Growth and SPL

[Hogg]

Have we gone too long without a heated SPL format debate? I think we've gone too long without a heated SPL format debate.

Before I start, big big disclaimer here: this is all my personal opinion. It is not a sneak peek into the TD's 2020 plans, it is not something we've already decided on and it is not something the current TD team even all agrees with. If people are into the idea I'll probably personally push it, but I wanted to get some feedback about it first.

SPL is a great tour, and easily the team tour that gets the most hype year after year. But it's also a tour that constantly struggles with being pulled in two separate directions. On the one hand, is by definition meant to showcase the very best of the best and to represent the top talent Smogon has to offer. On the other hand, there is a constant push for representation and expansion. Even with our current 12-slot model, this SPL saw 161 players retained or purchased in auction. Add on the 20 managers/assmans and we're up to 181 people participating in the tour. While our tournament community has seen a lot of growth, we've leveled out a bit over the past couple of years, and I feel like the size of the tour is unsustainable over the long term if we want to maintain competitiveness. And meanwhile, there are constantly pushes to incorporate more tiers than we currently do, and we're looking at yet another generation of Pokemon being released in the very near future.

It's a hard needle to thread, but I have a proposal that I think could perhaps do the trick: split SPL into two tournaments. I haven't hammered out the details, but basically I picture two 10-slot SPLs in January and June/July, one that focused on old gens and one that focused on non-OU tiers. The granular details, what tiers we include or don't include, etc can be fiddled with, but the basic idea is that by splitting SPL into two tours, we'd have the ability to expand and to include official tiers that are not currently represented by SPL without making things less competitive.

There would be some fringe benefits, too. In addition to giving us a chance to add tiers that aren't currently represented, it would also provide a built in framework for future growth, and it would fix the awkwardness of having to run a different format on the years when a new game is released.

But wait, isn't this basically what Snake already does?

To some degree, yeah, but there are problems with Snake that we have been unable to properly resolve. First, there's the format. While I think SSD2's format was better than SSD1, it still leaves a lot to be desired. SPL has a tried and true format that has worked and worked well for ten years now, and has been adopted by I don't know how many subforums and outside communities. Second, Snake has serious identity issues. Some of these are branding problems (the snake theme is boring and got old about five minutes into SSD1, and the only reason it was selected is because it was less divisive than any of the other proposals), but some of these issues are baked into the format itself. There's no continuity from year to year, no real feeling of team identity. And the fact that the snake draft format itself means that managers have less control over the final outcome of their team makes it hard to build any lasting identity even if you kept the same management over multiple years. Snake has produced some good games, but frankly I've seen UUPLs and POCLs that managed to do a better job of producing teams I cared about and was invested in.

Couldn't we just take Snake and do weeks instead of pools?

Sure, we could take Snake and give it SPL's superior format. But while we're at it, why not give it SPL's superior auction and branding, too? The main reason people have opposed adopting some of SPL's formats is that then we'd just be creating lesser SPL. But why not just lean into it and split SPL into two tours?

So we'd just drop Snake entirely?

That would be the easiest solution, yeah. I wouldn't mind working to make it stick around in some quasi-official capacity, just because the idea of a snake draft IS neat even if the tour itself is flawed. But I think we'd probably remove it from the trophy circuit if we went in this direction.

Why not just increase the number of SPL slots?

Is that really a solution? Again, we had 181 people participating in SPL X. Upping things to 14 slots would mean we'd almost certainly break 200, and it wouldn't even come close to fixing the issue of representation. Plus, there are other problems with just mindlessly increasing slots. For one thing, look at the issue of substitutes and support slots. Accounting for roster changes or substitutes when you've literally got a dozen or more different tiers/gens to cover with just a couple of spots becomes significantly harder. And the games and players that get everyone really goddamned excited, the blunders and Lavoses and BKCs of the tour, become much less important, because anchoring one or two slots out of 14 or 16 or however many we have to go up to is just less significant and doesn't contribute as much to winning a week percentage-wise. As a result good teams would likely shift away from spending big on high end players toward broader distributions. Which, OK, maybe you think that's a feature rather than a bug, but I think it spells out a much less exciting tournament.

Even if you disagree with the fundamental idea that premier leagues produce more exciting games with smaller teams, there are STILL problems with just constantly expanding the number of SPL slots, and splitting things up into two tournaments would allow us to do way more for tier inclusion than adding a couple of slots on top of the existing format would.

How would the teams work? Would it be the same 10 teams we currently have, or would we have 10 totally new teams?

Honestly, I'm not sure. Like I said, this is an idea that still needs developing. There are some advantages to keeping the same teams (such as the fact that we already have a ton of professional-level artwork for those teams and the teams already have a lot of great branding and identity baked right into them), but doing so would lead to interesting questions like how retains would work, how much we want to push continuity when selecting managers, etc.

Would we still call both versions SPL?

I don't see why not. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Again, all of this is very much just a proposal at this point, and could do with a lot of refining. But I wanted to bring it up now to see if there was any support, and if this was an idea worth exploring.

 

[Texas Cloverleaf]

As one of the presumed advantages of this proposal is to artificially allow for more players/representation without compromising the scale of the tournament, how much of an impact do you foresee it being to have players participating in both legs of the tournament?

No manager would turn down a finchinator or a bkc who signed up for each, so it seems there's a reasonable concern that the playerbase selected from remains functionally the same, only with two tournaments and some subset of players playing twice.

 

[Aurella]

(writing this in a hurry)

Whatever you do, please don't name it SPL 2. You're telling us that adding 2 more SPL slots will weaken SPL's prestige and competitiveness (disagree). I'm curious though how doubling the player & manager base through adding a second SPL season isn't thought to cause more harm in the end to the brand. The glory of the winning SPL team should last the entire year, not half of it.

You mention that adding 2 SPL slots would take away the week-by-week meaning of goats like BKC or Lavos winning, but at least in the current format (where's there's only 1 SPL) they know that their wins count towards an exclusive annual trophy. Somehow it feels less meaningful to win if you know it only counts for SPL Season and not THE SPL.

Through Sister SPL you're also creating new identity issues -- like for example having two different rosters and team environments yet housed under the same team names. I feel like someone would rather be known for representing the team brand for that entire year instead of having to explain if they were a member of A or B part (that's even assuming you're drafted for the same team again). This gets even more awkward if you have a criss crossing of manager team pairs, never-minding the fact that you can expect this to happen just in the player pool itself.

"Why not just increase the number of SPL slots?

As a result good teams would likely shift away from spending big on high end players toward broader distributions. Which, OK, maybe you think that's a feature rather than a bug, but I think it spells out a much less exciting tournament."

Feel like this should/could be addressed through adjusting the credit system rather than creating SPL Seasonals

Overall I just feel like this other thread of yours feels like a much more worthy cause to pursue. You can't just slap a MAC Cosmetics label over wet n' wild and just expect things to turn out the same -_-

 

[Amaranth]

I'll explain my views in a somewhat roundabout way so bear with me. (TL;DR at the end)

About one year ago I strongly agreed with this post by Lavos, about the current tournament structures. I just saw all of this as trying to find solutions for problems that didn't exist. Lowtiers were represented in Snake+SPL, oldgens in SPL+WCoP, current gen in all three - no problems with that distribution, sure. Since then, I've changed my stance due to multiple factors.

Factor 1: Team tournaments getting too large causes a variety of issues for managers. I've gotten a chance to manage 12-man in RoAPL two years in a row now and that number already brings a ton of tricky decisions and problems, and it's a tour with about one hundredth of the prestige SPL has - I can't speak from experience but I've heard from my trusted man Tony that 12 in SPL is already really difficult especially for control freak-style managers like me and him in both man-management and substitutes, and 14 would make it even harder. Quality managers are already hard to find and I don't think a stress test such as 14-man SPL would help much in that direction, too. Looking from the outside in "just expand to 14 lmao" seems like a pretty simple solution but it does make things non-negligibly harder for all the managers and I think we should look towards solutions that do not expand the numbers past the current 12. (Also, the whole thing about star player power which Hogg talked about in his post is also valid)

Factor 2: All oldgens and all non-OU core metagames deserve stable and equal representation, but the current structure does not allow for this. Over the last few years the circuit has had to make numerous cuts based on pretty arbitrary reasons, most of them reasonable, but ultimately I'm of the belief that all metagames are created equal and there is too much bias involved in choosing which "worst gen" can be cut. A circuit structure that can accomodate all oldgens and core metagames equally is a circuit that isn't going to upset communities and isn't going to be forced to selectively exclude some year by year and tournament by tournament; there are merits to more restrictive formats and we're arguing preferences at the end of the day, but I think this was worth stating regardless. (This was a belief I held one year ago already, but it is a relevant part of why I changed my views over the last year).

Factor 3: World Cup is a weird tournament, where the goal is not having an equal and highly competitive field, but rather representing your country. It's cool and all, but I don't think participation in WCoP is exactly equal to participation in the other two team tournaments because the conditions for those levels of competitiveness are not there. Maybe I'm biased as someone who directly suffers from this, but having drafts limited by nationality is to me clearly not very good for competiveness: top class players are forced to not participate or to fill in for tiers they're not as familiar with due to nationality overlaps or costraints (Italy's RBY is perhaps the most infamous case, but there are many many others across the years: Kaz missing out this year, Diegolh last year, Oceania's thelinearcurve+Golden Sun conundrum, Astamatitos and Tricking's GSC switches, reiku's ADV switch, the list goes on forever). I'm sure everyone can agree that SPL oldgen fields are more stacked than WCoP - and it would be surprising if things were not this way, SPL by design leads to the 10 best players getting drafted. This all is to say: I don't think WCoP participation can quite be put on the same plane as SPL or Snake participation, because it's not as competitive, and because some people don't get to participate in WCoP for reasons outside their control - also consider the cases of great players stuck in nations that don't manage to qualify as another example of this.



What do I get when I put all these factors together? Well, the structure isn't large enough to accomodate every oldgen and core metagame being in 2 official team tournaments per year, especially when you consider WCoP's faults, so perhaps it would be better to give up that goal and go for 1 official team tournament per year. Snake's already got lowtiers / core metagames covered, so they can leave SPL and leave it for the oldgens. We can now also make WCoP's oldgen spectacle much less painful to watch by simply removing oldgens and making it a full SM format - there's more than enough current gen players to fill 8 slots per nation without having to see poor fields in multiple oldgens every year. Also, and this is a relatively minor point but still one worth making in reply to Texas Cloverleaf's concerns, absolute star players are likely to play both SPL and Snake, true, but they'd mostly be taking up the current gen OU slots as their knowledge of lowtiers is probably not as vast, and those slots would be given back here via WCoP abundantly.

Ultimately, those proposed changes would cut the slots from 12 to 10 for SPL and from 10 to 8 for WCoP, so you might figure that they don't really help representation as they end up cutting down the total number of players involved in team tournaments per year, but I think that, as Hogg suggested in the first post as well, expansion past a certain point just isn't sustainable, and I think we should just accept that if we want some tiers to have 2 tournaments per year we need some others to have 0, and the better compromise is to just give 1 tournament per year to every metagame, oldgens to SPL and lowtiers to Snake, with a healthy sprinkle of current gen OU in each official team tour, and then balance our numbers around that. (I'm also of the opinion that representation would gain a lot more from expansions of our tournament circuits via B-tier versions of the three A-tier team tours rather than a couple extra slots, but that's definitely a discussion for a different thread)


The other proposal in Hogg's post is moving away from Snake Draft format and branding - I'm not really too informed on current community feelings on this and not very involved with Snake in general so I have a pretty neutral stance, the only thing I'd take issue with would be taking the SPL name, I think it fits a hell of a lot better as a separate and equivalent tournament entirely - I'm sure the finest creative minds on this website can find cool ways to brand it once an agreement on the format is reached either way



TL;DR Largely agree with Hogg. Circuit cannot ever be large enough to properly accomodate 2 tournaments/year for every oldgen and lowtier, settle for 1 tournament/year so that every metagame gets equal representation and we keep the size of our team tournaments in check. This means oldgens to SPL, lowtiers to Snake (or a rebranding of Snake), WCoP becomes full SM.

 

[dice]

As one of the presumed advantages of this proposal is to artificially allow for more players/representation without compromising the scale of the tournament, how much of an impact do you foresee it being to have players participating in both legs of the tournament?

No manager would turn down a finchinator or a bkc who signed up for each, so it seems there's a reasonable concern that the playerbase selected from remains functionally the same, only with two tournaments and some subset of players playing twice.

are we really still entertaining the playerbase disenfranchisement theatrics in 2019? if you're worried about getting excluded, be better. we want the best tournaments and most electrifying games possible. this is a complete derail.

very much so support the idea.

 

[Texas Cloverleaf]

are we really still entertaining the playerbase disenfranchisement theatrics in 2019? if you're worried about getting excluded, be better. we want the best tournaments and most electrifying games possible. this is a complete derail.

very much so support the idea.

I'm not sure what you're looking to accomplish by this pithy and tangential response.

Hogg specifically mentions representation and expansion as issues to address. Players playing in both tournaments is a plausible issue contravening that goal. I'm curious what Hogg's thoughts are on the matter. Nothing more.

Attacking my request for information by calling it theatrical and derailing based on buzzwordy ideas completely unrelated to my post is disingenuous as worst and self-serving at best. Do better.



Sidebar: since apparently it's necessary to make this explicit, I support ideas like this that seek to better the tournament experience which is why it's necessary to ask questions to help those ideas take shape. To imply I'm "worried about being excluded" when I haven't been "included" for years is fucking ridiculous.

 

[Ereshkigal]

Ok so just want to drop my thougts on this from a spectator point of view since I'm not really a tour player and probably never will.

Since the idea of make SPL 14 slots came up I always thought that would be a good idea, firstly to give more representation to tiers that had been cutting off in recent SPL for whatever reasons that i ignore and secondly because it gives more games to spectate thus making spectators happier and more excited to see some of the best players on Smogon do their best in games which are often really impressive in terms of skills and twist throughout the game. But as stated before we cannot add more slot forever else we will have SPL with 20+ slots which would be difficult to deal with for managers and, I think, lower the competitiveness by drafting non mainer or lower rank players. Now don't get me wrong giving their chance to some hidden goat is great but it's usually safer to draft a BKC, a ABR or a recognized lower tier mainer in his tier than an unproven player who may be good but who may also be complete garbage.

The idea of having two SPLs seems to be a good compromise between being more pleasing and exciting for spectators by adding tiers that has little to no representation in official tournaments, like PU or Monotype(?), and not "lowering" competitiveness. While I can understand some issues some people have like branding or if the trophy will be only for 6 months instead of 1 year, which is in my opinion secondary, like who cares about a trophy made in pixel on a Pokémon forum being colored on not lol it doesn't change that you won a tournament, but in my opinion it would be the best way to please both sides.

e: fuck royal

 

[Diophantine]

Writing this in a rush in my lunch break. Take everything I say with a pinch of salt since I'm not that involved with the tournament scene.

Thoughts on the competitiveness of WCoP:

Hide

You would be silly to say that WCoP is anywhere near as competitive as SPL. However, it doesn't have to be. SPL is supposed to be the pinnacle of Smogon's competitive play. What WCoP is about is representing your country, which is more than likely to have the bonus trait of it being with your friends. By definition this is going to be unfair, as it always is in regional based team competitions. The FIFA World Cup winners are always very predictable from before the tournament even begins; the US and some Asian countries always dominate the IMO; the US had a historically unfair geographical advantage over the other countries which was largely the reason for its prosperity and power; the UK have the world's best rappers(!), and so on.

As a UK player, I know that my chances of winning the tournament are incredibly slim, if existent at all. Heck, I'm playing GSC - a tier I haven't even been playing for a full year - because I'm just the least bad option (or maybe they just don't trust me to play OU lol). I don't care about that though. Of course our aim is to take the lads as far as we can, but there's a sense of brothership that is present in this tournament. Why do you think I made those cringy chant posts in the introduction thread? Competitiveness is not compromised too much either. NE is not the only team with a realistic shot at winning, and most of the best players are still playing. This is a tournament where the few at the top fight for the trophy, and the other guys aim for improvement to overthrow them - and I think that it is fine like that. Dealing with whatever random cards you've been dealt.

Thoughts on tier / player representation and splitting SPL / SSD dilemma:

Hide

I honestly do not see the point in this. What you are arguing for is essentially a reorganisation of SSD and taking away the focus of lower tiers from SPL. If you're splitting SPL, at least call the two resultant tournaments different things than SPL Winter and SPL Summer.

Like Dice, I have the opinion that player representation shouldn't be cared about. If you're complaining about being excluded, you're either not good enough or you're a dickhead - both of which have straightforward methods for correcting. We shouldn't have official team tournaments cater for "the little guy". If anything, it should be a goal for said miniature man, and I'm saying that as one of them. I'm not sure if I interpreted what Texas Cloverleaf and Dice were arguing about correctly, but there are my thoughts on it. If Texas Cloverleaf was talking about there being a jerk of people well known for overall ability meaning managers would disregard actual talent in lower tiers in favour of a Finchinator or ABR, then those managers are simply not good enough. Managers should be picking teams based on what it takes to win. They should weigh up their options and decide all things considered.

As for tier representation, I very much agree with TIN that every current generation lower tier (within reason ofc fuck ZU and LC UU unless enough people start to care) and past generation OU should be treated equally. This whole "axe RBY" thing is just very arbitrary and the reasons for removing it is silly, in my opinion. How long before they argue for removing GSC? Is ADV next? Or are they just arguing for whichever tier seems the least "competitive"? I also think that SPL is going to have too many slots for all the reasons that people above me have said. Expansion is just not sustainable in this context, and I think that splitting the OU tiers and the lower tiers is for the best. I also think that the current gen OU should be prioritised over every other tier, as it is supposed to be Smogon's flagship tier. It should be in every official team tournament.

So what do I think should be done about the official team tournaments?

Hide

Have two separate team tournaments for OU tiers and lower tiers + CG OU. These can just be SPL without the lower tiers and slightly changing SSD with regards to its format (but not the tiers). Small point but change the name SSD too. It doesn't really have the same "umph" as the other tournaments. In terms of the tiers played in WCoP, the selection does not matter as much. Ideally it would be different from the other two tournaments, and if it's just all CG OU then so be it. The only problem with that is that there is the possibility of even more of its competitiveness being compromised, and so I think that keeping it the way it is is also fine. 8 or so players playing one tier is bound to have more players that aren't too great compared to the way it is now.

 

[Hogg]

There's a lot to respond to, and I don't have time to answer everything in detail, but did want to hit on the points I could address quickly...

As one of the presumed advantages of this proposal is to artificially allow for more players/representation without compromising the scale of the tournament, how much of an impact do you foresee it being to have players participating in both legs of the tournament?

No manager would turn down a finchinator or a bkc who signed up for each, so it seems there's a reasonable concern that the playerbase selected from remains functionally the same, only with two tournaments and some subset of players playing twice.

Oh, that's definitely going to occur. I consider that a feature, not a bug. As I mentioned above, I feel like SPL was already starting to get unwieldy and hit its limits re: fielding competitive players with the 181 participants we had in SPL X. Splitting SPL into two tours would allow us to expand the total number of tiers/gens/formats represented without necessarily requiring one single tour to draft 200 or 250 players. There absolutely will be (and should be) a decent bit of overlap in players, but there will also be an open door for players who otherwise would never get a chance to participate. And if this format results in more cross-over like you see in WCOP, where players branch out beyond their "main" tiers, that's a good thing in my book.

Overall I just feel like this other thread of yours feels like a much more worthy cause to pursue. You can't just slap a MAC Cosmetics label over wet n' wild and just expect things to turn out the same -_-

Yeah, I mean this is really just an extrapolation of that same vision, but solely focused on SPL and Snake (whereas that thread also included other aspects like WCOP and Frontier). As for the name, I don't know that I agree that making SPL Red/SPL Blue or Winter Premier League/Summer Premier League or SPL1/SPL2 or whatever ends up making the most sense "dilutes" the SPL brand, but I also don't care that much about the name (as long as the name isn't "Smogon Snake Auction" or whatever).

The other proposal in Hogg's post is moving away from Snake Draft format and branding - I'm not really too informed on current community feelings on this and not very involved with Snake in general so I have a pretty neutral stance, the only thing I'd take issue with would be taking the SPL name, I think it fits a hell of a lot better as a separate and equivalent tournament entirely - I'm sure the finest creative minds on this website can find cool ways to brand it once an agreement on the format is reached either way

See above re: name. My main reason for suggesting we just stick with the SPL theme or something similar is probably because I'm super gun-shy after the nightmare that was choosing names during snake: part of the reason we ended up with the thoroughly yawn-inducing snake theme for SSD was because a lot of team naming options were rejected for being "too close to SPL," and the remaining options were so divisive that we all ended up just settling on snakes because we realized we'd never agree on anything else.

Also Nat raised a good point to me in PMs that the end result of this if implemented would be that the lower tiers currently represented in both SPL and Snake (including my own UU) would end up dropping down to a single official team tournament. That's a real issue. My argument is that splitting into two tours would better account for growth in the future, and could allow us to incorporate formats that would otherwise be excluded from our current tour setup, but under this proposal that inclusion would come at the cost of UU/RU/NU's current amount of team tour representation. In my eyes is a trade that's worth making, but I don't want to hide the fact that there are real costs. Both she and Luigi also brought up another aspect of SPL that this proposal would miss out on: SPL was the only place you really saw groups from the three major competitive Smogon communities (CG OU, old gens and lower tiers) all interact and work together. That's definitely a pretty special part of SPL and I would hate to see it go. I'm not sure if there's any way to keep that with my proposal, but it's something worth considering.

 

[talkingtree]

One of the things that I personally really enjoy, both as a spectator and recently as a participant in team environments, is seeing metagames develop and creativity blossom. With both SSD and SPL (and presumably WCoP, though I must admit I haven't followed it), the tiers represented often go through rather major shifts in a short span as the top players of each tier have to catch on very very quickly to trends and what could be good in the current atmosphere.

Having such tours twice in the year (per tier) is great for multiple reasons: First, it means that the tiers represented have multiple chances to go through this metamorphosis of sorts. I might be overstating the significance a bit, but I know from my experience in Doubles that every time a major team tour happens, new Pokemon become relevant, next suspects become obvious, previously great Pokemon become exploitable, and the tier benefits greatly. Seasonal tournaments and tier-specific circuit tournaments can be nice for this, but I've never seen anything truly comparable to what SPL/SSD can bring.

Second, the nature of usage-based lower tiers means that they, by definition, have a shift multiple times during the year. Having these big tours acts as a way to ground the tiers, figure out the best way to take advantage of the new subset of available Pokemon, and provide context for the shifting of the metagame. If these usage-based tiers are only seen by the community at large once a year, I expect they'll end up being almost unrecognizable from one tour to the next, which doesn't cause any explicit issues with current philosophy but just seems wrong to me.

I can see the value in consolidating tournaments and representation as presented both in the OP and in TIN's post; still, I don't think those benefits outweigh the merits of the current system that I just mentioned. I wish I knew a way to "fix" the current system without sacrificing this, but I still have minimal experience with Smogon-wide tournaments, so I don't feel qualified to say how the evolution of our tours should be handled. I also haven't seen any large issues that merit a necessary change, but that could just be my own lack of experience from multiple angles.

 

[Heysup]

I think the fact that we are still arguing about whether a single game should be worth 7% of a team win or 8% of a team win is absurd. Just increase the size. It's simpler and makes no material difference in the quality of the tour.

 

[dice]

or perhaps it's because folks want to add 20 slots to a tournament that has existing tiers already unable to field 10 quality players

 

[-Tsunami-]

I feel like I've said my thoughts in public already, but I suppose I will put them into a more cohesive form. It's always hard to know how much stock to put into the 43 likes Heysup currently has on his post, but I know for a fact many people share a similar opinion due to the public outcry that occurred after last year's SPL format was announced. I was initially always on board with expanding the tournament, but the more I think about it, the more I agree with people like ABR and dice. There really are not that many good players on Smogon. People obviously have their own opinions, but after spending about 6 years on this site and writing a plethora of predictions and Power Rankings, I can safely say that there is no way in hell we have enough good players on this website to justify having a 14-slot SPL. I'm sure if you, the reader, came up with your own list of players that you would consider to be good or even above average, you could not possibly come up with 140 names. Hell, I think if anything we should be reducing the size of the tour.

This brings us to an interesting question. Do we care more about inclusion or about our tournaments having the highest possible quality. There's obviously a spectrum here, and I would say that currently, SPL caters more to the inclusion side of things. Some of you may be fine with this, and that's cool. But personally, I want our team tournaments to be as high quality as possible without fully sacrificing inclusion. I think Hogg's proposed format helps achieve this. The best players will be able to play in both tournaments, and we won't have to really screw over the quality of SPL to provide a form of inclusion for the mainers. Call the tournament whatever you want; I don't really care. However, I echo dice's sentiments in the post above mine. Trivializing this issue as "lmao dumbass tds just increase the tour size vros 14 is megalit" isn't really doing justice to the issue. As I said before, I would not be opposed to reducing SPL to 10 slots, either. That is a conversation for anther day, however.

 

[Corporal Levi]

Making the coming SPL 14 slots more or less solves our most pressing issues with inclusion, seeing how there are maybe 2-3 more tiers we're seriously looking to add in the very near future. It's an immediate and mostly effective solution for the next tour that has inclusion issues, whether that's the SPL of 2020 or 2021. The dilution of game quality is by a pretty trivial amount for changing the slots from 12 to 14 - we'd likely be looking at maybe a 10% increase in involved players or so? And if the tiers in contention are LC, RBY etc. then they wouldn't dilute the individual player matchups much to begin with, because there's only low or moderate overlap between those playerbases and CGOU.

Planning for the future is good, but we're talking about literally years between new generations being released when we're discussing the long term issues of increasing SPL's size. Discussing time frames of this size means broad shifts in the community, their attitudes and their priorities that can't be planned for; we currently have zero TDs nominated before 2016 (I think). 12 slots was first enacted in the SPL of 2013; if we keep up the pace of 2 more slots every 7 years, then the hypothetical 20 slots would occur in 2041, at which point the game and its community would almost surely not be recognizable.

There really are not that many good players on Smogon. People obviously have their own opinions, but after spending about 6 years on this site and writing a plethora of predictions and Power Rankings, I can safely say that there is no way in hell we have enough good players on this website to justify having a 14-slot SPL. I'm sure if you, the reader, came up with your own list of players that you would consider to be good or even above average, you could not possibly come up with 140 names. Hell, I think if anything we should be reducing the size of the tour.

Asking to name 140 good players feels pretty arbitrary/unfair unless there's a significant portion of the playerbase that can name exactly 120 good players with ease but struggle to name 140 of them. It's also an unrealistically high bar to set to expect a manager to know every single good player in the draft, for every tier, and even if went by your usual power rankings we'd probably be expecting like 50 or 60 good players in total or so.


I'm ok with the OP's suggestion if the the community stagnates in quality for the next decade-ish, but as it is, I'm not a fan of how it's literally cutting in half team tour representation for lower tiers, old gens too if wcop becomes all CGOU, when we have available a far simpler solution with much better contained drawbacks.

 

[Laurel]

Personally, I believe that Smogon should prioritize inclusion. I have to disagree that Smogon doesn't have 140 quality players. While I hate to use this as a pedometer, I believe OLT is something that shows how deep our player base is. I'm sure most of us have tried to qualify and realized just how difficult it is consistently beating people around 1800 ELO (there are currently 300+ people above 1800 on the ladder).

However, I believe that saying there are 140 SPL quality players is accurate. Nothing quite compares to the pressure of playing in SPL or World Cup, even if/when you play VGC events, you're playing for yourself, but there is something about letting your team down that provides an extra level of pressure.

Regardless of this point, nothing rivals the experience of playing in these two tournaments. As someone who has sat some out and participated in others, I can genuinely say theres no better experience on Smogon than being able to work with your team to accomplish something bigger than yourself. I believe we should allow as many people as we can to share this experience and reduce the amount of circle jerk because lets be honest, when you get to the tail end of the rosters, whether it be 10, 12, or 14 "friends" will always get in over slightly better players.

 

[Heysup]

or perhaps it's because folks want to add 20 slots to a tournament that has existing tiers already unable to field 10 quality players

I feel like I've said my thoughts in public already, but I suppose I will put them into a more cohesive form. It's always hard to know how much stock to put into the 43 likes Heysup currently has on his post, but I know for a fact many people share a similar opinion due to the public outcry that occurred after last year's SPL format was announced. I was initially always on board with expanding the tournament, but the more I think about it, the more I agree with people like ABR and dice. There really are not that many good players on Smogon. People obviously have their own opinions, but after spending about 6 years on this site and writing a plethora of predictions and Power Rankings, I can safely say that there is no way in hell we have enough good players on this website to justify having a 14-slot SPL. I'm sure if you, the reader, came up with your own list of players that you would consider to be good or even above average, you could not possibly come up with 140 names. Hell, I think if anything we should be reducing the size of the tour.

This brings us to an interesting question. Do we care more about inclusion or about our tournaments having the highest possible quality. There's obviously a spectrum here, and I would say that currently, SPL caters more to the inclusion side of things. Some of you may be fine with this, and that's cool. But personally, I want our team tournaments to be as high quality as possible without fully sacrificing inclusion. I think Hogg's proposed format helps achieve this. The best players will be able to play in both tournaments, and we won't have to really screw over the quality of SPL to provide a form of inclusion for the mainers. Call the tournament whatever you want; I don't really care.

However, I echo dice's sentiments in the post above mine. Trivializing this issue as "lmao dumbass tds just increase the tour size vros 14 is megalit" isn't really doing justice to the issue. As I said before, I would not be opposed to reducing SPL to 10 slots, either. That is a conversation for anther day, however.

I completely disagree with the fact that the debate can't simplified into one sentence about the margin of difference (even when translated into lit shakeitup dialect vro -). The entire point is the margin. You're asking mangers to name 140? My point is if you can name 120, you sure as shit can name 140. It is literally such a low marginal increase there is no noticeable difference. It's an absurdity. And this is even just limiting the point to expanding the SM/current gen OU slots.

I think it's clear your position falters even further when you're expanding SPL for a new tier like LC or RBY where you would be adding different players outside of the regular pool who may or may not be as good as the mid level SPL OU players that play. In other words, adding 20 new current gen slots would be objectively (but very marginally) worse than the previous current gen ou players. That logic doesn't apply when you have highest quality players from other metagames. Not saying they are better than top or even mid-range SPL level OU players, I'm just saying the logic isn't the analogous.

This isn't surgery. 1% difference per game is unnoticeable.

 

[PDC]

in all honesty i think that lower tiers should probably be erased and de-officialized and only the OU + little cup + ubers tiers be the only ones to remain as official tiers. i realize this is probably impossible.

like shake, when the subject of expanding the tournament slot # originally came up, i was in favor of continuous expansion for the sake of inclusion. if a tier is deemed 'official,' then it should have a sort of representation that comes along with it. honestly, i think that hogg's suggestion of having '2 spl's' is not a bad idea if we re-format it to clearly divide the tournaments between old gens / current gen. flippant naming shenanigans aside, i believe that if we want to keep lower tiers 'official' along side OU tiers, we at some point will need to divide the two to not compromise the whole. let's face it, spl with a million slots in the ever-expanding list of lower tiers is beginning to make it suffer. every year we have the routine crisis of tier leaders throwing a fit over how their tier is not being represented in spl, and every year we upset a different sector of the community because we have to eliminate a lower tier (or rby, maybe).

splitting the tournament's in 2 gives us the best possible outcome. however, please do not name smogon snake draft SPL 2. that is possibly the biggest rhetorical mistake you can make in attempting to fix this process. spl will always be more valued than ssd, whatever we name it. we must face the reality that lower tier gameplay does not compare in any facet to overused gameplay at their respective peaks. calling both 'spl' harms both of their perceptions. keep ssd named smogon snake draft and figure out a better way to systematically name teams or implement some sort of personality into it to justify its existence instead of naively tacking on the spl franchise. if the 'naming' of ssd teams is really the main complaint here, then it seems to me as a non-issue.

spl should compose of old gens + 2 current gen ou slots. ssd should compose of lower tiers + x current gen ou slots (or vaguely something like this)

rby / gsc / adv / dpp / bw / oras / sm / sm (edit: i believe dou should be included in spl as well)
lc / nu / ru / uu / ou / ou / ubers / dou

a certain group of players will sign up no matter what for both of these tours, so if anything, this will 'boost' competitiveness and minimize lower-level play in our selection based tournaments as much as possible. i guess the main difference between me/shake/dice and hogg is that as a td, hogg sees this from both a PR and competitive perspective, while we only view it as a competitive issue.

regardless, you will always have lower tier players lobbying for their tier to be included in spl, but in truth, this needless expansion will damage the tournament's reputation. sacrificing competitiveness for inclusion on a site dedicated to achieving the highest level of competitiveness possible is contradictory. while being official grants the right to representation, it does not grant the right to be included in every tournament. in fact, i don't think lower tiers serve a purpose at all anymore and would like for them to be eliminated (and i know a certain td(s) who shares my belief), but for the time being keeping them around seems to be the only option.

 

[ManOfMany]

Totally on board with Hogg's idea. As far as naming goes, SPL 2 is a meme and Snake Draft is meaningless once you remove the "Snake" aspect of the auction and is just plain weird. My suggestion would be to call this new hypothetical competition the Smogon Elite Championship. I searched through the Tournaments Archive thread and didn't find anything called that, and it sounds cool so....

 

[Triangles]

What PDC said, and make WCOP all CG OU with 8 slots too.

It's the exact wrong time to think about expansion with average player skill being at a historic low and the playerbase for tiers like old gens continually shrinking.

 

[pokemonisfun]

What PDC said, and make WCOP all CG OU with 8 slots too.

It's the exact wrong time to think about expansion with average player skill being at a historic low and the playerbase for tiers like old gens continually shrinking.

1) What evidence do we have the average player skill is a historical low?

2) Let’s say there are 1000 players who would like to compete. Let’s say everyone can be evaluated on skill 1-10. Even if the median skill level player is “historically low”, let’s say a 3, how would that affect the margin of 20 extra players at the top here?

I.e., how does the average player have an impact on the marginal best 20?

3) We have evidence that power ranks are not helpful in measuring game outcomes (https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/spl-x-commencement-thread.3644186/page-25#post-8103927). Power rankings only measure the top players though. Even with this limitation, it’s fair to say this is some minor evidence that nobody really knows player’s skill level. Perhaps Pokémon doesn’t require much skill so it’s hard to say one person is significantly better than another?

 

[teal6]

It's absurd to say that the game doesn't require skill, we are far past the point where certain players have shown consistency at such a level above the rest that there is certainly some aspect of it. Unfortunately, pokemon skill isn't terribly quantifiable, and I incredibly disagree with the idea that we are at some historic low or anywhere near a low. Watching replays from like SPL 7 show absurdities in the teambuilder, in the game, etc. and that's not even THAT long ago. Frankly I think the average tournament player now is a league above what they were even when I became active again.

Now, all that said, I am and will always remain vehemently against expanding SPL itself in any way shape or form. One of the few really top moments for me in this community was seeing Val hard !10 on me in the auction, vindicating my efforts up to that point. I was unsure I would even get drafted in SPL - when you're a new(er) tournament player inclusion in the tour is certainly a milestone and to lessen that would be very silly in my opinion. I'd prefer 10 slot and this comes from no self-motivated place, considering I intend to return as a player next year and I'm hardly on the forefront of any metagame likely to be included.

I do despise the Snake names and have from the beginning though. Lets change that and maybe the format, idk, it's hard to get too pumped up over in one direction or another. The only thing I, and I think most people, care about is keeping SPL as pristine as possible.

 

[Shrug]

i think the most logically untenable position is the current status quo. it's a weird attempt to balance "representation" and "eliteness" that succeeds at neither.

Heysup is correct in saying that 8% vs 7% (or whatever) is a negligible difference from week to week. critics of his position that say there would be a dilution of quality going from 120 to 140 active players neglect the fact that the new 20 players arent being drawn from a big pool of all players on smogon ordered by their general pokemon quality. most of the introduced new players will be tier specialists of similar quality to other specialists in existing tiers. there will be a bit of dilution owing to the slight additional spread of people who could be called "professional lower tier players" who can hop in as a superior option to the lower-roster tier specialists, but that isn't severe.

but the critics are not necessarily incorrect in their underlying ideological point. it is perfectly reasonable to want an spl that is "elite" however defined. but taking that point to its logical conclusion means a more radical change than ive seen itt. make spl six slots all current gen ou. you wont have messy lower tiers or specialists trying to jank out wins. you'll get the best dudes playing and every match will feel like an event.

this will require a shift in the tour structure and in spectator orientation. teams will need narratives constructed around them moreso than the current setup of a team only having external meaning -- of a team being a representation of Something rather than simply a collection of players -- if one manager pair has a bitchy feud with another. teams should be cohesive and have a defined identity. this means every player on a team should be eligable to be retained after the season ends. if they have good players at low cost, train better players and beat them. this continutiy will also allow for a more developed fan culture to grow around the tournament. if the tour is small enough to be permanently exclusive to a certain set of users, those users will become involved in the tournament through support or else try to improve enough at OU enough to gain entry.

speaking of, there should be designated farm teams for each SPL team that play in a league against one another with the assman as the lead manager for logistical purposes. managers should have the option of elevating these players at midseason for a fee and to buy them again at a retain price for next spl. this will incentivize a certain sort of mentorship and guidance from older better players to newer ones -- improve a member of your farm team and you have a cheap option for the next season. it will also create a lower-pressure, but still important place for development.

wcop should stay pastgens + ou as a nod to its position as a historical tournement and to incentivize the continued return of older users. snake should stay for currentgen nonou tiers and some ou too. those will be the more inclusive, fun, loosey tours that vary from year to year.

or else make spl for all the tiers and have each tier play a trophy teamtour twice a year. but what shouldnt stand is the current structure where some tiers remain in spl and others are excluded because of some weird prejudices held towards certain tiers because who like moderated the lc forum in 2013. spl for the few -- the best -- or spl for everyone.

 

[Astoria]

Hey guys, you probably don't know me but I would like to give you my own suggestion regarding "Growth & SPL".

I actually have never been interested in SPL at all because I simply can not participate as I am pretty unknown and probably not good enough (I think many people here feel the same way). However, this year it was kinda different. It was very interesting to follow through Blunders Youtube channel and I enjoyed every bit of SPL coverage I could get, especially because the people playing approach it with a lot of hype! I feel like sharing this type of hype by expanding SPL is an easy way to grow! To me it obviously makes sense that people want to see only the best of the best in SPL so that should def not change.

Imo the best way to approach the problems SPL has is to expand the tournament by not spliting it into two tournaments but just introducing a 2nd Division (which is basically a 2nd tournament lol). It could work like this:
The main SPL bracket would be like it has always been, maybe a bit smaller so that even for top players its something special to participate. The 2nd Div would just be played out at the same time and I guess it would work the same way - just with nothing to win (maybe something like a better chance for the captains to get into the 1st div next year). The number of teams would be doubled I guess, giving more people a chance to be part of the community. Top players who are usually expected to play in SPL would actually have to prove themselves year in year out to get into the main tournament, so it would be a challange for the big names to get in. If they don't make it they can still participate in the 2nd Division and no one would feel excluded, so it would still be very good players joining into the 2nd div. It would be the place to promote players with lots of potential and to play and tryhard alongside friends in a slightly less competetive atmosphere.
I feel like if that approach was to be taken the growth of the tournament scene could be incredibly high! Pls support this if you like the idea!

 

[teal6]

Hey guys, you probably don't know me but I would like to give you my own suggestion regarding "Growth & SPL".

I actually have never been interested in SPL at all because I simply can not participate as I am pretty unknown and probably not good enough (I think many people here feel the same way). However, this year it was kinda different. It was very interesting to follow through Blunders Youtube channel and I enjoyed every bit of SPL coverage I could get, especially because the people playing approach it with a lot of hype! I feel like sharing this type of hype by expanding SPL is an easy way to grow! To me it obviously makes sense that people want to see only the best of the best in SPL so that should def not change.

Imo the best way to approach the problems SPL has is to expand the tournament by not spliting it into two tournaments but just introducing a 2nd Division (which is basically a 2nd tournament lol). It could work like this:
The main SPL bracket would be like it has always been, maybe a bit smaller so that even for top players its something special to participate. The 2nd Div would just be played out at the same time and I guess it would work the same way - just with nothing to win (maybe something like a better chance for the captains to get into the 1st div next year). The number of teams would be doubled I guess, giving more people a chance to be part of the community. Top players who are usually expected to play in SPL would actually have to prove themselves year in year out to get into the main tournament, so it would be a challange for the big names to get in. If they don't make it they can still participate in the 2nd Division and no one would feel excluded, so it would still be very good players joining into the 2nd div. It would be the place to promote players with lots of potential and to play and tryhard alongside friends in a slightly less competetive atmosphere.
I feel like if that approach was to be taken the growth of the tournament scene could be incredibly high! Pls support this if you like the idea!

While the goal here is nice, this is just farm league with harder administration. I don't think anyone particularly hated farm league, but it died for a reason - no interested hosts and a barely interested playerbase. I'd imagine a B-league with no discernible stakes would run into the same problem.

Now, an A-League and a B-League with promotion and relegation, that's another story..

 

[Stratos]

I asked Tony for posting permissions for this thread like two weeks ago, so I should probably actually use them...

I used to think the people against 14 slots were basically full of shit, and that an increase in team size was whatever. Then DPL increased from 6 to 8 slots last year and I found the tour to be significantly less fun. I think there are two main reasons this was the case. One is that I was less able to focus on prepping and helping each team member with more games to spread my attention across. Two is that there was reduced lineup flexibility when the number of slots increased but the number of subs did not. I think I didn't notice these things in SPL because I'm a mainer, but I can totally understand where multi-tier threats (and managers) are coming from now when they oppose increasing the size of SPL. In fact if anything, I think we should reduce the number of starting slots in our main draft tournaments.

I also think that we all know Snake draft is a significantly less exciting format than SPL. The draft this year was so boring I basically didn't even watch it, and I'm playing in the damn thing. On the other hand I tune in for the entire SPL draft every year, and I haven't been able to sign up since SPL6. Having static team size and pick order eliminates the main strategy of bidding, which is balancing peaks vs depth. I think we gave Snake drafting an honest try, and it's just kind of lame, and we should move on.

So I support Hogg's proposal of splitting SPL into an OU-only tournament and a current-only tournament, with the latter replacing Snake.

---

I think the concern of the current-only SPL playing second fiddle is a valid one (I mean, Snake already does, but even moreso). So I think that rather than names like "SPL and Summer SPL" or "SPL and SPL2," the ideal naming solution would be to rename both tournaments. The OU one can be Standard Premier League because it's standard formats. The current one can be Current Premier League. Standard Premier League gets to keep the SPL acronym, teams, winter timeslot, etc. so it's basically Smogon Premier League in all but name, which I think is fair as frankly old gens have always had more prestige on the site. Current Premier League's name isn't explicitly subservient though.

As far as the concerns of shrinking the tournament in the face of a growing playerbase, I want to point out that there are three dimensions that a tournament can grow in, and this thread has only considered one. To get more players involved, you can increase the number of starting slots, increase the minimum substitute limit, or increase the number of teams in the tournament. Even if SPL11 shrinks down to 10 starting slots (3 SS + 1 of each old gen), you can easily raise the minimum substitute limit to 4 to keep the same number of players in the tournament. Another option is increasing the number of teams, but I don't really like that one as much because it lengthens the tournament (if we keep doing round robin). Really I think the ideal team size is probably 8+4, but I don't think that's feasible in SPL (it may be in CPL).

To address talkingtree's post:

One of the things that I personally really enjoy, both as a spectator and recently as a participant in team environments, is seeing metagames develop and creativity blossom. With both SSD and SPL (and presumably WCoP, though I must admit I haven't followed it), the tiers represented often go through rather major shifts in a short span as the top players of each tier have to catch on very very quickly to trends and what could be good in the current atmosphere.

Having such tours twice in the year (per tier) is great for multiple reasons: First, it means that the tiers represented have multiple chances to go through this metamorphosis of sorts. I might be overstating the significance a bit, but I know from my experience in Doubles that every time a major team tour happens, new Pokemon become relevant, next suspects become obvious, previously great Pokemon become exploitable, and the tier benefits greatly. Seasonal tournaments and tier-specific circuit tournaments can be nice for this, but I've never seen anything truly comparable to what SPL/SSD can bring.

Second, the nature of usage-based lower tiers means that they, by definition, have a shift multiple times during the year. Having these big tours acts as a way to ground the tiers, figure out the best way to take advantage of the new subset of available Pokemon, and provide context for the shifting of the metagame. If these usage-based tiers are only seen by the community at large once a year, I expect they'll end up being almost unrecognizable from one tour to the next, which doesn't cause any explicit issues with current philosophy but just seems wrong to me.

I can see the value in consolidating tournaments and representation as presented both in the OP and in TIN's post; still, I don't think those benefits outweigh the merits of the current system that I just mentioned. I wish I knew a way to "fix" the current system without sacrificing this, but I still have minimal experience with Smogon-wide tournaments, so I don't feel qualified to say how the evolution of our tours should be handled. I also haven't seen any large issues that merit a necessary change, but that could just be my own lack of experience from multiple angles.

I don't want to literally say "Check your privilege", but this is definitely easy to say as a DOU main. We stand to lose the most representation from Hogg's proposal, and we suffer the least from having overlarge teams since we're mostly mainers that only care about our little corner. Some formats stand to be eliminated entirely if we maintain the status quo, and basically every one except DOU is hurt by the reduced availability of teammate prep time. Besides, I don't know about other tiers, but DPL can easily fill the void left by SPL for us.


There are a few real issues with the proposal I haven't addressed in this post, because I'm not sure about a good answer. But I do think that this is the right path forward, and I want to get the discussion rekindled on this topic.