SPL XII - Commencement Thread

[Vay]

Whats.
Going on guys whats the drama was busy playing Minecraft
Check my house

View attachment 299126

What's the penguin looking thing next to your house ?

 

[CyberOdin✝]

 

[GOAO]

 

[MAMP]

this was a pretty callous decision

 

[ima]

2021 BIGS CYPHER COMING SOON.

 

[Nova]

 

[antemortem]

my ass is clenched awaiting callous’ victory post

 

[Charmflash]

Ok cat's out of the bag, everyone knows by now that the decision was forced on the TD team by SS, which in my 3 years as a TD has literally never once happened, no matter how controversial of a decision we decided to take, we had full autonomy. I say this to illustrate how unusual this is.

QQ said in smogtours that SS has the authority to make tournament decisions, and sure, at face value i guess that's literally true, but notice how SS never interferes with the running of a section by the leaders of that section unless something catastrophic is happening, like the 1v1 situation earlier this year or that time Ubers decided to rig a vote. It literally never happened in tournaments before. But let's grant it that they can act in a catastrophic situation, is this one? The 2 reasons Eo provided in his post are: a) the call to bluri and b) an interview with lavos

The call with bluri being in any way abusive has been thoroughly debunked, there are literally logs of him giving consent to Callous having his number 2 posts above, and people calling their players to get a game done has happened in literally every single team tournament in this site for the last 5 years. I've personally called both Dekzeh and Tiba to get off their asses and play their wcop games before. Literally anyone that has played a team tournament before has seen this happen.

The interview with Lavos might have been more problematic, Lavos has been known to say some very inflammatory stuff before so i initially thought this was the main reason, but i listened to it earlier today and it's insanely mild. Like the worst things Lavos says are that Elodin is a moron and that Smogon leadership is bad. These are 2 mainstream positions held by the community at large. Like get a time machine and ask tournament players if they are satisfied with the direction smogon is going in at any point in time and tell me if the answer is positive. Beyond that, "giving a platform to a banned user" means what exactly? you can't talk to banned users anymore? There's a very common practice in tournaments of having banned users in your chat, and not to throw anyone under the bus here but it's an open secret that last year the bigs were shadowmanaged by Bushtush to give an example, who was at the time indefinitely banned. The official manager of that team was stone cold... who is managing the same team this year. Is this not giving a platform to a banned user? (note: not saying dave shouldn't be allowed to manage at all, just that it's a ridiculous situation to hold having interviewed lavos against Callous, especially since Lavos didn't even say anything outrageous, nor did callous agree to the even mildly spicy takes Lavos had)

Which leads me to believe that either there is a third, real reason why this decision was made or just that it was made by people that have absolutely no clue about tournaments. There is another problem here of accountability, since before BKC whistleblew on this the entire fallout was gonna be on the TDs, which means that either SS mandated that the TDs would get thrown under the bus, or Eo decided that he'd rather the TDs absorb the blow than SS, both of which are problematic for different reasons, but i digress

To get to the point, what i want to know from SS is: What about Callous being a manager is so terrible that SS needed to (in unprecedented fashion!) overrule a decision taken by the TD team

Why are we assuming SS overstepped their boundaries based on no evidence? Eo has a history of enacting overly harsh punishments if something goes against his world view & the quite frankly ridiculous reasoning #2 of "platforming" controversial user Lavos on one's private youtube channel to discuss competitive Pokemon is nothing short of cancel culture in it's ugliest and most unjust form.

 

[Finchinator]

giving sprinkles competition i see

 

[Charmflash]

giving sprinkles competition i see

You can have my like too, may you feel validated

 

[Bouff]

Why are we assuming SS overstepped their boundaries based on no evidence? Eo has a history of enacting overly harsh punishments if something goes against his world view & the quite frankly ridiculous reasoning #2 of "platforming" controversial user Lavos on one's private youtube channel to discuss competitive Pokemon is nothing short of cancel culture in it's ugliest and most unjust form.

 

[Eo Ut Mortus]

If I really acted on everything that went against my worldview, the first thing I would do would be to delete all the replays featuring your attempts at playing Pokemon competitively from last year.

 

[Iguana]

Hi, Iguana here again. :) Well, I was going to say that while we're all waiting for this debacle to be resolved and busily reloading this thread every 3 minutes instead of doing other shit, how about we enjoy a little music, but this has been resolved, so time to celebrate!

Feeling a little emotional recently? Jesus, I certainly am. The pandemic rages on, and continual isolation is taking its toll. How about a few pop throwbacks to help?

Ariana Grande - Love Me Harder
Jessie J ft. B.o.B - Price Tag
Kelly Clarkson - Breakaway
The Script - Breakeven

Into some great electronic music? Same! Here are a few of my favorite selections:

Legowelt - Dark Days (This is one of my favorite albums in general, and it has excellent electronic music, ranging from house to techno to ambient. Really good stuff.)

deadmau5 - Random Album Title (How could you not love this album if you're a big electronic music fan? It's damn near perfect and probably the best progressive house album of all time. Also has some great hype songs on it, like "Alone With You" and "Brazil (2nd Edit)".)

Legowelt - Legendary Freaks in the Trash of Time (Another great album from Legowelt! This was a YouTube playlist I found, so it has all the songs kept together but just in separate videos.)

Indie music your thing? Right on! Try these out or just remind yourself why you love these songs. Some might be more "indieish" than others.

The xx - Intro
Fleet Foxes - Mykonos
Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal
Tame Impala - Feels Like We Only Go Backwards
Christine and the Queens - The Walker
Christine and the Queens - Doesn't Matter

And lastly, how could you not enjoy a good banger every once in a while?

Flo Rida - Low
Calvin Harris ft. Gwen Stefani - Together
Daft Punk - Superheroes
Oiki - Groove
deadmau5 - Monophobia

 

[Charmflash]

If I really acted on everything that went against my worldview, the first thing I would do would be to delete all the replays featuring your attempts at playing Pokemon competitively from last year.

I didnt even say everything lol. I understand that youre mad im right and you're going for the impulsive burns, but at least try to not put words into my mouth

 

[Jisoo]

dead people can’t speak

 

[Jordy]

Hey guys who else is excited for WLR tonight haha

 

[Perry]

dead people can’t speak

 

[Bughouse]

The Chicks did it first and better

 

[eriados]

prefacing: I don't think callous should have been given a managerial spot in the first place for reasons I will go into later; I also think the overturn itself as a concept is fine, if given sufficient reasoning. I do not, however, think the official reasoning that was given to justify the overturn was at all sufficient as has been said a thousand times over itt. it was flimsy, undocumented, and inexplicably rushed.

it was also, as far as I and anyone else has been able to gather, a decision made by Senior Staff, not TDs and made in such a way that completely overrides the TD team's agency. thus far, there has been no attempt (as BKC has talked about in the SmogTours Discord server) by SS to communicate to the TD team, to go along their complete silence towards the rest of the community. remember this thread? the community at large was justifiably upset with the various mishandlings of SS when it came to situations similar to this, and the SS response in this thread and other similar IS threads, was the claim that they will be making decisions in more transparent ways moving forwards. there are 2 main reasons I want to hone in on transparency here:

1) the official justification given for callous's removal being at best poorly thought out, and at worst intentionally misleading. I am not calling out Eo or the TD team here; due to the nature of the decision and more details that I will mention soon, I can only assume it had SS behind it.

2) the secrecy this decision was carried out with. said secrecy encompasses both how SS has seemingly left the TD team in the dark, and how there has yet to be as much as a single sentence by SS about this.

on why callous should not have been given the managerial spot in the first place and why it matters:

I am not willing to die on this hill or argue about his merits as a manager as it pertains purely to pokemon. the reason I am talking about this is to add to the overall point of this being a massive SS mishandling.

per Eo's post, callous was denied the spot due to
1) platforming Lavos specifically through interviewing him
2) calling bluri on his phone as a form of harassment

the second has been thoroughly debunked; bluri gave his number consensually, and even if you disagree with callous's...peculiar approach to it, it is absolutely not a disqualification in any way.

as for the first; as others have mentioned, the interview itself was fairly mild, especially by Lavos standards.

Callous's biggest offense, and IMO something that should be considered damning, was how he harbored Lavos and other permabanned users (that were permabanned for similar reasons..) in his invitational and server of, and stood by and defended their inclusion when confronted. In fact, the driving force behind Lavos's removal from PSI was ABR, not callous, who even disagreed with removing Lavos from it. I consider such attempts of reintegration and mild re-normalization of these users absolutely reprehensible when viewed alongside their offenses. these are not users with "simply differing opinions", they were active harassers and general incredibly toxic presences that were deemed bad enough to be permanently ousted from smogon. callous did not simply interact with them, he actively attempted to rehabilitate them into the larger pokemon community. this is not about him interacting with them through DMs. to me, giving callous a managerial spot so soon after these incidents is nonsensical.

all that said, I can't help but wonder; why were these things completely skipped over in the official reasoning we were given?

to add to how this non-inclusion makes absolutely negative sense, the TD team was aware of these things. explicitly so. callous being given a slot is imo a fault of their judgment, and is why I don't think such an overturn is inherently bad as a concept. however, I have a very strong feeling that if the official post articulated these points there would be much less outrage. enabling and defending a permabanned user talking about how he was canceled by the "tr***y brigade" IN HIS SERVER, and EXPLICITLY making it a point against him is significantly less contentious than "yea he interviewed him".

I apologize for taking me so long to arrive at the thesis of my post, but: why were these things mentioned nowhere to the larger community, and why were the TD team apparently not consulted on them? There's been so fucking many threads and back and forths about Senior Staff needing to be more transparent about their decisions and ESPECIALLY when it comes to the tours section, and when it comes to user toxicity, bigotry, and harassment. this is a massive clusterfuck that could have simply been avoided, or at the very least mitigated, if this decision wasn't

1) rushed immensely; seriously, conduct a longer 'investigation', give it half a day or one day or something

2) carried out with more transparency, especially with the TD team. what is the point of not just not consulting the designated section leaders, but actively bypassing them with such massively insufficient information? what I talked about earlier is information the TD team was aware of and took under consideration when making their decision. why were they not even so much as asked about their engagement with the matter??

I cannot for the life of me consider the logic behind making such an impactful and obviously contentious decision so quickly and so secretly. it is absolutely baffling, and the damage has already been done, no matter what happens next.

 

[Rchie99]

Since I am a lesser known player, I would like to establish why I would be a great pick for your team. I am a viewer of NathanLikesChicken, a talented Smogon player on YouTube/Twitch who I have learned plenty from. Sure he may not even play the tier that I signed up for but the knowledge carries over throughout the gens (and I wanted to give him a shoutout too). I am Top 50 on the ADV ladder which MIGHT put me in the Top 500 ADV OU players in the world, which would mean statistically that the decision to draft me would only be about 90% stupid (I think, I'm not entirely sure how to calculate that). I would contribute some great stuff to the team chat including my Dutch jeweler joke and the exact sets to my most iconic team: Prime Red. I would greatly experience the tournament experience, I wish that I was more active in the past but I had a crippling case of teambuilding autism and not wanting to use other people's teams (don't fall into that trap kids). So instead of letting me build up my resumé just throw me into the meat grinder and pray that I don't meat my doom. Why do that strategy with me and not the other hundreds of players at my level? Because I am the only player to nickname their Pokémon after the greatest piece of art created in the age of man: Ishtar (1987). Thank you for your time and please don't ban me this is the only gamertag that I could come up with

 

[Nails]

 

[cherryb0ng]

Dont get me wrong. I don't have anything against the managers.
I have in fact been a tutee of one of the managers and I hope the work that is cut out for him goes well.
I also banned a once known doxxer from one of my servers before, but I only ever did it when I was given considerably reasonable amount of evidence that he wasn't safe (making a celebratory post of to celebrate 17 years since his attack towards the P.S and smogon staff. Does that ring a bell?)

By any stretch of the imagination with which you try to portray Callous presumed degeneracy, even if it were wrong, which you can't prove (cuz it isn't), it is nowhere near as bad as what people may have to deal with as far as harassment is concerned.

The story as I understood it was quite clear —

- Callous wanted Bluri to play a match.
- He continued to go to different sources in Bluri’s inner circle until he acquired his personal phone number.
- Callous then called Bluri over his personal phone about playing in a tournament.
- Callous being a late 20 something, early 30 something calling a then teenager out of the blue who never gave you his phone number is really worrisome, if you don’t take my view thats fine. This is different than Pearl calling Ricardo who are roughly the same age and have mutually provided eachother’s information or any other example in the thread.

If this has been debunked, this was all consensual and Bluri had previously provided Callous his personal information then I apologize for my ignorance and my spreading of fake news. If this has been debunked, I would also like to personally apologize to Callous for what I said. As a Pokemon boomer myself and someone who has known Callous for near 8-9 years, I was incredibly upset when I heard the story how it was told to me.

As has been said in the thread, in order to determine the necessary actions the only person who can really speak to what happened is Bluri.

I like this one.

 

[SPACE FORCE meeps]

cb jose altuve corvettes

 

[Kevin Garrett]

I'd like to voice my dissent with the decision to replace FlamingVictini and TPP as managers of the Scooters. They provided a positive and productive culture, pulling crazy hours to ensure players had the needs at their disposal in order to be prepared for matches. You would be hard pressed to find a player on their teams that could prove otherwise. This is entirely a case of circumstance and perception shrouding reality to their disservice.

I'm not trying to force a change by posting this. I'm just saying what needs to be said.

 

[ToF]

is there ever going to be a year where a major tournament is void of drama? when's smogon coming to netflix?