Tournament Most Wanted III Format Discussion

[Minority]

(Requested and Approved by the Ubers Moderation Team)​

Hello all! As per the tours schedule the third iteration of Most Wanted is coming up in about a month and the mod team has begun discussions regarding the tournament. Since Most Wanted in an experimental format in its early iterations (and an ever so popular Snake Draft at that) several high-level players have voiced opinions and suggestions regarding updates to the tournament. The moderation team is committed to making this tournament live up to its full potential, with particular emphasis on scouting new Ubers talent in a more relaxed / less committed format as compared to Ubers Premier League, our flagship team tournament. That's where this thread comes in; gauging opinions regarding the tournament format, what works and what doesn't, mainly from those who participated in the first two iterations. Through mod and private discussions there are also a few ideas that I'll briefly touch on in this OP to address some of the concerns with the format and rules as we move into this tour's third showing. Naturally there have already been a lot of worthwhile posts, most of which occurred after the second iteration and can be found here. The opening of this discussion to forums was contingent upon having the thread strictly moderated:

Thread Specific Rules:

• No one-liners, low effort posts, or posts that otherwise offer no constructive critique
• Keep discussion limited to format changes still applicable to a Snake Draft or to the original spirit of the tournament
• Provide elaboration on identified issues as warranted and provide reasonable consideration for suggested format changes

Some possible changes to the format that are already in consideration include the following. Many of these were chosen because of their potential to make bounty gathering more team oriented, and to create a better experience for old gen mains or those on the bottom of the bounty list:

Change how much bounty a victor takes from the defeated.
Pros: May make losses feel less punishing, may make it easier for low bounty players to become high bounty players, may better distribute bounty among a team
Cons: Bounties may take longer to consolidate thus lengthening the tour, total tournament bounty equilibrium may or may not be sustained

Rotate tiers. Play only two or three tiers per week, for example, SS / ORAS / DPP in Week 1, USM / BW / ADV in Week 2.
Pros: Consolidates pools to increase total matchups per tier, helps spread bounties around, potential for additional lineup strategy
Cons: Disincentives players from singing up who only want to play a single tier, may inadvertently push most big talent to modern tier options

Dramatically change the initial bounties as determined by draft position.
Pros: Can be used to better distribute initial bounties of a team, overall a simple change to implement
Cons: May undervalue top players and overvalue rookie players, may make it more costly to gamble on unknown players at draft

Dramatically incentivize tiers that have a low number of matches.
Pros: May increase the number of matchups in tiers with low player numbers
Cons: May overcompensate and thereby reward more versatile players by a large margin

Set rules that limit the number of times a player rematches another in pools or how often they can meet again.
Pros: Will make matchups in smaller pools more varied
Cons: Some players who lost their previous game may desire the option for a rematch relatively soon

Various changes to how assassins are determined, prioritized, or advantaged.


For additional reference, the full ruleset of Most Wanted II can be found here.

 

[Aberforth]

The fundamental problem I had with the tour was that it felt like it was later picks didnt matter to the team at all. Wins being so drastically different in value meant that only a few games mattered each week. Case in point: the Solgaleos won last tour comfortably, with 130k extra compared to the second place team in terms of bounty. They had a record of 35 wins, 19 losses. Second place were incredibly far behind, at 160k bounty compared to 290k bounty of the Solgabois. But in terms of wins and losses, they actually had a better record, with 34 wins and 17 losses.

To me, that doesnt fit the spirit of a team tour. My favourite solution is just moving to a normal snake draft format, but if we have to keep the bounties, I'd like the draft itself to be an auction. This doesnt solve the win-value discrepancy, but it does at least allow for teams to have more identity. But yeah, I'd rather a normal snake draft.

 

[ckw]

Echoing the previous posts; you can have a week where all your tailenders win and still be in the negative because your high bounty players lost. While I understand the positive effects that a bounty system can have, such as player seeding in team tours based on skill (we can safely assume high skill = high credits for majority of cases), I'd like to collectively agree with the majority of the playerbase that this has done more bad than good with regards to the enjoyment of the players. Unless the bottom half of the draft are undefeated for the first 3 weeks, there is very little chance for them to contribute towards their team.

We don't have to create a unique team tournament to enjoy the tiers we play. Any standard team tour format that we are accustomed will by default be superior to this format for me personally. Players want to team up and have fun just as much as they want to win the tour but when your entire team's gains are based on the match result of 2 players, the arbitary nature of like 70-80% of the pairings definitely makes it hard to stay motivated throughout the tour. If the majority of the draft cannot enjoy the tour, then why are we having one?

Suggestion: We hold a vote on whether to keep the bounty system or not. A simple Yes / No imo

 

[byulharang]

Glad this is being hosted again, we talked about the format briefly but I'll just post here for others to see. I do want to quickly mention why I wouldnt mind this tour.
Mw is original and a very cool ruleset for a tour. I liked the fact that you can kinda determine matchups before the week starts and try to snipe people in their tiers. Being able to be experimental and move to other tiers to help catch bounty benefitting your team unlike slotting same tier every week UPL is also a pretty cool feature. This tour isn't suppose to be as prestige as UPL obviously but a fun competitive team tour which it accomplishes having its own unique twist. Deciding on benching, chasing bounty, assassin is a cool concept that can benefit good managing. I am not opposing a regular snake draft but I think Mw can work and is still a cool format idea. Mw is way better than a world cup regardless js

-Change how much bounty a victor takes from the defeated.
I tried to explain this last year but didn't really know if it could be implemented, good to know it can. I think the pros outweigh the cons because another change to the tour I'll bring up is instead of making a bounty limit to win make the tour end on a determined week. Increasing this would make it so winning gives more than last MW which the biggest problem was how low bounty players felt they meant nearly nothing besides gaining wins for assassin. Maybe like 75% - something to have in mind is possibly limiting this bounty gain increase to maybe like 15k-20k or something because maybe the increase would rapidly speed up the tour if high bounty players winout early.

-Rotate Tiers
I think this is a solid idea on paper but realistically most players would like to stick to a pool if they could and forcing players to play a tier they potentially aren't versed in and don't want to play.

-Dramatically change initial bounties
I really like this idea and originally got it from Plats post last year, iirc he suggested 5k or around it for everyone. Im not sure what the initial bounties would be best at but I think putting everyone on nearly the same playing field at the start would make it so losing week 1 isn't the end of the world and as damaging as last mw felt. Since last MW the entire bounty pool was 870000 and if you change the initial bounty you would obviously have less money in the pool so a solution to that would be needed. I am not the best at math so I don't really know what would be best but maybe you or someone else knows! Maybe giving a winners bonus to winners for the first weeks or throughout the tour based on win streaks or something.

-Incentivize tiers with low matches
HUGE fan of this one but don't think I tried to explain it enough to you, the fact tiers "die out" and ss/usm are where the money was usually at isn't ideal. Cold tiers was a step in the right direction but giving maybe 3 wins towards assassin instead of 2, adding onto the similar initial bounty missing funds you could give a money bonus to winners in cold tiers to further incentivize playing. I would suggest increasing win% but that would mean the loser loses more, so not as incentivizing as a whole I would imagine. Someone could expand on these ideas more.

new tingz I wanna bring up

-Player not being able to be targeted by an assassin back to back, beating an assassin gives
This is just a safety measure I would like, reference to last MW when I was targeted by an assassin. My team only really had me and Icemaster with a good sized bounty so we needed to be the big bounty getters, being targeted by a 2k assassin is a lose/lose for me because if you lose then you lose money and life, if you win then you get like 1k. Imagine if you win and are targeted again next week, your team momentum is basically killed. I would like to prevent this by just not allowing someone to be targeted back to back or maybe a second time not at all, idk ab the last option. Another thing would be to give the target wins towards assassin status for their team similar to winning in cold tiers.

-Not ending at 275k possibly ending by week 7-9 instead
I'm not entirely sold on this but this could be a cool feature so fears of teams steamrolling a week and getting lucky would be prevented and team longevity would be rewarded. People being eliminated would maybe be a problem for this but as I said, ideally this rewards teamplay.

Im kinda on the fly atm so I may add onto this later.

 

[DNNP]

I am in favor of doing away with the whole bounty system. Cool idea, but I don't see a way to execute it in an efficient manner. Even if we change the tour ending at a bounty amount to ending in a certain number of weeks, you end up in the same situation we had last tour, where it was basically over by W3. Everyone knew who was going to win, so a lot of people gave up on trying because it was hard to care when your games didn't matter. Dragging last MW out to 7-9 weeks would have just been more painful, I honestly wish Crucify's Play Rough hit and it was over W3.
Only other note that I didn't see mentioned yet is repeat match ups. I don't think we need to see Heysup and Noitu play each other 3 times again, no matter how interesting the games are. I would be willing to work with Aberforth's suggestion of a regular Snake Draft, but in general I say scrap this entire tour.

Oh and s/o plat for being lit af <3

 

[Exiline]

Make MW blind auctions (each managers put a bid on each nominated players without knowing how much the others put, the player going to the managers who bidder the higher) and delete the bounty system

 

[TJ]

Why does MW have to stay a bounty tour? Why not have a Snake Draft tour which more people from the ubers community are interested in? MW's demand has obviously waned and the core fundamentals of the tour have done more bad than good. The bounty system is overly elaborate and makes it so if you fall behind during the first 1-2 weeks, you are practically out of the tour. Last year, most teams were essentially eliminated by Week 3. Old gens in the tour are extremely under-represented for better of for worse, with most people aiming for SS for huge bounties. Team dynamic also feels non-existent if you aren't hard winning all your games, since someone can go 4-0 and carry every 3k in the sun. Assassins also feel underpowered when a good player is benched and overpowered when a good player accrues a large advantage. I think Aberforth's suggestion of moving toward a regular Snake Draft format would be a step in the right direction and a lot more fun and interesting with less chance of disaster compared to trying to improve this tour.

 

[SparksBlade]

Change how much bounty a victor takes from the defeated.

This seems ok. Teams lose and gain bounty slower, so we can instead do just fixed number of weeks with highest bounty at the end winning, or change the amount of bounty that automatically wins.

the Solgaleos won last tour comfortably, with 130k extra compared to the second place team in terms of bounty. They had a record of 35 wins, 19 losses. Second place were incredibly far behind, at 160k bounty compared to 290k bounty of the Solgabois. But in terms of wins and losses, they actually had a better record, with 34 wins and 17 losses.

Also addresses this to an extent.

Rotate tiers. Play only two or three tiers per week, for example, SS / ORAS / DPP in Week 1, USM / BW / ADV in Week 2.

The cons in the OP for this are why I don't like this.

Dramatically change the initial bounties as determined by draft position.

This seems ok.

The fundamental problem I had with the tour was that it felt like it was later picks didnt matter to the team at all

you can have a week where all your tailenders win and still be in the negative because your high bounty players lost

since someone can go 4-0 and carry every 3k in the sun

Also addresses these issues.

Dramatically incentivize tiers that have a low number of matches.

Don't like this for the reasons mentioned in cons in the OP, but maybe we can apply small boost to bounty gained from these.

Old gens in the tour are extremely under-represented for better of for worse, with most people aiming for SS for huge bounties.

Can also address this.

Set rules that limit the number of times a player rematches another in pools or how often they can meet again.

This will make matchmaking a bit complicated, and difficult for managers to predict, but at least it'll rid us of Heysup vs Noitu Bo3 Bo3 which many people don't like.

-Player not being able to be targeted by an assassin back to back, beating an assassin gives

100% agree

Everyone knew who was going to win, so a lot of people gave up on trying because it was hard to care when your games didn't matter

They gave up just like the teams that won't make playoffs in regular UPL gave up. This is not unique to MW.

Make MW blind auctions (each managers put a bid on each nominated players without knowing how much the others put, the player going to the managers who bidder the higher) and delete the bounty system

This is terrible, but maybe with the Dave/ebay system it's not so bad.

----------------------------------------------​

I tried to go through everything brought up in this thread (including the two deleted posts), but frankly there was very little about Most Wanted itself, and most of it was repeated across different posts. Instead, people are just eager to end this tour because the popular opinion is that this format sucks. But also very few people actually want to try to improve it, or even reply to other people's attempts at improving it (Minority and Holy Ghost), which is really disheartening.

We have a unique tour, and I understand that unique doesn't necessarily mean good, but I believe this one can be improved. Many of the issues that people raised I found were almost if not completely addressed in the OP, but nobody took the effort to actually respond to them.

I also don't want to move to a regular snake draft. The draft itself is boring, and in the actual tour we most likely do an imitated and modified version of UPL with maybe RBY or different Bo3/Bo5 slot(s), which I fear will eventually become the testing ground for UPL itself rather than being a tour with its own identity.

Replacing the draft in Most Wanted with an auction (as suggested by Exiline, albeit a different type) might be interesting, as now the value managers put on a player in auction is tied a lot more to their own potential record and a bit less to the support they can provide to the team.

 

[MMII]

I don't particularly care if MW stays or not but a regular snake draft is just 100% going to be shitty UPL. Please consider something else if the decision is to drop MW. (a blind auction sounds fun tbh)

I might edit this post with my input on how the issues with MW could be fixed but I'm too lazy rn to just repeat what I already said on discord.

 

[Aberforth]

My issue with most wanted, that I dont think is resolved by the suggestions made in the OP, nor by Holy Ghost, is that each win is inherently different in value. This is a fundamental difference between my desires for a team tour and the tour's formatting, because no matter how much its tweaked, that is a cornerstone of Most Wanted's format, that wins should be valued differently based on who your opponent is. I think that introducing ways to control this more (ie an auction or a blind auction instead of the set values based on draft position) would be a good way at improving the MW format, but I cannot help but significantly prefer snake because I dislike one of the premises of the MW format.

I dont think that changing the starting bounty of each player helps fix this. Because by week 3 or 4, you will have situations where some teammates wins matter, and some really dont. And that's not touching on how much I dislike having people be eliminated from the tournament after 3 losses. Being literally unable to help your team by winning because you lost 3 games in a row would be demotivating as fuck, and I dont think that punishing players like that is a good way to bleed newer players into the community.

I feel like being a shitty UPL is better than being a format that feels like multiple individual tours trying to masquerade as a team-tour. The blind auction seems like a cool idea, but feels like it would be not as exciting a watch for a draft, and probably would end up with complications and hold-ups in the draft itself, because I dont think Scrappie can do Blind Auctions right now.

Also there is almost no doubt that MW has a branding problem. You have people like Dave who will not take part if the tournament is called Most Wanted, and from the discussions in the Uberscord and in a couple of side-discords, it seems fairly clear to me that participation will be lower in the event of a MW3 than it would a different format like Snake or the Blind Auction plan. I dont think there is anything that can be done to fix this either, whether it is fair to the format of MW or not. I respect the time and effort to make a unique team tour, and the idea is very creative and meticulous, but I think continuing with it in the face of a bad reputation would be harmful to the format more than anything else.

Also I'd like to say that we should be looking to start this tour earlier in January rather than later, so that the tournament clashes with as few pieces of our individual circuit as possible, as well as giving some extra breathing time between this tour and UPL.

 

[Denial]

Not gonna partecipate whatever format is decided so i have no interest in vouching for one or another, but i would think not having a third team tour at all is the best option. The third team tour of every subforum always ends up being the less hype or liked, and right now i really don't see much interest for a third team tour to happen at all. People are also divided rn, snake is boring, mw sucks, not everyone will be happy. I'd say a third team tour will just cause burn out and make UPL potentially worse. Dont have the third team tour and make UPL a bit earlier next year.

 

[LBN]

I guess I was beaten to the punch a bit by the other Luna, but all of her points ring true for me as well. Except the part of disliking snake. For me, snake is just a small extension of UPL and it really doesn't matter too much if its similar, but I do also think that having them in such close proximity is a bad idea. While I'm not opposed to having an Ubers snake next year, skipping out on a third team tour entirely is probably the way to go. As for Most Wanted itself... just about everything criticizing it before is accurate in my eyes as well. I think my biggest issue though (that hasnt been mentioned anyway) is its just a needlessly complicated system that feels off putting for someone just starting out in tours when it shouldn't be like that; and isn't like that in any of the other tours.

 

[Tomahawk]

I don't want to come off as mean-spirited, but the Most Wanted format doesn't really make sense to me. I signed up for this last year as it seemed to be a fun team tour where I could play some DPP Ubers, but if it happens again I am definitely not signing up. It's just so complex and unclear unless you dive into it, when I asked for clarifications on the Ubers discord the common reply was "your managers need to know, you don't". So I had no idea what was going in within the tour, I only know who was doing well or wasn't doing well with the total credits but no idea why. Wasn't really sure when a game matterered or didn't (it seemed to me that going 0-2 into 3-2 for example, is totally pointless, but again I am not sure at all), players are randomly benched, and at the end suddenly a team won but I did not realize they would be. At the end of the tour, I still didn't really follow the format. Just my two cents as a player last year.

 

[SparksBlade]

Here's a new tour idea different from UPL but with very simple rules.

3-4 teams, increased number of slots, maybe 2xUSM, a Bo3 ADV DPP BW etc etc. A team will play every other team twice (so a regular season x2), and we'll have home/away system for points similar to what's used in European football a lot.

That's all I've thought for now, very unpolished. What should the playoffs be like? Should it be a home and away match in final? Do we just use BD for home/away scores or can there be something else?

 

[Highlord]

Aberforth makes a good point that one of the biggest issues with Most Wanted was that certain games barely mattered at all, but the premise that having games with varying degrees of importance is problematic is only true when pushed to the extremes. Here’s a team tour idea that encapsulates the “weighted game” concept of Most Wanted while fixing a few issues:

• Standard auction-based draft and weeks system like UPL.
• Along with lineups, each manager tells the host one slot that they would like to “boost.” Winning a boosted slot is equivalent to winning two games.
• If both teams coincidentally tell the host to boost the same slot, then there is a single boosted slot that is worth three wins.
• There is no such thing as winning a week. After the regular season is over, the two teams with the most wins will play each other to win the tour.

The games are no longer weighted to ridiculous extremes like we saw in Most Wanted, and the confusing bounty system no longer exists. As a bonus, there is no issue of dead tiers. Also, MMII is 100% correct that a snake draft would devolve into a shitty UPL. I also think Sparksblade's idea has some merit, but I'm not sure if its differences are significant enough to be anything more than a standard team tour with less teams and more slots.

 

[Fc]

Hi, the mod team has been discussing this quite a bit over the past few days, and after ruling out some options, our main one is based on the post by Highlord above, with these being the main focuses of it:

• Along with lineups, each manager tells the host one slot that they would like to “boost.” Winning a boosted slot is equivalent to winning two games.
• If both teams coincidentally tell the host to boost the same slot, then there is a single boosted slot that is worth three wins.
• There is no such thing as winning a week. After the regular season is over, the two teams with the most wins will play each other to win the tour.

The games are no longer weighted to ridiculous extremes like we saw in Most Wanted, and the confusing bounty system no longer exists. As a bonus, there is no issue of dead tiers.

There are a few things that need to be fixed up a bit more, such as format of the draft (auction vs keeping a snake) as well as slots (more vs less, rby?) as a way to make it different from UPL in more ways than just the gimmick.

More input is always appreciated in threads like these, but from the community we need assistance with 2 things, hosting and a name for the tour. With this new format the tour would be rebranded as it doesn't fit the exact theme of most wanted since people don't accumulate points that can be lost, just possibly increasing their points. If anyone has serious suggestions they can go here or in #general in the ubers discord and we'll consider them all. As for hosting, if anyone's interested you can message one of the forum mods on smogon or discord (Fc#6888, dreamy#7119, SparksBlade#9221, Minority#7788) with your hosting experience and interest, thanks!

 

[Master Chief]

Given the previous tour was called most wanted, we should call this tour most strapped

 

[Gareeb]

a name for the tour.

Most Not Wanted Tour

 

[InkPupil]

Most Not Wanted Tour

lol lmao

 

[MMII]

Well, if the plan is to make a new tournament using the scrapped MW then it's worth the bother to repeat myself.

some remarks I made before that will still be relevant here

Aberforth definitely nails it when they bring up unequal value between matches as a core issue. I feel weighted games contradicts the premise of team tournaments in general, so I'm not as keen as Highlord in salvaging that part of MW. (although I'm not strictly against it either)

I think the most interesting and unique aspect of MW is in the performance based matchmaking that gives us roughly equal matchups each week. In other words, I think a swiss-style team tournament is cool.

So, instead of a convoluted bounty system:
- Each win is worth X and each loss is worth -X, regardless of that player's bounty
- Players in a gen pool are matched up against the player with the closest bounty, starting from the highest value player
- Players are no longer eliminated after losing 3 times.*
- The winning team is the first to reach Y total bounty and/or the highest team bounty total after however many weeks

* - You can eliminate players when they don't have the X bounty to lose but you can also just play with the numbers so that it's not possible to go that low. Or you just make it so that you don't loss any bounty when you lose.


This is a much simpler bounty system and also fixes other issues like old gens drying up (any win has the same worth so it's optimal for players to play in their strongest meta, ie the ones they actually want to play) and makes it easier to change other rules without fears of fucking up your carefully (un)balanced bounty economy. For example, you can easily add Highlord's recommendation of a boosted slot by using 2X or 3X. You can also force teams to fill gen slots like in UPL or just make it a minimum to field per gen if you want to keep the MW freedom of having an army of USM players. (Doing so complicates things for matchmaking but that may be worth it?)

Some things that would still need to be addressed would be stipulations to prevent repeat matchups (Pair the highest player against the closest bounty that they haven't played against yet/within the last X weeks and work your way down from there?) and whether or not we want variable initial bounties. For the most part, though, you just have to look at how standard swiss tournaments do things and copy it when applicable.

 

[Icemaster]

Do we really need this tournament to have a gimmick? Something more simple like a snake format or blind auction seems best to me, the main attraction of team tournaments for me is playing against good players while working with other good players, rather than anything else.

 

[eden]

Speaking as an outsider I wanna reiterate icemasters take: why do you guys feel like you need to be different so badly?

You're making the tour unnecessarily complicated, end of the day you wanna play mons in a high level tour right?

In fact I'd argue overly gimmicky tours kill the hype, most people really do not care what the draft format is, even what the tour format is, as long as they're playing for keeps in high stakes games vs good opponents: arguments over format shouldn't essentially turn into a glorified way to pat yourself on the back for finding the most "unique" convoluted way to host a tour

Who cares if it's mini upl? Your tours not gonna magically grow history and prestige behind it; hell you can even just do ubers snake draft, snake drafts seem to attract more than enough attention for every single lower tier: should work out just fine here too;

As an aside: Ubers world cup is basically UPL with extra steps - instead of weeks, you got pools, UPL is basically SPL except with ubers tiers - see the pattern here? There's a limited pool of good ideas, and ultimately everything you do will be a riff on something that's been done before to some extent; so don't worry too hard about your format not standing out; if you got good players who're itching to play: and you give them a platform to focus on just that - the hype/engagement automatically comes

When you're spending more time arguing over how to weight wins and the exact draft format than actually playing you've already missed the point

 

[MMII]

Every new tournament requires discussion, it's happened every time. You are going to have to be nitpicky about details cause that's part of planning and helps make sure that things are smooth and easy for the players when the tournament is actually happening. Unless you are arguing that swiss is gimmicky and complicated?

Anyways, snake sucks ass; it's why it doesn't even exist anymore outside of lower tiers. It has nothing to do with history and prestige, the format is just shit. It's impossible to not compare it to UPL when Snake is a carbon copy but instead of the auction you use a draft format that's strictly worse. An actual second UPL is honestly a better idea.

Personally, I'd rather not have a third team tournament but if we are going to do one then it's worth the effort to make sure it ends up being fun.

not important for this post

As an aside: Ubers world cup is basically UPL with extra steps - instead of weeks, you got pools, UPL is basically SPL except with ubers tiers - see the pattern here? There's a limited pool of good ideas, and ultimately everything you do will be a riff on something that's been done before to some extent; so don't worry too hard about your format not standing out; if you got good players who're itching to play: and you give them a platform to focus on just that - the hype/engagement automatically comes

The only similarity between world cup and premier league is that they are both team tournaments, literally nothing else is the same. UPL and SPL have completely different target audiences, obviously not the case for whatever this third team tournament would be. The point of doing something different isn't some badge of pride, it's because people have to dedicate two months to a team tournament and stay engaged or it ruins the fun for everyone. That's the whole point of this thread; folks have UPL and UWC and want to do a third team tournament this year, what should we do that will keep folks interested until the end?

 

[SparksBlade]

Do we really need this tournament to have a gimmick?

Speaking as an outsider I wanna reiterate icemasters take: why do you guys feel like you need to be different so badly?

You're making the tour unnecessarily complicated, end of the day you wanna play mons in a high level tour right?

I think this idea has been overplayed/overexaggerated a decent bit. For me it's not about searching for a unique gimmick that makes this tour stand out from all others in existence, but rather having a tour that's simple to follow for all parties yet just different enough from UPL so as to not live in its shadow. From the people suggesting Snake Draft to other different ideas, I presume that many people don't mind having a slightly different tour. The emphasis in this thread has been to have a tour that's fun and not convoluted, whether that be an updated Most Wanted or an entirely different tour. If you've missed that point and view every suggestion as just a gimmick then that's either misunderstood by you or miscommunicated by us. If it's the latter, I apologize for the confusion.

arguments over format shouldn't essentially turn into a glorified way to pat yourself on the back for finding the most "unique" convoluted way to host a tour

This is embarrassingly ignorant imo. I would think almost all posts in this thread would give you the idea that we're trying to use a format that's simple to grasp for the managers/captains, players, and spectators, as well as not put too much burden on the hosts. I really don't understand what gave you the idea that this is "a glorified way to pat yourself on the back".

Who cares if it's mini upl? Your tours not gonna magically grow history and prestige behind it

I do care, and at least a few other people do as well. You can read some of the posts to see that. Also for some reason you think we're trying to make a gimmicky convoluted absolutely unique tour that'll also have high prestige from the get go? Well no, we're not trying for either of those things. We want a tour that'll last long and people will enjoy, and it can build prestige along the way.

As an aside: Ubers world cup is basically UPL with extra steps - instead of weeks, you got pools

That's a distinction, not extra steps. You even used "instead of [X], you got [Y]" which tells difference.

UPL is basically SPL except with ubers tiers

Another distinction.

If we had the luxury to pick completely different tiers from UPL for this new tour, it would just be so easy and we might not even have this thread. But we don't have that luxury. We have GSC-SS in UPL, and RBY is the only one left out. I don't expect any of the mid-gen metagames to have lasting popularity - the team legality hassle for XY BW1 etc would be a mess. That leaves us with few options - one of them being combining different old gens for Bo3 or Bo5 slots which many have brought up. The other option is to do something with the format of the tour itself, which brings us back to the purpose of this thread.

When you're spending more time arguing over how to weight wins and the exact draft format than actually playing you've already missed the point

That happens many times when organising an event - the preparation and discussion takes longer than the actual thing. Now

To reiterate, the plan is not to make a unique tournament that'll stand out from all others, but to have a tour that's different enough from UPL but simple and fun for participants and spectators. For now, this seems to be the favorite by far.

re: just do second UPL - I don't mind it. If a majority of people just think this is the best option, then we'll do it. I personally don't like it, and I think we have the ideas to do something else.

re: delete third tour - I prefer this, but the argument of World Cup vs whatever this tour becomes is a separate one. I dislike all World Cup tours so I would prefer that go. But for that, this tour would need to exist so I would like that we finish this discussion.

 

[Minority]

Locking this thread since a decision regarding format was made.

I'll just close this out by stating that as has been echoed by Sparks, several players, and past mods alike, replacing this tour with an inferior UPL copy is pretty much the worst outcome. Not really sure why we need an aberration of UPL that doesn't even try to disguise the fact that it's a cheap knock off as this just pointlessly detracts from our premier tournament and runs up the legwork for circuit scheduling and tour administration. The tour isn't even geared toward supporting talent scouting for UPL in the slightest.

If a sizable portion of this community currently no longer wants to pursue Most Wanted in any recognizable sense, then that's just how it is. Where I take issue is when a sub optimal decision is made privately by a mere two individuals, who also happen to have made themselves managers in the same tour. I am recording here that doing literally anything else was a better option, including just axing this tournament entirely as we've already filled the need for a gimmick circle-jerk tour with World Cup.