I don't really wanna derail this thread with long reply chains about individual mods, so if you have any further clarifying questions, feel free to ask me about them on Discord. For now, though, I'll respond to what you said here.
The goal of my post was to give a general overview about all of the mods up for consideration and to rank them based on my own personal beliefs about their metas/eligibility. I didn't get hyper-specific in a lot of cases because I'm not intimately familiar with all of these mods, and I feel it would be more appropriate for the mod leaders themselves to extol the virtues and address the criticisms of their mods.
As for what I did say about VGC 20XX, I'll go over your points in order. To start, I know very, very little about VGC. However, what I do know a lot about is making viability rankings. Volbeat and Illumise stood out to me because not only did you rank them in the same subrank, but you ranked them on the same line, implying you think they are virtually identical. This presents a twofold problem. Firstly, they aren't identical. You say the stat differences don't have a major impact, but I find that very unlikely if these mons run any attacking moves at all. However, in the case that they actually don't, we come across the second problem: when two mons are extremely similar to each other in role, one always comes out on top. This can be seen very clearly in mons like Indeedee and Toxtricity, where both forms, despite being near identical to each other, often end up in different tiers due to one cannibalizing the usage of the other. Having these forms be ranked identically is, from my experience, a hallmark of a very preliminary VR which represents a meta where neither mon has been tested enough to know which one is preferable on a team, hence why I pointed it out as a cause for concern.
Now that's mostly a non-issue, as like you said, Geko's post clearly outlines that VRs can be preliminary. However, what's a lot more glaring in my eyes is how not all fully-evolved mons are ranked. In fact, there's so many mons not listed that I can't even mention them all within a reasonable amount of space, but I'll just point out Ninetales, Escavalier, and Possmortem as examples. I would understand if all these mons were unviable, however your VR has a D tier in which "Almost Every NFE mon" is ranked, implying it serves as the "Unviable" tier, and yet none of these mons are ranked there either. Again, from my experience this is a hallmark of a very early VR in which many mons have not been tested and as such cannot be ranked, which is a big cause for concern when we're considering placing this meta in the single most prestigious Pet Mods tournament.
Also, I have a question. Are you planning to code the most recent slate before PMPL? Because if so, then those mons not being listed on the VR/other resources is VERY relevant, as they could completely shake up the meta and nobody looking at the resources provided would be any the wiser.
As for playtesting, this tour you're talking about had 7 signups and 12 total games played, which is such a small sample size that it wouldn't even meet the replay criteria for mod submissions. I'll take your word on the public games + private testing - assuming those were as extensive as you're saying, I'll believe that there probably won't be any issue on the coding side. However, I'm still very concerned from a balancing perspective. There just isn't anywhere near enough serious gameplay of this mod (indicated by its lacking resources) for me to be comfortable saying the meta is balanced, and I personally feel including it would be a coin toss on whether it's an enjoyable experience for players or not. That's not to say we haven't included similar tiers in past PMPL iterations - however, those tiers have often been the ones that have had major issues, such as Multiverse and Burgundy.
The spreadsheets not being part of the approval process is lowkey confusing to me, as they're absolutely relevant for players. Speaking from experience as both a manager and a player here, it is very important that mods have both robust spreadsheets and legible teambuilders, for ease of building as well as clearer understanding of all the custom mechanics. On the spreadsheets VGC 20XX currently has, there should not be two of them. Custom elements and edited base elements should not be separate from each other, as doing that means I (and your players) will need to have both sheets open in order to look anything up, in case I suddenly come across an element from the other sheet and have to switch over. Additionally, the sheets are completely unformatted, confusingly laid out, and difficult to parse through quickly - if you compare them to other mods' sheets that have been submitted, the difference is night and day. I understand the argument that since they weren't part of the mod submission requirements, they shouldn't be considered when determining the mod's eligibility, however I'm evaluating these tiers based on what I personally know to be important for players/viewers, and spreadsheets are absolutely one of those things.
By all means, feel free to make improvements to these resources. I'm totally willing to change my opinion on the mod if the problems I currently see go away, and I think it would be great to bring the VGC crowd into PMPL, so if anything I'll be rooting for you. However, until then I'm not going to ignore the issues I see with VGC 20XX's current resources.
The goal of my post was to give a general overview about all of the mods up for consideration and to rank them based on my own personal beliefs about their metas/eligibility. I didn't get hyper-specific in a lot of cases because I'm not intimately familiar with all of these mods, and I feel it would be more appropriate for the mod leaders themselves to extol the virtues and address the criticisms of their mods.
As for what I did say about VGC 20XX, I'll go over your points in order. To start, I know very, very little about VGC. However, what I do know a lot about is making viability rankings. Volbeat and Illumise stood out to me because not only did you rank them in the same subrank, but you ranked them on the same line, implying you think they are virtually identical. This presents a twofold problem. Firstly, they aren't identical. You say the stat differences don't have a major impact, but I find that very unlikely if these mons run any attacking moves at all. However, in the case that they actually don't, we come across the second problem: when two mons are extremely similar to each other in role, one always comes out on top. This can be seen very clearly in mons like Indeedee and Toxtricity, where both forms, despite being near identical to each other, often end up in different tiers due to one cannibalizing the usage of the other. Having these forms be ranked identically is, from my experience, a hallmark of a very preliminary VR which represents a meta where neither mon has been tested enough to know which one is preferable on a team, hence why I pointed it out as a cause for concern.
Now that's mostly a non-issue, as like you said, Geko's post clearly outlines that VRs can be preliminary. However, what's a lot more glaring in my eyes is how not all fully-evolved mons are ranked. In fact, there's so many mons not listed that I can't even mention them all within a reasonable amount of space, but I'll just point out Ninetales, Escavalier, and Possmortem as examples. I would understand if all these mons were unviable, however your VR has a D tier in which "Almost Every NFE mon" is ranked, implying it serves as the "Unviable" tier, and yet none of these mons are ranked there either. Again, from my experience this is a hallmark of a very early VR in which many mons have not been tested and as such cannot be ranked, which is a big cause for concern when we're considering placing this meta in the single most prestigious Pet Mods tournament.
Also, I have a question. Are you planning to code the most recent slate before PMPL? Because if so, then those mons not being listed on the VR/other resources is VERY relevant, as they could completely shake up the meta and nobody looking at the resources provided would be any the wiser.
As for playtesting, this tour you're talking about had 7 signups and 12 total games played, which is such a small sample size that it wouldn't even meet the replay criteria for mod submissions. I'll take your word on the public games + private testing - assuming those were as extensive as you're saying, I'll believe that there probably won't be any issue on the coding side. However, I'm still very concerned from a balancing perspective. There just isn't anywhere near enough serious gameplay of this mod (indicated by its lacking resources) for me to be comfortable saying the meta is balanced, and I personally feel including it would be a coin toss on whether it's an enjoyable experience for players or not. That's not to say we haven't included similar tiers in past PMPL iterations - however, those tiers have often been the ones that have had major issues, such as Multiverse and Burgundy.
The spreadsheets not being part of the approval process is lowkey confusing to me, as they're absolutely relevant for players. Speaking from experience as both a manager and a player here, it is very important that mods have both robust spreadsheets and legible teambuilders, for ease of building as well as clearer understanding of all the custom mechanics. On the spreadsheets VGC 20XX currently has, there should not be two of them. Custom elements and edited base elements should not be separate from each other, as doing that means I (and your players) will need to have both sheets open in order to look anything up, in case I suddenly come across an element from the other sheet and have to switch over. Additionally, the sheets are completely unformatted, confusingly laid out, and difficult to parse through quickly - if you compare them to other mods' sheets that have been submitted, the difference is night and day. I understand the argument that since they weren't part of the mod submission requirements, they shouldn't be considered when determining the mod's eligibility, however I'm evaluating these tiers based on what I personally know to be important for players/viewers, and spreadsheets are absolutely one of those things.
By all means, feel free to make improvements to these resources. I'm totally willing to change my opinion on the mod if the problems I currently see go away, and I think it would be great to bring the VGC crowd into PMPL, so if anything I'll be rooting for you. However, until then I'm not going to ignore the issues I see with VGC 20XX's current resources.
On the matter of Volbeat and Illumise, I can now understand the confusion around them being ranked on the same line. To prevent people from potentially thinking they are identical in basically every way, these Pokémon can be simply put in a different line.
However, their A- ranking (iirc) will still remain the same for now because, in the context of VGC 20XX, they are functionally the same (speed control + damage manipulation), with minor move differences within these roles. The way Volbeat and Illumise are used in VGC 20XX cannot be easily compared to a Pokémon like Indeedee in VGC. To explain: Indeedee-Female has slightly more bulk and Follow Me, making it a prime support Pokémon whereas Indeedee-Male has been traditionally used on Hyper Offense teams most of the time due to slightly higher Speed and Special Attack and the lack of Follow Me. In other words, both forms are very different from each other.
Moreover, just because there is precedence for this cannibalisation you talked about, it doesn't necessarily mean that it also has to apply to Volbeat and Illumise in VGC 20XX. Otherwise, that could be perceived as faulty analogy. Perhaps, for all I know, Volbeat and Illumise might end up in different rankings as time goes on and the metagame develops but for now, the important part of their ranking is to indicate that they are good support Pokémon. Whatever difference within their shared role as a speed and damage control option there might be and whatever impact they could have on the metagame, for now, it is so miniscule it is, arguably, not worth debating whether one should remain in A- while the other ought to go to B+ or sth. VGC teams are generally very personalised; oftentimes, you will encounter different EVs, IVs, moves, etc. even within mostly identical teams, which makes a more nuanced ranking as you seem to desire much more difficult even with many games played. It's up to the players to decide. Aside from the same line ranking, perhaps, we'll have to agree to disagree on the rest of the Volbeat/Illumise matter.
As for the viability ranking, a part of the unmentioned Pokémon are part of the newest patch (such as Possmortem that you mentioned) and which would be addressed in a new update, others like Ninetales and Escavalier are not held to such a high degree that players have to be extremely wary of them when teambuilding--sth that needs to be put in the ranking with such high priority. I personally prefer a much more careful and accurate approach when it comes to ranking a Pokémon (rather than putting them in a wrong place) even when there have been already some testings. But if people can already be somewhat content just with an early assessment of those Pokémon (that are not expected to be super metagame centralising), it may not hurt to include them anyway in a viability ranking. It looks like there are different expectations for the viability ranking from diffferent perspectives. To my knowledge, and outside of the newest batch of Pokémon, there are no dominant Pokémon that have not been mentioned in the viability ranking or the VGC 20xx thread yet. That's sth we wanted to prioritize. But sure, we could always be wrong and overlook sth. That said, I could have been more clear with the post being continously updated until the tournament or the manager sign-up starts. So, I can totally understand your concerns and the conclusions you arrive at.
To answer your question, if, by most recent slate, you are referring to the slate that is currrently active, then, no, it will not be coded before PMPL, only after the end of it.
As for playtesting, there is a total amount of roughly 47 saved replays taking into account the tournament and outside of it, which easily does meet the 15 replays requirement for the mod submission, unless you just want to argue that only the 12 games from the tournament are insufficient for the criteria. Though, I can understand if the roughly 50 games being played aren't considered sufficient enough to ease potential balance or metagame concerns to a satisfying level relative to the number of slates VGC 20XX had so far.
I'll concede and agree with your stance on the part about spreadsheets.
We are not asking you to ignore issues with VGC 20XX, just desiring more transparency (through more details / in-depth explanations, for instance), which you did respond with to the best of your abilities or circumstances, as far as I can tell.
That said, I appreciate the seriousness and politeness with which you attempt to clarify your points. We'll see how the new post update (whenever that might be in the next few days) will affect people's reception of VGC 20XX. Until then, take care.
