The
tentative list of formats for this year's Snake Draft is as follows:
- (Best of 5) 2v2 Doubles
- (Best of 3) Pure Hackmons
- Tier Shift
- Trademarked
As members of the OM community, you are urged to voice your opinion on the metagames you would like to see in this tournament. The list above is
not final and will change based on the feedback provided in this thread.
Best-of-3 Pure Hackmons seems atrocious.
DISCLAIMER: I am looking at this from a statistical approach. Sorry if that was not clear.
To preface, all of these stats are using the 1500 stat files:
- December 2019: Camomons - 12172 battles
- December 2019: [Gen 7] Balanced Hackmons - 56888 battles
- January 2020: 2v2 Doubles - 14012 battles
- January 2020: [Gen 7] Balanced Hackmons - 62494 battles
- February 2020: Pure Hackmons - 41928 battles
- February 2020: Trademarked - 21603 battles
- March 2020: Inheritance - 21729 battles
- March 2020: Scalemons - 19099 battles
- April 2020: Shared Power - 89999 battles
- April 2020: Pacifistmons - 4809 battles
- May 2020: Camomons - 37516 battles
- May 2020: Flipped - 23856 battles
- June 2020: Tier Shift - 35304 battles
- June 2020: 2v2 Doubles - 12968 battles
Camomons is fairly popular, but it was in OMPL, so I doubt it will be included this time around.
From the stats above, you can see that [Gen 7] Balanced Hackmons had over 50k battles in both months of it being Leader's Choice. Why is it not being included here? I know Snake Draft is trying to use different formats than those played in OMPL, but the activity is very clearly there, and in fact is more active than
all of this generation's ladders, so it should at the very least be included in Snake.
I am unsure why Pure Hackmons is being required to be played in a Bo3 format. The nature of most hackmons formats entails some form of stall, so having to sit through that 3x through seems horrid. Please make it Bo1 if it stays through to the actual tournament.
Next, I'm a bit confused why 2v2 Doubles is in here? It doesn't seem to be all that popular judging by these ladder stats. Both times it was OM/LCoTM, it only got at most 14k battles (yes I'm rounding down, sorry to those 12 extra battles), which is the least of all of the formats listed above (barring Pacifist mons, but that metagame is very inactive so I doubt anyone would bring it up). It even hosted a suspect test on the ladder last month and still got less plays than when it was first ladder. No offense to Mubs or anyone else involved in the community, I just don't think it's good to host a format in a tournament that could risk getting fewer signups.
I think Shared Power should be added. It's gotten the most attention of any OM this generation. The only drawback of it being involved is that the banlist needs to be severely kept up with, since I don't think it's been touched at all since being OMotM, and as a result, obviously broken abilities like Libero are still allowed. I can also understand that inherently broken nature of it being used as a counterargument to not including it though, so I won't fight too much on this.
Inverse is a very good candidate. Although it is a new format this generation and might be difficult to gauge activity from as a result, it has historically been semi-popular since its inception in ORAS and has been a format in official OM tournaments before.
Inheritance is another metagame that has historically been a community favorite. Although it has never been included in official tournaments (at least not from my memory), it has a solid userbase and people constantly enjoy playing it, so garnering signups for it shouldn't be hard at all.
I'm not commenting on Scalemons due to the bias I hold from leading it.
Other metagames that don't yet have stats but have already proven to be enjoyable, such as Cross Evolution, Godly Gift, and Linked, are also favorable choices.
I don't have much else to say, but I will say that my ideal lineup would look similar to this:
- Tier Shift
- Trademarked
- Linked
- Godly Gift
- Shared Power or Inheritance
- Pure Hackmons or [Gen 7] Balanced Hackmons
I don't really have too much of an opinion though on what does actually get picked, I would just like to see something of some sort addressed.
Onto my next concern:
I very much dislike the idea of relying on side servers for tournaments (no offense,
urkerab) because of the unreliability they can hold in coding differences, etc. For example, the way urkerab implemented Mix and Mega in the past would also change the species of the Mega-Evolved Pokemon, and would also cause things like Red Orb Darkrai with Dark Void to fail due to the species TECHNICALLY being "Darkrai-Primal". As a result,
The Immortal is there a plan to put these formats on the main server, at least for the duration of this tournament, to ensure stability?