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We will probably be using IRC as our primary means of communication in the draft from this point forward. IRC is a lot less laggy and it's easier to set up several channels for multiple pools. It also allows us to moderate the chats.
Than that will probably be a problem. You see, my computer is not able to download the latest Flash Player Adobe has out, and out video card is obsolete. Another problem is the fact that we don't have extra money to buy a new computer. So I am stuck on the IRC part.
You can always try chatzilla too, theres a big load of ways to connect to synirc.
Anyways, I think im one of the few that actually support a Trading Phase. You see, even though I was the only one who did trades, I managed to get a Bronzong for my Snorlax (Snorlax wasnt gonna do crap vs my opponent, while Heatproof Trick Bronzong proved very useful in stopping Shaymin and company), and managed to fool The_Chaser into giving me his Nidoking for my Blaziken, convincing him that Blaziken could easily 6-0 his opponent in r1, while removing Nidoking from him let me set up toxic spikes and stall him out with ease for r2. Sadly I lost and the Nidoking trade didnt prove useful, but what im trying to say here its that the Trading Phase, imo, gives more strategy to the game.
Also please it only takes 10 minutes, not 1 hour so I dont see how its exactly bad lol
I forgot to report from last night that the new packs and 3:3:4 worked extremely well. The packs were a lot more usable and interesting and random shit like Scyther stopped showing up. Thanks a bunch for the great idea, Kyre!
I'm going to take an indifferent stance on trades lol. I have seen that trading doesn't have a huge impact on the drafts (usually it's just 1-3 trades per pool, and they usually aren't high OUs), but I see that the one or two that are made add to the depth of draft. =/ I'd prefer to keep it to player preference, but something is going to have to be decided for a larger tournament.
I forgot to report from last night that the new packs and 3:3:4 worked extremely well. The packs were a lot more usable and interesting and random shit like Scyther stopped showing up. Thanks a bunch for the great idea, Kyre!
Yes. I noticed the difference with the first pack I made. It was beautiful.
The Reaver said:
I'm going to take an indifferent stance on trades lol. I have seen that trading doesn't have a huge impact on the drafts (usually it's just 1-3 trades per pool, and they usually aren't high OUs), but I see that the one or two that are made add to the depth of draft. =/ I'd prefer to keep it to player preference, but something is going to have to be decided for a larger tournament.
For me, I think it is, "I don't see why not". Most every thing like this allows trades. If you don't like trades, you don't have to participate, but they can be really useful. I think I fall in the direction of allowing trades, but not by much.
reyscarface said:
but what im trying to say here its that the Trading Phase, imo, gives more strategy to the game.
I'm against the trade phase mainly because it lengthens the tournament when you could be creating your team (and because I made a retarded trade). I think the competitors of the night should vote before the draft occurs whether there is trades and if it is even it should be up to the tournament administrator.
Second:
I'm throwing in my two cents for pack generation. I agree that the "usage method" makes more sense than the "tier method", and I'm glad that it worked out for you guys last night. However, I disagree with the proportions used to determine top OU, middle, and bottom. Currently you're using the mtg rarity system, which is convenient to use, but doesn't apply to competitive pokemon. It may be that the best way to determine the ratios is simply by "trial and error", I'm not sure that there is a statistical method that could be applied that would both have merit and be useful in practice.
In any case, it doesn't make sense to include a mediocre pokemon like Electivire in the top of ou because the mtg rare to uncommon ratio says so. Alternative numbers for a cutoff other than 34 that I would suggest would be 33, 30, or 28. 33 because it doesn't include Electivire, 30 because it's a nice round number and doesn't include Electivire, and 28 because all of the pokemon are very useful for a team (in my opinion) and because it doesn't include Electivire.
Clearly I have a bias against Electivire. However, I am pretty certain the common consensus is that it is not a very good pokemon and is used more than it ought to be.
I guess the point of this post is to, in the short term, suggest not including Electivire in the "top of ou" list. For the long term, I hope this promotes discussion for a statistical method for pack generation cut offs or at the very least a thoughtful reconsideration of the cut offs / overall method (is usage even the best way).
I think the competitors of the night should vote before the draft occurs whether there is trades and if it is even it should be up to the tournament administrator.
The thing is is that there will always be those for and against the trade phase. Theres also nothing stopping you from just team building during the trade phase. The phase would last 5 minutes anyways.
I'm throwing in my two cents for pack generation. I agree that the "usage method" makes more sense than the "tier method", and I'm glad that it worked out for you guys last night. However, I disagree with the proportions used to determine top OU, middle, and bottom. Currently you're using the mtg rarity system, which is convenient to use, but doesn't apply to competitive pokemon. It may be that the best way to determine the ratios is simply by "trial and error", I'm not sure that there is a statistical method that could be applied that would both have merit and be useful in practice.
In any case, it doesn't make sense to include a mediocre pokemon like Electivire in the top of ou because the mtg rare to uncommon ratio says so. Alternative numbers for a cutoff other than 34 that I would suggest would be 33, 30, or 28. 33 because it doesn't include Electivire, 30 because it's a nice round number and doesn't include Electivire, and 28 because all of the pokemon are very useful for a team (in my opinion) and because it doesn't include Electivire.
Clearly I have a bias against Electivire. However, I am pretty certain the common consensus is that it is not a very good pokemon and is used more than it ought to be.
I guess the point of this post is to, in the short term, suggest not including Electivire in the "top of ou" list. For the long term, I hope this promotes discussion for a statistical method for pack generation cut offs or at the very least a thoughtful reconsideration of the cut offs / overall method (is usage even the best way).
Well, I hosted tonight and it was a blast. We did it Round Robin style instead of the usual style, so it was a bit different. The members and their Pokemon:
The Chaser: Blissey, Dusknoir, Gliscor, Shaymin, Vaporeon, Donphan, Metagross, Blaziken
The predictions were heavily in bigfoots favor. Also bigfoots is cool. There was a lot of fun going on in IRC though. A few people showed up 30 minutes after we started and stayed to watch (yankees, Twin Scimitar, Ken) and we talked and had a good time. Some trash talking and mistakes with team building did occur, and it made for laughs for all. Turned out that even though we feared bigfoots for his Dragons and Chaser for his stall, Class won it going 3-0 while the rest of us tied for second at 1-2.
I personally would like to call myself a hero for swiping Tentacruel and making sure Chaser couldn't use Toxic Spikes on his team :P Really though, the packs looked really good as we got a lot of top tier Pokemon and team building was fun. I can't wait for another Draft tomorrow night.
Tomorrow night there will be a Draft for sure. It will be at 8:00 EST. Be on #pokedraft then if you wish to participate. We hope for a nice turnout.
Edit: Please do not hesitate to join us. We are expecting and hoping for a large croud. Feel free to PM for or The_Reaver with any questions that you may have.
Thanks a bunch for hosting tonight, PokeN3rd. It seems to have gone smoothly, and I'm impressed. You're on the host list. (Admittedly, I did put you there yesterday preemptively, but hey, looks like my expectations were met. =P)
I'm expecting tomorrow to be huge, so I'm going to need all the hosts I can get. I'm going to make packs in anticipation, but if anyone is willing to help host, please be there about half an hour early to make packs. I'm going to shoot for a cap of sixteen, so I will need four hosts. I know DJX and probably I are going to host, so we'll need two more people to help. Hosts preferably shouldn't play because it's a lot easier to manage a pool while not playing.
Additionally, any people who come late but want to watch anyway are welcome to. Please be silent during the draft process, however.
EDIT: I forgot to mention this earlier, but would anybody who is decently skilled with programming be willing to create a pack generator for this? I feel really bad about asking in public, but it would make hosting a shitton easier. I made one for the old tier method, but it's REALLY inefficient (just an RNG and a bunch of if/else if statements) and it generated a lot of duplicates within the packs. It wouldn't be that hard for an experienced programmer, which I am not.
Basically, the parameters I'm looking for are the following:
Generates 4 packs at a time
Each pack contains 3 Pokemon from the Top group (34 Pokemon), 3 Pokemon from the Mid group (30 Pokemon) and 4 Pokemon from the Low group (61 Pokemon) using the USAGE METHOD.
No more than 1 Pokemon per pack, no more than 2 per pool
If someone actually decides to write this, may I please have the source code so I can edit the lists when the usage stats come out each month? Again, I feel really bad for asking in this thread, but it's for the better of draft.
HI forgot to report from last night that the new packs and 3:3:4 worked extremely well. The packs were a lot more usable and interesting and random shit like Scyther stopped showing up. Thanks a bunch for the great idea, Kyre!
Awesome, glad it worked out so well! (And I don't think I could have asked for a better first post on Smogon :D)
Anyways, this thread is going on in a few directions. Should we allow trades or not? Should pokemon in packs be divvyed out with already existing movesets or completely "fresh"? What sort of draft system should we use? I think the best way to approach this is by writing out specifically what sort of strategic thinking one would enjoy playing with.
I've been reading everyone's posts here as well as researching magic's draft system, and I think these two goals are essentially the implicit ideas behind what we want to see in a draft:
1. Players are forced to make a team under unique limitations. These limitations should be reasonably different each time and encourage on-your-feet thinking, while still being fair. In short, Creativity under limitations is the paramount skill in drafts.
2. The players should benefit from strategic psychological thinking and interplayer information management during the drafting of teams.
I'll use these two points to explain my feelings on some of these discussion points. Keep a bucketful of salt beside the monitor while you read this and use as needed - I haven't got a chance to play yet, so this is all draft theorymonning.
Drafting System:
Rochester is frankly a mediocre system. The first thing about it I dislike is that it's far too open informationally - all players know exactly what everyone else has in their decks at all times, which extremely diminishes any strategic thinking going into making your team. "Oh, so-and-so is going for a team with xxx combination? I'll grab a pokemon that does yyy to counter their combination". Sure, that's a good teambuilding exercise, but it's not very different from playing in standard, where it's usually easier to shut down a team combination than it is to build one. You also can't hide a pokemon that relies a lot on a gimmick or has a very exploitable weakness - if you pick a Shedinja or Charizard you can bet that anyone facing you will be sure to get a good stealth rocker and/or spin blocker. All in all, this discourages creativity and novel pokemon teams, and stops a lot of the psychological out-thinking and guessing out opponent's strategies while trying to hide your own.
Another downside is that it's a lot harder to plan out your team while you are building it. For your first two picks, you only get to see a quarter of the total usable pokemon. For picks three and four you only have seen half of the usable pokemon, and so forth. The worst part is the last pack - you'll only have six pokemon chosen, and unless you're extremely lucky there'll probably be at least one that you're not too satisfied with. I see the last pack as similar to the river card in Texas Hold'em - but there's a huge difference: if you're depending on the river card as something to complete your hand, you've done something very wrong. With a four pack rochester draft, it's almost unavoidable to not depend on the last pack. I feel as if this places too much importance on luck in teambuilding, which diminishes point 1 above.
I have a feeling that due to these two main issues the general strategy for Rochester drafts will be something like this: "Make a general goodstuff team, and if you see an opponent doing any funny business do your best to get a pokemon / move that can counter it easily". This doesn't sound exactly like a very diverse metagame.
Not to say Rochester is all bad - like other people have commented, it is extremely easy to set up, and all but eliminates cheating in teambuilding. However, if one could make a third-party system to account for all these things (i.e. an IRC bot) then we could try other drafting styles that promote our goals.
The favorite method I've seen is Magic's Booster Draft system. I'm pretty sure other people have explained it already, but here's the gist of it: Each player starts with a 15-card booster pack, whereupon they take a card and pass it to another player. The drawing and passing continues until all the cards are taken. Then each player gets another booster pack and the whole process repeats until all the cards are picked. One more round goes through until all the cards are taken (If this seems confusing, try it yourself - WotC has an online draft simulator at http://www.wizards.com/Magic/TCG/Resources.aspx?x=mtg/tcg/resources/boosterdraftsimulator). There's also a wide depth of strategy you can do in this format, here's a guide of strategies I found: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/academy/39
I like the booster draft method as you get progressively more information the more pokemon you pick - using our packs and number of players you get to see almost half (47.5%) of the usable pokemon while you pick your 2nd team member, and while you choose the 4th you'll have seen all but 6 (or 85%) of the usable pokemon in the game; this makes it a lot easier to build a cohesive team, and prepare for some possible threats in-game without giving too much away. Also, your opponents won't know who picked that Shedinja or Linoone (or maybe even that they were picked at all), or that you have a certain synergy going on in your team (i.e. if on your first turn you get a pack with a Blissey and a Leafeon, you could take the Blissey and wait for the pack to come back to you - if nobody's taken Leafeon, you now have essentially a SkarmBliss combo that nobody knows about).
Yes, it is a little more complicated, but I imagine that a 3rd party IRC bot could manage the drafting process and make it quick, easy, and relatively immune to cheaters. I've half a mind to write one myself, but my school semester's starting on monday and I don't want to embark on a new project just yet.
Trading:
I feel that trading takes away more than it adds to the spirit of drafting. Provided your opponent agrees, you can exchange one of your team choices made under limited circumstances with just about any other pokemon in the entire pool. It's also unfair to players that don't trade - If you and an opponent trade and both profit from the trade, you both have an unfair advantage over the other competitors. Trading also stifles team creativity; why bother trying to work with what you have when you can trade with an opponent to complete a tried-and-true team combo?
There is the argument that one could use trading to essentialy extort pokemon from an opponent. If you know your opponent is building a team with, say, Abomasnow, you could pick up a Walrein and likely trade it for almost anything on his team. However, this really encourages people to screw each other over in the teambuilding process, which I think overall would be frustrating and not enjoyable to play.
Last, and probably worst of all, trading is an extremely easy way to exploit the whole drafting system. Your buddy could purposefully trade you all of his good pokemon for all of your crappy ones, giving you a huge advantage over everyone else in the tourney. There's no easy and elegant way to prevent this from happening, so it's probably best to ban trading altogether.
Fixed Movesets:
(Note: I make a lot more assumptions in this topic than the previous two - like I said at the top, I have tet to play in or watch a draft. Please excuse me if my theorymonning here is way off the mark.)
The way that (I imagine) most of the draft drawings work are that the better OU's get picked first, following the lower OUs, then likely the UU's and NU's at about the same rate. This makes sense; they are Overused for a reason: OU pokemon tend to have better stats, a wider movepool, or a better typing than similar UU pokemon (If a pack contains both a Skarmory and a Leafeon, almost everyone would pick the Skarmory). OU pokemon tend to fulfill a good variety of roles; a lot of NU or UU pokemon can only perform a few roles well. And, of course, if you don't pick the OU pokemon, someone else will - all the more reason to grab it. I don't think anyone would likely ever pass up getting a Scizor. When you pick UU or NU pokemon for your team, you shouldn't be thinking "this is just something to take the 6th spot on my team because all of the good OU and BL pokemon are taken".
So if we want to encourage people to use more novel combinations, as well as to not making this "random pseudo-OU", we should prevent rampant OU hogging and encourage UU choices. 1 or 2 OU per team is fine - with 4 or 5 we're essentially playing just random OU. Pregened Movesets are an interesting way to fix this - by limiting pokemon flexibility it makes it harder to just stuff OUs on a team, certainly. But some pokemon have a LOT of movesets - like The Reaver mentioned earlier, Clefable has 15 different listed movesets - getting the Clefable you want is highly unlikely.
How about a compromise? What if all OU pokemon (or the top OU pokemon only) had parts of their movesets fixed? i.e., they would have a specific item (Focus Sash Infernape), a specific Move / choice of moves (A Bronzong that had to have either Trick Room or Gravity), an ability (Guts Machamp) or a specific EV set or range of EVs? The choices would be made so that the pokemon has a distinct role / set of roles they have to play, but would still give them flexibility to play around a bit (i.e. a Focus Sash Infernape could be a standard LeadApe, an Endeavor Lead, or be even a sweeper as long as it had a Focus Sash). UU and NU pokemon would not have this restriction, freeing them up to fulfill the roles that support your OU choices. Therefore it makes sense to pick a few OU pokemon as your team core and then choose UU or NU pokemon to round out your team.
The major problem with this (still) is deciding what aspects to fix for what pokemon. However, this should be a lot easier than adding in entire movesets, especially as pokemon that fulfill multiple roles tend to have major differences between them. I suggest that we can also determine the proportionality of these different fixed pokemon archetypes by using the usage stats.
One last thing to keep in mind - no matter how we decide to eventually do drafts, it's going to be different from standard OU. Think how different Little Cup is from Standard - that's kind of what we have here.
I'm really sorry for this gigantic post - I certainly didn't mean to ramble on for so long. And I know I definitely need to play sometime. Thanks again for reading!
EDIT: I forgot to mention this earlier, but would anybody who is decently skilled with programming be willing to create a pack generator for this? I feel really bad about asking in public, but it would make hosting a shitton easier. I made one for the old tier method, but it's REALLY inefficient (just an RNG and a bunch of if/else if statements) and it generated a lot of duplicates within the packs. It wouldn't be that hard for an experienced programmer, which I am not.
Basically, the parameters I'm looking for are the following:
Generates 4 packs at a time
Each pack contains 3 Pokemon from the Top group (34 Pokemon), 3 Pokemon from the Mid group (30 Pokemon) and 4 Pokemon from the Low group (61 Pokemon) using the USAGE METHOD.
No more than 1 Pokemon per pack, no more than 2 per pool
If someone actually decides to write this, may I please have the source code so I can edit the lists when the usage stats come out each month? Again, I feel really bad for asking in this thread, but it's for the better of draft.
Usage instructions: open your command prompt, and just run pokedraft.exe. It will generate four packs based on your requirements and display them on the command prompt. If you'd rather it output into a file (so that it's easier to copy and paste), do "pokedraft.exe > somefile.txt". Make sure you have three text files in the same directory as the program called topfile.txt, midfile.txt, and lowfile.txt - each of which contain the pokemon in that rarity level. You can change these three input files to your heart's content.
If you want to see the source code and input files I used, here they are below:
Source:
Code:
import os
import random
pack_list = []
top_file = open(os.getcwd() + '/topfile.txt','r')
top_list = top_file.readlines()
mid_file = open(os.getcwd() + '/midfile.txt','r')
mid_list = mid_file.readlines()
low_file = open(os.getcwd() + '/lowfile.txt','r')
low_list = low_file.readlines()
for j in range(0,4):
top_draw = top_list
mid_draw = mid_list
low_draw = low_list
print "===== Pack %d of 4 =====" %(j+1,)
for i in range(0,10):
if (i < 3):
top_rand = random.randint(0,len(top_draw)-1)
if (pack_list.count(top_draw[top_rand]) < 2):
pack_list.append(top_draw.pop(top_rand).rstrip())
elif (i > 2 and i < 6):
mid_rand = random.randint(0,len(mid_draw)-1)
if (pack_list.count(mid_draw[mid_rand]) < 2):
pack_list.append(mid_draw.pop(mid_rand).rstrip())
elif (i > 5):
low_rand = random.randint(0,len(low_draw)-1)
if (pack_list.count(low_draw[low_rand]) < 2):
pack_list.append(low_draw.pop(low_rand).rstrip())
print pack_list[i+j*10]
print ""
Drafting System:
Rochester is frankly a mediocre system. The first thing about it I dislike is that it's far too open informationally - all players know exactly what everyone else has in their decks at all times, which extremely diminishes any strategic thinking going into making your team. "Oh, so-and-so is going for a team with xxx combination? I'll grab a pokemon that does yyy to counter their combination". Sure, that's a good teambuilding exercise, but it's not very different from playing in standard, where it's usually easier to shut down a team combination than it is to build one. You also can't hide a pokemon that relies a lot on a gimmick or has a very exploitable weakness - if you pick a Shedinja or Charizard you can bet that anyone facing you will be sure to get a good stealth rocker and/or spin blocker. All in all, this discourages creativity and novel pokemon teams, and stops a lot of the psychological out-thinking and guessing out opponent's strategies while trying to hide your own.
Another downside is that it's a lot harder to plan out your team while you are building it. For your first two picks, you only get to see a quarter of the total usable pokemon. For picks three and four you only have seen half of the usable pokemon, and so forth. The worst part is the last pack - you'll only have six pokemon chosen, and unless you're extremely lucky there'll probably be at least one that you're not too satisfied with. I see the last pack as similar to the river card in Texas Hold'em - but there's a huge difference: if you're depending on the river card as something to complete your hand, you've done something very wrong. With a four pack rochester draft, it's almost unavoidable to not depend on the last pack. I feel as if this places too much importance on luck in teambuilding, which diminishes point 1 above.
I have a feeling that due to these two main issues the general strategy for Rochester drafts will be something like this: "Make a general goodstuff team, and if you see an opponent doing any funny business do your best to get a pokemon / move that can counter it easily". This doesn't sound exactly like a very diverse metagame.
Not to say Rochester is all bad - like other people have commented, it is extremely easy to set up, and all but eliminates cheating in teambuilding. However, if one could make a third-party system to account for all these things (i.e. an IRC bot) then we could try other drafting styles that promote our goals.
The favorite method I've seen is Magic's Booster Draft system. I'm pretty sure other people have explained it already, but here's the gist of it: Each player starts with a 15-card booster pack, whereupon they take a card and pass it to another player. The drawing and passing continues until all the cards are taken. Then each player gets another booster pack and the whole process repeats until all the cards are picked. One more round goes through until all the cards are taken (If this seems confusing, try it yourself - WotC has an online draft simulator at http://www.wizards.com/Magic/TCG/Resources.aspx?x=mtg/tcg/resources/boosterdraftsimulator). There's also a wide depth of strategy you can do in this format, here's a guide of strategies I found: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/academy/39
I like the booster draft method as you get progressively more information the more pokemon you pick - using our packs and number of players you get to see almost half (47.5%) of the usable pokemon while you pick your 2nd team member, and while you choose the 4th you'll have seen all but 6 (or 85%) of the usable pokemon in the game; this makes it a lot easier to build a cohesive team, and prepare for some possible threats in-game without giving too much away. Also, your opponents won't know who picked that Shedinja or Linoone (or maybe even that they were picked at all), or that you have a certain synergy going on in your team (i.e. if on your first turn you get a pack with a Blissey and a Leafeon, you could take the Blissey and wait for the pack to come back to you - if nobody's taken Leafeon, you now have essentially a SkarmBliss combo that nobody knows about).
Yes, it is a little more complicated, but I imagine that a 3rd party IRC bot could manage the drafting process and make it quick, easy, and relatively immune to cheaters. I've half a mind to write one myself, but my school semester's starting on monday and I don't want to embark on a new project just yet.
I do like Booster Draft, but it won't work until a bot is written for the very reasons you mentioned, and even then, it's still extremely hard to enforce no-cheating and keep secretiveness. Additionally, Rochester works a lot better than one would think. Each player's box is publicly available, so players attempt to counter-team each other as best as they can. It works a lot better, and the lack of diversity actually isn't that much of a problem.
As for the planning ahead problem, you do have to realize that the same problem exists in Booster Draft because there isn't a whole lot you can do to control other people's picks. You don't know what are in the other packs.
Trading:
I feel that trading takes away more than it adds to the spirit of drafting. Provided your opponent agrees, you can exchange one of your team choices made under limited circumstances with just about any other pokemon in the entire pool. It's also unfair to players that don't trade - If you and an opponent trade and both profit from the trade, you both have an unfair advantage over the other competitors. Trading also stifles team creativity; why bother trying to work with what you have when you can trade with an opponent to complete a tried-and-true team combo?
There is the argument that one could use trading to essentialy extort pokemon from an opponent. If you know your opponent is building a team with, say, Abomasnow, you could pick up a Walrein and likely trade it for almost anything on his team. However, this really encourages people to screw each other over in the teambuilding process, which I think overall would be frustrating and not enjoyable to play.
Last, and probably worst of all, trading is an extremely easy way to exploit the whole drafting system. Your buddy could purposefully trade you all of his good pokemon for all of your crappy ones, giving you a huge advantage over everyone else in the tourney. There's no easy and elegant way to prevent this from happening, so it's probably best to ban trading altogether.
I was originally in this stance, but I'm leaning toward's rey's now. While I agree trading isn't really a part of other forms of draft, trading in this actually isn't too bad. It's very hard to convince someone to give up a Pokemon, especially if you've explained why you want it.
Fixed Movesets:
(Note: I make a lot more assumptions in this topic than the previous two - like I said at the top, I have tet to play in or watch a draft. Please excuse me if my theorymonning here is way off the mark.)
The way that (I imagine) most of the draft drawings work are that the better OU's get picked first, following the lower OUs, then likely the UU's and NU's at about the same rate. This makes sense; they are Overused for a reason: OU pokemon tend to have better stats, a wider movepool, or a better typing than similar UU pokemon (If a pack contains both a Skarmory and a Leafeon, almost everyone would pick the Skarmory). OU pokemon tend to fulfill a good variety of roles; a lot of NU or UU pokemon can only perform a few roles well. And, of course, if you don't pick the OU pokemon, someone else will - all the more reason to grab it. I don't think anyone would likely ever pass up getting a Scizor. When you pick UU or NU pokemon for your team, you shouldn't be thinking "this is just something to take the 6th spot on my team because all of the good OU and BL pokemon are taken".
So if we want to encourage people to use more novel combinations, as well as to not making this "random pseudo-OU", we should prevent rampant OU hogging and encourage UU choices. 1 or 2 OU per team is fine - with 4 or 5 we're essentially playing just random OU. Pregened Movesets are an interesting way to fix this - by limiting pokemon flexibility it makes it harder to just stuff OUs on a team, certainly. But some pokemon have a LOT of movesets - like The Reaver mentioned earlier, Clefable has 15 different listed movesets - getting the Clefable you want is highly unlikely.
How about a compromise? What if all OU pokemon (or the top OU pokemon only) had parts of their movesets fixed? i.e., they would have a specific item (Focus Sash Infernape), a specific Move / choice of moves (A Bronzong that had to have either Trick Room or Gravity), an ability (Guts Machamp) or a specific EV set or range of EVs? The choices would be made so that the pokemon has a distinct role / set of roles they have to play, but would still give them flexibility to play around a bit (i.e. a Focus Sash Infernape could be a standard LeadApe, an Endeavor Lead, or be even a sweeper as long as it had a Focus Sash). UU and NU pokemon would not have this restriction, freeing them up to fulfill the roles that support your OU choices. Therefore it makes sense to pick a few OU pokemon as your team core and then choose UU or NU pokemon to round out your team.
The major problem with this (still) is deciding what aspects to fix for what pokemon. However, this should be a lot easier than adding in entire movesets, especially as pokemon that fulfill multiple roles tend to have major differences between them. I suggest that we can also determine the proportionality of these different fixed pokemon archetypes by using the usage stats.
I think I already mentioned this, but the major problems with this are that a) it's really hard to enforce and really annoying to keep track of and b) there may not be enough Pokemon in the packs to fulfill enough roles.
Since this format is primarily OU, I don't see a problem with this, either. We aren't trying to encourage random gimmicks, just novelty sets that work well against your opponent. Again, this format stresses counterteaming, not secretivity.
Also, Kyre, thank you so much for the pack generator, but DJXO9 and I were having trouble running it. A kind user named Witz rewrote it for Java so that we were able to run it. The download link is here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=R61ET4HX.
I don't have much to add, but I would like to say that I play MGT Drafting, and I think that the concept combined with Pokemon sounds interesting. It sounds like it has already yielded fun results, which is excellent. :)
Good games tonight, guys. Though my team did a horrible job.
As for what you said during my battle with Bob, Reaver. Conversion 2, as you witnessed, changes the Pokemon's type to one that resists the move used on it. I am pretty sure Dragon halve's against Steel-type, so that was what Porygon2 was changed to.
Well, in this past night's tournament, we had 16 people participate. We had numerous veterans to the draft, and quite a few new people to like Whistle and TheFourthChaser (can't think of any others atm). Like I said there were 16 people, but in return, it got much more hectic. As I type, Witz is making a "DraftBot" which would help so much during the draft, and will hopefully speed things up. As previously mentioned, Witz also made a pack generator, which is absolutely beautiful. All one must do is press generate, and it immediately gives you 4 packs.
Now that we have the bot, which makes things go so much faster, the time is down to a little over an hour. If each team gets done team building in .5 hour, its just a matter of team building, and beyond that, how many people are involved.
Many, many thanks to Witz, the developer of the DraftBot, and the now obsolete Pack Generator. While it is still being tweaked here and there, it is functional, and speeds up the process so much. Its been a while since there hasn't been a Draft on any given night, so if you show up on #pokedraft a little before 8 pm EST, you will be in it.
So please, if you want to see the Bot in action, or you with were displeased with how smoothly the draft wen previously, please join us there any day of the week. If you have questions, just stop in there, and there will quite possible be someone else there willing to answer any questions.
