Announcement National Dex Circuit Feedback and Discussion thread

[Steorra]

Hiya all,

With 2021 National Dex Circuit coming to a close with our last circuit tour closing off and playoffs fast approaching, we thought to take this time to have a feedback thread to hear your thoughts on the rights and wrongs of this year's circuit and if and what we could change to make next year's circuit even better. To get the ball rolling, I'll layout some quick personal thoughts I had on it.

Seasonals and Majors - While we did better than last year with turnout, going from 64 man tours to 96 and 128 man tours, I do think having three seasonals is a bit much and especially when two of them collided with Majors, which got a similar amount of signups. Maybe another OU based tour but in a different format than Seasonal or Majors or removing this tour as a whole since it did conflict with the schedule and by extension NDPL later down the line.

Grand Slam - This was a great tour, far exceeding our expectations to go up to 196 man tours for Mono and AG opens and 128 man tour for UU open. This tour really helps show some light for our other tiers and showed to be a fun format for players inside and outside Natdex. It additionally brings a whole lot of diversification to our circuit and would love to see it return.

Ladder Tour - Quite an engaging tour to the tier that brought around a lot of trends and helped the tier grow greatly. While it did fall off a good chunk come Cycle 4, signups for the other 3 cycles were quite high, ranging in the 60s, 70s, and 120s ranges for signups and speaking as someone who played in it, it was very exhilarating to the very end.

Once again this is no indication of what next year's circuit may look like and just my brief personal thoughts on it.

Would you like to see something else than a third Seasonal? Would you want to bring back an old tour format from last year? or maybe introduce a whole new one altogether? Let us know!

 

[spell]

Proxy posting for pannuracotta because they scrambled their smogon password for whatever reason
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Speaking as someone who, albiet half-assedly, did play in almost every circuit tour this year, i have some things i wanted to say,

First off, seaonals are boring as shit, and please do remove one of them in favour for a more interesting ou tour.

Majors was probably my favourite tour this year despite me literally throwing playoffs r1, the best part was the pools phase probably, playing in bo1s is a more fun and fast format than the regular bo3 in tours and also helped weed out some lesser experieced players, allowing for a more competetive playoffs.

Lt was probably the most competetive tour of the year, probably due to the amount of non mainers that did sign up, it was also really fun to watch the games and it felt as if it had the most development for the metagame within it.

Lastly i wanted to comment on Grand Slam, i firmly believe that it shouldnt be a circuit tour. Mostly because of circuit poffs being entirely ndou yet ou isnt even in slam, i dont see why winning a ndag tour should give you points to play in ndou circuit playoffs. it was, however, a fun tour and helped develope some lesser played national dex metas (nduu). It should be kept around, just please just have it not be a circuit tour

 

[peap]

I appreciate the forum mods and tour hosts for pretty much always supporting an ongoing competition. I do think there is a ton of overlap time wise between tours - playoffs of one tour are very likely to coincide with the start of the next - but there’s no pressure to play them all. In that respect, the circuit has been very positive for players to try their hand at the meta and collectively gain experience in the tier. You can see this from the large number of new people who signed up in the current seasonal since the previous.

I think as Kaede mentioned we could remove one of the three seasonals, without harming opportunities for players to develop. As someone who played in most of these tours (Fall Seasonal, Spring Seasonal, Ladder Tour) and then NDPL, I was honestly too exhausted to sign up for the current Seasonal especially as it overlapped with the final rounds of LT. Seasonal in particular has the highest number of games due to the double elimination structure, but it feels more isolated since replays aren’t required until semifinals (usually round ~10) and you can’t scout your opponent through the tour itself. So the metagame development is not as visible to the community, and there’s much less engagement compared to Grand Slam or NDLT.

I propose hosting just two Fall and Spring Seasonal tournaments, with replays required from Round of 16 or earlier.

 

[Clone]

Forcing AG and other tiers made me not care about playoffs despite having a good chance to make it had I played in the last ssnl instead of johnning and getting coinflipped out. I'm probably in the minority with this opinion, but AG is a bad tier and doesn't belong in any tour that wants to be taken seriously, to include PL or the circuit

The last ssnl overlapping with NDPL also sucked because I didn't really want to play in both, so I prioritized the team tour given my obligation to them. Either removing it or moving it sooner/changing it to something else is probably the best decision

But the main point of this post is having shit like AG in the circuit honestly made me not care about playoffs at all

Edit: also given that OU tours make a majority of the circuit there 100% needs to be more than 1 OU game per set in playoffs

 

[Avery]

hi we've taken the feedback above into account and we've come up with the following rough gameplan for the 2022 circuit. the dates are subject to change but it gives a rough idea of when tours will take place. you'll notice the noteworthy changes, such as no third seasonal and ou replacing ag within grand prix (formerly grand slam), as well as small adjustments to the amounts of points given out by each tournament. below is the projected 2022 schedule -

[type a] winter ssnl - signups go up jan 2
[type c] ndou cup - signups go up feb 20
[type c] nduu cup - signups go up feb 20
[type c] ndmono cup - signups go up feb 27
[type b] grand prix playoffs - april 24
ndwc - 4-6 weeks - signups go up april 10 (NOT PART OF CIRCUIT)
[type a] summer ssnl - signups go up june 5
ndpl - 11-13 weeks - player signups go up july 3 (NOT PART OF CIRCUIT)
ndlt ladder stage - 4 weeks - sept 4/sept 11/sept 18/sept 25
[type a] ndlt playoffs - oct 2
[type b] last chance - signups go up oct 9
circuit playoffs - dec 4

thank you for your input