Rejected Smogon Tour Times

[a fairy]

Me, as me and nothing else

I support a second STour on the grounds of increasing the amount of high level competition that matches standard competition. Live competition is the backbone of online (video) game competition, from external games like chess (and other turn-based stuff that could in theory be asynchronous) to even just the base structure of our own opening pitch to all those who want to compete seriously - the ladder and simulator in-game tours. I am a fan of live competition conceptually, even if I strongly dislike it as a person. I don't have the stamina or ability to compete, but it's no secret that nearly every other successful competitive scene (with exceptions like Diplomacy or Stratego, but even then) is driven by its live, "the tour ends the weekend/day it starts" mentality.

If I had to pick between the options of region preference, my gut instinct is that EU + APAC would be my preference when prioritizing health of the tournament and range of times (people of all regions can have life schedules mimicking distant regions!). I don't know that I have an easy way to explain why or defend this stance, so frankly, I'm not going to try very hard to convince people of this, but reintroducing another STour without it having a satisfactorily different identity when it comes to timings seems like an unfortunate surrender of a very useful and beneficial tool for the advancement of high level play.

 

[Star]

Me, as me and nothing else

I support a second STour on the grounds of increasing the amount of high level competition that matches standard competition. Live competition is the backbone of online (video) game competition, from external games like chess (and other turn-based stuff that could in theory be asynchronous) to even just the base structure of our own opening pitch to all those who want to compete seriously - the ladder and simulator in-game tours. I am a fan of live competition conceptually, even if I strongly dislike it as a person. I don't have the stamina or ability to compete, but it's no secret that nearly every other successful competitive scene (with exceptions like Diplomacy or Stratego, but even then) is driven by its live, "the tour ends the weekend/day it starts" mentality.

If I had to pick between the options of region preference, my gut instinct is that EU + APAC would be my preference when prioritizing health of the tournament and range of times (people of all regions can have life schedules mimicking distant regions!). I don't know that I have an easy way to explain why or defend this stance, so frankly, I'm not going to try very hard to convince people of this, but reintroducing another STour without it having a satisfactorily different identity when it comes to timings seems like an unfortunate surrender of a very useful and beneficial tool for the advancement of high level play.

I guess I wasn’t very explicit, but to be clear my thought on the compromise option was one NA + EU time, one EU + APAC time, one NA + APAC time. I didn’t mean catering the whole tour to one combo of regions. I personally don’t think it makes sense for a competitive trophy tour to ever rly exclude Europe or the Americas entirely. That being said I did have APAC focused as an option but as I mentioned I don’t really expect that to have significant community support given the makeup of the tournament community.

 

[a fairy]

Ah, that wasn't clear to me, I thought this was comparing to the other STour.

That seems fine to me, I don't really think we need a timeframe that is explicitly APAC-targeted to the point of not considering value for other regions. I'm fine with [NA+EU], [EU+APAC], [APAC+NA] as a tour time trio, though I probably have stronger opinions on which ones should be on which days, but that's jumping several sharks.

 

[Finchinator]

RE: 2 STours vs 1 STour:

I support going back to two seasons. Smogon Tour is one of our best tournaments and the only arguments to remove it outright have been unserious. Arguments to keep it at one, while more serious and genuine, are largely tied to circuit balance since Masters was introduced. Personally, I think keeping history going with one of our best tournaments supersedes slight balance concerns that can potentially be fixed by redoing some of the calendar. I think our goal is to serve the needs of tournament participants and it is clear that the demand is high for Smogon Tour when it is timed well, so we might as well keep supply where it was for many successful years.


RE: Timing of potential second STour:

I do not think any times work as well as the times we currently have for the first season (6 Fri-4 Sat-2 Sun EST) and I am fine only using them, but I am ok with flexing a few hours here or there as a compromise without losing larger portions of our peak playerbases if -- and only if -- this is possible. I do think experiments like a 6am EST tour or a 4th tour have been tried and failed; proposals with stuff like this or close equivelants tend to pop up in this thread and are popular within some groups, but it is clearly a major drop off in number of competitors both in that specific tournament and overall.

We should probably look to establish parameters based off of reasonable posts in this thread, take a look at sign-up trends, and go from there. I am curious what times can jive with potentially retaining APAC participants while retaining at least some EU/NA as I do think some prior attempts went too extreme, I do think this discussion has gotten out of hand in prior editions of this discussion, and I do worry about finding a midground that may not be possible/popular.

 

[Slowpoke Fan]

I guess I wasn’t very explicit, but to be clear my thought on the compromise option was one NA + EU time, one EU + APAC time, one NA + APAC time. I didn’t mean catering the whole tour to one combo of regions. I personally don’t think it makes sense for a competitive trophy tour to ever rly exclude Europe or the Americas entirely. That being said I did have APAC focused as an option but as I mentioned I don’t really expect that to have significant community support given the makeup of the tournament community.

Yeah I was not asking for a Smogon Tour to have three timeslots catered to the Asia-Pacific, what you mentioned was closer to what I had in mind as long as feedback from Asian players is taken seriously (e.g. 6pm Saturday is just not it for a lot of Chinese players, we would either prefer to start earlier in the afternoon/morning or later on at night).

Edit: Would something like this be reasonable for months when EST is -4? People will obviously point out that slot 3 is not too dissimilar from the disastrous 6am EST Saturday timeslot last year, but this time is a lot more friendly to Asia due to how we typically spend our Saturday evenings. I could be missing lifestyle differences in Europe though (late Sunday morning is a pretty good time for us), so I would appreciate feedback regarding this from people living in the region

Suggestion for potential #2 STour timeslots

Slot 1: Friday 10pm EST (Saturday 10am China time, 2pm New Zealand time, 7pm PST, 9pm Brazil time)
Slot 2: Saturday 1pm EST (Saturday 10:30pm India time, 6pm to 8pm for Europe, 10am PST, 2pm Brazil time)
Slot 3: Sunday 5am EST (Sunday 2:30pm India time, 5pm China time, 9pm New Zealand time)

 

[Texas Cloverleaf]

One of the reasons I vaguely recall from the policy threads back when the second Smogon tour was removed was a chunk of the player base feeling increased burnout from the intensity of the tour when ran biannually. Given this is unlikely to arbitrarily change, it would be wise for the second tour to center around a different geographic core of the player base (while keeping them accessible to all regions of course). One focused on NA friendly times and one on EU+AIPAC times for example.

 

[Finchinator]

One of the reasons I vaguely recall from the policy threads back when the second Smogon tour was removed was a chunk of the player base feeling increased burnout from the intensity of the tour when ran biannually

This is simply not true though. It was not a reason that factored into the decision at the time and I can only even find one post ever alluding to this as a complaint from that discussion. It was removed specifically when Masters, which overlaps 2 of the 3 tiers, was added.

If you are burnt out, simply do not participate -- it should not be taken out on everyone else. I went from playing every single tournament I could to about half as many, but this should not inhibit the ability of others to join those other half of tournaments.

 

[Merritt]

As we come up against making the schedule for next year, Smogon Tour is the only remaining outstanding issue.

I am opposed to adding another Smogon Tour to the official circuit. The reasoning for this largely boils down to participation numbers, in both individual tours and overall, as well as a lack of concrete reasoning for why adding another stour specifically will be beneficial.

Let's talk numbers. Smogon Tour is not a tournament with particularly high overall participation numbers. It falls fairly in line with OLT, which is probably the best comparison with both being a significant time investment tournament with an extended participation period (4 full weeks for OLT instead of stour's specific timing over 9 weeks). Full signup numbers for these two can be a bit tricky to get at a glance, unlike tournaments with a single signup thread, so I've compiled numbers below. Note that for OLT I cannot confirm which signups actually played any games, and numbers have a margin of error of ~2.

Stour 36 (2024) - 593 players / 462 >0 points
Stour 35 (2023) - 587 players / 440 >0 points
Stour 34 (2022) - 570 players / 386 >0 points
Stour 33 (2022) - 665 players / 467 >0 points
Stour 32 (2021) - 635 players / 457 >0 points
Stour 31 (2021) - 750 players / 548 >0 points
Stour 30 (2020) - 665 players / 448 >0 points

OLT 11 (2024) - 590 unique signups
OLT 10 (2023) - 584 unique signups
OLT 9 (2022) - 814 unique signups
OLT 8 (2021) - 712 unique signups

To provide a reference point for other individual tours, OST hasn't dropped below 1000 signups since 2017, OSDT hovers on average around the 350 player mark, Masters has averaged 700 signups, Classic and Slam numbers are below.

classic/slam

Classic 10 (2024) - 976 players / 540 >0 points
Classic 9 (2023) - 819 players / 473 >0 points
Classic 8 (2022) - 995 players / 520 >0 points

Slam 13 (2024) - 918 players / 523 >0 points
Slam 12 (2023) - 973 players / 513 >0 points
Slam 11 is an outlier and should not be counted

Smogon Tour is one of the lower participant tournaments we currently hold, with only OSDT having definitively lower signup numbers. This isn't a case of a tournament with incredibly high player counts justifying a split - and to be clear these are the most favorable numbers for Stour. Individual tournaments within Stour are small, especially since Stour 31, and the second half of the weekly tournaments often barely (if at all) break 100 players. At best this suggests that people give up once they feel they're out of playoff contention (though the fall off happening around Week 4 means people are giving up very early), but it also indicates overall burnout or waning interest after the 'new tour' excitement fades somewhat.

The proposal of making a second Smogon Tour with times deliberately targeted at smaller playerbases only exacerbates this concern. While I feel confident that making an "asia-friendly, americas-poor" time won't entirely exclude one of our largest possible player pools, it's almost certainly liable to result in even smaller participant numbers - at "best" for just those specifically timed tournaments, not for the tournament as a whole.

This doesn't even begin to get into the additional draw away from Smogon Tour #2 that overlap with other tournaments will cause. Masters alone is a >3 month long tournament, with incredibly high metagame overlap. Smogon Tour itself is a 3 month long tournament. Unless we're willing to run Masters with heavy similar timing to Stour (which I believe to be a very bad idea for both tournaments), one of the three is going to have to run near-concurrently with either Classic (which already gets complaints about entering every Cup being stressful and both pull from oldgens playerbases) or SPL (direct tier overlap again).

The arguments for why add another Smogon Tour specifically seem to be people who like the tournament which, fair enough, nothing I say can convince you there, or people who want to have more accessible (globally speaking) participation in a livetour format. Basically if you're asked why a second Smogon Tour specifically instead of a second OLT or second Masters, these seem to be the only justifications. An argument that Smogon Tour had two tournaments a year until 2022 so it can clearly work again without issue should be dismissed out of hand, as our circuit structure has changed since then and 2021 and 2022's schedules were already somewhat stressed.

I would strongly prefer that we A) figure out a way to adjust the single Smogon Tour's timing so that greater global participation is reasonable, though the how is very up in the air, maybe put it in summer instead of spring, B) if adding another tournament to the schedule, lean away from the livetour format that makes it difficult for players in certain countries to participate (as done with Smogon Masters which has been a success by most metrics), or C) at the very least have the second "Smogon Tour" not run the same metagames so that we can at least justify its absolutely mandatory overlap somewhat better.

 

[Perry]

As we come up against making the schedule for next year, Smogon Tour is the only remaining outstanding issue.

I am opposed to adding another Smogon Tour to the official circuit. The reasoning for this largely boils down to participation numbers, in both individual tours and overall, as well as a lack of concrete reasoning for why adding another stour specifically will be beneficial.

Let's talk numbers. Smogon Tour is not a tournament with particularly high overall participation numbers. It falls fairly in line with OLT, which is probably the best comparison with both being a significant time investment tournament with an extended participation period (4 full weeks for OLT instead of stour's specific timing over 9 weeks). Full signup numbers for these two can be a bit tricky to get at a glance, unlike tournaments with a single signup thread, so I've compiled numbers below. Note that for OLT I cannot confirm which signups actually played any games, and numbers have a margin of error of ~2.

Stour 36 (2024) - 593 players / 462 >0 points
Stour 35 (2023) - 587 players / 440 >0 points
Stour 34 (2022) - 570 players / 386 >0 points
Stour 33 (2022) - 665 players / 467 >0 points
Stour 32 (2021) - 635 players / 457 >0 points
Stour 31 (2021) - 750 players / 548 >0 points
Stour 30 (2020) - 665 players / 448 >0 points

OLT 11 (2024) - 590 unique signups
OLT 10 (2023) - 584 unique signups
OLT 9 (2022) - 814 unique signups
OLT 8 (2021) - 712 unique signups

To provide a reference point for other individual tours, OST hasn't dropped below 1000 signups since 2017, OSDT hovers on average around the 350 player mark, Masters has averaged 700 signups, Classic and Slam numbers are below.

classic/slam

Classic 10 (2024) - 976 players / 540 >0 points
Classic 9 (2023) - 819 players / 473 >0 points
Classic 8 (2022) - 995 players / 520 >0 points

Slam 13 (2024) - 918 players / 523 >0 points
Slam 12 (2023) - 973 players / 513 >0 points
Slam 11 is an outlier and should not be counted

Smogon Tour is one of the lower participant tournaments we currently hold, with only OSDT having definitively lower signup numbers. This isn't a case of a tournament with incredibly high player counts justifying a split - and to be clear these are the most favorable numbers for Stour. Individual tournaments within Stour are small, especially since Stour 31, and the second half of the weekly tournaments often barely (if at all) break 100 players. At best this suggests that people give up once they feel they're out of playoff contention (though the fall off happening around Week 4 means people are giving up very early), but it also indicates overall burnout or waning interest after the 'new tour' excitement fades somewhat.

The proposal of making a second Smogon Tour with times deliberately targeted at smaller playerbases only exacerbates this concern. While I feel confident that making an "asia-friendly, americas-poor" time won't entirely exclude one of our largest possible player pools, it's almost certainly liable to result in even smaller participant numbers - at "best" for just those specifically timed tournaments, not for the tournament as a whole.

This doesn't even begin to get into the additional draw away from Smogon Tour #2 that overlap with other tournaments will cause. Masters alone is a >3 month long tournament, with incredibly high metagame overlap. Smogon Tour itself is a 3 month long tournament. Unless we're willing to run Masters with heavy similar timing to Stour (which I believe to be a very bad idea for both tournaments), one of the three is going to have to run near-concurrently with either Classic (which already gets complaints about entering every Cup being stressful and both pull from oldgens playerbases) or SPL (direct tier overlap again).

The arguments for why add another Smogon Tour specifically seem to be people who like the tournament which, fair enough, nothing I say can convince you there, or people who want to have more accessible (globally speaking) participation in a livetour format. Basically if you're asked why a second Smogon Tour specifically instead of a second OLT or second Masters, these seem to be the only justifications. An argument that Smogon Tour had two tournaments a year until 2022 so it can clearly work again without issue should be dismissed out of hand, as our circuit structure has changed since then and 2021 and 2022's schedules were already somewhat stressed.

I would strongly prefer that we A) figure out a way to adjust the single Smogon Tour's timing so that greater global participation is reasonable, though the how is very up in the air, maybe put it in summer instead of spring, B) if adding another tournament to the schedule, lean away from the livetour format that makes it difficult for players in certain countries to participate (as done with Smogon Masters which has been a success by most metrics), or C) at the very least have the second "Smogon Tour" not run the same metagames so that we can at least justify its absolutely mandatory overlap somewhat better.

If a second Smogon Tour is off the table, then I'd rather TDs keep the times we have used last season - theres no need to change something which has proved itself to work time and time again.

 

[Finchinator]

For 2025, Smogon Tour is only having one edition per the official tournament schedule here.

It will maintain the 6pm Friday, 4pm Saturday, and 2pm Sunday (will be GMT-4 by the time Smogon Tour starts) times.

I understand there was some support, including my own, for a second season to be brought back, but drawbacks noted here about participation and logistics are very fair and without much opposition.

Thanks to everyone for posting.