Tournament NeverUsed Snake Draft I: Manager Sign-ups

[shiloh]

art credit: Zephyr2007​

With the second wave of DLC coming out at the end of this month, we decided that there we did want a second team tournament for NU, especially considering the help it can give to develop the new metagame as it starts forming at the end of this month. This means our likely start date will be November 1st for the first week of the tour, and will likely be 8 teams, so 7 week regular season, and 2 weeks for playoffs. With SPL being pushed back a month as well, this will match up well with it and mean there is minimal overlap with official tours.

With that being said, we did not just want a full SS tour, so the tiers for this tour will be as follows: 4 SS NU / 2 SM NU / 1 ORAS NU / 1 Bo3 (SS/SM/ORAS). This might change before player signups, but we do not foresee adding additional tiers, it would mainly be changing up the number or removing a slot like Bo3.

Like mentioned earlier, we are looking to have 8 teams, and that is the purpose of this thread. Post below if you would be interested in managing, and feel that you could commit to staying around for the entirety of the tour. Managers will be able to purchase themselves, but it will be in lieu of a round 1 pick in order to keep it fair. As it is a Snake Draft, the pick order will be randomized and announced a couple days after player signups. There will be either 10 or 12 rounds of drafting; this will be discussed among managers / moderators.

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With all that out of the way, these are the qualifications we are looking for; managers will be chosen based on experience in NU tournaments (most notably NUPL and SPL), involvement in the community, competence™, and historically demonstrating good behavior. If you're signing up, include solid reasoning as to why you would be a good manager based on these qualities. No shitposts masquerading as sign up posts, so no "in" posts please. Team names will be decided once all managers are picked. Also if it was not clear, I will be the host and do not plan on participating myself.

Signups will remain open till this Sunday the 18th.

 

[Finchinator]

I will be managing

e: Nimbasa Ninjask > Castelia Cramorant

 

[etern]

The Dewford Duckletts are back!!

 

[Kiyo]

you misspelled bird draft.

I would like to manage the New Bark Noctowls.

 

[Garay oak]

I would like to manage the Solaceon Swellows.

I would like to give managing a second try. Things didn't really go well for my team in NUPL, but I believe I know what went wrong and I could fix it. Other than that, I've been a member of the community for almost 4 years now, pretty much since I started on smogon, and I've always been fond of the tier and its players, so I feel like I know the playerbase enough to draft a competent team. I know my activity hasn't been the best lately but I wouldn't sign up to manage if I were planning not to give a fuck about it.

 

[Oathkeeper]

Alright, basically going for broke here but I would like to manage the Sandalstraw Sandacondas. I'll be totally honest up front but, I have never managed a team before (EVER) and I need to start somewhere and why not in a tier that I main right?

I did play in the RU Snake Draft earlier this year with MrAldo's team (Happy-Go-Lucky Heliolisks) and my only victory was against Lopunny Kicks in 5 games and I played in ZUPL last year with my only game being a loss (first time in a PL). Again, no experience managing and I would need to start somewhere.

So yeah, intro over and here's a Sandaconda. Cuz, you know, it's a SNAKE draft guys? C'mon now.

 

[Luck O' the Irish]

so this isnt a sign up post but just wanted to share some thoughts w regards to how the currently we deal w managers who want to play (might not be ideal place to voice this but w/e).

my mindset w regards to this is i think it would be cool if nu snake was an opportunity to give opportunities to lesser established players to manage, and i wonder if the auto r1 tag for managers wanting to play would discourage some users from being managers. for myself personally, i am very interested in managing, but 100% want to play. im not sure im worth a r1 pick as I can provide basically zero support for SM and haven't quite ascended to NU tour slayer. the opportunity cost here is actually much higher compared to say nupl, as even if you end up being a more expensive player-manager in nupl you can still spend on other players whose prices are instantly gonna get driven up to 15-20k+. in snake, those users, for the most part, are all just gonna get taken r1. as i see it, if you are a manager who plays and are not a consensus r1/r2 pick your team has an inherent disadvantage. this is particularly the case if you have an early r1 pick.

expulso and I discussed this briefly and I really liked his idea: essentially tiering prospective managers into 3 tiers (or similar concept) and having Tier 1 player managers take themselves in r1, Tier 2 in r2, etc. Perhaps a little too convoluted as the tier is obviously subjective, but w broad enough descriptions and these managers still having to take themselves in an early round, it may encourage other users to apply for manager, and thus having a group of managers more diverse than "users heavily involved in tour scene".

for those of you that read this and think "i dont think this is worth complicating the process" or "quit bein a pussy bro just draft yourself r1", all I can say is fair enough. maybe it wouldnt end up mattering at all; I'm just interested in having managers who aren't just "folks who have managed in past nupls" and think this way of handling manager-players could make that more likely.

 

[Expulso]

expulso and I discussed this briefly and I really liked his idea: essentially tiering prospective managers into 3 tiers (or similar concept) and having Tier 1 player managers take themselves in r1, Tier 2 in r2, etc. Perhaps a little too convoluted as the tier is obviously subjective, but w broad enough descriptions and these managers still having to take themselves in an early round, it may encourage other users to apply for manager, and thus having a group of managers more diverse than "users heavily involved in tour scene".

I love Luck O' the Irish's post, and I want to expand a little bit on this possible solution we discussed.

I think that we could divide prospective managers into 4 tiers based on objective criteria:

Tier 1: Experienced official tour players.
Definition: players with > 11 games on the sheet, representing more than one full season of an official tour (except wcop oops but thats all ou), but you could probably raise that threshold to 18 or 22.

This would include players like Finch, Eternally, Garay Oak, etc. who have tons of success in official tours. If they signed up as players they'd be no-brainer R1 picks, so making them worth a Round 1 pick is fair.

Tier 2: Inexperienced official tour players.
Definition: players with between 1 and 11 games on the sheet, representing less than one full season of an official team tournament.

This would include players like GW, Ho3n, and I, who have some official tour experience but are still new to that scene and thus significantly less experienced than Tier 1 players.

I think making them worth a Round 2 pick would be fair; I'd expect myself to go around R3 in this tour as a player and think most of us would be approximately round 2-4 picks, so making Tier 2 players worth a Round 2 pick would ensure that nobody's able to get themselves as a steal in this system.

Tier 3: NU subforum tour players
Definition: players previously drafted for NUPL (or maybe also other tiers' subforum tours) but without the official team tour experience included in the categories above. This would include players like Davon, Luck O The Irish, Rabia, Abejas, and plenty of other NU community regulars.

I think making them worth a Round 3 pick is probably fair? Some would be taken pretty far after Round 3, but a Round 3 pick is less costly to your team than a Round 1 pick, so even though it would still be an overpay it would be much more manageable for them if they wanted to play.

(Honestly Davon's a possible exception to this, he was extremely widely regarded as a snub in this SSD after winning NU Open so I could see a team that really likes him taking him in the second round. A r3 value would be more than fair for 99% of the players in this category, though.)

Tier 4: New tour players
Definition: players who don't have experience in NUPL or official tours.

This would be fairer than a R1 pick for people that are very new to the scene but hoping to play; something as low as a R4 or R5 pick would be fair, maybe even lower but I wouldn't make it too low in order to risk ppl circumventing the spirit of the system (e.g. if someone played in uupl but never nupl, so they're in this category but have experience)

I think having objective criteria makes this system fair, though possible exceptions like Davon in Tier 3 may pose an issue. That could be solved by just raising the pick value of that tier to R2, using the categories as rough guidelines, or expanding the definitions (e.g. including nu open semifinalists / finalists / winners in the tier 2 definition, which seems fair enough but is something i didnt do for simplicity's sake)


thx for reading! sorry i cannot be concise for the life of me

 

[GW]

I would like to manage the Fortree Frogadiers

I have played in the past 2 NUPLs and was able to show a big improvement from basically winless my first year to positive this year, and have managed/played in a countless amount of discord team tournaments as well, knowing what it takes to have a successful team that wants to win. I also believe that I can be good team support. I also love the NU community and think this would be pretty cool : D

 

[Scottie]

Sticking with the bird theme I would like to manage the Air Balloon Samurotts

 

[Sjneider]

Managing the Sav Mode Sjneasels

Tier 1: Experienced official tour players.
This would include players like Finch, Eternally, Garay Oak

Taking myself r2

 

[Finchinator]

Technically just for manager sign-ups, but the above proposal went off-topic, so I shall as well.

Using the amount of games on the Official Tournament sheet to determine what round pick managers in the NU Snake Draft would be valued at is a bad idea.

The aforementioned Official Tournament sheet encompasses dozens of tournaments over a long period of time, many of which do not involve any NU (WCOP and some editions of SPL), let alone modern NUs. I do believe I would go r1 if I was in the player pool and I do not fight this valuation whatsoever, but the logical leaps we are now applying with this proposal to justify that are ridiculous. The same can be applied to a lot of other prospective managers and their valuations, too.

Let's expand on this example: I have >100 games on the sheet, but well less than 20% of them are in NU and none of them are in SS NU. In addition, I have played in 9 official tournaments (SPL 8, SPL 11, and WCOP 2014-2020) that had no option to play an NU tier in them out of 16 total official tournaments (others were SPL 6, SPL 7, SPL 10, and SSD 1-4, which all had a generation of NU in them) I have played in. This is less than half of the my opportunities to participate in officials.

Moreover, using this as the sole decider of manager's value in a strictly NU tournament does not make much sense to me. Does my overall experience help advance my skills as a player and teambuilder? Yes, but things do not always translate perfectly between metagames and there are countless examples of this. The current proposal is very flawed and should not be implemented.

If you are going out of your way to make an arbitrary scale -- which this absolutely is with the game cutoffs and it seems others want for whatever reason, then it has to be very effective and persuasive in order to be implemented as otherwise people can and will nitpick it to death (see: this entire post). Generally, finding arbitrary solutions like this are off-limits in serious tournaments as they are always going to end up imperfect.

If we absolutely have to use something arbitrary to evaluate the round value of managers (which, again, I disagree with doing), then use NUPL prices, NU circuit performances, and/or things that pertains to NU over the last few years. I cannot stress enough that I much prefer we do not use anything arbitrary and I would even prefer not playing as a manager to applying anything arbitrary like these solutions, but given that the managers make up a sizable portion of the involved playerbase for tournaments like this, I understand the circumstances.

The "all managers are worth a r1 pick" solution makes the most sense to me from a logical perspective (especially seeing as none of the others follow particularly good logic), but people are going to cry "finch is bias" when I say this because that would advantage my team as I am already r1 by default, so I would prefer this portion of my opinion is not taken into any decisions being made. I just ask that we do not do apply something based off of the Official Tournament sheet for the reasons expressed above.

 

[shiloh]

The ruling in the OP will stand, as while some points LoI and Expulso did bring up are valid, it is the most fair to just have managers purchased r1. Finch's post covers a lot of good reasoning as to why, and I do not want to cloud up the thread with any more discussion after this so I will delete anything further on this topic after this post.

 

[Kingler]

so this isnt a sign up post but just wanted to share some thoughts w regards to how the currently we deal w managers who want to play (might not be ideal place to voice this but w/e).

my mindset w regards to this is i think it would be cool if nu snake was an opportunity to give opportunities to lesser established players to manage, and i wonder if the auto r1 tag for managers wanting to play would discourage some users from being managers. for myself personally, i am very interested in managing, but 100% want to play. im not sure im worth a r1 pick as I can provide basically zero support for SM and haven't quite ascended to NU tour slayer. the opportunity cost here is actually much higher compared to say nupl, as even if you end up being a more expensive player-manager in nupl you can still spend on other players whose prices are instantly gonna get driven up to 15-20k+. in snake, those users, for the most part, are all just gonna get taken r1. as i see it, if you are a manager who plays and are not a consensus r1/r2 pick your team has an inherent disadvantage. this is particularly the case if you have an early r1 pick.

expulso and I discussed this briefly and I really liked his idea: essentially tiering prospective managers into 3 tiers (or similar concept) and having Tier 1 player managers take themselves in r1, Tier 2 in r2, etc. Perhaps a little too convoluted as the tier is obviously subjective, but w broad enough descriptions and these managers still having to take themselves in an early round, it may encourage other users to apply for manager, and thus having a group of managers more diverse than "users heavily involved in tour scene".

for those of you that read this and think "i dont think this is worth complicating the process" or "quit bein a pussy bro just draft yourself r1", all I can say is fair enough. maybe it wouldnt end up mattering at all; I'm just interested in having managers who aren't just "folks who have managed in past nupls" and think this way of handling manager-players could make that more likely.

This is a great post, and I legitimately hope it inspires lesser-known NU players to sign up for manager spots; it’s always nice to see new talent crop up.

As someone who sees himself as a rising NU player (but would probably be bought closer to R10 than R1), I’m signing up with Eternally as my assman (yes, I’m coup-ing him).

 

[Scottie]

I change my mind I would like to manage the Only Rotom Fans

image courtesey of 0NI / poh for the idea

 

[watashi]

i would like to manage the pablodors

will post logo as soon as zracknel is done with it

 

[shiloh]

managers are now selected:

Finchinator / Eternally / Kiyo / Garay oak / Oathkeepre / Sjneider / Osh / watashi

are the 8 that have been chosen. and this is the randomized order

player signups will be up soon