Hosted by Gekokeso, Snaquaza and maaaaaaybe Copen
Art by @zxgzxg with a few edits
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Hello everyone, we are finally bringing back Solopl. To prevent the tour from interfering with the schedule of other tours such as PMPL, we have decided to begin a bit earlier this time around.
Petmods team tournaments have never done this before but given the chaos that has plagued some of them in the past I believe its time to start making up for that. For starters, this thread shall serve as a way for the general community to give input on decisions pertaining to the thread. With that out of the the way, let us begin with the topics at hand.
Team Size
There will be about 6 teams with a minimum of 9 players each and a maximum of 11. This is the format that was done last year and it seemed to work, so we will be repeating it. Anything that seems wrong with it feel free to point out in the thread. The amount of credits at the start is 120k.
Retains and selfbuy prices
Truth be told we haven´t decided anything regarding retains and selfbuys other than the system put in place last year. Right now, we are considering No retains, as similar tournaments to this one don´t have retains and it allows good players to change teams rather than being stuck on the same teams for all editions of the tournament. Selfbuys are the same price of last year, which is 15k. Should anyone want to argue these prices feel free to do so.
Tiers
This has been the most contended element of the tournament so far. The proposed lineup for Solopl 2 is the following:
Modern Gen 1
GSC Doubles
Do Not Use
Balanced Createmons / Modern Gen 2
Scootopia
CommunityUsed2
Fusion Evolution VGC Regulation
Clubmons: Requiem
I understand there is significant amount of discourse going on about which of these tiers should make the cut. Which is why we are gonna let said discourse take place in this thread. However, I understand this topic is also one that has led to some heated arguments. The Mod Team will not be entertaining any posts dedicated to solely bashing a tier or its players, regardless of who says it. Please keep discussion as respectful as possible as both us the host and the Pet Mods team will do their best take all sugestions as we can.
NOG BLOG #17: Thoughts of the Previous Solomod PL Winner
Hi Geko, thank you for making this thread. I mainly wanted to talk about tiers in solopl but a few main brief points to mention.
1. The biggest issue I had last year which we attempted to remedy in the managers discord was how tiebreakers were done. Obviously it was a massive issue when we have one singular host who is playing and the tiebreaker rule was:
"In the case of a tie in playoffs, the advancing team will be decided by a best of three - each team picks a unique tier with the higher seed picking second, then a tier voted on by the hosts is the 3rd game."
I don't think I need to really talk about why that was so bad to have last year. Thankfully, we did not run into the issue of needing tiebreakers. While certainly "better" this year as we don't have only one tournament host, I think we can surely do better. I think the best idea that was mentioned last pl, I believe by woo, was to have both teams rank the tiers most preferred to least preferred, with both teams #1 being a tier, and then the whatever the teams aggregately voted highest for would be the 3rd tier. I don't think that's perfect, but I definitely think it beats what we currently have. Another option which I'm not particularly fond of is to just say at the start of the tournament before the draft: x tier would be the 3rd tier played. This is what the fake SPL does, but they have SV OU and we do not have SV OU, and they have 3 SV OU slots. Again, I don't like this idea at all, but it might still be better than what we have right now. I would say the best tier for that would probably be DNU.
2. Not really a complaint, but I think waiting to declare a team size would be best as we don't know how many signups we will get this year. Last year we had to extend signups by an extra week to just get 60, and teams were forced to a team size of 10 exactly. I don't think that was bad, but if we end up with 80 this year (lol), I don't think limiting team size 11 makes sense.
3. For retains, I don't really feel strongly either way. The strong argument
against having retains in my opinion is that it's really hard to know who is good in these tiers. When we were drafting, I pretty much only could name good players for two tiers, and I think my comanager could only confidently do two to three. Yes we did additional research for drafting, but it's hard to know who are the best players (and how good they are relative) to the other 8 players who play that tier regularly. I'll give the only real example that I can which is in mg2 (mg2 forshadowing). For our last draft we were going to go cheap on mg2 because I felt I could support pretty much any player to a decent record. MG2's best, qsns, we had penciled in for going around 25k as a realistic offer. Keep in mind, this isn't SPL where teams try to have a bunch of subs. 120k for 10 players is alot, and any player who you are confident can x-0 is easily worth 25k. Yet, because MG2 is not exactly a massive community, and outside of the Lialiabeast + Anique team who self bought for MG2, none of the other managers knew anything about the tier. I actually made a mistake as bidding was around 12k for qsns and we immediately jumped up to 20k because teamo kept increasing by 500 and it was taking forever, and immediately everyone dropped out on a player that should've gone for 25k, and could've gone for more. Long story short, you can probably find an example of this for every single tier because it's so hard to know every player for every tier. When your best metric is usually the 1-2 tours held in the past year to determine the best player in a tier, it makes it really hard to adequately assess each players value. So how does this matter for retains? I think that having managers who know the details of a tier is already an advantage on its own, and for teams to year after year reap the benefits of retaining the same player over and over because 3 years ago we had teamo as a manager who didn't know what they were doing doesnt make sense. I mean we only had like 7 manager pairs sign up last year. TLDR: I don't really care that much despite the wall of text, but I think no retain probably makes the most sense.
4. I think Gekokeso should change the title of the thread to Solmods Premier League II (mg2 foreshadowing)
5. Final point before going into tier consideration: thoughts on having managers who want to self-buy themselves for a second consecutive year cost 18k?
Solopl Tier Inclusion
I will now attempt to be as unbiased as possible and give my thoughts on what tiers should be in solopl. I'm not going to waste my time for tiers that I have been informed are a "lock." These being MG1, DNU, and Scoot.
Disclaimer: if you did not already know, I am the tier leader for Modern Gen 2 so while I will try to be as neutral as possible, keep in mind there will be some implicit bias.
This leaves GSC Doubles, BC, MG2, CU2, FEVGC, Clubmons. I will also be mentioning KEP briefly.
I know literally nothing about Clubmons and CU2. I know a little of FE VGC, BC, and GSC Doubles. Consequently, I will be throwing out Clubmons from my post. I do, however, want to mention that I have heard very little of CU2 and I have been told that it isn't in a great state right now. So I don't think it should be 100% locked in for solopl. The same could be true for Clubmons but I don't know. FE VGC I thought was good last year, it definitely seems neat, and I know the FE playerbase has a large community, so I do think FE VGC should be included as well. This is not really a unique stance.
To me, there are four main tiers that I think should be considered for the two remaining slots: GSC Doubles, BC, MG2, and KEP.
Final Disclaimer: I will be mentioning signup numbers at points in the following sections. I was pretty sure we had 60 signups last year (10 for each team) but I'm looking at my spreadsheet we made for drafting last year and it only has 52. I am too lazy to go back and find the missing 8 people, so the number of signups I will be using will be off. I don't imagine the 8 missing signups will have a massive difference though.
Making the Case: Kanto Expansion Pak (KEP)
This is going to be my shortest one because I think it has the least chance of making it. Not only was it not included as a potential substitute, but I did see some criticism for it during last solopl and I think alot of people were putting it in the bottom half of tiers. I built exactly 1 team, watched all the games, but I do think it's cool. That being said, it is still
somewhat similar to RBY OU. I think that counts against it, as does the fact people seemed to not enjoy it last tournament. A final point against it is that we already have MG1, a Gen 1 meta, locked into the tour, and RBY as a generation is already polarizing enough. I think those that want to play Gen 1 can find comfort in playing just MG1. There were also only I think two mainers who signed up exclusively for KEP so we wouldn't be missing out on a ton of signups. The best case I can make for KEP other than the fact that I like it is that it had the most signups of KEP (26), MG2 (25), and BC (21).
Making the Case: Balanced Createmons (BC)
One of the reasons to exclude BC (and the reason that it is BC on the chopping block and not another tier to be replaced) is because it is very much a mainers tier. Including it is nice, last year we got 4 signups who exclusively signed up for BC, but I think it is far and away the hardest tier to pick up and just play. Someone mentioned earlier today (I forgot who) in the discord, but apparently the consensus among the BC mainers is that the tier is dead. They also had the fewest signups of KEP, MG2, and BC. I don't have a ton that I can really say in support of BC to be perfectly honest though I am trying. I also saw complaints that it might not be super balanced right now, and the games I saw during solopl kinda reflected that. BUT. If they can maybe throw together some minor changes and try to revitalize the tier a little before solopl, I think it could be a good tier to include. That being said, my general understanding from the discussion earlier in the petmod server is that there is only one main advocate fighting for this tier who may or may not be hosting.
Edit:
BC will likely never receive anymore balance changes as the TL has essentially abandoned the tier and elected to not make someone else the TL
Source: The one BC player I know
Making the Case: GSC Doubles (GSC Doubles) (elite abbreviation I know)
I don't think there's really much consideration to drop GSC Doubles from solopl right now but I will say I'm not a huge fan of having two Doubles/VGC metas. Doubles/VGC community isn't huge, and last tour we had FE VGC which was on the lower end (only by a small amount) of signups, and I believe that has a larger playerbase than GSC Doubles (I could be wrong). Even still, I think there would be a ton of overlap and most teams would really struggle to find two solid doubles/vgc players for both tiers, and you're also kinda forced into getting a doubles/vgc sub. When you have 1-3 subs, that's not ideal. There's also the minor issue of having two Gen 2 metas, but that's a case against including MG2 as well which I will talk about more. For me, I'm not a huge fan of including GSC Doubles BUT I am very much a fan of including a metagame currently on main ps ladder. We are looking to boost main ladder numbers and hopefully having GSC Doubles in solopl would force people to play more, hopefully get a bunch of test games on ladder, and get a bunch of activity. I'm not sure if GSC Doubles will still be on ladder when solopl starts, but if it is, I genuinely think that is a huge reason to include it.
Making the Case: Modern Generation 2 (MG2)
If you have any familiarity with MG2, you probably know that I will not shut up about the tier, so this most likely be a very long section. I just want to briefly say that while MG2 is currently on the outside of the solomod lineup for solopl, despite being in the tier last year, this is for one main reason. I will not talk very long about this because it's not really the point, but I have had differences with a certain MG1 tier leader who was up until several days ago, the only host for solopl, and the only one who made the lineup. She was also telling people in other servers that I had said I did not want MG2 in solopl (this is not true).
So why should MG2 be in solopl?
1. Last solopl, everyone I spoke to about the tier who had watched the tier or played the tier seemed to like it (excluding a single data point from a certain MG1 tier leader). And to be honest? I thought the MG2 meta at that time was kinda boring.
2. We just had a lovely little tour ourselves so our community is fresh and we have recently had several interesting innovations to the tier that will hopefully spice things up more.
3. Everyone who played the tour who I spoke to either liked the tier, or said "ban Mew and the tier is good." We just banned Mew.
4. I am extremely active in the community! Though I have a job, I prefer
not doing it and therefore spend an extraordinarily excessive amount of time on the tier. I also have made the tier extremely easy to understand for other players who have never played the tier before in my hit series:
Nog Blogs. I made this for our most recent tournament, and made several posts for last solopl in order to help newer players and managers with the tier, despite managing my own team. I do this for the love of the tier.
5. We had a good number of signups last year, with a few less than MG3 and I believe only one more than MG1. We also have at least two mainers who I know will not be signing up for solopl if we do not have MG2.
6. It is part of the Modern Gen series which, outside of DNU, is the most popular collection of solomods.
7. I am asking nicely to please let Modern Generation 2 into solomods (my best argument).
Why shouldn't MG2 be in solopl?
1. We did just hold our own tour that started a few months ago and didn't get as many signups as I thought. We got I think a similar number as our previous tours (18 I believe) but not a ridiculous amount. This does mean we would most likely get a similar number of signups as last solopl.
2. In the reasons to include MG2, I mentioned we banned Mew. But Nog, how can banning Mew be both good and bad?! Well, Mew has been a mon that was top 1-3 in usage since the inception of MG2, so banning a very popular and centralizing mon means that the meta might shift a good amount. If you think a big tiering shift like this is good or bad before a big tour, that's up to you to decide.
3. The most compelling reason to exclude MG2 from solopl in my opinion is that we would have two GSC tiers. GSC is already pretty much the least popular generation, so having two isn't great. People didn't like having two RBY last year, and I also don't think having two Doubles/VGC tiers would be great either.
4. Final reason I could come up with that isn't a big deal but might bother some people is that MG1 will most likely be getting played by challenge command while I would prefer to have MG2 played on DH. If I was given an ultimatum that said "you can have mg2 in solopl but you must play with a challenge code" then I would obviously choose the challenge code. It's not a huge deal to me so I won't get into the very minor intricacies of mechanical differences between the DH and code. That being said, having a validator for your tier is super nice...
For more reasons as to why MG2 should not be included, I'm quite sure that all you have to do is ask and I imagine a tour host would be more than happy to provide some.
TLDR: One of MG2, GSC Doubles, and BC has to go. BC might be the "worst" of the three but I don't like having two GSC and two Doubles/VGC metas which we would have with GSC Doubles included.
Lineup I think we should have:
Modern Gen 1
Modern Gen 2
Do Not Use
Balanced Createmons
Scootopia
CommunityUsed2
Fusion Evolution VGC Regulation
Clubmons: Requiem
I really am not a fan of having a VGC and Doubles meta. Like the Mew ban for MG2, GSC Doubles is
maybe going to be unbanning GSC Uber mon Celebi, so that could shift the tier alot. (Though to be honest, I think the Mew ban is probably more influential than unbanning Celebi). If I must boot BC for MG2, then that is also a price I am willing to pay.
Obligatory Arcane mention.
- Modern Gen 2 Tier Leader and Reigning Solomod Premier League Champion
i enjoyed bouncing around ideas with my players and watching the games in the last edition.
