Proposal Remove the ability to hide replays on smogtours

[teal6]

The smogtours server is intended to be a showcase of various tournament games. In official games, we're already required to publicly post the replays, the clear intention behind this server is to play games that many people can watch. I believe we should get rid of the ability to hide replays for games played on smogtours to more closely align with the spirit of the server.

 

[UT]

My one major concern with this rule is that it incentivizes playing on main, which is undesirable.

This is obviously not a problem for officials and big team tours, but for smaller team tours and unofficial tours where playing on stours is not mandatory (or not enforceable), this creates an incentive to play on main if you want to hide your replays.

Anything that encourages tour gaming on main is undesirable as we have far less ability to re-create games or handle bugs on main. While I think this change would be a net positive for officials, I think it would be a net negative for other tours.

 

[Sabelette]

Removing replay hiding has an additional benefit - it makes prep less about busywork of finding people's posts on the forums and more about, you know, actually preparing for a game against them. Non-official tournaments should simply enforce playing tour matches on smogtours rather than allowing people to play on main (I know in, for example, randbats they prefer main because of constant balance updates that get pushed to main earlier but scouting is also not really an issue in randbats afaik). It's not a skill element of the game to have time to search the forums or friends/helpers to do it for you, it's just another time waster added onto a game we're all playing in our free time in between more important things and it decreases the accessibility of tournaments to people who don't have time to meticulously search, incentivizing everyone to hide every single replay they can and inconvenience their opponents too.

 

[Eeveeto]

Agree on the proposed idea, hard disagree with enforcing playing on Smogtours. I think that if both players agree, playing on Main should still be allowed in every tour (except playoffs of oficial ones). Scouting shouldnt be something easy, if you really want to know what your opponent usually uses, you have to make an effort and invest time.

 

[Eledyr]

Not going to add much, UT's post pretty much sums up the whole issue with it. I believe the current ruleset and how replays are handled are fine. If we want to force public replays in officials, we have the option to infract people. This can go as far as a tourban for someone with multiple repeated offenses in officials.

Tl;dr don't change anything.

 

[Sabelette]

Scouting shouldnt be something easy, if you really want to know what your opponent usually uses, you have to make an effort and invest time.

Scouting someone isn’t easy, but it’s stupid to add additional time barriers like having to search the forums for replays that they already publicly have to post just because they can hide them to create extra work for you. How are we going to have a zillion threads about act calls and respecting players’ time and then allow people to waste others’ time by making public tournament replays an extra pain to find? Wins don’t become that hard to find when hidden, but losses become a pain for no real reason.

Alternative or additional solution, just make it punishable to unlist tournament replays (game doesn’t count or infract or whatever), even if the tour is played on main. I have no clue what the point of allowing people to hide their tournament replays when they have to post them on forums to confirm a win is, anyway, as said all it does is provide an incentive for people to make the game less accessible. If your concern is visibility of tour games only it still makes sense to disallow hiding tour games in any tournament just on face value.

 

[lydian]

Removing replay hiding has an additional benefit - it makes prep less about busywork of finding people's posts on the forums and more about, you know, actually preparing for a game against them. Non-official tournaments should simply enforce playing tour matches on smogtours rather than allowing people to play on main (I know in, for example, randbats they prefer main because of constant balance updates that get pushed to main earlier but scouting is also not really an issue in randbats afaik). It's not a skill element of the game to have time to search the forums or friends/helpers to do it for you, it's just another time waster added onto a game we're all playing in our free time in between more important things and it decreases the accessibility of tournaments to people who don't have time to meticulously search, incentivizing everyone to hide every single replay they can and inconvenience their opponents too.

i like this idea, but wouldn't this end up encouraging people for playing on alts, to make finding replays harder, and so that you still have to search on the forums for winposts to find what alts this player you're prepping against has? i don't have a proposed solution for this, but i just wanted to raise this concern!

 

[Sabelette]

i like this idea, but wouldn't this end up encouraging people for playing on alts, to make finding replays harder, and so that you still have to search on the forums for winposts to find what alts this player you're prepping against has? i don't have a proposed solution for this, but i just wanted to raise this concern!

Yes, entirely possible, and even so I think we should still do what steps we can to discourage this stuff.

If we have to talk about alts in tournaments again at some point and find some compromise between accessibility and player freedom, we can always have another PR thread for it. For now it seems logical to me to have a rule “any tournament game with replays required cannot be hidden or unlisted,” which still allows for round 1s in tournaments without replays required (due to byes and info disparity) to be hidden and still fulfills the goal of making tournament replays more visible to spectators.

 

[Drifting]

the clear intention behind this server is to play games that many people can watch.

I don't see what this has to do with unlisting replays. Anyone can watch any game happening on Smogtours since they get declared in chat and there's no way to make a private game. There's plenty of valid reasons to not want every single game you play on Smogtours publicly immortalized forever and caught in stuff like the Replay Scouter tool, whether it be random games played with your friends or something like an off-site money tour. Frankly I find the whole scouting/prepping/fishing culture obnoxious and would prefer to make someone actually work for it if they want to do that stuff, since the replays are already required to be posted anyway (which again satisfies your concern of people not being able to watch games that were played on stours).

 

[Vileman]

I don't really follow this. Games from official team tours are already required to not be unlisted, and are made public if a player by accident unlists it. Not sure if this also applies for individuals but pushing for that would be fine.

As UT mentioned, this would really incentivize playing tournament games that don't require replays on main. I would for sure not play any seasonal game on stour if this comes through.

There's already been a huge push with information parity regarding prep with requiring replays in winposts, this would lead to some people having replays and some not for seasonals, so don't really see the upside for this.

 

[MANNAT]

What’s this whole meme behind “people will be incentivized to play on main”? People are ALREADY incentivized to play on main in tours without replays required. It is multiple magnitudes harder to locate those replays than games on stours that anyone can randomly catch. Any round of a tournament that requires replays should have smogtours required regardless.

This change is an easy win with little downside.

 

[BigFatMantis]

There are quite literally hundreds of games played each day on Smogtours that have nothing to do with officials. Unless the goal is to make Smogtours nearly exclusively for officials, I’m not sure this accomplishes much. As some have already said, the rules already require that you don’t unlist replays for officials, so if people are doing that anyways then just warn and infract repeat offenders.

 

[cherryb0ng]

The smogtours server is intended to be a showcase of various tournament games. In official games, we're already required to publicly post the replays, the clear intention behind this server is to play games that many people can watch. I believe we should get rid of the ability to hide replays for games played on smogtours to more closely align with the spirit of the server.

Neutral on this but if we were to implement this, then each tournament needs to decide whether or not it should even be allowed to go on Showdown to play instead of Smogtours.
I'm in favour of this only if we enforce all replays to be public.

 

[Eledyr]

Neutral on this but if we were to implement this, then each tournament needs to decide whether or not it should even be allowed to go on Showdown to play instead of Smogtours.
I'm in favour of this only if we enforce all replays to be public.

Heavily support this. While I said the current ruling is fine, an alternative is to make hide replays unavailable on Smogtours AND make it so that playing on smogtours is mandatory for tournaments that requires replays. If done that way, I think it'd be a net positive for everyone.

 

[teal6]

Heavily support this. While I said the current ruling is fine, an alternative is to make hide replays unavailable on Smogtours AND make it so that playing on smogtours is mandatory for tournaments that requires replays. If done that way, I think it'd be a net positive for everyone.

I am in favor of this in a strong way, and didn't bring it up in the OP because I thought that community wise, there wouldn't be the same amount of support. Can we get a few more opinions?

 

[UT]

I am in favor of this in a strong way, and didn't bring it up in the OP because I thought that community wise, there wouldn't be the same amount of support. Can we get a few more opinions?

Tour policy is non-binding outside of official tours, so you cannot make smogtours required for non-official tours. Making a change to smogtours that makes its functionality worse for non-official tours is counterproductive and cannot be fixed with a policy change that’s non-binding for them.

 

[a fairy]

As myself: I don't like this proposal much. I think that it would be nice to reduce the amount of hidden replays, but I think the consequences make it not motivating for me.

- STours is for more than just trophy/ribbon circuit tournaments. Plenty of games happen on STours that have no connection to the type of tours that necessitate unhidden replays, even if we expand unhidden replays to individual trophy tours. I am not motivated to push those tours and communities away from stours by disregarding their presence for a decision like this.
- I do not want to encourage more games being played on main. Playing on main is super undesirable for a number of reasons, and I have to imagine that the desire to play on it will spike in this situation. I definitely don't think "mandate playing on stours" is a logical or feasible response for this - we'd have done this ages ago in response to mid-week bans or stability reasons if we could've/wanted to. I for sure don't think that "hiding replays is bad" is going to get this to happen.
- Many circuits already don't require posted replays until much late into their tournaments. I suspect this kind of change would make players push for that bar to be raised even further as they push back against the sudden increased accessibility in replays. I can't connect a community mindset of "replay posting should be from top 8 on" with "all games should happen on stours and be listed" personally.

I dunno. I don't think that I'd stand in the way of this, necessarily, but I don't see it being particularly advantageous or beneficial and suspect it would likely only cause further problems.

 

[teal6]

I see. Perhaps the negatives are too great. I dream of a far more standardized tournament circuit than we currently have, but the route there might not be so straightforward.

 

[MANNAT]

If information protection is such a concern playing on main is ALREADY optimal in any round of a tournament where replays arent required. Anyone can be online and catch your game on the smogtours and link it to your friends if not your future opponents. The impact of this change on the server people play games on is greatly overstated.

 

[Bobsican]

Is there any possibility to link the forum with the server that hosts the replays so it "just" automatically filters for any publicated link in the forum (notably excluding DMs) to override the hidden setting of all saved replays so they become public instead? This seems unlikely, but it'd be a neat way to fix the issue.

 

[NotVeryCake]

I would like to add that this also destroys the idea of playing any sort of friendly game on Smogtours either, relegating them to always being played on a less than desirable experience on mains. Would effectively kill it for anything that doesn't force it to be used.

 

[Tree69420]

I would like to add that this also destroys the idea of playing any sort of friendly game on Smogtours either, relegating them to always being played on a less than desirable experience on mains. Would effectively kill it for anything that doesn't force it to be used.

Nobody is stopping you from playing ur friendlies on smogtours, this type of anti scouting behavior is actually OD asf, if people are watching it live anyway then who gives a shit if you hide the replay or not man just let people watch it
I see no reason why all games shouldn't be public, unhidden, easy to find, on stours for information equality, your success in tour should be based on how well you can prep and play not how well you can find all of your opponents replays