Lower Tiers RBY Grand Slam IV - Format Discussion

Sabelette

Sabelette

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Hi all,

Doing this early because I want to talk about Grand Slam's timing in the year, ways to reduce tour fatigue, and tier inclusion. So, let's talk about how we run this tour and adapt to 2025 RBY, which looks super different on the low tiers side than it did a couple years back. I have 4 discussion points/questions I want to bring as well as space for an open discussion of any other considerations anyone else brings up.

1. Should we add RBY ZU to the tournament?
2. Should we cut Stadium or Tradebacks (or both) from the tournament?
3. Should we start the tournament earlier in the year? Currently the tour is slated for June through August.
4. Should we space out opens by 2 weeks instead of 1 week?

My position
I believe we are having signup fatigue for RBY Grand Slam both due to the increased number of opens (5 to 6) and the short spacing between each tour, creating a really packed schedule alongside other RBY tours (OU tours, teamtours) and other tours people might play in other gens. I also believe Tradebacks and Stadium simply... failed to generate any momentum or lasting interest - people would come, play one tour, promise to work on resources, samples, etc., and inevitably get bored quickly and move on. See data below (I tried to do a table but forums broke, sorry, best I can do)

Grand Slam I/II/III
Ubers: 55 / 47 / 48
UU: 57 / 38 / 32
NU: 51 / 37 / 41
PU: - / 32 / 39
TBs: 32 / 32 / 21
Stad: 47 / 24 / 16

My takeaways/thoughts here:
  • Most tiers have experienced a dropoff to some degree over the years, which makes some sense as tournaments have gotten more saturated and the novelty has worn off. Ubers and NU have stayed relatively intact, PU has only had 2 iterations but actually gained a decent few in Grand Slam III, UU experienced a pretty rough drop over time, but what stands out to me is that Tradebacks was never popular (its best was as good as UU's worst) and Stadium lost literally 2/3rds of its players in 2 years. It's not from a lack of tournaments, IMO; there have been attempts to spotlight Tradebacks and Stadium including Triple Threat and giving both spotlight tours, but none of these have ever gotten more than a handful of players and nobody has the motivation to host tours of their own, while Ubers through PU have had dedicated communities constantly developing them.
  • ZU has had a lot of support behind it from the ZU community from day one and deserves the spot here, and it brings us back to a nice clean Best of 5 with 5 tiers again like the original Grand Slam. Tradebacks and Stadium have had plenty of time to develop a community, functional resources, and a real metagame instead of the same stagnant stuff over and over, but even with things like ALTPL spotlighting Tradebacks, the tiers end up being a meme and not really going through any longterm development. I think that tiers being supported by their community should be supported by our tournaments, instead of continuing to try to drag tiers on life support forward when nobody even cares enough to maintain resources.
  • Personally, I get super tired during every Grand Slam, and I think it's fair to say participation probably does drop at the end in part from fatigue, but I don't think that accounts for Tradebacks failing to ever break 32 and Stadium plummeting to 16. We can see that even people who qualified early still play these tours, so it's not top seeds dropping out, and even people close to qualifying don't enter these tours to try to get into playoffs. I think these tiers simply do not have much of a playerbase.
  • I think we could start Slam earlier by a month or two with the current tournament schedule for a couple reasons: one, its expected that NU and PU LTC (part of the Classic for each tier) will be run in June by said tiers, meaning a pretty rough overlap with Grand Slam. Two, we could then space out each open by 2 weeks, meaning 3/4ths of players are out of each open as the next one starts, reducing fatigue as very few players will be playing multiple opens at once, unlike past years where it wasn't uncommon to be playing 3 or even 4 opens at a time on top of other tournaments. I would also favor running the opens backwards (ZU first, Ubers last) for this reason - if we were to start in, say, early- to mid-April, we could have PU finished before PU Classic and NU into top 8 or top 4 at least before NU Classic opens signups, rather than both of them overlapping their respective Classics really hard.
TLDR: Remove Tradebacks/Stadium, add ZU, start earlier, 2 weeks between opens, in my opinion. Thoughts?
 
I think now that ZU is a fully established tier it deserves a spot in Slam. Stadium and Tradebacks are more adjacent to OMs than the Lowtiers. If OMPL becomes a yearly thing it could also add Tradebacks to keep both Stadium and Tradebacks alive as well. Correct me if I’m wrong here but I believe the only reason Stadium and Tradebacks were included in Slam in the first place was because PU didn’t exist during Slam 1, so there were only 3 lowers in Ubers UU NU, so these were added to make it a functional tournament.

Regarding the tour timing, having to do so many tours at once last year was super exhausting. If you make it deep into multiple tours, you will end up playing like 4 games at once. Personally last Slam, I felt like I was barely prepping and was reusing a ton, since building 12 new teams a week is somewhat impossible. Because of this I believe a two week gap between signups would be really nice, so that people wouldn’t be in so many tours at once. Also removing 3 way finals will likely make some tours a week longer, for example a 24 person tour will now be 5 weeks instead of 4, causing more potential overlap.
 
Sabelette said:
Personally, I get super tired during every Grand Slam, and I think it's fair to say participation probably does drop at the end in part from fatigue, but I don't think that accounts for Tradebacks failing to ever break 32 and Stadium plummeting to 16. We can see that even people who qualified early still play these tours, so it's not top seeds dropping out, and even people close to qualifying don't enter these tours to try to get into playoffs. I think these tiers simply do not have much of a playerbase.
Click to expand...
Screenshot 2025-03-11 at 16-47-40 .png

I just so happen to have some data on this, I do not think the low player counts of Tradebacks and Stadium are due to fatigue at the end of Slam. Looking at signups, the majority of players who participated in Grand Slam last year only signed up for 1 tournament. The minority of players who signed up for 5-6 of the tours were the majority of signups for Stadium (13/16) and Tradebacks (14/21). This is not the case for the other tournaments and is indicative of no playerbase. Tradebacks only had 3 solo signups, and Stadium literally had none. I think this indicates that most people already know what they will play, and Grand Slam as a whole doesn't really get people play tiers they otherwise wouldn't.

I am not sympathetic to the argument that Stadium / Tradebacks need Grand Slam to not wither on the vine. A lot of the players who played every open already play every RBY tour already, so Tradebacks and Stadium being in Grand Slam isn't really necesary. Like look at the signup list for LC, Stabmons, or C+, you will see almost all of the same faces there as on the top of the sheet I posted.

I think there really isn't an argument for keeping either of the two OU-like formats over ZU, Grand Slam bringing new players to a tier really isn't that pronounced, and there already exists an active ZU playerbase that would fill out a ZU Open.
 
ZU should be aded imo. Clearly popular and deserves a slot 100%.

Although i love stadium and tradebacks they dont deserve a slot. They clearly have no interest and very little discussion on the metagame outside of the once in a blue moon instance someone brings it up. I would love to see these tiers get yearly individuals tours but grand slam just isnt it.
 
AM said:
Ubers, UU, NU, PU, ZU for a simple bo5 format come playoffs that feels akin to other Grand Slams.
Click to expand...

Not that I play low tiers anymore, but I think this is the best solution. Stadium and Tradebacks could get one-off tours occasionally… maybe even Triple Threat? Though that had less than 16 signups when it happened. It’d be a shame to have the metas kind of die but there are plenty of formats that don’t see a lot of play that we don’t try to force life into (NC98, NC99, Petit Cup, Pika Cup, etc) by shoehorning them into something like Slam.

I think going back to 5 tiers is better for not only the Bo5 format for playoffs, but also for tournament fatigue. And yes I’d be in favor of two week gaps between signups as well. Makes it longer but I think Gastlies made the point well. I have no opinion on when the start/end dates for Slam should be because I think it’s highly dependent on when the other LTC tournaments can be scheduled which takes coordination with folks outside of the RBY forum.

Overall I’m happy Slam is still alive and well, and hopefully we’ll see a bump in signups this year!
 
Okay, at this point I'm pretty set on 5 opens, 2 week spacing. I have one last point to address - would it make sense to actually change the order and go NU - PU - ZU - UU - Ubers? The reasoning is that NU Classic is expected early June and PU Classic end of June, so if we run those two first then there should be little to no overlap with those, since those also count for LTC. Any objections to going a bit out of order?

I'm thinking NU starts about mid-late April and PU start of May, so they should be either at semis/finals or done by the time of their respective LTC/Classic.
 
Feedback on discord suggests people don't care about the order, so the plan's set. See you all soon for Slam!
 
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