Proposal Rework / Remove Game Discussion on SmogTours

dice

dice

is a Tiering Contributoris a Tutor Alumnusis a defending SPL Championis a defending World Cup of Pokemon Champion
The current setup with Game Discussion isn’t working. Right now, as I write this post, over 250 accounts are on SmogTours to watch a WCOP Finals game, over half of which are registered, yet only 38 are in the Game Discussion chat. That’s not a coincidence. The requirement to manually join the chat is fussy. It splits the conversation in a way that’s actively detrimental to community engagement.

Before this was implemented, we managed just fine. Now, instead of fostering discussion in one place, we've scattered it across private Discord servers and DMs. SmogTours chat has gone quiet, and a big part of what made watching live games fun has been lost.

So what’s the solution? Either auto-join all registered accounts into Game Discussion or remove it altogether. Bring back the loosely moderated, socially governed main chat. Ironically saying [REDACTED] was more engaging than pretending this ghost town is a meaningful improvement.
 
This is gonna sound radical to new players but simply allow almost the same level of discourse that currently exists in the game discussion chat in the lobby. This is how it worked back in the day and it was completely fine. Ask other people that played back then how much time they spent looking at chat during their games, the answer for most people is gonna be almost 0.

For a little bit of history the ban on "lobby ghosting" happened because of a Smogon Tour playoffs game where someone speculated on whether blunder's Gyarados had natural gift and it ended up having it and Alexander played around it (he might have played around it regardless of there being a chat, who knows?).

So to be specific, my proposal is:
  • Ban speculating on uncommon sets. Little subjective, but i'd say speculation on anything that is in the smogon dex is fine, if you start talking about Natural Gift Gyarados, that gets muted.
  • Ban speculating on esoteric mechanics. Very subjective, but we could come up with a list of what counts. What I mean by this is things that someone that has been playing for a year might not know, and someone that has been playing for a long time might forget. The main example I had in mind is let's say a Tornadus-T and an Alakazam both switch in the same turn, and the Alakazam switches first. This reveals the Tornadus-T is (probably) not max speed. Even an experienced player might fail to notice this. Everyone knows a Clefable not taking rocks damage but taking sand is Unaware with boots, so that'd be fine to talk about in chat.
  • Ban multi-turn game plans. "I'd go chomper here" is fine, "i'd go chomper here, which baits in Skarmory and then i'd double to Magnezone" = mute. Similarly, laying out a general game plan regardless of turn like at preview going "He's gonna need to trap Skarmory to open up his SD chomp" is banned too.
  • If the same people are saying what they'd do every single turn mute them, as per rule 3.
  • Allow everything else. "That Alakazam probably has Encore" "Is he gonna rocks or attack the Hatterene?" "i'd go chomper here". "if he gets up rocks the Enamorus can't switch in anymore cause it's at 20%" are all fine.
Other than situations like the ones above, 99% of lobby chat is people that struggle to get past 1400 on the ladder going "LOOOL". Any player in a tournament game that draws enough spectators to be worth mentioning is gonna know all the options in play in a given gamestate (other than possibly the stuff covered by rules 1 and 2) and is just calculating which one gives them the best chance to win, the mental bandwidth they would have to allocate to parsing through the sea of LOL's to find insight from good players offsets any advantage gleaned from seeing ABR saying he'd go chomper here.

This proposal lets people experience the old lobby, which was awesome and did a lot for turning pokémon into a spectator sport, without any meaningful interference in competitive integrity.
 
^ and i don't even know about all these limitations, we could follow common sense to a degree...

but spectating + the stours lobby environment was way more hype with looser rules on chatting (and really, very very very minimal benefit was gained by players looking)

edit: i think the above is true with or without kicking ppl who r players
 
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Agree with a lot of the points here however id differ in my implementation of this.

1. Scrap the game discussion channel as its nowhere near as hype as lobby used to be and has made spectator experience worse overall
2. Allow open ghosting in the lobby where people can speculate as much as they want and bring up whatever they want to encourage high level discussion amongst spectators
3. (And this is the most important part) Implement some sort of coding that kicks players currently playing from lobby / all rooms on smogtours. Im not the most experienced programmer but id imagine this is certainly not unfeasible to do

Benefits: brings back the hype of lobby, removes the barrier to entry for discussion for the majority of spectators, heightens the effort required to gain knowledge from public rooms by a considerable amount and disincentivizes ghosting, no grey area as to what can or cant be discussed as we know eventually there will be some super borderline or contentious thing that's said and gets debated to death causing more headache.
Drawbacks: requires code implementation to make sure active players aren't watching lobby
 
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