Sorry I’m late replying to this thread, no one pinged me saying that people were advocating for cutting one of the old gens lol. I’ll try and address everything I saw so far and try and reason through the suggestion I’m about to make.
I think we need an even number of slots. This means 10 or 12 slots.
An odd number of slots isn’t good IMO, I think having an appropriate amount of points for wins, ties, and losses is a tried-and-true format that just works. In the playoffs it leads to tiebreakers too which I think increases the hype. This tournament is supposed to be a hype showcase of the best-of-the-best after all, and I think even number of slots is what does that.
I think we need representation from every old gen OU.
Call this RoA Leader bias, but cutting RBY, SS, or whatever gen is a complete non-starter for me. This tournament should showcase the best-of-the-best from every generation, and cutting RBY for ~reasons~ or giving SS “some time off” violates that.
I think two SV slots just isn’t enough.
As we’ve already covered in this thread, two SV slots isn’t enough. We need at least 3 IMO (more on “at least”) later. It’s the latest release and even though it’ll still be very fresh when SPL starts, two slots just isn’t enough.
With that said, here’s what I have so far…
3x SV
1x SS
1x SM
1x ORAS
1x BW
1x DPP
1x ADV
1x GSC
1x RBY
1x (open)
I think the above should be a lock. And I think it should be a lock with 10 teams, for the reasons FOMG highlighted. It just makes the most sense to me from all sorts of points of view. There’s no way to fit everything into 10 slots without cutting an old gen or by reducing the current gen to two slots, both of which I think are bad ideas. I mean okay, there is a way to do it (reducing some old-gens to Bo3/Bo5 over multiple tiers like marcop suggested) but I think that’s bad too lol. So it all comes down to what that last format should be.
I don’t think the last format should be any doubles/Nintendo/lower tier.
We’ve seen people advocate for DOU, VGC, Ubers. I don’t think any of these fit the theme of the tournament here. I have no doubt that Doubles players can “fit in” or whatever (that’s a dumb argument that they can’t IMO), I just think that having an all singles OU tournament with one Doubles tier/lower tier randomly thrown in there is just out of place and not on theme with what we’re going for. This is why I feel VGC and Ubers aren’t the right call either. I would much rather have another OU slot to round out the tournament. Because of this, here’s my (non-original) suggestion:
The last slot should be another standard SV OU slot
People are going to say that this is going to dilute the quality of games or whatever, but I think capitalizing off the hype of SV release + giving more up-and-comers a chance is the way to go (so basically I’m agreeing with blunder). You do this with a standard slot IMO, not a No Johns or a Blitz slot. No Johns isn’t as fun or more competitive IMO, and Blitz, while yes it is a different skill set, also doesn’t fit in line with the tournament as a whole.
As much as I wanted to say make the last slot a Bo3 slot with some old gen representation (like was mentioned on page 1 a few times) I don’t think it’s realistic because people will whine about prep, so yeah. I think logically it just makes the most sense to have 12 slots, 10 teams, one slot RBY-SS, 4 slots standard SV.