Implemented Fixing Smogon Tour times

[Luigi]

Hello, I'm Luigi, former Smogon Tour host and winner, and current big fan of the tournament. Let's talk about Smogon Tour season 36 times.

History:

Starting in Season 33, there have been several measures implemented by the TD's to make it easier for players from the eastern hemisphere, specifically in Asia and Oceania to participate in Smogon Tour, due to the original times, established during season 14 (6 PM on Friday, 4 PM on Saturday and 2 PM on Sunday, all EST) being deemed to be inconvenient times for the players from this region, and an idea that there had been substantial growth in those playerbases, allowing their sign-ups to offset the loss of American and European sign-ups.

The first attempt to fix this was to change the Friday time to 6 AM EST on Saturdays (Season 33), which was abandoned halfway through the season, then followed by a change to 9 AM EST on Saturday (Season 34) and finally to a bizarre format with 4 tours (Season 35).

The problem:

These 3 seasons had the lowest signup numbers ever. I won't write at length about this because the numbers tell the whole story. Far fewer people play Smogon Tour with these times, individuals Tours are substantially smaller, the tournament suffers. The projected boom of Asian and Oceanian players simply never happened, or there weren't enough of them to make up for the decrease in American and European signups.

Additionally, as shown by Amaranth here, this didn't even accomplish its stated goal of improving Smogon Tour for Asian and Oceanic players in any perceptible capacity. The same number of them made playoffs, roughly the same number of them played at all, and in exchange for that we got substantially fewer players overall.

I understand that the implementation of the 6 AM time for season 33 was cut short, and the time was not ideal to begin with, but both seasons 34 and especially 35 were incredibly generous for the players of those regions, and they still resulted in far fewer sign-ups, and a worse tournament for everyone else. There is simply no getting around the fact that there aren't that many players living in those Timezones.

Conclusion:

In both of the previous tour policy threads discussing this issue, which were all linked here, there were posts by TD's calling this an experiment. After 3 seasons of this we can certainly conclude that this experiment was an abject failure. The sheer demographics of Smogon makes it impossible to cater to the players of those regions without massive drawbacks to the Tour. It sucks for people from those regions, but that's the reality of the situation. One of the Smogon Tours was already removed to make room for a format that works at any timezone, let's stop sabotaging the one live tournament left on the site to cater to a miniscule population at the expense of everyone else.

Season 36 starts a few months from now, let's fix this before then. Bring back the times as they were in Season 32.

I mean, come on.

 

[Star]

just posting personal opinion.

I brought up the 4 tour idea in the last thread as an experiment and ended the post with "If it works, then great and if it doesn't, then we have a datapoint for moving back towards a 3 tour system." I think it's pretty safe to say we ended up in the latter case and it's time to go back to a 3 tour system.

As for times in a 3 tour system, the numbers do in fact support everything Luigi outlined and expanding on this feels kind of pointless so I'm in favor of moving back towards the original times as they were in ST32.

 

[SoulWind]

Good idea, we should also delete Smogon Masters and bring back the second stour.

 

[Finchinator]

We should go back to 6pm Friday, 4pm Saturday, and 2pm Sunday. It was easily the most popular Smogon Tour format; I imagine it will help with numbers moving forward.

Other ideas had merits, but Smogon Masters provides an option that is friendly to every timezone and schedule without much hassle. This gave us greater balance for SS/SM in the circuit. In addition, OST, OLT, and many other tours give flexible options for CG OU.

In short: it’s best to adopt the historically best format for this tournament when one of the biggest “issues” it had is at least partially accounted for.

 

[Perry]

I have been a huge supporter of changes to Smogon Tour as long as they proved efficient and improved the tour, but it is clear to me that these changes (all of them, to be honest) did not reach the outcome we desired.

I agree with Luigi and the others, revert back to the original times and accept that the community is growing older and therefore we need to accept that Smogon Tour's decline is generational and due to the nature of there being two tournaments more than anything, to be honest.

While I am expecting a boost in demand for the tournament for this year (as it's been almost a year since the last), I would still ask TDs to monitor the host / players signups well and, if things are still dire, lead more thoughtful discussions about this tournament after its conclusion.

 

[w_r]

Hello former TD Luigi, you make some excellent points but the conclusion leaves a lot to be desired.



Let me offer you a different perspective, smogon tour after it’s inception back in 2006 has largely been successful in catering to the playerbase and believed to be doing well till in recent times starting in Season 33 the TD team acknowledged the significant growth and a shift from an American centric playerbase to more of an inclusive competitive environment involving The Asian and Oceanic players. This started with the herculean task of finding a time slot that caters to all of GMT +8 / GMT +11/ GMT +5.5 etc which as you mentioned didn’t achieve the desired result. With that out of the way let’s move on to the difficult topic which is to devise an active solution that takes into account the future and pushes toward the growth and competitiveness of the website.



As all things we have fond memories of smogon tour being a novel idea incorporating a unique format (live tour) which over the years consisted off OU/UU/Ubers circulating between the cg ou along with the past two generations. We had some iconic formats over the years but as we all know its not 2006 anymore and we’re moving into Feb 2024 as I’m typing this and with it we need to adapt our tours with the growing playerbase. Anyone remember the iconic smogon frontier (started in 2007 with the last edition being in 2013) it was shelved after people realized it wasn’t a practical format anymore with the growing number of participants and time constraints. The same seems to apply for smogon tour now which looks to join Mt Pyre but it doesn’t have to be the case with a minor change in format, we can still save this iconic tour.


Proposed solution or a middle ground to avert this crisis

• Abandon the live tour idea completely. It simply isn’t practical to entertain this format anymore while promoting competitiveness and inclusivity.
• Smogon masters something which was brought to replace the failed smogon tour format has proved to be a success in its very first edition. With the data clearly at hand it seems to be the most logical direction and practical step to take which solves the numbers problem along with competitive concerns. If someone wants to run the numbers for the playoffs stage for smogon masters they'll find a culturally rich competition.
• The solution should be something that aims to solve a problem not backtrack to something we already know doesn’t work for a large chunk of the playerbase. A trip down the memory lane and something to learn from Mt. Pyre for the current TD team.
• If this isn’t acceptable, I’d like to divert attention to the raw numbers brought up in the OP by Luigi, what is it trying to signify? Were the 16 competitors / winner who qualified through the seasons 33-35 less deserving in any way? Was there a significant drop in quality? Is this a debate on quantity over quality? Did you track player retention over the weeks or were the numbers boosted by players joining one random tour and disappearing altogether? How do you quantify these numbers? Anyway, looking forward to the reply!

 

[Finchinator]

• Abandon the live tour idea completely. It simply isn’t practical to entertain this format anymore while promoting competitiveness and inclusivity.

Smogon Tour is one of the best tournaments ever with a rich history and hundreds of motivated participants. Abandoning Smogon Tour would be the biggest mistake possible; the live tournament qualifiers feeding into the top 16 playoffs should be maintained (and returned back to the original format as alluded to in the above posts).

Yes, it is not fair to everyone everywhere due to live tournaments conflicting with specific timezones and schedules, but not everything is going to be perfectly fair always. I want things to be as fair as humanly possible and that is a big part of why I created Smogon Masters -- I felt bad about ORAS and the uneveness of live tournaments dominating SS/SM's individual official circuit, but things are never going to be perfect and we should not destroy a longstanding institution because of it.

We should just revert back the failed format changes to the old format and restore what worked for many people prior, not kill Smogon Tour.

 

[pj]

As someone who is big fan of smogtours and would like to play in upcoming edition I just hope atleast one of time slot is dedicated to Asia/pacific region, which maybe including changing one of the time slot or adding one more tour as whatever feels convenient. Incase not this tours bring back Smogtours 2 and give favourable timing there.(don't remove masters tho it's epic tour)

 

[freezai]

its true that a 3rd american/eu slot will get more participants than 1 slot for asia-pacific regions, there are simply more people. What it comes down to is what our priorities are:

Option 1: 3rd Slot for Americans/EU: Bigger tournament sizes, in turn leads to a "better" tour. Greatest good for greatest number of people
Option 2: One slot for Asia-Pacific : Diversity and Inclusion of a region historically locked out of Smogtour because of their timezone. Makes sure that everyone has a chance

Neither option is strictly worse than the other, it's about what we value as a community. I know that when I lived in Asia, smogtour was utterly meaningless to me because I could never realistically compete in it

 

[Amaranth]

It's all well and good claiming that different times will allow Asia-Pacific players to participate, but it didn't. We literally just tried this. I went out of my way to speak to some Chinese players to try and drum up interest, but still no discernible change in overall participation from those regions was observed.

We already tried fighting this battle and resoundingly lost. We tried these Asia-friendly theories and they simply did not work. I really wish they did, but they didn't, so what can you do?

I think it's not the end of the world if a small cut of our playerbase has to sacrifice ST because it simply does not fit their schedule. It sucks, and I spent many hours fighting it because it sucks, but all those attempt didn't work - I think it's time to accept it.
People already sacrifice all kinds of tournaments every year because they don't quite fit their life circumstances. People don't try for Classic because life gets busy and it's a lot, people skip one of the three yearly team tours to prevent burnout, etc. I think if players from APAC want to spend every waking hour playing Pokemon to win an official tournament, they already have tons of opportunities on the site for that. I don't think inaccessibility to ST changes that. It would be good if they had the option, but if they can't due to format constraints it's not a must-fix issue, especially since the introduction of Masters and the removal of the second yearly ST. It's a bit lame for them, but the Official circuit is rich with opportunities, and everyone has to deal with lame factors that keep you from partaking in the tournaments you like from time to time.

From the person who individually put the most on the line trying to make ST work for APAC: please give it up (or come up with new arguments if you want to keep fueling this fight, the old ones don't work). 6/4/2 is the only realistic way forward in my view at the moment.

 

[HANTSUKI]

Any chance of going back to old format but swapping saturday and sunday times? Seems easier to stay up until almost morning in a saturday -> sunday night than sunday -> monday for Asians.

(and asking because swapping would fit my schedule better since I'm free earlier on saturday than on sunday)

 

[pulsar512b]

Any chance of going back to old format but swapping saturday and sunday times? Seems easier to stay up until almost morning in a saturday -> sunday night than sunday -> monday for Asians.

(and asking because swapping would fit my schedule better since I'm free earlier on saturday than on sunday)

this would also (in theory) make it easier for Eastern Europe - probably easier to stay up late on Saturday night than Sunday night

 

[pj]

Last year smogtours were still fine, top 16 of that tours are almost similar people who be qualifying anyway so I don't see how stours were such a failure you were always gonna get few signs up in one of smogtours if you have 4 tours and people can only join 2 incase you guys require more sign ups in all the tours just change that people can join 3 tours instead, then there will be increase in sign ups for every tour i guess. To pin on overall less sign up fell only on time change feels unfair, the Americans and Europeon had chance to play in other 3 or 2 favourable time tours to play if more user wanted to join ,they could have played easily in those times.

Plus there is always possibility that next tours might have more partipants from Asia/ocn, I already see big chunk of guys from India competing in almost every team tour in lower tier even winning puwc (Piyush carried btw) who knows maybe this time they might be joining smogtours. Another thing only people for whom these time change won't be affecting a bit(infact makes it more convenient for them) are supporting this change is funny.

Still feel like having one time tour for asia/ocn is not an end of the smogtours just don't play those small tours if your concern about too Low sign ups not enough points for you to qualify and let guys play those tour for whom it's convenient to play instead overall it's just a good pipeline to have new players come through.

 

[Eeveeto]

Any chance of going back to old format but swapping saturday and sunday times? Seems easier to stay up until almost morning in a saturday -> sunday night than sunday -> monday for Asians.

(and asking because swapping would fit my schedule better since I'm free earlier on saturday than on sunday)

From Europe (and someone who goes to bed quite early) perspective I would swap Friday with Sunday. Friday at 00:00 is way too late even with Saturday being the next day and with only 2 tours being the maximum you can play anyway, losing the one with the worst timetable is preferable. Worst timetable being thrown at Sunday (Monday beginning the working day right after it, so you want to go to sleep early) is optimal for Europe therefore. Of course, what is good for Europe, often isn,t good for America and Asia, so its understandable if this idea is not followed.

 

[w_r]

the live tournament qualifiers feeding into the top 16 playoffs should be maintained (and returned back to the original format as alluded to in the above posts).

I read your post above, must agree with you there the smogon tour pink would suit your scroller and the same goes for anyone really (hop onto earthworm / golden sun’s page, both are from the regions we’re trying to omit from the tour).

Wait almost forgot you disagree with me, right? Well let’s try to find out, why?

Before we do that let’s establish some facts.

• In your own words, as someone who was actively involved with the Smogon Masters tournament from the beginning to the end you laid out the fact that the masters tournament passed with flying colors in it’s very first edition effectively solving the problems plaguing the failed smogon tour qualification format and therefor replacing it permanently.
• Putting aside Luigi’s heavily mispresented numbers (here). We can all agree that smogon tour is dying and has been the case for some years even with the all-American time slots and isn’t a new trend that popped up with Asian / Oceanic friendly times. (TD Response)
• The crux of the problem hasn’t been with the timings all along. We rarely question things that have remained the same since a long time. It’s the smogon tour qualification format as a whole that needs to change. Amaranth

Moving on to some important WHY’S and WHY NOT’S

Let’s explore why smogon tour was a beloved tour back in 2007?

• Back in the day replays were non-existent meaning if you wanted to know what happened in the finals / any given series either you had to read the logs in text format or catch the games live as they take place. There were no replays as we know them today.
• This made smogon tour live tours qualification format unique which meant you get to watch your favorite players live and take part in the action.
• This is not relevant in 2024 with replays being mandatory to claim your win starting from round 2 of any official trophy tournament. Making live tours lose their unique identity /effectiveness.

Why do we need to over work our hosts?

• This is the paradox presented to the live tour format, the bigger they get (in signup numbers) the more undesirable they become. Barring the points for the final three rounds seemingly an infinite number of people can earn points / join… but no live tours have a cap on the number of participants ranging from 256-192-128-96-64-48. This means anything beyond these numbers results in being randomly thrown out from tour despite signing up.
• This is a blessing in disguise for the hosts though, managing large numbers in a live tour is something not many wishes to do as charity but this sucks for the player who not only rushes to sign up at a particular window of time putting aside their irl but unfortunately find themselves sitting out of the tour of no fault of their own.
• I might as well point out that it’s not ethical to yell at our live tour hosts demanding they release a new round / bolded someone wrong / taking too long etc. They’re doing this free of charge learn to appreciate it, some of them are doing it for the first time. The burden of live tours on hosts causes irregularities in duration of the tour ranging from anywhere between three hours to four and a half hours including signups. This is again not healthy for the casual player and not to mention considering the odd times subjected to some people at a geographical disadvantage. Imagine waking up at 1:30 am and finding yourself in a round robin finals @ 6:00 am with no sleep.
• Another irregularity I found negatively influencing the tour was the use of DST (Daylight Savings Time) for a global tour instead of something uniform like GMT. It is in the best interests to standardize the timings to ensure max participant turnout.
• Keeping these irregularities in mind it would make the hosts job easier by moving from a live tour format to something like the master’s qualification format allowing them to update the threads at their own convenience.

Why should we keep the live tour qualification?

• Despite the flaws I mentioned earlier there are some clear merits in a live tour qualification format. These tours tests different skills than all other tournaments, stamina playing consecutive sets and so on. It’s just a different experience and way of playing pokémon.
• Live tours allow anyone even alts to participate freely. Besides OLT this is the only other tour where you can signup and directly influence the outcome of the tour even if you are permanently banned from the website without interference from the mods as evidenced by here, here, here, here, here, here. These are only the instances when they won just think of how many more runs were ruined with undetected alts that didn’t win the tour. This adds a layer of difficulty to these already strenuous and time-consuming live tours.
• Luigi’s data may be flawed by taking total amount of signups across all the live tours and not accounting for R1 byes, act wins, a single alt signing up multiple times instead we’ll be looking at the sheets to get an actual idea of the quality of these tours and determine more realistic numbers across seasons 24-28, we’ll be omitting covid season to avoid fluctuations and end the myth that all American timings were a better alternative.
• The numbers are shockingly low for a trophy tour that is considered beloved by many….by filtering the sheets from season 24, season 25, season 26, season 27, season 28 with people with atleast five points in total across the live tour weeks as minimum we reach the numbers
• season 24 – 198 participants
• season 25 – 263 participants
• season 26 – 254 participants
• season 27 – 245 participants
• season 28 – 200 participants
• These numbers are lower than the 256 cap live tours if you increase the filter to ten points the numbers are even more depressing. The silver lining is that these are low effort high reward tours, if you can commit the time around eight hours per weekend show up early and have the geographical advantage and somewhat skilled in these three tiers you have a higher chance to qualify for playoffs. The unique appeal of cutting a chunk of the player base who wish to participate either due to geographical disadvantages or people being cut through live tour caps ranging from 256-192-128-96-64-48 make the players who dedicate a good amount of time and effort to the game to succeed. Not everyone can afford to participate in these high demand tours which asks atleast 8 hours per weekend to qualify.

How do we ensure max participation / uniform numbers while retaining competitors over the long qualification period?

• It is clear as day that moving away from a live tour qualification phase to a Swiss qualification format serves the utilitarian approach, greater good for greater number of people. Something which I realized most people seem to be arguing for in the thread perhaps unknowingly.
• Both smogon tour and smogon masters have one thing in common the duration of the tour in both cases seem to be approximately 14 weeks or 100 days.
• Smogon masters features the fool proof Swiss format which ensures your qualification into playoffs won’t be hindered by alts of perma banned users / one bad day of rng and ensures a higher quality in the playoffs stage. It isn’t bogged down by the shenanigans presented by the live tours either.
• If you’re gonna complain about numbers with the knowledge that live tours come with its own challenges with a cap in number of participants per tour / geographical inaccessibility / requirement of large hours of commitment per week during qualification phase for both player & host. It would be a direct contradiction for people who wish to participate but are denied the opportunity due to being at a geographical disadvantage despite being a game played over the internet.
• Moving from a live tour to a Swiss format would be a huge upgrade to the overall competition and infinitely better than the wonky live tours ensuring smooth qualification for those who deserve it.
• Lastly there is the option of doing nothing, the quality of the competition seems to be intact even with the timings from season 35 and provides a decent chance for anyone from Oceania / Asia to qualify if they wish to do so as evidenced by the quality of playoffs.

 

[Finchinator]

I read your post above, must agree with you there the smogon tour pink would suit your scroller and the same goes for anyone really (hop onto earthworm / golden sun’s page, both are from the regions we’re trying to omit from the tour).

Wait almost forgot you disagree with me, right? Well let’s try to find out, why?

Does it make you feel better poking fun at me not having won Smogon Tour? If so, congrats I guess.

Let’s explore why smogon tour was a beloved tour back in 2007?

• Back in the day replays were non-existent meaning if you wanted to know what happened in the finals / any given series either you had to read the logs in text format or catch the games live as they take place. There were no replays as we know them today.
• This made smogon tour live tours qualification format unique which meant you get to watch your favorite players live and take part in the action.
• This is not relevant in 2024 with replays being mandatory to claim your win starting from round 2 of any official trophy tournament. Making live tours lose their unique identity /effectiveness.

You miss the mark here.

Smogon Tour is an awesome live experience regardless of replays. It is just a unique, interactive experience where many people are able to compete and spectate some of the best grinding it out week-by-week; nothing really matches it in terms of excitement. This is true from back when I started during the PO days all the way up until 2024. It is plenty of specific identity and nothing else replicates it.

Putting aside Luigi’s heavily mispresented numbers (here). We can all agree that smogon tour is dying and has been the case for some years even with the all-American time slots and isn’t a new trend that popped up with Asian / Oceanic friendly times. (TD Response)

I disagree with this a bit; Smogon Tour was not dying when it had the optimal times and restoring the times from Season 32 would easily help the tournament. I do agree Smogon Tour was falling off when it had worse times because the target demographics did not produce enough numbers to compensate; a risk was taken and it did not pay off.

I also disagree with your claim that Luigi misinterprited the numbers. The OP from Luigi and Star's post after the OP both felt very appropriate to me.

The numbers are shockingly low for a trophy tour that is considered beloved by many….by filtering the sheets from season 24, season 25, season 26, season 27, season 28 with people with atleast five points in total across the live tour weeks as minimum we reach the numbers

For starters, this is a huge misunderstanding of Smogon Tour to begin with. Not everyone joins because they want to make playoffs or a deep run. One of the biggest things here is people just joining a select week or a couple of select tournaments because they have time and it is fun; casual entries are the lifeblood of the tournament. Using this as a metric is just playing narrativeball.

• season 24 – 198 participants
• season 25 – 263 participants
• season 26 – 254 participants
• season 27 – 245 participants
• season 28 – 200 participants

It also isn't even playing effective narrative ball; you actually proved Smogon Tour was relatively popular.

I am not sure why you arbitrarily picked "at least five points in total", but going with the trend: Grand Slam had 174 participants with at least 5 points while Classic had 157 (both in 2023). In 2019 (which you used for Smogon Tour because it was prior to COVID for some reason), Grand Slam had 225 and Classic had 143. Classic is well below Smogon Tour. Grand Slam is currently below and used to be on par.

The point? Smogon Tour was not dying with good times. It was thriving if anything. The premise is sadly never going to cater to everyone equally, but no tournament is ever going to be perfect. Masters surely wasn't and people have gripes about Slam, Classic, etc. as well.

TL;DR: Do not cancel Smogon Tour. Maintain the live tournament structure. Adopt the old times from Season 32 as the OP suggests. The numerical argument of the post above actually helped prove Smogon Tour's old popularity.

 

[Perry]

I'd like to point that the excerpt above mentions problems related to gathering data for Smogon Tour when comparing it to Slam or Classic -- and not the tournament itself. Smogon Tour is my favorite tournament and to see it canceled would be a huge blow to Smogon's tournaments history and community.

 

[Eeveeto]

There are like 6 or 7 trophy tours that are not live tours. Smogon Tour is the only one. Don't remove the main feature of the tour, there are enough tours to play without it.

 

[w_r]

Does it make you feel better poking fun at me not having won Smogon Tour? If so, congrats I guess.

Maybe try not to make it about yourself, I was pointing out you made a double post saying the exact same thing above when you quoted my post (spiderman meme) . It wasn't my intention to upset you rather imply everyone should have an equal opportunity to win the tour. Maybe that was a bit too much anyway I hope you understand the point I was trying to make.

I disagree with this a bit; Smogon Tour was not dying when it had the optimal times

Feel free to dispute my observation with actual data. I explained why the raw numbers were not representative of the actual competitiveness of the tour in my post. If you're going to add all the people who had 0 points / 1 or 2 points but didn't join any other live tour. Does it somehow make it better or are the numbers inflated? It doesn't have to be 5 pts (I chose it because it suggests you made a decent run round 5 elimination) feel free to contradict me by quoting some kind of actual data.

Not everyone joins because they want to make playoffs or a deep run. One of the biggest things here is people just joining a select week or a couple of select tournaments because they have time and it is fun

So numbers aren't really a concern now? By that logic the size of the tour shouldn't matter as long as there are 50 dedicated participants who are fighting for playoffs.

It also isn't even playing effective narrative ball; you actually proved Smogon Tour was relatively popular.

This actually isn't super obvious chances are you'll contradict yourself if you run the numbers with the 5 point threshold or any number you choose. I'd like to see if the change in timings were actually worse off like you suggest it to be.

I feel like you did not actually read my post maybe I'm wrong. Anyway it's a long post that tries to understand both viewpoints. I concluded by suggesting a change in qualification format or keeping the timings as they are.

 

[Star]

After the discussions above, we've arrived at the decision to lock in the following:

1. Smogon Tour will go back to a 3 tour (join 2) format
2. The Saturday and Sunday tours will be at 4pm and 2pm eastern time (GMT -4 for the duration of the tour) respectively
3. The Friday tour will be somewhere in the 6-10pm range GMT -4. This is the part we'll leave open to further discussion before locking in a time.

We've arrived at this decision for a few reasons. Primarily it's just the raw numbers. We've experimented with various approaches over the past few seasons to make the tour more accessible to Asia/Oceania and it's definitively led to an overall drop in signups and smaller sized individual tours. We haven't seen real growth from this playerbase either, with the same number making playoffs and no signficant change in overall participation.

While it is obviously ideal for tournaments to be easily accessible for everybody while maintaining their competitive quality, it's proven to be difficult with the inherent nature of live tours. We will be (at least mostly) going back to the schedule with a proven track record to hopefully rectify the issues from the last few seasons. Cutting Smogon Tour or the live-element isn't going to be considered. Being live is Smogon Tour's defining feature and it's obviously been one of the most widely popular tournaments in this site's history.

As for not locking in the Friday time, we believe there is at least some wiggle room there to potentially cater to a wider audience while not affecting overall signups. A later time in the 6-10pm range would still be accessible to US East and Brazil (which is mostly one hour ahead) and more doable for US West/US Midwest/Asia/Oceania. The main drawback would be losing the crowd of Europeans that sign up for the midnight time (unironically a notable population). We are open to hearing people's opinions on what time they think would be best in this range before locking in a final decision.

 

[Luigi]

This is what the times look like:

All of them are good for US East, but they're better earlier. They're all fine for West, but better later. Only 6 PM is "good" for Europe (we know it's not good, but we also know Europeans do show up in numbers for old Friday tours at midnight). None of these times are accessible to Indians, except the 10 PM one, which is still pretty bad. All of them look fine for Australians (?), with the 10 PM being best.

If you want the most numbers, you just do 6 PM like I outlined in the OP, since even a time fully catered to people in the +5 and up timezones won't produce many players, while we know 6 PM works. If you feel there is a need to make a perfunctory gesture of trying to include everyone the 10 PM time is the least bad one. Anything else is trolling.

Obviously I think we should just do the 6 PM option and serve the most people.

edit: fixed DST

 

[Rewer]

Is there any chance the second stour could run alongside masters?

I personally think, and have always thought, that smogon tour is by far and away smogon's best tournament and I never thought the two trophies a year ever hurt any of the prestige it had, besides some yapping about worst stour winners or whatever. Some of my good memories in the site were from spectating live tour games with friends. I participate in this site for a decade and a half now and smogon tour has never gotten old.

Masters is pretty cool, but I think the playerbase could be surveyed about this. Personally, I missed the weekend live tours in the second semester. Why not just do both?

For the sake of staying on the times topic, it feels bad for south asia but 2, 4, 6 will definitely bring the most people in and it seems to make very little sense not to stick with it.

 

[ninjadog]

This is what the times look like:

All of them are good for US East, but they're better earlier. They're all fine for West, but better later. Only 6 PM is "good" for Europe (we know it's not good, but we also know Europeans do show up in numbers for old Friday tours at midnight). None of these times are accessible to Indians, except the 10 PM one, which is still pretty bad. All of them look fine for Australians (?), with the 10 PM being best.

If you want the most numbers, you just do 6 PM like I outlined in the OP, since even a time fully catered to people in the +5 and up timezones won't produce many players, while we know 6 PM works. If you feel there is a need to make a perfunctory gesture of trying to include everyone the 10 PM time is the least bad one. Anything else is trolling.

Obviously I think we should just do the 6 PM option and serve the most people.

This isn't accurate, by the time stour starts daylight savings has begun in the US (and ends in Aus like 2 weeks in) and so the times are 1/2 hours earlier than what you've listed in Australia, and an hour earlier for India.

I think it's absolutely ridiculous and speaks to how entitled some people are that they think having a trophy tour that can be basically impossible to play in based on where you live is a good idea, yes the majority of the player base is in Europe and the Americas but I fail to see how having a 4th tour that allows others to compete negatively impacts their experience in any way.

I also think it's a complete cop-out to blame the decrease in signups entirely on the times changing, personally I think a major reason for this is the shift in smogon's culture to where fewer people play tours just for fun rather than expecting a prize (eg. look at how every unofficial team tour has to have a custom avi to get players, and unofficial individuals being now non-existent), obviously stour has a trophy prize but people are less willing to dedicate hours of their time if they know they have no chance of qualifying or won't have time consistently to compete, it just isn't as big of a thing to join tours purely for fun anymore. I also think the community is a lot older than it once was so people have less spare time.

 

[Rewer]

This isn't accurate, by the time stour starts daylight savings has begun in the US (and ends in Aus like 2 weeks in) and so the times are 1/2 hours earlier than what you've listed in Australia, and an hour earlier for India.

I think it's absolutely ridiculous and speaks to how entitled some people are that they think having a trophy tour that can be basically impossible to play in based on where you live is a good idea, yes the majority of the player base is in Europe and the Americas but I fail to see how having a 4th tour that allows others to compete negatively impacts their experience in any way.

I also think it's a complete cop-out to blame the decrease in signups entirely on the times changing, personally I think a major reason for this is the shift in smogon's culture to where fewer people play tours just for fun rather than expecting a prize (eg. look at how every unofficial team tour has to have a custom avi to get players, and unofficial individuals being now non-existent), obviously stour has a trophy prize but people are less willing to dedicate hours of their time if they know they have no chance of qualifying or won't have time consistently to compete, it just isn't as big of a thing to join tours purely for fun anymore. I also think the community is a lot older than it once was so people have less spare time.

I believe most smogon users are from north america and most of these are in the east coast.

Sadly, it is proven that if this demographic cant play, the tour will be dead. I don't think that disagreeing with the existence of tours that end on round 5 reeks of any entitlement whatsoever. For a lot of people, that is justifiedly unacceptable.

I do agree that there's been a cultural shift of some sorts and it's not just the hours, back in SM era the tours often hit 200+. I remember hosting a 256 man smogon tour in my first ever tour hosted. Only one tour of last season broke 150 (week 1 sv ou #3) and most of them didnt even break 100, sometimes even in the saturday "good" hours. I suppose we will all bite our tongues if the 2pm 4pm 6pm system gets reintroduced and the numbers dont actually increase much but we will see.

Maybe a more spaced out distribution could work like 12pm 3pm 6pm? Not ideal but better than current times for sure... we can always accept stour is dead and keep the 9 am tours so nobody misses out, but for now we are coping and hoping the activity goes up.

 

[ninjadog]

I believe most smogon users are from north america and most of these are in the east coast.

Sadly, it is proven that if this demographic cant play, the tour will be dead. I don't think that disagreeing with the existence of tours that end on round 5 reeks of any entitlement whatsoever. For a lot of people, that is justifiedly unacceptable.

I do agree that there's been a cultural shift of some sorts and it's not just the hours, back in SM era the tours often hit 200+. I remember hosting a 256 man smogon tour in my first ever tour hosted. Only one tour of last season broke 150 (week 1 sv ou #3) and most of them didnt even break 100, sometimes even in the saturday "good" hours. I suppose we will all bite our tongues if the 2pm 4pm 6pm system gets reintroduced and the numbers dont actually increase much but we will see.

Maybe a more spaced out distribution could work like 12pm 3pm 6pm? Not ideal but better than current times for sure... we can always accept stour is dead and keep the 9 am tours so nobody misses out, but for now we are coping and hoping the activity goes up.

How is the existence of a 4th tour impacting their ability to play in the slightest?

Honestly it gives them increased opportunity to play because some of them may have non-standard schedules or prefer playing in the morning etc.

People complaining about the 4th tour being smaller than the others because it's 'easier to win' or whatever is also ridiculous to me, this is offset by the fact that 1) if it's smaller it'll give less points and 2) this is the only tour of the week a lot of the entrants can play, whereas the people who complain about it still have 3 times that suit them.