Tournament National Dex Doubles 2025 Circuit Feedback Thread

[Smudge]

Use this thread to discuss any potential changes, additions, formats, points distributions, etc.
Council will discuss feedback and implement what we see fit for the next year, and we may respond to certain things if elaboration is needed.

Please refer to the Doubles feedback thread for examples of the type of feedback we're looking for. i.e. no one-liners, constructive / productive feedback only.

Starting topic: Were there enough tournaments, with a satisfying format variety?

We had some minor hosting hiccups this year & start dates being adjusted - sorry for that.

Here was this year's schedule, roughly, for reference:

Last Year's Schedule

National Dex Doubles Circuit Schedule ​

Note that signups will be posted around one to two weeks before the start date and the end date of tournaments may be dependent on the number of signups.

National Dex Doubles Spring Seasonal
March 2nd - Late May

National Dex Doubles Swiss
June 1st - August 11th

National Dex Doubles Fall Seasonal
August 3rd - October 26th

National Dex Doubles Ladder Tournament
September 28th - November 10th

National Dex Doubles Invitational
November 16th - December 9th

Other Tournaments Featuring National Dex Doubles

Doubles Derby III - Signups open!
March 10th - July 28th

National Dex World Cup
Player signups go up ~ April 7th

National Dex Premier League IV
Player signups go up ~ August 18th

Active tournaments will be coloured in Blue
Completed tournaments will be colured in Grey​

 

[Smudge]

Do note that the circuit championship will only begin once we've calculated the results for the year and sent out invites & got confirmation. It will not start before seasonal ends, the date is inaccurate on this.

 

[Astro Nation Shoe]

Tournament Idea:
This tournament aims to create a fast-paced, group stage that avoids the problems of a standard Round Robin. Instead of small, isolated groups, we will use two large 16-player pools, run as a 4-week Swiss. This format is designed to find the 16 best players and seed them for a traditional knockout stage.
Phase 1: Swiss Pools (4 Weeks)
32 players are randomly seeded into two pools (Pool A and Pool B) of 16 players each.
Each pool is run as a 4-Round Swiss Tournament.
Players will only play opponents within their own 16-player pool.
The Top 8 players from each pool advance to the Playoff Stage.

Phase 2: Playoffs (4 Weeks)
The 16 advancing players (A1-A8 and B1-B8) are seeded into a standard Single Elimination bracket.
Seeding: The bracket will be seeded to reward high-placing players (e.g., A1 vs. B8, B1 vs. A8, A2 vs. B7, etc.) example below!
Tiebrakers: Match Record (W-L), This is simple. A 3-1 record is better than a 2-2 record. OMW% (Opponents Match Winrate) also known as Resistance helps in the case of a shared score to determine who is the better player ranking them higher. In the rare Case of both W-L and OMW% being the same OOMW% (Opponents Opponents Match Winrate) will be used.​

How Ranking Works (Example):
At the end of 4 rounds, we will have a ranked table. ​

Rank​	Player​	Record​	Resistance(OMW%)​	Status​
1​	Player_A​	4-0​	62.5%​	Advances​
2​	Player_B​	3-1​	58%​	Advances​
3​	Player_C​	3-1​	55%​	Advances​
4​	Player_D​	3-1​	47.5%​	Advances​
5​	Player_E​	2-2​	60%​	Advances​
6​	Player_F​	2-2​	52%​	Advances​
7​	Player_G​	2-2​	50%​	Advances​
8​	Player_H​	2-2​	48%​	Advances​
9​	Player_I​	2-2​	44%​	Eliminated​
10​	Player_J​	1-3​	50%​	Eliminated​
...​	...​	...​	...​	...​

As you can see, Player B, C, and D all have the same 3-1 record, but they are ranked by their Resistance. The same is true for Players E, F, G, H, and I, who are all 2-2. ​

​

Schedule (8 Weeks)​

Week 1: Pool Stage - Round 1 (Bo1)
Week 2: Pool Stage - Round 2 (Bo1)
Week 3: Pool Stage - Round 3 (Bo1)
Week 4: Pool Stage - Round 4 (Bo1)
Week 5: Playoff Stage - Round of 16 (Bo3)
Week 6: Playoff Stage - Quarter-Finals (Bo3)
Week 7: Playoff Stage - Semi-Finals (Bo3)
Week 8: Playoff Stage - Finals (Bo3)

If you have come this far, Thank you for reading. I believe this could be a new take on the classic Swiss style tournaments. This post was made with 32 players in mind it can ofc be adjusted depending on the amount of players that would sign up. If you have any questions or thoughts on this post please let me know.​

​

 

[gephicka]

on NDDLT:

i honestly had a lot of fun with this tour, i do not think it should ever be dropped, it just needs a few tweaks to be more competitive
1. a new alt each week.
a huge problem we had this past LT is users having ladder alts so high that if you didn't qualify one week you could just sit on an alt for a whole week & still be within the top 4 for that week. requiring users to make a new alt for each week (or having a different prefix for each week like a lot of other LTs) circumvents this by forcing users to ladder up again preventing a few users from camping at the top and also solving the second issue:
2. a difficulty of finding games on high ladder
because of the issues described in the previous bullet, players would oftentimes just camp the ND Events room to see when good players were online and log off to avoid them, leading to some users having to wait insane periods of time to even find a single game. i believe this will largely be circumvented by the above new alt per each week proposal, as it forces you to play more games per week to qualify.
3. possible changes to the week format
i don't necessarily think this holds as much water, with the only real change i'd be in favor of being 3x4 or 2x4 rather than 4x4. having any more than 4x quals per week is too many, the tour needs to have a limited amount for it to be pretty competitive & 4 felt perfect. 4 weeks is still fine & makes the actually playoffs bracket really streamlined, but it's honestly just a bit of a slog & by week 3 a lot of the best players have already qualified.

TL;DR
i think the only real change that needs to be made is forcing people to make new alts each week by having a new prefix each week. makes it a lot easier to track the leaderboard on a week-by-week basis & prevents high-ladder accounts from just camping until the next week. also means that players will have to engage with the ladder more which is overall the desired outcome of the tour in the first place