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With round 1 of qualifiers having concluded, it feels appropriate to take a look at this now and make the change for next years edition. 3 weeks for players to complete 2 games is excessive; players do not need more than 2 weeks to complete 2 games. Almost no games are played in the first week regardless, and tiebreak scenarios like what we're seeing this year prolong the process even further. 2 weeks for R1 + 1 week for potential tiebreaks + 1 week for R2 allows us to complete qualifiers within a month and start looking towards the main event.
Shortening qualis round 1 to two weeks won't "move up" the start date of the main event any sooner; it's posted annually in the year's official schedule, and it takes a wee bit of meticulous planning to push earlier dates before that so that the start date of pools is around, ideally, plus or minus one week from the posted Monday.
I'll put this year's schedule below, which has been pinned in #wcop in stours for months now.
March 16th - Captain Signups open (all teams)
March 23 - Quali Signups open, intro thread opens
March 30 - Roster thread opens, captains chosen
April 1 (Tuesday) - Quali prelim rosters due
April 6 - Quali Signups close
April 11 (Friday) - Roster deadline
April 13 - Qualis R1
April 27 - Main Event Player Signups open
May 5 - Qualis R2
May 9 (Friday) - Main event player signups close, main event rosters due
May 12 or 19 Buffer week for tbs
May 12 or 19 or 26 - Buffer week for media
May 19 or 26 or June 2 - Pools reveal, pools go up
June 9 or 16 or 23 - tb/quarters
June 16 or 23 or 30 - quarters/quarters tb/semis
June 23 or 30 or July 7 - semis/semis tb/finals
June 30 or July 7 or 14 - finals/finals tb
What's important to note is everything prior to May 26th is worked backwards from that date. I'll start at the beginning and explain some of the logic in the schedule I worked up for this year.
We've pushed main event manager signups up for the past couple years so that spriters are afforded more time to work their magic and pump out 40 custom avatars for the current 20 main event teams, of which 2 teams get ~2-3 weeks of time to have them worked on, whereas the final 2 will get ~1-2. Perhaps unsurprisingly, not all teams are equally responsive despite the extra time, things come up that delay spriters having time to actually work on them, and there's always minute details to hammer out so they both fit in with the spriting standards and satisfy requests from teams, so the ~2 months between initial captains being chosen and announced and posted main event start date likely shouldn't (and won't, hopefully) be deviated from too much.
Quali player signups close a few days before rosters are due because inevitably someone ends up being chosen for a roster or suggested around the time they close for a team they don't have eligibility for and teams need time to work through that. IP checking and verification of eligibility takes time, and there's not many of us who have capabilities to comb through IP histories of potentially hundreds of players, especially because there are times when we need to check PS alts, making the ability to check even further limited by only having PS admins be able to perform these checks. Lastly, with eligibility rules changing, new continental team players have the added privilege of full IP history checks to ensure compliance.
While I have asked Chains of Markov to generate matrices (last year's qualis R1 in the spoiler below) from which I further generate pairings to cut down on time in regards to generating Round 1 in both levels of the tournament, it still takes quite a bit of time to prep for Round 1 in qualifiers and pools with respect to translating these matrices into actual matchups and the text you see in the threads. I've written a few Google appscripts and new Google sheet formulas therein to streamline the process should I host again next year, but many of them also require tweaking depending on the number of teams, slots, and pools in the main event.
Beyond turning these matrices into actual matchups with country codes and names, the added return of the predictions tournament means I had the pleasure of creating what is probably one of the longest forms in Smogon's history (so far; pools will be twice the length). That takes hours. I don't mind the work, and I think the predictions tournament is super gas. But it takes time, and I work a full-time job with a fun 2.5 hour roundtrip commute during the week, and creating forms and keeping matchups tight-lipped prior to their release means very few people have the full information available to them in order to either help or contribute to putting things together in order to prevent any possibility of things leaking. This isn't to say I don't trust my fellow hosts (or they wouldn't be cohosting) but rather secrecy surrounding the matches is simply a high priority. Same goes for pools.
Cue main stage signups mid-qualis round 1. I've moved them and made the roster deadlines slightly earlier compared to the earliest (original) potential day for pools to be revealed because finalized teams generally give input on their team's custom avatar prior to its finalized version, which, unsurprisingly, also takes time.
Enter where we are now: Qualis R2 (play-ins) was supposed to start Sunday night my time if there was no tiebreak. However, we've got a fun event that's basically unprecedented in official tournaments, and so I added two buffer weeks for tiebreaks in the event we repeated a 3-way tie like last year's main event. Shame on me for not predicting we'd end up with a 5-way with the last game ending ~40 minutes prior to the round's deadline, but these weeks to solve it and do play-ins are still built into the schedule from the start (unless we fully reset the 5-way and cannot physically do a live reset this Sunday, which, transparently, is a possibility, even if unlikely).
Even without tiebreaks, there's still a week for media to do article prep, myself to put pools together and get them to Kalalokki to get the graphics for the reveal stream together and then create a 300 question form for predicts, and then the earliest date it would've possibly started is May 18th (if we get everything done that Sunday, otherwise Monday the 19th). We're on track at present to likely start at the date initially posted in the year's tournament schedule, the 26th (25th if up on the Sunday) or potentially a week later due to the tiebreak.
(tl;dr for those who don't want to read my yap)
So, this isn't to say I don't support dropping qualis to a 2-week deadline. This is purely to say that it won't affect the start date of pools at all, and it likely won't affect the initial start date of captaincy signups. The tournament requires so much more administrative overhead than the other two in the circuit because of all the moving pieces, we need to coordinate across multiple sections of the site, and there's >30 teams participating annually at this point. If we shorten qualifiers to a 2-week deadline, it will likely add another dead week (everyone is free to decide if that's a good or bad thing on their own), especially if/when there's formal discussion and accepted policy of expanding to even more teams in the main event, because putting all of this together takes more time than most realize.
And I'd be remiss to not formally shout out the goats TickenChains of MarkovKalalokki for their already-insane or yet-to-be-done amazing work to contribute to make the matchup generation, sheeting, and graphics move along seamlessly.
First off I want to say I feel like the tour hosts have been doing an amazing job and I appreciate everything that they do, including making the hard decisions for this TB.
I do want to say that I agree with making it 2 weeks for next year. ken I understand your argument that "the R1 start date would be the same anyway," but I think that misses the point. I think the problem with 3 weeks + 1-2 potential TB weeks + dead week is not really that R1 starts late, rather it is the tour length. In every tour, there is tour fatigue. It is why long tours like SPL come with the disappointment of dropping out, but with the small relief of "at least this tour is over for us." And also why most people after SPL take a small break from the tier they played. Even me who plays ORAS OU pretty much exclusively had to take a step back.
As someone who played WCoP, Retro WCoP, RU/ZU WCoP in the last year, and now this year's WCoP, I have to say that the tour fatigue is very real for this type of tour. I felt it in every single one of them, even though some of them we were out by qualifiers or R1. For qualifying teams, they have been in the trenches for a long time. It is obviously fair, but as I captained West Retro Cup in qualifying rounds, we had to go through 2 weeks of TB. We really did not have the gas in R1, much less POs. Everyone was basically dragging themselves by the time we got eliminated. So much so that when the tour ended, there weren't many heartfelt goodbyes, but rather "thank God this is over"
I believe tour fatigue starts building up before the tour even starts. During signups, everyone wants the tour to start, and that suspense and waiting adds to the fatigue. The teams that are not in qualifying but in R1 already, they are in that "can't wait for the tour to start" mentality for 4+ weeks, even though they feel like they are part of the tour already - not prepping, but watching, discussing, and planning. So basically, all players suffer from more tour fatigue as a result of 3 versus 2 weeks of qualifiers.
If making the tour 2 weeks will still have the same R1 date, I think that is still for the better. The fact that the tour length is shorter will feel better for everyone. Trust me.
If more teams are introduced and there are 3 games to be played for each player, then sure yeah make it 3 weeks. But even then, I always recommend finding ways of making the "tour length" shorter, which is probably found easiest in making qualifiers 2 weeks instead of 3.
EDIT:
Another suggestion, and forgive me if I'm talking from pure ignorance here, is to somehow always guarantee TB to be 1 week.
Even if 5 teams are there, come up with a method to choose the teams with 1 week of tiebreakers not 2. For example, a round robin between all the teams that picks the best 2 teams. Again, I'm no expert but yeah.
Last year I remember a secondary score similar to the one used in VGC was there. Maybe use that in some way.
During my experience in retro cup, by far and away the two weeks of TB is what gave everyone the most tour fatigue. I think with a heavy decrease in content and an increase in suspense, TB weeks should really be minimized, with however way you guys think is plausible.
a perhaps radical proposal: what if world cup qualifiers occurred in some other time during the year? e.g. december/january.
people have valid concerns about the length of the tour, and if doing qualis in 2 weeks instead of 3 weeks wouldn't significantly shorten the main event, here's a solution that would.
it would be fairly feasible to do wcop qualifiers in january (overlap with first few weeks of SPL) or december (immediately after SCL finals). Teams typically don't have too many players participating in these tours, minimizing conflict there.
One con would be that the qualifiers would occur in a different meta, but i dont think this matters much. Only UU is subject to tier shifts, and the meta can also change during main event wcop (see: UU meowscarada potentially getting banned between qualis and pools or during pools).
Qualifier teams may believe this interferes with the chemistry/momentum they build up in qualifiers. On the other hand, it could alleviate their burnout and give them a few extra months to lock in with the motivation of participating in main event. I'd be curious to hear feedback from the qualifier teams' managers/players about this.
not that this matters, but this would also mirror the actual soccer[football] world cup, where qualifiers are done separately from the actual event.
Expulso's proposal in an ideal world would be good, but doesnt account for a very important thing: people sometimes retire, get banned, get tour-banned or simply change availability. The chance for all of these things increase if the time between qualifiers and main event increases. It wont affect all qualified teams, since some of them will be able to recruit new players in time. Still, imagine for example something like team New Zealand (small country) getting separated from Oceania, somehow qualifying in December, then 3 racists from the team get banned and other 2 guys find a job and get a GF at the same time, having no time for Mons in May/June. This is a realistic scenario, especially the Ban part, those happen continuosly on this forum. So, I think its better to keep qualifiers right before main tour, chance for something happening is much lower.
We're not going to implement this; ken did an excellent job of laying out the administrative overhead and given the choice between a three week round and a two week round with an additional dead week, we'd prefer the extra scheduling flexibility of three weeks.
If and when there is a larger conversation on World Cup's format, we can revisit this conversation then.
