in one of two ways -- they make flavor comments in competitive threads, or they stay out of competitive threads and only post in flavor threads. Both of these tendencies are actually bad for the long-term health of the CAP project. Both forms of participation act as a disincentive for participation from good competitive players. Fanboys either shit up the competitive threads, or they make the competitive threads look like a graveyard of activity -- both of those are bad for CAP.
So here's what we have to do as leaders of the CAP project to keep us on course -- We have to discourage fanboyism and flavor across the board, and play up the competitive aspects of the project as much as possible. I'm basically saying we need to abuse the innocent pokemon nerds, and coddle the smug competitive battlers. It's a harsh statement, I know.
But here's the harsh truth -- pokemon "fan knowledge" is pretty much worthless to us. It has almost no value, because it is so easy to come by. How much work does it take to learn enough about pokemon to argue if Dragon pokemon look cooler than Dark pokemon? How hard is it to find someone capable of writing a Pokedex entry? How many people feel they have enough pokemon expertise to come up with a good name for a pokemon? Pokemon fan knowledge is worth jack shit here at CAP. Because there is no defensible "skill" to it, and there is no way to distinguish between people that are "good" at pokemon flavor and who is "bad" at pokemon flavor.
Competitive knowledge, on the other hand, is very valuable at CAP and is generally hard to come by. It's not hard to come by in Smogon, but it can be hard to attract to the CAP project if we allow the project to be dominated by users obsessing over flavor. We don't want CAP members interested only in flavor -- we want people with expert knowledge and skills to participate in CAP, and for THOSE PEOPLE, we want to provide a place for them to indulge their fan interests. Does that make sense?
The focus of the CAP project is experimentation with competitive battling, and alongside that we provide a small outlet for our fan interests. The fanboy aspects of CAP are just an "added bonus" for the competitive players we want to involve here. Unfortunately, the fan stuff tends to overshadow everything, and it is the primary attraction for a HUGE number of CAP participants. But don't confuse popularity with focus. The CAP project is not designed to be a fanboy project, and we will never succumb to the constant onslaught of fan influence. If we really want a fan project, then we are doing this entirely the wrong way, and we are doing it in the wrong place here at Smogon.
Don't get me wrong, we are ALL fans of pokemon and we all probably got started in the CAP project due to a keen interest in the flavor aspects of the project. Whether you were intrigued by the cool artwork, you got hooked by a prevo thread, or you made a noobish post about some ridiculous typing you would like to see in the real game -- almost every "serious CAP veteran" probably started in CAP as a flavor-loving fanboy. I know I did. And there's nothing wrong with that. But we need to transition that initial fanboy hook into a deeper interest in serious competitive pokemon. Even if CAP participants never get into battling seriously, they need to understand and appreciate that CAP is primarily driven by competitive goals. If participants don't make that transition, then we should not cater to their desire for CAP to be a home for pokemon fans only interested in flavor.
From the very beginnings of the CAP project, we have had to defend our legitimacy as a worthwhile competitive endeavor. And despite our history, our organization, our rules, and our process -- we still get a constant stream of pokemon noobs that wander into the CAP project and assume we are just making "kewl pogeymanzz". These people litter our competitive threads with idiotic flavor comments and suggestions. They spam the art threads with "OMG that is so awesome!!!" comments, but don't even bother to look at the damage calcs when voting for stat spreads. They are the regular joe pokemon players of the world, and they will forever be the bane of our existence.
A CAP project is a big event
Almost every aspect of an individual CAP project is designed to make it into "a big deal". It's something I learned a long time ago in leading groups, and I made it a fundamental part of CAP. We want to make each CAP project a big spectacular event with a big buildup and a high-profile execution. This is the main reason we don't rush the creation process, and it's the main reason I don't like us to have anything else significant going on in the CAP forum when we are in the middle of building a pokemon.
I bristle when I see people make comments between CAP projects like, "Let's hurry up and start the next one!" While I appreciate the enthusiasm, we should intentionally put some spacing in between projects. If we just crank out pokemon one after the other, it lessens everyone's individual commitment to make each project as good as it can be. We don't want contributors thinking, "Hmmm, I'm a little busy right now. I'll sit out this one and participate next time." That's a sign we are doing projects too frequently. We want people thinking, "Oh wow, a CAP project is starting! Let me clear my schedule to make sure I can participate in this special event!" I don't expect anyone to literally say these things, but you get the idea. We want CAP projects to be special, not just regular run-of-the-mill activity in the CAP forum.
This is the reason I don't want to see CAP projects running concurrently. In addition to making a confusing mix of threads in the CAP forum, it creates the perception that the CAP project is a factory that churns out pokemon one after the other. Heck, I don't even like too many steps on a single project being executed concurrently. When we are executing a CAP project, we want all eyes on the current step. We want everyone giving their best effort on that step. We want every submitter that makes the poll to feel like they are in the limelight. We want every winner to feel like they achieve a little well-deserved e-fame. We want all participants to think, "We need to capitalize on this project now, because we won't get another chance to do this for a while." We want everyone to feel like they are part of something BIG.
Think of each CAP project like Smogon regards major tournaments. The buildup is big, the stakes are high, and there's lots of glory for the winners. So everyone works their ass off to maximize the opportunity, and many people prepare well in advance to ensure they don't blow it. Competitive battlers are heavily "invested" in major tournaments. We want a similar investment from CAP participants.
There are lots of little things we do in CAP to amp up the importance of each project. The CAP website is basically a highlighter underscoring the importance of CAP. The main reason I put a lot of work into the subsite, was to make our project look like a "big deal". The CAP subsite is one of the biggest and most advanced sections in Smogon.com. Our process guide is featured prominently. Each step has rigid rules and history. When we even consider changing those rules, we make big Policy Review threads and discuss the issues in minute detail. Some of you may hate that stuff and pass it off as "bureaucracy". I'll let you in on a little secret -- if you get annoyed by the "bureaucracy", YOU DON'T GET IT. All the attention paid to the process, is part of what makes it obvious to everyone that the process is important, and our project has weight and gravitas.
Longtime CAP members may remember that in every CAP news announcement, I would always describe implementing our pokemon on the simulator and use the phrase "use it in REAL BATTLES!". I did that because most people assume that fakemon projects are just for making pretty pictures of pokemon and assigning typing and names. I always felt it was important to mention that in CAP we actually battle with our pokemon, and not just theorymon with them. It's a little thing that jacks up the importance and hype of the project, and hopefully increases commitment to the project.
When a CAP project is underway, I think the CAP forum is the most exciting and interesting place in all of Smogon. I know many other people feel the same way. Keep that in mind as we plan and execute operations in CAP. Don't spread the project out too thin, and don't allow distractions to steal the thunder from our core project threads. It is very easy to allow well-intentioned participants to spin up activity that diverts attention from the community. Don't assume the project will attract attention magically. CAP gets attention because we work to build hype and anticipation and we have structured our operations to hold people's attention along the way.
Great art is great advertising
Artists have a special place in CAP, and we intentionally cater to them. We have special rules for art and special expectations, we dedicate the most technically advanced part of the CAP subsite to artists, and we moderate art threads and polls with more attention than just about any other threads in CAP. Considering that art and sprites are just flavor and have nothing to do with competitive pokemon, you may wonder why we make such a fuss over artwork. It's because great artwork tends to draw all sorts of attention to the CAP project.
The art and sprite polls consistently get the most votes in a given CAP. The art submission thread gets TEN TIMES more views than most other CAP threads. On the Smogon.com website, the CAP Gallery is one of the most visited pages in all of Smogon. Let's face it -- people love pretty pictures of fake pokemon.
So we try to create an environment that encourages talented artists to participate in CAP. That's the main reason I made the CAP gallery -- I didn't like seeing good artists that didn't win first place feeling like their artwork "lost" and would get no further attention. By showcasing the top art for every CAP, we encourage artists to participate, even if they have doubts if they can win.
I do not consider artwork to be the most important aspect of CAP, but it's certainly near the top of the list, by simple virtue of its drawing power (no pun intended). But art has its downsides too. Artists are whiny. Cheating is rampant in art threads and polls. Moderating art threads is a constant nightmare. And art threads attract more annoying fanboys than you can shake a stick at. But good art is still well worth all the trouble.
Let me take this opportunity to mention that we have an ART COMPETITION in CAP, not a DESIGN COMPETITION. Part of me really wishes CAP art could be about truly good designs, rather than pretty pictures -- but the practical reality of CAP is that "good design skill" is ambiguous to the point of being worthless. I find it very frustrating when wannabe artists spam up the art threads on the misguided perception that they are "good designers that simply can't draw very well". That's horseshit, and I place very little value on their "contribution" to the CAP project. Everyone has opinions on art, and everyone can write down an idea that they think would make for an amazing pokemon design. You can call that "design skill" all you want, but it's nothing special at all. People that have trained themselves to draw well or sprite well have developed a distinctly identifiable skill, and those are the people that we want to encourage to participate on the CAP project. Everyone else are just commenters and voters, and nothing more. So while the ideal of CAP wanting good designs is noble, the fact is that we really just want good skilled artists to participate in CAP.
In the past we have had people who claimed to be "good designers" ask if they can commission professional artists to draw their designs for the designer to enter in CAP competitions. While this might get some really great looking art in the CAP poll, I refuse to allow professional commissions because I think it would discourage active CAP artists that regularly participate in the community. We want CAP to be a place where talented individuals participate with others; not a place where no-talent hacks with money pay some professional hired gun to win a contest for them.
So yeah, great art is a boon to the CAP project and great artists should always get somewhat special treatment around here.
Appearances matter
(aka. Step outside the bubble)
The CAP project has been around a long time, and we have developed many internal traditions, rules, lingo, history, and culture. I call it the "CAP Bubble" because many people that get immersed in CAP lose perspective on how things look to the normal competitive pokemon playing public. We sometimes make decisions that seem perfectly normal to CAP, but appear to be stupid, broken, or fanboyish to the average outsider. If this gets out of control, it can actually hurt project participation or operations. Sometimes when I see us about to make a bad decision like that I will say, "That could cause PR problems for us." (referring to Public Relations, not Policy Review) CAP project leaders need to step outside the bubble and be sure to manage how things appear. In business jargon, the term "optics" is used to refer to "how things appear". In CAP, we always need to manage the optics of our project and pokemon.
We need to respect common assumptions about the game of Pokemon, regardless of whether such assumptions are valid in terms of the CAP project or in light of past CAP experience. For example, in early DP CAP we seriously considered giving Stratagem a speed higher than 130. Whether 130+ speed was appropriate for that pokemon or not was less of a concern than the general appearance that 130+ speed would give to the public. At that time, the only pokemon with more than 130 speed were ubers or very specialized pokemon, most of which could not really be used in OU for other reasons. For all intents and purposes, 130 was the effective speed ceiling for a "normal pokemon". If CAP gave a pokemon 140 speed, for example, it would be instantly labeled a "stupid fanboy pokemon" by casual observers, just because of the ridiculously high speed. It really didn't matter if learned students of the game would conclude upon further analysis that our pokemon was fine with that higher speed and it was perfectly balanced in DP OU. The CAP project didn't need a lot of negative press for violating a commonly accepted belief, just to allow us to play with a speed number never seen before on a normal OU pokemon. It just wasn't worth the PR trouble.
CAP participants and voters tend to love new things, and therefore we tend to do things in CAP that have never been done before. That's great in many cases. It creates excitement. It makes discussions fresh and interesting. But when we go too far with it, we damage our credibility to outsiders. If anyone thinks, "I don't care what outsiders think. We can do whatever we want here on the CAP project!" -- then you just "don't get it". You have spent too much time inside the CAP bubble and have forgotten the way normal competitive pokemon is played and how players think.
While I'm mentioning appearances, I'd like to remind everyone of something very obvious that we sometimes forget to acknowledge when discussing the CAP project "in public" (ie. not in the CAP forum, #cap channel, etc):
CAP POKEMON ARE NOT REAL POKEMON.
I wince when I am chatting in a Smogon channel talking about competitive pokemon and some CAP diehard brings up a CAP pokemon and inserts it into the conversation without any special segue or explanation. It's terribly awkward when this happens. Usually the conversation just dies immediately. Or even worse, a few other CAP diehards chime in and everyone else shuts up as the CAP guys go on and on with their conversation about pokemon that don't really exist, that the rest of the world knows nothing about, and most people couldn't care less about. See the problem with this?
This was exactly the problem that first jeopardized the CAP project in the very beginning with Smogon. CAP members went and posted CAP teams in the general Smogon RMT forum, and honestly expected badged team raters to rate the teams. The Smogon team raters got offended, because they considered it to be the exact same as someone posting a Digimon team in the forum and asking Pokemon team raters to comment. They responded, "Get the fuck out of our forum, you idiot fanboys, and take your retarded fake characters with you! We play a game called Pokemon here, in case you didn't know." It almost got the CAP project killed.
We've come a long way since then, and we don't have anything to fear from outsiders really. But the project still depends on new blood to join the project on a regular basis. It's hard to attract new talent if we have created a terrible public perception to outsiders. In the CAP forum, we tend to get so immersed in our project that we lose sight of how things look to everyone else. Always keep it in the back of your mind when making decisions on CAP pokemon, and keep it in mind when discussing the project publicly.
Be willing to change
This principle is about the policies of Create-A-Pokemon project, and a desire to encourage the project to evolve. One of the first things I did when I formed the CAP forum was I enacted an open Policy Review process by which we as a community could question CAP policies and try to improve the way we operate. Even though I was clearly the guy in charge, I didn't want people to think they couldn't propose changes to the project. I'm generally very open to explaining my reasons for my beliefs, and I'm willing to defend policies I advocate. I wanted everyone on the CAP project to adopt a mentality where we constantly evaluate our project and force ourselves to ask the question, "How can we improve the project?" Groups of people tend to become slaves to tradition, and stagnation develops. So I wanted to make constant evaluation and change a core tradition of the CAP project. I wanted to turn a weakness into a strength.
By instituting traditions that encourage group evaluation of policy, we ensure that leadership never assumes they are infallible. Regular change also makes the project not fear failure. Sometimes we enact policies knowing full well that they don't fully solve the problem, but the proposed change is a step towards solving the problem. That is a very healthy mindset for businesses, and I think it is healthy for our CAP project as well.
But don't change things just for the hell of it. Sometimes people get bored with the CAP project and they want to "spice things up". Be careful about these kinds of suggestions. Often these things are distractions from the core mission of the CAP project, and they can cause more harm than good. If a policy change is suggested, always ask yourself, "What problem does this solve?" I have found that many policy suggestions from well-intentioned CAP participants don't actually solve any real problem. Usually the underlying problem is some form of "I'm bored." Well, that's YOUR problem, not OUR problem.
The main reason for an ever-evolving project is constant IMPROVEMENT -- not constant EXPANSION. Like it or not, there's only so much territory Create-A-Pokemon can cover. CAP will never be an all-encompassing general pokemon community. CAP is a community focused on a certain niche. I'm not saying we should never expand, and I've been pleasantly surprised at some of the interesting offshoots that have spawned from the CAP project. But our mode of operations is to experiment with new competitive pokemon concepts. That's our bread-and-butter. Always be open to new ideas that allow CAP to improve at executing our core mission.
It's about the project, not the pokemon
I'll end with this one because it is, BY FAR, the most important operational principle in CAP. If you ignore everything else, please think long and hard about this one. If you don't understand and accept this principle, it is very unlikely that you will ever be able to help lead this project in a meaningful way. I described this in our mission statement as "It's about the journey, not the destination." I beat this drum at every opportunity, because for some reason it is incredibly hard for people to keep at the forefront of their thinking when leading the community.
Don't worry about the pokemon we make; worry about the way we make pokemon. Don't focus on the winner of a poll; focus on the quality of the discussions that led up to the poll. Encourage everyone to give their best effort; don't obsess over making the best pokemon. Don't get so concerned about how powerful a CAP pokemon is in battles during the week we playtest it; be concerned about whether we had an interesting and engaging project for the two months that we spent building it! Create-A-Pokemon is more about "creating" than it is about "pokemon". CAP projects don't get "ruined" by choosing a bad stat spread or giving it a bad movepool -- CAP projects get ruined by having boring discussions or discussions that wander all over the place and no can figure out what the hell is being talked about for 8 weeks straight.
CAP participants have a tendency to be very myopic and selfish during a project. Individual participants do not care if they are working well with the community and encouraging robust discussions involving as many people as possible. When the average CAP participant makes a post, they don't give a shit about anyone else. They have an opinion as to what is the "best decision" for a given step, or they might even have a submission of their own that they want to win. Either way, they aren't thinking about the community for any reason other than ensuring that their option wins the next poll.
When a CAP member gets to a point where they can actually influence other votes, the selfish motive gets even stronger. These members begin to build long-term visions of the kind of pokemon they want by the end of the process and they argue vocally to try and make the community go in the direction they want. When the community doesn't go down their preferred course, they pout and complain. Some people throw a selfish tantrum and ragequit the project. Others might adopt a "sour grapes" mentality and try to counter-campaign against options that beat them in earlier polls. Some people outright cheat and manipulate polls to try and ensure that their personal favorite wins.
It's amazing the lengths people will go to in order to try and get what they personally want out of a given CAP project. But if you really think about it, it's pretty silly to do that. If you really want to make a pokemon according to your own personal desires -- then just fucking do that! Go do it on your own! You don't need to be part of CAP to make your own personal pokemon! I marvel at why some people are so obsessed with "getting their way" when it comes to making community decisions about our little fakemons. I personally enjoy participating in interesting discussions, and learning about competitive pokemon in the process. I definitely have favored options, and I will try to argue convincingly for them. But I accept that this is a community process, and I can only control my opinion and my participation. As such, I don't waste much time obsessing over outcomes. It's pointless and selfish to do so. But make no mistake about it -- that's exactly what most CAP members do every time. They obsess on results and not on participation.
Don't fall into that trap. As a CAP leader, you need to raise your sights higher. Rise above your petty personal favorites and look at the bigger picture. Help make a great project. Help inspire intriguing discussions. Encourage us to make tough choices and evaluate difficult decisions. Praise good arguments, even if the argument is for something that is not your favorite option. Create a positive environment that attracts intelligent and talented people to participate. That's the best way to recruit people that will be future leaders and decision influencers on the project, and ensures Create-A-Pokemon is a healthy, self-sustaining, community project.
<The End>
Over the past several months, I have been concerned that the CAP project has "lost its way". Not that the project is dying or lacking participation, but more that we have moved in a general direction that I don't think is in the project's best interests, as it pertains to our original mission. Perhaps the original mission should be changed, but I don't think so. I think the mission still applies and is the right foundation for our thriving community project.
I'm not exactly sure why we have ended up where we are now. Some of it is just natural drift that occurs over time. But I also think there are probably too many things unstated when it comes to CAP operations, and many people just don't know how Create-A-Pokemon should be led.
People jump into the CAP forum, participate in a few projects and then assume they are a "CAP veteran". Some of those people end up on the PRC, as Topic Leaders, or even CAP forum moderators -- and they actually know very little about CAP operations and CAP principles that drive those operations! When you combine that with a relatively short contribution lifetime for most project participants and leaders, that's a recipe for wandering direction.
When reading this post, keep in mind that I am not just referring to project moderators when I mention "CAP Leaders". I am referring to everyone who helps influence decisions and direction on Create-A-Pokemon -- moderators, topic leaders, server mods, IRC ops, PRC members, and even active users that influence the community with their posts in CAP threads. All these people collectively "lead CAP", and we need to have a better concept of the direction we are headed.
So in this thread I want to make explicit some of the key operating principles that we have encouraged over the past several years, and explain the reasons they are good principles for leading the project. Some of this is common sense. For some of you that have been around for a long time, you may know this or you have heard me mention it before. Some other stuff may come as a complete surprise to you.
All of these principles have been bedrock for me running this project since it's formal inception several years ago when the CAP subforum was created and organized from CAP's beginnings as a loose confederation of threads in Stark Mountain. At that time, I did not just throw together some forum rules and process guides on a whim. In real life, I am a businessman, so I treated this project like I was starting a business. I looked at what we had been doing and tried to identify the core of what made CAP a compelling project, and set down a few basic goals. Then I wrote a mission statement to capture the essence of those goals, hopefully in such a way as to inspire others to accept and support the mission. I also came up with a set of operating procedures designed to achieve the mission and wrote the first process guide to act as a How To Manual for us to reproduce organized projects over and over successfully. As we executed projects, we learned many lessons in how to keep the CAP project moving forward efficiently, and how to make a self-sustaining community. Over the history of the project, the core mission has never changed, even though our specific process rules have changed quite a bit. What I plan to do here is explain many of the previously unwritten principles that have driven the decision-making of CAP over the years.
I am not writing this down here just for fun. I'm writing this down because I think we have collectively forgotten it, and for many of you, you probably never knew it in the first place. I'm also writing it down as a baseline, because I will be proposing and implementing some changes to the CAP project in a few PR threads immediately following this one. This is a very long post, and I understand that most people won't bother to read it. But if you do read this whole thing, you will have a much better idea of where I am coming from on those upcoming PR threads. You'll also get some insight into some of the not-so-obvious drivers contributing to the project's success for so long, and you'll get a better idea of how to support the project as a present and/or future leader in Create-A-Pokemon.
Leadership
My Role
I think this is probably a good time for me to describe my role in the leadership structure of CAP. I tend to assume everyone just sorta knows this or picks up on it by hanging out around the CAP project. But in recent months there have been some occurrences that have made me realize that it is not very clear how CAP project governance is structured. So I'm going to lay it out clearly for everyone, and also explain some of the reasoning behind the current structure, and give some CAP history at the same time.
I (DougJustDoug) am the head leader of the Create-A-Pokemon project and community. This is not some vague tradition we tend to collectively respect when it is convenient. It is an explicit condition of the original agreement that led Smogon and Create-A-Pokemon to partner with each other (yes, they are technically separate entities, but more on that in a minute) and it is not subject to your interpretation or your vote of support. If you don't like the way I run things here, there is no recourse for you. Deal with it or leave, it's that simple.
I'm not trying to be a jerk by throwing this in anyone's face. In fact, my tendency to NOT put myself in front of every decision for the project or constantly remind people of my leadership role, has led to some very nasty power struggles in CAP's past. In those cases, some people have assumed if they yell louder than everyone else, that they can somehow become the de facto head person in charge here. Combine that with some privileges inside and/or outside the CAP project, a few misguided assumptions about the project, and a few brash personalities -- and you get ugly power wars in CAP. In those situations in the past, I tended to be a bit too nonchalant about it when it was happening, and probably let the struggles go too far before I stepped in and squashed the conflicts. But contrary to some ridiculous rumors I have heard in the past -- I have been the head of the CAP project since it's formal organization many years ago, and I have never "stepped down", "abandoned the project", or otherwise removed myself from my role as head of this project.
I am not the only person who acts in a leadership capacity on CAP. We have forum moderators, we have server moderators, we have IRC ops, we have topic leaders, etc. Without the contributions of all those people, there's no way we could operate efficiently. I believe responsibility and control should go hand in hand, so when we make someone responsible for something in CAP, I tend to let them have complete control over that thing. My job is to oversee that things are being done in accordance with CAP rules and goals. Sometimes I have to step in and "pull rank" on a CAP leader, but I really don't like doing that. It tends to discourage good leaders and limits their growth. Since most CAP leaders are much younger and less experienced than I am, I accept that most CAP leaders are "learning on the job". So I try to act as a mentor as much as possible and offer advice, not issue commands. But when problems escalate in CAP, they usually end up in my lap. And when it comes to passing the buck in CAP, the buck stops here.
Leadership History
Some of you may ask, "Why are you in charge, Doug? What gives you the right to be the ultimate authority on the CAP project?" Good question, particularly considering that I'm not the "founder" of the project. Let me give you some relevant history, as it pertains to project leadership and my role in CAP.
Create-A-Pokemon was started in November 2007 by a guy named Cooper. He thought it would be cool to have a big group of people make a fake pokemon via a series of steps, and then send all the information about the fake pokemon to Nintendo and ask them to put the pokemon into a future version of a real Pokemon game. The thinking was that a bunch of community posts and community support would be like a big petition to convince Nintendo to do it. The appeal to Nintendo would be along the lines of "Look at this great pokemon we made, and look at all the work that went into it!" I have serious doubts as to whether such a thing would have actually convinced Nintendo to make a pokemon. My guess is that Ninty doesn't give a shit about fan projects like ours, and they certainly wouldn't be interested in opening up their multi-billion dollar Pokemon franchise to characters made on some random fan site with dubious copyright ownership and all sorts of other problems. But hey, it was a noble goal, and many of us were interested in making a fakemon, so away we went.
Cooper asked a moderator of Stark Mountain (the DP pokemon forum of Smogon at the time) if it was OK to make threads for the project. I don't know who that moderator was, but supposedly the project had the Stark mods approval. Cooper made all the threads, and the rest of us posted and voted as we made the pokemon you now know as Syclant. The process was a wonderful mess. We were making it up as we went along, and we all deferred to Cooper to call the shots. We called him the "mini-mod" for the threads. Fortunately for the project, several creative and intelligent posters joined in the fray and we somehow completed the project with a pokemon that we were relatively proud of.
Cooper was trying to compile the information to send to Nintendo, but was having trouble figuring out how to actually accomplish that. In the meantime, many CAP posters had grown attached to our little Ice Bug, and really wanted to see how it performed in battles. People tossed around ideas of making a ROM hack. Other people mentioned the new Pokemon simulator that had recently come online -- ShoddyBattle. Someone reached out to Colin, the programmer that made Shoddybattle, and asked him if he would add Syclant to his battle simulator. Colin told us to fuck off, or something along those lines. To be fair to him, he was up to his ears in getting ShoddyBattle stable, and really had no interest in our stupid fakemon project. So the project was dejected and floundering a bit as to what to do.
Then I went and opened my big mouth...
I mentioned that ShoddyBattle was open source code and written in Java. So "somebody" should just make their own custom server with Syclant in it.
At that time, I had no time or interest in doing the programming myself. And I definitely had no interest in being responsible for leading anything. I had posted a lot in the Syclant threads, but so did a lot of other people. I think it's fair to say that by the end of the Syclant project, I was somewhat influential in the nascent CAP community. But I was not the "top guy" on the project, and I was almost a complete unknown in Smogon as a whole. Up to that point, the only real involvement I had with Smogon and Smogon leadership was in the DP Battle Tower threads, where I took Jumpman16's team and actually bested his BT streak at that time. Since Jumpman was such a BT junkie, he took notice of my streak (which was the all-time 2nd or 3rd best streak at that time) and also liked the way I helped other players with advice on how to play certain battles and general battle strategy. I can't say I was "friends" with Jumpman or anything, but he was part of Smogon senior staff and he knew who I was.
So I had posted that someone should do the programming to make a custom simulator with Syclant in it. I just assumed there were lots of programmers around, and that someone would take up the task. No one did. So I decided to dig a little deeper and see how hard it would be. One thing led to another, I got interested in the programming challenge, and I ended up untangling a bunch of Shoddybattle code and I successfully made a custom CAP server with Syclant as a "real" pokemon. I had no idea what I was in for the minute I brought "Doug's Create-A-Pokemon Server" (Yes, that was the name, not to be confused with all the other Create-A-Pokemon servers out there! ;-) online and open to the general public.
My server instantly exploded in popularity. It was a total shock to me, but in retrospect, it now makes sense why the server took off so quickly. There was a ton of interest in simulator battling in general, and at the same time the only server that was stable and popular was Colin's server called the "Official Server". Colin and his server staff could be brusque with users, and there were some people that didn't like battling there, but did so because there was no other viable choice. So when I made my server there was not only interest in this "new pokemon" we made (and everyone wanted to see what the fuss was about), but some people just wanted an alternative to the Official server. So almost overnight, my CAP server had hundreds of users and the pokemon community was buzzing with excitement over it.
I had no previous experience leading a battle simulator, but I had a ton of experience leading companies and other groups, so my "take charge" instincts kicked in immediately. I had worked very hard to do the programming, and I ran the server on my computer (I ran it in my home office!), and I paid the bills for bandwidth and everything else. When trolls, spammers, and hackers started piling on and tried to ruin the fun -- I moved into "manager mode" and started establishing rules for how the server would be operated. It was unquestionably my server, and unquestionably my problem to deal with the madhouse. So I laid down the law, and people followed. I enlisted the help of a small cadre of users that had participated heavily in the Stark Mountain CAP threads, and they became the first moderators of my server. I called them "The Blue Team", because on ShoddyBattle moderators names were in bright blue at the top of the user list, while everyone else's name was normal black text below. So me and The Blue Team established some order, had fun, and tried to encourage everyone to play nice with others. A community of regular users quickly developed on my server, and we used my CAP server as the all-purpose place to hang out and conduct CAP business.
Although Cooper started the whole thing (and he was a member of my server's first Blue Team), Cooper wasn't too interested in all the work that went into running the show. Although he never said it to me directly, I think Cooper was kinda sick of dealing with all the headaches and drama. After we did the Syclant project, Cooper picked Hyra to be the mini-mod for the second Create-A-Pokemon project. We were all fine with his decision to appoint Hyra the next mini-mod, although it's not like he bothered to ask any of us. He just did it. So Hyra started the first threads for what eventually became Revenankh.
I was the owner of the CAP server which quickly became the centerpiece of the CAP universe, mainly because it was drawing so much attention from everyone inside and outside the project. The CAP project began deferring to me for my opinions on what we were doing in the forum threads, because the ability to play with the pokemon in real battles became the most important aspect of what we were doing. All the key project participants were mods on my server, so a "leadership hierarchy" emerged in CAP. I found myself somehow responsible for all the big problems that were cropping up related to the CAP project. Most people in CAP were just posters who really had no desire or vested interest in dealing with problems. I, on the other hand, began to realize that there were all sorts of nasty issues that came with letting a bunch of kids play pokemon on my server. This includes monetary fines from my bandwidth provider who really didn't appreciate hacking attacks that the CAP server attracted, COPPA issues with underage kids, blatant pedophiles trolling mainchat and then me being threatened with lawsuits by angry parents, threats of copyright violations and trademark infringement by people supposedly associated with Nintendo/Pokemon, and a whole slew of things like that. Since the CAP server was considered by the public to be the "home" of the CAP project, all fingers pointed at me whenever the shit hit the fan. So, whether I liked it or not, I was increasingly being required to act as the leader and spokesperson for Create-A-Pokemon.
Within Smogon leadership, things were getting ugly as it pertained to CAP threads in Stark Mountain. Smogon was getting annoyed with CAP, and many Smogon higher-ups felt like the spam of CAP threads were a distraction in Stark Mountain. Many badgeholders and serious battlers thought CAP was a silly fanboy project that had no place inside a serious battling community like Smogon. Smogon leaders were pointing fingers at each other as to who allowed these stupid fanboys to make the eyesore of Create-A-Pokemon threads. And due to the popularity of my CAP server, more and more attention was being paid to the project, which was bringing the controversy to a boiling point.
My CAP server was getting a lot of traffic, much of which was from Smogon battlers. At that time, Colin did not agree with Smogon's tiers, and he steadfastly refused to honor them on the Official Server. On my server, I implemented Smogon tiers with the addition of Syclant, since Syclant was designed to be played alongside Smogon OU pokemon. So if battlers wanted to play Smogon tiers, they had little choice but to play on my server. When Smogon badgeholders and senior staff showed up at the CAP server, they expected to have some clout, and didn't take kindly to being told what to do by the CAP server moderators. They considered themselves to be senior Smogoners and serious battlers, and we were just a bunch of clowns that were spamming up Stark Mountain with stupid fakemon threads. When the CAP server mods refused to treat Smogon staff any different than other users, that just added fuel to the fire. So behind the scenes at Smogon, there were ongoing discussions about kicking CAP out of Smogon, and terminating the whole thing.
Keep in mind that I was not a badged user in Smogon at that time, so I had no proof that such discussions were taking place. But based on the demeanor of posts in Stark Mountain, comments made in mainchat on my CAP server, and other remarks -- I knew something was brewing and that it probably wouldn't be good for the CAP project. Most other hardcore CAP participants, including Cooper and Hyra, were almost completely oblivious to what was happening around us. I think some people sensed something was wrong, but they had no clue how to deal with it. Since I was the owner of the CAP server, which was the cause of most of the attention and disruption, I felt like it was my job to smooth things out with Smogon. So in February 2008, I wrote a long PM to Jumpman and X-Act, who were the only badged members of Smogon that I felt like I knew at all. Here's the text of that fateful letter: click here.
Now that I am a Smogon admin, I can see the threads that were made behind the scenes, and yes they were exactly as I feared. Some members of Smogon staff wanted to get rid of the CAP project and make us move to our own website or shut down completely. They felt like the CAP project was littering up Smogon's forums and causing problems. Jumpman posted my letter in that thread, and told everyone, in essence, "This DougJustDoug guy has a good point." Jumpman advised Chaos (the owner of Smogon.com) to get in touch with me and work something out.
So Chaos and I chatted on IRC and came to a compromise. I was the owner of the CAP ShoddyBattle server, and Chaos liked the idea of using my server as a draw for sim battlers to come to Smogon, and he also wanted me to help him with programming at Smogon. I liked the endorsement of Smogon, because it legitimized the project and brought users to my server. But we both agreed that CAP threads were a mess in Stark Mountain and pissing off the Smogon old guard. So Chaos and I agreed to the following terms:
- Chaos would make a dedicated subforum for Create-A-Pokemon, he would allocate a subdomain on Smogon for me to create a CAP website, and Smogon would officially "sponsor" CAP -- but CAP would be a separate entity from Smogon
- I agreed to endorse Smogon tiers and rulesets on my server and I would promote Smogon in general there
- I agreed to take responsibility for the CAP Project and I would moderate project content, web content, threads, and members and make sure we didn't get out of control
- Chaos agreed that we would have autonomy within the subforum and the ability to enforce whatever CAP rules we saw fit
- CAP would not be subject to any moderation or retribution from other Smogon staff, on the condition that we observe Smogon's general posting rules and general behavior guidelines
- I agreed to help Smogon with programming projects to be determined later
For the record, those "programming projects to be named later" that I agreed to do for Smogon turned out to be:
- The Smogon University ShoddyBattle Server
- The Smogon Damage Calculator
- Smogon Tiering and Usage Statistics for the entire DP generation of metagames
- The programs and statistical analysis for the first Smogon Suspect Testing process
- and many many more
Over time, my role in Smogon changed considerably, as I moved from just leading the CAP project to be a Supermod and to my current role as an Administrator for Smogon. CAP and Smogon have become very intertwined over the years, to the point where most people think CAP is pretty much the same as other Smogon projects like The Smog or Battling 101. It isn't the same at a fundamental control and responsibility level, but I prefer to not emphasize the fact that CAP is actually still an autonomous entity, unless it is absolutely necessary to raise the point.
Now you know the history of how the project came to be, how it was organized in its current form, and where I fit in to the CAP leadership mix and the Smogon leadership mix as a whole.
Leadership Style
CAP leadership is a "Benevolent Dictatorship" if we describe it as a form of government, although I cringe every time I see that phrase used to describe it. But it is an apt description. I enjoy seeing the project succeed, and I like to work behind the scenes to make this an interesting place for us to participate as a community. Hence, the "benevolent" aspect of things. I take that very seriously. Sometimes to a fault, I try to keep my ego out of things and I try to act in the best interests of the project as a whole. But I am far from perfect, and I hope no one expects me to be. I have plenty of annoying personality quirks and I make mistakes all the time. But I truly enjoy working to provide things for others.
I do my best to be fair, even in cases where manipulative assholes use my sense of fairness against me. Some people have learned how to exploit the rules we have established here, and then also exploit my tendency to give contrary opinions due consideration. In those cases, some observers and project newcomers conclude that all CAP decisions are subject to a community vote, or that if someone can establish enough popular support, they can do whatever they want around here. That is certainly not the case. That's where the "dictatorship" side of things comes into play. I don't play that card very often, but it's not uncommon for me to do so when ending arguments with some indignant wannabe-lawyer types who are dissatisfied with the way I have handled a situation and they are directly or indirectly threatening to "go above my head" or otherwise attempt to overturn my decision. In arguments like that, I sometimes make the comment, "You seem to be under the mistaken impression that this is a democracy."
I like to encourage others to be leaders here in the CAP project. When I first organized the CAP forum, everyone assumed that I would lead every CAP project since I was put in charge of everything. I didn't want that then, and I still don't want it now. I like the idea of CAP having a broad distribution of leaders of various aspects of the project, and a rotation of responsibility to shepherd each pokemon from start to completion. Although I am sometimes very involved in certain decisions, and sometimes I will flat out "put my foot down" and make a decision by executive fiat -- I usually try to manage by consensus building. I also try to promote others and watch them reap the satisfaction and glory of successful leadership. I've never really been interested in running an individual CAP project, and I've always felt it wouldn't be right for me to do so. The way I see it, I'm responsible for the framework and foundation of CAP. But when it comes to individual projects, I prefer to be a regular contributor and enjoy participating just like everyone else.
I try to look at the big picture when it comes to CAP. That's the reason I'm making this thread and others right now. I'm trying to get more of you to see the bigger picture as it applies to CAP, with the hopes that perhaps we can turn this thing around and get on a better path forward. I'd also like to start grooming a new set of up-and-coming CAP leaders, because right now I feel like the well is running dry. That's one of the warning signs that we've gone astray, because many of the people that are currently active and influencing CAP decisions seem to have no clue about the underlying drivers that make this project work. Which brings us full circle to the point where I started this post! So now that we have a ton of backstory out of the way -- let's talk about operating principles, shall we?
Fundamental Operating Principles
Dichotomy Part A: This is a terrible way to build a good pokemon
If you really want to make a good pokemon, don't invite a few hundred people together to make decisions in a rigid step-by-step manner and use majority vote for every significant decision. Design-by-committee sucks. If you want to make a good pokemon, get a few talented people together in a room, and make it an iterative effort. Building a pokemon en masse waterfall-style is fraught with problems and is virtually guaranteed to have many stumbles and mistakes along the way. Popularity voting is a horrible way to get anything of quality, because propaganda and bandwagoning tend to overshadow "doing the right thing" almost every time. All in all, the CAP process is pretty much the worst way to make a high-quality pokemon you could possibly conceive.
So get used to it.
We are NEVER going to encourage a few supposed "experts" to go off in a private room and make their own wonderful pokemon, and then reveal it to the CAP masses and expect the rest of the community to call it "our creation". It is not going to happen. If you even imply it -- you are threatening the community aspect of this project and you are missing the whole point of Create-A-Pokemon. If we don't do this thing as a big collaborative group -- then we are not doing "Create-A-Pokemon".
The internet is filled with thousands of fakemon created by individuals or very small groups. It is so common and uninteresting, it's not even funny. Do a quick Google search on the term "fakemon". Do you honestly give a shit about the stat spread or movepool of any of the thousands of pokemon you see in the list that comes up? Do you have even the slightest desire to actually work to implement any of those pokemon and use them in real battles? Don't get me wrong, some of those fakemon look cool as hell and you'd probably try them out if you could easily battle with them. But would you actually expend any of your personal time and effort to determine if those pokemon were competitively viable, and then work to implement them on a simulator to use them in battle?
Hell no, you wouldn't.
Because all those personal fakemon creations are a dime a dozen. They saturate pokemon fandom so completely that they are irrelevant at best, and annoying at worst. That is not the goal to which Create-A-Pokemon aspires.
I don't care what you personally know about making awesome pokemon, and what kind of amazing pokemon you might make if you had a chance to do it on your own. Let me repeat that for emphasis -- I DON'T CARE. And neither does anyone else. And that is exactly the point and key differentiator between your perfect personal creations, and our horribly flawed group creations. People CARE about our pokemon creations, and they don't care about yours. And if ours is flawed and yours is perfect, what does that tell you about how quality relates to interest and involvement? END RESULT QUALITY DOES NOT MATTER MUCH AT ALL. What matters is that we all get to play a part in the creation of our pokemon, and we all feel like we own a little piece of it.
Create-A-Pokemon gets many people invested in the creation process, and it is precisely because of that investment that our project stands head and shoulders above all the other personal fakemon projects out there. Yes, our process makes it very hard to make a good pokemon. But it is the ONLY way to get everyone involved, and THAT is the reason the project exists.
So when I see individual CAP participants getting pissed off about our pokemon being "ruined" by people that "don't know what they are doing"; or when I see individuals trying to hog threads, manipulate polls, or otherwise short-circuit the community in order to make what they consider to be a "better pokemon" -- those people just don't get it. In fact, as a community leader, you should see it as your job to protect the community from the influence of people like that. So if you really can't stand to be part of a project that knowingly and consistently makes less-than-perfect pokemon -- then get out of here and don't come back. Because you are not going to be happy here, and we're not going to be happy with you while you are here.
On the other hand, if you like being part of big groups, if you like pitting your ideas against others and vying for your ideas to be selected over others, if you enjoy the crucible of creating something and exploring ideas with others -- then the CAP project is the place for you.
Dichotomy Part B: CAP pokemon are important and our decisions matter
This may seem completely contrary to the point I just made above, but CAP pokemon are "important" and our decisions have important consequences. I put the word "important" in quotes, because I don't mean they are literally important. We are just making fake pokemon for crissakes. But we need to treat each step of the process as important, otherwise everyone will make a half-assed effort on the project. Although we must accept that the result of all our hard work will likely not be very good, we still need to encourage a project where everyone gives their best effort.
People don't work hard on anything if they don't feel like the results of their effort have any real impact. So it is imperative that CAP takes each project seriously and we consider each decision carefully. We encourage participants to make good arguments. We encourage submitters to work their ass off on their submissions and to put their best foot forward. We celebrate winners, and we console losers. Each step of the CAP process is treated with gravity and importance -- and that is BY DESIGN. It makes everyone step up their game and work hard to make the best possible decision on every step. It's what makes each CAP pokemon as good as it reasonably can be.
Deal with the dichotomy
If you want to be a leader around here; if you want to truly "get it" in terms of the inner workings of Create-A-Pokemon -- you need to synthesize the two principles I just presented above. On the one hand, you have to accept that our creations will most likely never be very "good". But you must also be absolutely committed to encouraging us to make it as "good as it can be", taking into account the considerable limitations imposed by the project structure and community creation process. Most people tend to fall in one camp or the other, but never really figure out how to promote both principles. If you understand the importance of both, then you are well on your way to being a true CAP leader, and not just a person who posts a lot in CAP threads.
This is a "serious" project, which is what makes it "fun".
(Warning: I tend to overuse quoted words and phrases all the time, but I will be using them even more than usual here, because I really don't want anyone to make strictly literal interpretations of phrases with the words "serious" and "fun" in them.)
Create-A-Pokemon is sometimes derided with comments like,
"CAP takes itself too seriously. They need to lighten up and have some fun. After all this is just Pokemon..."
No doubt the CAP project has a lot of rules and process and structure, and all that organization can be very stuffy and oppressive at times.
But as a leader, you need to always remember that the organized, analytical basis of CAP is one of the key differentiators between CAP and every other fakemon project on the internet. The "serious" orientation of the CAP project is also the only reason CAP exists in partnership with Smogon. Although Smogon has plenty of "fun" aspects, the main appeal of Smogon is that it takes the game of Pokemon "seriously".
Pokemon is a silly little kids game, whose main purpose is for exploring a simplistic fantasy world, collecting cute characters, and solving puzzles aimed at elementary school children. Within the game of Pokemon are some interesting battling elements that we take "seriously" and we analyze it from a competitive standpoint on par with many other "adult" games. Smogon basically wrote the book on taking something intended almost purely for "fun" (the game of Pokemon) and making it into something "serious" (competitive battling). If you don't want to think of Pokemon as a "serious game", then you really don't need to be hanging out here in Smogon. Go to any one of the DOZENS of big websites aimed at the average pokemon player that is interested in purely fun pursuits like "Catch 'em all!" Smogon is aimed mostly at people that find it enjoyable to analyze the game of Pokemon. And CAP is the same way -- we have fun being serious about creating Pokemon.
So when people throw around ideas for CAP that are intended mostly "just to have fun" -- that should raise a warning flag with CAP leaders. Not because having fun is a bad thing -- but it almost always has the unintended side effect of marginalizing the "serious" aspects of the project. I can't say categorically that anything proposed as "fun" will be bad for CAP. We've seen all sorts of great projects from Cartoons' Battle Capacity fighting game to wacky tournament formats on the CAP server -- all initiated as "fun projects", that worked out great for us. We will continue to do things for fun. But as a leader of the project, be wary of anything suggested as a "fun project". Most of them are attempts to apply CAP community principles to something mostly related to Pokemon flavor, and that just isn't a good match.
The CAP community and process is rooted in analytical discussions about competitive pokemon. When a project gets centered on flavor, it takes the teeth out of any attempt at engaging discussion. There is simply no way to argue over flavor in Pokemon. There's no way to determine who has a good point and who has a bad point. So basically, if we do flavor projects (ie. "fun projects") we have nothing really to talk about. And if we don't have something interesting to talk about -- then why are we hosting it on an internet discussion forum? And why are we doing it within a community geared towards serious analytical discussions?
Don't get me wrong, CAP sometimes goes a bit overboard and gets "too serious" at times. At the end of the day, this is a leisure time activity for everyone on the project, and levity is a good thing for all of us. But always remember this essential truth about CAP participation -- if you don't think it is "fun" to have "serious" discussions about creating fake pokemon -- then CAP is not the place for you, and you should NOT be wasting your time trying to make CAP into a place you consider "fun".
Defend project legitimacy and resist fanboyism
Fanboys. Pokemon geeks. Pokenerds. You know who they are. Heck, I AM ONE. If you are reading this, then you are too! But hopefully you are also serious about competitive Pokemon.
The CAP project is a magnet for fanboys and fanboyism is a black hole for the CAP project.
If we want to be a pure fan project, then we don't need to be doing this project in Smogon. In fact, if we want to be a pure fan project, then we won't be able to continue here at Smogon. Smogon is first and foremost a competitive battling community, and the CAP project needs to align with that.
It is impossible to be a competitive project if the project does not have the participation of good competitive battlers. In general, competitive battlers do not like to participate in forums dominated by little kids and pokemon noobs who talk endlessly about whether Bulbasaur is cuter than Squirtle, or brag about how amazing Hyper Beam is on Snorlax. You can call competitive battlers elitist or snobs, but the fact remains that most people that play pokemon know very little about the "serious" aspects of battling. It is incredibly annoying for the people that know about competitive battling to hang around with the average pokenoob. So we have to do our best to make a project that is exciting and enticing for knowledgeable battlers, and that means we have to discourage the project from being overrun with fanboys and fanboy concerns.
If you look at the CAP project and most of the participants are pokenerds that don't battle competitively, have no knowledge of competitive battling, and no desire to learn more about competitive battling -- then would you conclude that CAP is a "competitive project"? If you were a typical good competitive player, would you want to jump in and be a part of the project? No. If that was the case, and if you did want to be part of the project, you would not be doing so as a competitive battler. You would participate as a fanboy too and you would do it "Just to have fun".
For individuals and their motivation level, there is nothing wrong with that. But for the project as a whole, it is a terrible influence. If it goes unchecked, the project is doomed.
Unfortunately, when the average new pokemon player comes to Smogon they are somewhat intimidated. All the serious battle strategies, lingo and acronyms, organized tournaments, rules and tiers -- the whole thing is kinda scary to new players. But as they survey the forum listing, they come across a phrase that resonates with them instantly -- "Create. A. Pokemon."
Halleluyah! Something that makes every fan's heart sing -- a place for pokemon fans to make their own pokemon! "OMG, I have the greatest idea for a pokemon! I know so much about Pokemon, I beat the Elite 4 ten times in a row! I will instantly fit right in here!"
Ugh.
So they come in droves. And they don't bother to read rules or learn what the project is all about. They assume they know the game of Pokemon and they dive right into the CAP project. When they see a bunch of competitive mumbo-jumbo being discussed, they bypass that and focus on what they do know about -- which is flavor. And they do this in one of two ways -- they make flavor comments in competitive threads, or they stay out of competitive threads and only post in flavor threads. Both of these tendencies are actually bad for the long-term health of the CAP project. Both forms of participation act as a disincentive for participation from good competitive players. Fanboys either shit up the competitive threads, or they make the competitive threads look like a graveyard of activity -- both of those are bad for CAP.
So here's what we have to do as leaders of the CAP project to keep us on course -- We have to discourage fanboyism and flavor across the board, and play up the competitive aspects of the project as much as possible. I'm basically saying we need to abuse the innocent pokemon nerds, and coddle the smug competitive battlers. It's a harsh statement, I know.
But here's the harsh truth -- pokemon "fan knowledge" is pretty much worthless to us. It has almost no value, because it is so easy to come by. How much work does it take to learn enough about pokemon to argue if Dragon pokemon look cooler than Dark pokemon? How hard is it to find someone capable of writing a Pokedex entry? How many people feel they have enough pokemon expertise to come up with a good name for a pokemon? Pokemon fan knowledge is worth jack shit here at CAP. Because there is no defensible "skill" to it, and there is no way to distinguish between people that are "good" at pokemon flavor and who is "bad" at pokemon flavor.
Competitive knowledge, on the other hand, is very valuable at CAP and is generally hard to come by. It's not hard to come by in Smogon, but it can be hard to attract to the CAP project if we allow the project to be dominated by users obsessing over flavor. We don't want CAP members interested only in flavor -- we want people with expert knowledge and skills to participate in CAP, and for THOSE PEOPLE, we want to provide a place for them to indulge their fan interests. Does that make sense?
The focus of the CAP project is experimentation with competitive battling, and alongside that we provide a small outlet for our fan interests. The fanboy aspects of CAP are just an "added bonus" for the competitive players we want to involve here. Unfortunately, the fan stuff tends to overshadow everything, and it is the primary attraction for a HUGE number of CAP participants. But don't confuse popularity with focus. The CAP project is not designed to be a fanboy project, and we will never succumb to the constant onslaught of fan influence. If we really want a fan project, then we are doing this entirely the wrong way, and we are doing it in the wrong place here at Smogon.
Don't get me wrong, we are ALL fans of pokemon and we all probably got started in the CAP project due to a keen interest in the flavor aspects of the project. Whether you were intrigued by the cool artwork, you got hooked by a prevo thread, or you made a noobish post about some ridiculous typing you would like to see in the real game -- almost every "serious CAP veteran" probably started in CAP as a flavor-loving fanboy. I know I did. And there's nothing wrong with that. But we need to transition that initial fanboy hook into a deeper interest in serious competitive pokemon. Even if CAP participants never get into battling seriously, they need to understand and appreciate that CAP is primarily driven by competitive goals. If participants don't make that transition, then we should not cater to their desire for CAP to be a home for pokemon fans only interested in flavor.
From the very beginnings of the CAP project, we have had to defend our legitimacy as a worthwhile competitive endeavor. And despite our history, our organization, our rules, and our process -- we still get a constant stream of pokemon noobs that wander into the CAP project and assume we are just making "kewl pogeymanzz". These people litter our competitive threads with idiotic flavor comments and suggestions. They spam the art threads with "OMG that is so awesome!!!" comments, but don't even bother to look at the damage calcs when voting for stat spreads. They are the regular joe pokemon players of the world, and they will forever be the bane of our existence.
A CAP project is a big event
Almost every aspect of an individual CAP project is designed to make it into "a big deal". It's something I learned a long time ago in leading groups, and I made it a fundamental part of CAP. We want to make each CAP project a big spectacular event with a big buildup and a high-profile execution. This is the main reason we don't rush the creation process, and it's the main reason I don't like us to have anything else significant going on in the CAP forum when we are in the middle of building a pokemon.
I bristle when I see people make comments between CAP projects like, "Let's hurry up and start the next one!" While I appreciate the enthusiasm, we should intentionally put some spacing in between projects. If we just crank out pokemon one after the other, it lessens everyone's individual commitment to make each project as good as it can be. We don't want contributors thinking, "Hmmm, I'm a little busy right now. I'll sit out this one and participate next time." That's a sign we are doing projects too frequently. We want people thinking, "Oh wow, a CAP project is starting! Let me clear my schedule to make sure I can participate in this special event!" I don't expect anyone to literally say these things, but you get the idea. We want CAP projects to be special, not just regular run-of-the-mill activity in the CAP forum.
This is the reason I don't want to see CAP projects running concurrently. In addition to making a confusing mix of threads in the CAP forum, it creates the perception that the CAP project is a factory that churns out pokemon one after the other. Heck, I don't even like too many steps on a single project being executed concurrently. When we are executing a CAP project, we want all eyes on the current step. We want everyone giving their best effort on that step. We want every submitter that makes the poll to feel like they are in the limelight. We want every winner to feel like they achieve a little well-deserved e-fame. We want all participants to think, "We need to capitalize on this project now, because we won't get another chance to do this for a while." We want everyone to feel like they are part of something BIG.
Think of each CAP project like Smogon regards major tournaments. The buildup is big, the stakes are high, and there's lots of glory for the winners. So everyone works their ass off to maximize the opportunity, and many people prepare well in advance to ensure they don't blow it. Competitive battlers are heavily "invested" in major tournaments. We want a similar investment from CAP participants.
There are lots of little things we do in CAP to amp up the importance of each project. The CAP website is basically a highlighter underscoring the importance of CAP. The main reason I put a lot of work into the subsite, was to make our project look like a "big deal". The CAP subsite is one of the biggest and most advanced sections in Smogon.com. Our process guide is featured prominently. Each step has rigid rules and history. When we even consider changing those rules, we make big Policy Review threads and discuss the issues in minute detail. Some of you may hate that stuff and pass it off as "bureaucracy". I'll let you in on a little secret -- if you get annoyed by the "bureaucracy", YOU DON'T GET IT. All the attention paid to the process, is part of what makes it obvious to everyone that the process is important, and our project has weight and gravitas.
Longtime CAP members may remember that in every CAP news announcement, I would always describe implementing our pokemon on the simulator and use the phrase "use it in REAL BATTLES!". I did that because most people assume that fakemon projects are just for making pretty pictures of pokemon and assigning typing and names. I always felt it was important to mention that in CAP we actually battle with our pokemon, and not just theorymon with them. It's a little thing that jacks up the importance and hype of the project, and hopefully increases commitment to the project.
When a CAP project is underway, I think the CAP forum is the most exciting and interesting place in all of Smogon. I know many other people feel the same way. Keep that in mind as we plan and execute operations in CAP. Don't spread the project out too thin, and don't allow distractions to steal the thunder from our core project threads. It is very easy to allow well-intentioned participants to spin up activity that diverts attention from the community. Don't assume the project will attract attention magically. CAP gets attention because we work to build hype and anticipation and we have structured our operations to hold people's attention along the way.
Great art is great advertising
Artists have a special place in CAP, and we intentionally cater to them. We have special rules for art and special expectations, we dedicate the most technically advanced part of the CAP subsite to artists, and we moderate art threads and polls with more attention than just about any other threads in CAP. Considering that art and sprites are just flavor and have nothing to do with competitive pokemon, you may wonder why we make such a fuss over artwork. It's because great artwork tends to draw all sorts of attention to the CAP project.
The art and sprite polls consistently get the most votes in a given CAP. The art submission thread gets TEN TIMES more views than most other CAP threads. On the Smogon.com website, the CAP Gallery is one of the most visited pages in all of Smogon. Let's face it -- people love pretty pictures of fake pokemon.
So we try to create an environment that encourages talented artists to participate in CAP. That's the main reason I made the CAP gallery -- I didn't like seeing good artists that didn't win first place feeling like their artwork "lost" and would get no further attention. By showcasing the top art for every CAP, we encourage artists to participate, even if they have doubts if they can win.
I do not consider artwork to be the most important aspect of CAP, but it's certainly near the top of the list, by simple virtue of its drawing power (no pun intended). But art has its downsides too. Artists are whiny. Cheating is rampant in art threads and polls. Moderating art threads is a constant nightmare. And art threads attract more annoying fanboys than you can shake a stick at. But good art is still well worth all the trouble.
Let me take this opportunity to mention that we have an ART COMPETITION in CAP, not a DESIGN COMPETITION. Part of me really wishes CAP art could be about truly good designs, rather than pretty pictures -- but the practical reality of CAP is that "good design skill" is ambiguous to the point of being worthless. I find it very frustrating when wannabe artists spam up the art threads on the misguided perception that they are "good designers that simply can't draw very well". That's horseshit, and I place very little value on their "contribution" to the CAP project. Everyone has opinions on art, and everyone can write down an idea that they think would make for an amazing pokemon design. You can call that "design skill" all you want, but it's nothing special at all. People that have trained themselves to draw well or sprite well have developed a distinctly identifiable skill, and those are the people that we want to encourage to participate on the CAP project. Everyone else are just commenters and voters, and nothing more. So while the ideal of CAP wanting good designs is noble, the fact is that we really just want good skilled artists to participate in CAP.
In the past we have had people who claimed to be "good designers" ask if they can commission professional artists to draw their designs for the designer to enter in CAP competitions. While this might get some really great looking art in the CAP poll, I refuse to allow professional commissions because I think it would discourage active CAP artists that regularly participate in the community. We want CAP to be a place where talented individuals participate with others; not a place where no-talent hacks with money pay some professional hired gun to win a contest for them.
So yeah, great art is a boon to the CAP project and great artists should always get somewhat special treatment around here.
Appearances matter
(aka. Step outside the bubble)
The CAP project has been around a long time, and we have developed many internal traditions, rules, lingo, history, and culture. I call it the "CAP Bubble" because many people that get immersed in CAP lose perspective on how things look to the normal competitive pokemon playing public. We sometimes make decisions that seem perfectly normal to CAP, but appear to be stupid, broken, or fanboyish to the average outsider. If this gets out of control, it can actually hurt project participation or operations. Sometimes when I see us about to make a bad decision like that I will say, "That could cause PR problems for us." (referring to Public Relations, not Policy Review) CAP project leaders need to step outside the bubble and be sure to manage how things appear. In business jargon, the term "optics" is used to refer to "how things appear". In CAP, we always need to manage the optics of our project and pokemon.
We need to respect common assumptions about the game of Pokemon, regardless of whether such assumptions are valid in terms of the CAP project or in light of past CAP experience. For example, in early DP CAP we seriously considered giving Stratagem a speed higher than 130. Whether 130+ speed was appropriate for that pokemon or not was less of a concern than the general appearance that 130+ speed would give to the public. At that time, the only pokemon with more than 130 speed were ubers or very specialized pokemon, most of which could not really be used in OU for other reasons. For all intents and purposes, 130 was the effective speed ceiling for a "normal pokemon". If CAP gave a pokemon 140 speed, for example, it would be instantly labeled a "stupid fanboy pokemon" by casual observers, just because of the ridiculously high speed. It really didn't matter if learned students of the game would conclude upon further analysis that our pokemon was fine with that higher speed and it was perfectly balanced in DP OU. The CAP project didn't need a lot of negative press for violating a commonly accepted belief, just to allow us to play with a speed number never seen before on a normal OU pokemon. It just wasn't worth the PR trouble.
CAP participants and voters tend to love new things, and therefore we tend to do things in CAP that have never been done before. That's great in many cases. It creates excitement. It makes discussions fresh and interesting. But when we go too far with it, we damage our credibility to outsiders. If anyone thinks, "I don't care what outsiders think. We can do whatever we want here on the CAP project!" -- then you just "don't get it". You have spent too much time inside the CAP bubble and have forgotten the way normal competitive pokemon is played and how players think.
While I'm mentioning appearances, I'd like to remind everyone of something very obvious that we sometimes forget to acknowledge when discussing the CAP project "in public" (ie. not in the CAP forum, #cap channel, etc):
CAP POKEMON ARE NOT REAL POKEMON.
I wince when I am chatting in a Smogon channel talking about competitive pokemon and some CAP diehard brings up a CAP pokemon and inserts it into the conversation without any special segue or explanation. It's terribly awkward when this happens. Usually the conversation just dies immediately. Or even worse, a few other CAP diehards chime in and everyone else shuts up as the CAP guys go on and on with their conversation about pokemon that don't really exist, that the rest of the world knows nothing about, and most people couldn't care less about. See the problem with this?
This was exactly the problem that first jeopardized the CAP project in the very beginning with Smogon. CAP members went and posted CAP teams in the general Smogon RMT forum, and honestly expected badged team raters to rate the teams. The Smogon team raters got offended, because they considered it to be the exact same as someone posting a Digimon team in the forum and asking Pokemon team raters to comment. They responded, "Get the fuck out of our forum, you idiot fanboys, and take your retarded fake characters with you! We play a game called Pokemon here, in case you didn't know." It almost got the CAP project killed.
We've come a long way since then, and we don't have anything to fear from outsiders really. But the project still depends on new blood to join the project on a regular basis. It's hard to attract new talent if we have created a terrible public perception to outsiders. In the CAP forum, we tend to get so immersed in our project that we lose sight of how things look to everyone else. Always keep it in the back of your mind when making decisions on CAP pokemon, and keep it in mind when discussing the project publicly.
Be willing to change
This principle is about the policies of Create-A-Pokemon project, and a desire to encourage the project to evolve. One of the first things I did when I formed the CAP forum was I enacted an open Policy Review process by which we as a community could question CAP policies and try to improve the way we operate. Even though I was clearly the guy in charge, I didn't want people to think they couldn't propose changes to the project. I'm generally very open to explaining my reasons for my beliefs, and I'm willing to defend policies I advocate. I wanted everyone on the CAP project to adopt a mentality where we constantly evaluate our project and force ourselves to ask the question, "How can we improve the project?" Groups of people tend to become slaves to tradition, and stagnation develops. So I wanted to make constant evaluation and change a core tradition of the CAP project. I wanted to turn a weakness into a strength.
By instituting traditions that encourage group evaluation of policy, we ensure that leadership never assumes they are infallible. Regular change also makes the project not fear failure. Sometimes we enact policies knowing full well that they don't fully solve the problem, but the proposed change is a step towards solving the problem. That is a very healthy mindset for businesses, and I think it is healthy for our CAP project as well.
But don't change things just for the hell of it. Sometimes people get bored with the CAP project and they want to "spice things up". Be careful about these kinds of suggestions. Often these things are distractions from the core mission of the CAP project, and they can cause more harm than good. If a policy change is suggested, always ask yourself, "What problem does this solve?" I have found that many policy suggestions from well-intentioned CAP participants don't actually solve any real problem. Usually the underlying problem is some form of "I'm bored." Well, that's YOUR problem, not OUR problem.
The main reason for an ever-evolving project is constant IMPROVEMENT -- not constant EXPANSION. Like it or not, there's only so much territory Create-A-Pokemon can cover. CAP will never be an all-encompassing general pokemon community. CAP is a community focused on a certain niche. I'm not saying we should never expand, and I've been pleasantly surprised at some of the interesting offshoots that have spawned from the CAP project. But our mode of operations is to experiment with new competitive pokemon concepts. That's our bread-and-butter. Always be open to new ideas that allow CAP to improve at executing our core mission.
It's about the project, not the pokemon
I'll end with this one because it is, BY FAR, the most important operational principle in CAP. If you ignore everything else, please think long and hard about this one. If you don't understand and accept this principle, it is very unlikely that you will ever be able to help lead this project in a meaningful way. I described this in our mission statement as "It's about the journey, not the destination." I beat this drum at every opportunity, because for some reason it is incredibly hard for people to keep at the forefront of their thinking when leading the community.
Don't worry about the pokemon we make; worry about the way we make pokemon. Don't focus on the winner of a poll; focus on the quality of the discussions that led up to the poll. Encourage everyone to give their best effort; don't obsess over making the best pokemon. Don't get so concerned about how powerful a CAP pokemon is in battles during the week we playtest it; be concerned about whether we had an interesting and engaging project for the two months that we spent building it! Create-A-Pokemon is more about "creating" than it is about "pokemon". CAP projects don't get "ruined" by choosing a bad stat spread or giving it a bad movepool -- CAP projects get ruined by having boring discussions or discussions that wander all over the place and no can figure out what the hell is being talked about for 8 weeks straight.
CAP participants have a tendency to be very myopic and selfish during a project. Individual participants do not care if they are working well with the community and encouraging robust discussions involving as many people as possible. When the average CAP participant makes a post, they don't give a shit about anyone else. They have an opinion as to what is the "best decision" for a given step, or they might even have a submission of their own that they want to win. Either way, they aren't thinking about the community for any reason other than ensuring that their option wins the next poll.
When a CAP member gets to a point where they can actually influence other votes, the selfish motive gets even stronger. These members begin to build long-term visions of the kind of pokemon they want by the end of the process and they argue vocally to try and make the community go in the direction they want. When the community doesn't go down their preferred course, they pout and complain. Some people throw a selfish tantrum and ragequit the project. Others might adopt a "sour grapes" mentality and try to counter-campaign against options that beat them in earlier polls. Some people outright cheat and manipulate polls to try and ensure that their personal favorite wins.
It's amazing the lengths people will go to in order to try and get what they personally want out of a given CAP project. But if you really think about it, it's pretty silly to do that. If you really want to make a pokemon according to your own personal desires -- then just fucking do that! Go do it on your own! You don't need to be part of CAP to make your own personal pokemon! I marvel at why some people are so obsessed with "getting their way" when it comes to making community decisions about our little fakemons. I personally enjoy participating in interesting discussions, and learning about competitive pokemon in the process. I definitely have favored options, and I will try to argue convincingly for them. But I accept that this is a community process, and I can only control my opinion and my participation. As such, I don't waste much time obsessing over outcomes. It's pointless and selfish to do so. But make no mistake about it -- that's exactly what most CAP members do every time. They obsess on results and not on participation.
Don't fall into that trap. As a CAP leader, you need to raise your sights higher. Rise above your petty personal favorites and look at the bigger picture. Help make a great project. Help inspire intriguing discussions. Encourage us to make tough choices and evaluate difficult decisions. Praise good arguments, even if the argument is for something that is not your favorite option. Create a positive environment that attracts intelligent and talented people to participate. That's the best way to recruit people that will be future leaders and decision influencers on the project, and ensures Create-A-Pokemon is a healthy, self-sustaining, community project.
<The End>
