We currently have (outdated DLC1) RFAQs with teams for ladder metas. If we update this and possibly expand it to cover challengable metas it should be sufficient. This is dependent on councils creating new samples however.
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Project Suggestions for OM Improvement
- Thread starter Ransei
- Start date
Following a great discussion on the state of OMs and viable changes to resuscitate activity/metagame development going forward, there are some points of that conversation that I think are worth bringing up here—primarily because some of them are concerns I have myself and also to [hopefully] gain some community input/insight :]
Problems (P) -> Suggestions (S)
(P) OMPL is too exclusive for lesser known players to participate in the full experience. Oftentimes, said players sign up in vain because they don't have the reputation/accolades to gain the attention of managers who understandably want to pick varying interpretations of the safest and/or most reliable options when it comes to assembling a team, and thus end up not getting a chance to play. This has a negative effect on development and activity (esp. potentially in the OM room on PS) as a whole, because it means more or less the same [fairly selective] group of players is getting chosen while others are missing out on a lot of the networking benefits that participating in a team tour can have.
(S) Having Premier Leagues for individual formats (AAAPL, BHPL, STABPL, CamoPL, etc.) could be a solution to this. This would mean specialization on a specific tier (or tiers, since there's potential for oldgen inclusion into said PLs) and gives more opportunities for users to not only shine, but have easy access to competent players who can help them get better and maybe even make a name for themselves pending the next set of major tournaments. Additionally, putting forth effort into more tour representation for different metas means more games played -> more discussion on and development of the metas because there's an ongoing competitive scene that's more accessible by the community -> a less intimidating source of entry into tournament participation overall. There's also the possibility that people might be more willing to invest in metas through participation in a team tour rather than trying to grind ladders [that aren't the most active at all times], roomtours, and test games.
(P) Collectively, OMs (as in, any OM that's either playable on PS through ladder/challenge OR any OM that has [recently] been or can be an OMotM option) have a tendency to be lacking in resources. I won't point any fingers, but there are cases of OMs not having up-to-date Viability Rankings (VRs) or sample teams for extensive periods of time—and as someone who is in the PS room quite a bit, it's quite discouraging to see [new] users give up on certain metas because they don't know where to start, and there aren't any resources readily available to help them out. In the case of some OMotM options specifically, there are cases of metas not having relevant sample teams or VRs before, during, and even after their month of play, making it hard for anyone not already familiar to find a place to start and also giving the impression that a meta is "dead."
(S) There were actually a few suggestions proposed for this:
1. OM Personal VR Project: as the name implies, people submit their own VRs for a given OM and can potentially contribute to resources that way (even if they aren't on council).
2. Rotational OM councils: Players can join tiering councils for pre-determined periods of time rather than feeling pressured by the commitment of being on a council full-time.
3. End of month OMotM Resource Update(s): For any meta that wins OMotM, it could be a good idea to encourage that there at least be some kind of VR (even if temporary) and/or sample teams by the end of its month on rotation—that just makes logical sense to me. Accountability on resources updates would also make it possible for said metas to perhaps see more interest and further more investment in helping them develop. While it's definitely true that not every meta gets enough exposure to see super consistent updates, I personally don't think that's an excuse for not at least trying to put up a vr by the end of a month where it's playable—after all, it's the responsibility of metagame leaders to also help push out resources for their respective metas.
tl;dr We need more team tours, and OM resources are overall too neglected in their current state.
Problems (P) -> Suggestions (S)
(P) OMPL is too exclusive for lesser known players to participate in the full experience. Oftentimes, said players sign up in vain because they don't have the reputation/accolades to gain the attention of managers who understandably want to pick varying interpretations of the safest and/or most reliable options when it comes to assembling a team, and thus end up not getting a chance to play. This has a negative effect on development and activity (esp. potentially in the OM room on PS) as a whole, because it means more or less the same [fairly selective] group of players is getting chosen while others are missing out on a lot of the networking benefits that participating in a team tour can have.
(S) Having Premier Leagues for individual formats (AAAPL, BHPL, STABPL, CamoPL, etc.) could be a solution to this. This would mean specialization on a specific tier (or tiers, since there's potential for oldgen inclusion into said PLs) and gives more opportunities for users to not only shine, but have easy access to competent players who can help them get better and maybe even make a name for themselves pending the next set of major tournaments. Additionally, putting forth effort into more tour representation for different metas means more games played -> more discussion on and development of the metas because there's an ongoing competitive scene that's more accessible by the community -> a less intimidating source of entry into tournament participation overall. There's also the possibility that people might be more willing to invest in metas through participation in a team tour rather than trying to grind ladders [that aren't the most active at all times], roomtours, and test games.
(P) Collectively, OMs (as in, any OM that's either playable on PS through ladder/challenge OR any OM that has [recently] been or can be an OMotM option) have a tendency to be lacking in resources. I won't point any fingers, but there are cases of OMs not having up-to-date Viability Rankings (VRs) or sample teams for extensive periods of time—and as someone who is in the PS room quite a bit, it's quite discouraging to see [new] users give up on certain metas because they don't know where to start, and there aren't any resources readily available to help them out. In the case of some OMotM options specifically, there are cases of metas not having relevant sample teams or VRs before, during, and even after their month of play, making it hard for anyone not already familiar to find a place to start and also giving the impression that a meta is "dead."
(S) There were actually a few suggestions proposed for this:
1. OM Personal VR Project: as the name implies, people submit their own VRs for a given OM and can potentially contribute to resources that way (even if they aren't on council).
2. Rotational OM councils: Players can join tiering councils for pre-determined periods of time rather than feeling pressured by the commitment of being on a council full-time.
3. End of month OMotM Resource Update(s): For any meta that wins OMotM, it could be a good idea to encourage that there at least be some kind of VR (even if temporary) and/or sample teams by the end of its month on rotation—that just makes logical sense to me. Accountability on resources updates would also make it possible for said metas to perhaps see more interest and further more investment in helping them develop. While it's definitely true that not every meta gets enough exposure to see super consistent updates, I personally don't think that's an excuse for not at least trying to put up a vr by the end of a month where it's playable—after all, it's the responsibility of metagame leaders to also help push out resources for their respective metas.
tl;dr We need more team tours, and OM resources are overall too neglected in their current state.
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I agree OMPL is much too exclusive; even extremely skilled and handsome players who won the previous individual tour in their meta and with proven success in the previous OM team tours have no chance at getting drafted.
Memes aside, this is mostly what I hoped to mitigate with OMFL(2) last year. It's kinda the point of OMPL that it's the peak of competitiveness in the OM community and showcases all the best we (as a community) have to offer, be it in gameplay, managing, hard work supporting and prepping etc, so it isn't surprising that many capable but not top tier players can't take part. I think having "secondary" events provides most of the same benefit for them while not placing any strain on OMPL that changing it to include more people might, so in general I love your idea for a solution.
One problem I can potentially see with team tours for some of these metas is the lack of a sizeable player base would mean you'd have to have pretty limited team numbers/sizes, and there are already quite a lot of om tours throughout the year (especially if we add 3+ more PLs) and with anything like this that might not be seen as top priority it could lead to lesser enthusiasm, especially when a bunch of the players might not main the meta in question and have other mons stuff going on (on top of irl). For an individual tour this isn't really an issue cos you just lose, but it has more knock on effects in team events.
That being said we've had various stabs at BH team tours and they have been by and large successful (afaik), but apparently not to a degree that they've become a regular thing. I think part of the problem is the continuing mystery around how to actually host tours and stuff (I believe there was a post maybe by Chloe about this in this kinda thread maybe a gen or two ago) with the only mention of them in the rules being "Tournaments and projects are approved on a case-by-case basis and should be posted in submissions too" which doesn't really offer any insight into who can host team tours and that kinda stuff - it's pretty intimidating to just go and submit to host one with no real guidance on what the submission process is or how your submission should be formatted when all the ones you see are big fancy official looking affairs hosted mostly by big scary people like The Immortal. If it was a bit more transparent I think it would be easier for people to just go ahead and do it. Maybe an example post of a tournament like how there is for submitting metagames would make it a lot clearer.
I disagree with the premise that ompl is an exclusive tournament particularly when you compare it to the main premier leagues for any other community on smogon. Think, you should know this very well considering you were drafted and started every week on my team when you had started playing oms (aaa in particular) FAR later than myself, mamp, and many others on the team.
You made a name for yourself very quickly by working extremely hard and putting yourself out there by playing tons of games with the other big aaa names. Redflix is another excellent example of a player like this. All you need is to have a very strong ladder rank with a solid gxe and managers are going to look at you especially in metas like mnm, aaa and camo. There are other similarly simple ways to get noticed as well.
One guy I've noticed from his dominance of the mnm ladder recently is a guy named qways. As someone who got noticed in my first ompl solely based off of ladder grind and recommendations from others in the community, If he qways signed up and put in ANY work to show off his resume and knowledge of the tier, I can almost guarantee he would be drafted I don't think this is some super difficult problem that the community needs to solve I think it's more a problem of individuals needing to put themselves out there in the right ways.
One thing to note about this is that everyone has put in their time to make themselves "draftable" in ompl at some point. You may think this is some exclusive country club but the returning people have all put in the same work that a new user needs to put in to be noticed, it was just a previous year or ompl that happened and now that they have experience (especially if they have a good record or such), it is much easier to get in the next time.
You made a name for yourself very quickly by working extremely hard and putting yourself out there by playing tons of games with the other big aaa names. Redflix is another excellent example of a player like this. All you need is to have a very strong ladder rank with a solid gxe and managers are going to look at you especially in metas like mnm, aaa and camo. There are other similarly simple ways to get noticed as well.
One guy I've noticed from his dominance of the mnm ladder recently is a guy named qways. As someone who got noticed in my first ompl solely based off of ladder grind and recommendations from others in the community, If he qways signed up and put in ANY work to show off his resume and knowledge of the tier, I can almost guarantee he would be drafted I don't think this is some super difficult problem that the community needs to solve I think it's more a problem of individuals needing to put themselves out there in the right ways.
One thing to note about this is that everyone has put in their time to make themselves "draftable" in ompl at some point. You may think this is some exclusive country club but the returning people have all put in the same work that a new user needs to put in to be noticed, it was just a previous year or ompl that happened and now that they have experience (especially if they have a good record or such), it is much easier to get in the next time.
Some of my own thoughts on this since I brought it up on discord a couple days ago.
- They have to serve different enough purposes to exist
- They have to avoid forcing players into burning themselves out
- They have to be schedulable/logistically possible
I already covered the first point by explaining the differences between OMPL and other PLs, and Think covered some of the benefits that can come from PLs for individual metas. The other two are naturally related to each other, and I will cover this in more detail later in the post.
Obviously, we dont want any individual PLs to cross over with each other, nor do we want any of these PLs to cross over with OMPL or OMWC, however it is probably possible to schedule these events fairly close to each other. While there is a small portion of the community who are involved in practically everything to do with OM tours, and most of those people likely won't be able to/won't want to sign up for all of these PLs too, for the rest of the community I don't think it's too much to imagine that high level players of one main OM would mostly be able to handle playing OMPL, OMWC and their own meta's PL, while other competitively inclined players who aren't currently getting drafted for OMPL or OMWC would still be able to sign up for and probably get into their main meta's PL. Overall, even though some players will definitely have to skip some tours, I don't think this is enough of a negative to fully discourage the idea, and either way if a top player really wants to set aside their time for just one or two tours a year, they'll still be able to prioritise OMPL/OMWC without a problem.
Personally right now I'd support a tour format with 6 teams and 5 or 6 formats, preferably 5 imo to give the tour a fixed length and also err on the side of caution when it comes to player signups, probably with the top 2 teams going straight to finals after the round robin stage. This would leave us with an actual tour length of 6 weeks and an overall tour length of 7-8 weeks (depending on the length of signups) which in itself shouldn't be too committal.
While I dont find the playerbase itself to be a likely issue, I would be more concerned about finding managers and hosts. I feel like we're in a better position to host extra tours now than when we had TI hosting everything so that's good, and I'd also support willdbeast's suggestion of having a hosting guide somewhere as it's just a good idea to have as many viable hosts as possible in general. As for managing, I don't think I could accurately predict how many solid signups we would get, mostly just because we don't have that many dedicated community members for each OM and I wouldn't be able to guess how many of the other respected OM users or generally experienced managers elsewhere would be interested in signing up.
In any case, with OMPL being in May and stuff already happening right now, there's like at least 4 months until we could even run one of these PLs, which would give us plenty of time to iron out the kinks in the plans I've suggested, as well as more time to discuss the idea in general.
One final note that I'll add, circling back to the second section of Think's post is that just about any problem in OMs can absolutely be helped by this kind of thing, just for the simple reason that it brings more people into being invested in the tier which helps in all areas. In my experience, most of the reason our councils are slower on things like resources compared to other councils in bigger communities is that we don't have the same luxury when it comes to choosing who would be an absolute model council member, and naturally have to compromise to an extent, whether that be through adding strong players with questionable work ethic, or by adding weaker players who may be worse at expressing accurate opinions. Either way, having a larger pool of "general community members" helps with just about everything.
As someone who has participated in a few OMPLs and also managed one, the attitude of the managers that is described here is definitely accurate, just by nature of what OMPL is. Personally I agree with the posts from MAMP and Andy in the sense that the current format of OMPL itself is good and also that people who are really eager to put themselves out there on a regular basis usually end up getting drafted. There is a bit more to the latter statement that I'll elaborate on later when replying to Andy's post, but for the sake of clarification before we're too deep into the post I do want to emphasize that I don't think OMPL itself is an issue. However, what I do tend to notice is that the dynamics of OMPL as a team tour are often very different from various other PLs I have participated in, which I mostly attribute to the fact that we have one slot for each meta and much less overlap between the metas involved which changes how drafting and certain aspects of teamwork play out. This gives us some notable benefits in some areas (OMPL is probably the most competitive unofficial PL i've played in which is great), but it does also come with some drawbacks. Back in 2018 when I was first starting out in OMs, I would say that there were some outright issues with the tour schedule, mostly because half the main OMs didnt even have seasonals and we didn't yet have OMWC as a second premier team tour which led to issues with retaining our existing top playerbase at the time. Since then I'd say we've pretty much moved past top player retention being a major issue, which also gives us time to focus on what improvements we might be able to make when it comes to attracting players to OMs. This is where I see AAAPL/MnMPL/BHPL potentially serving a very useful purpose, not to fix issues with OMPL, but instead to neatly complement its existence in a way that doesn't lead to either tour undermining the other (which is easier to guarantee with this than it is with something like OM Farm League).
I also wanted to highlight this part of Think's post because I think it's important to explain why extra team tours specifically would be very helpful. Firstly, on Smogon as a whole you will usually find that most players have different attitudes regarding their enjoyment of individual tours and their enjoyment of team tours. This can go either way, but in my experience team tours tend to get more people properly invested as there's more of a reason to compete and also more aspects that a participant can find enjoyable (some teams are just fun to be on even if your record ends up sucking). More importantly, as of right now we arguably have a bigger gap in the market for team tours -- Think's post mentions plenty of benefits to having PLs for individual metas, and I don't think there's really much more we can offer in terms of individuals. We already have a full on circuit as well as OM slam, and looking at the interest level shown in smaller individual tours such as seasonals we seem to be pretty much saturated on that front at least when it comes to the main OMs. Team tours are less likely to have issues regarding saturation -- there's already intrinsic value in the experience due to the ability to participate in a team environment. In my mind there's only three conditions for running multiple successful team tours in tandem with each other:
- They have to serve different enough purposes to exist
- They have to avoid forcing players into burning themselves out
- They have to be schedulable/logistically possible
I already covered the first point by explaining the differences between OMPL and other PLs, and Think covered some of the benefits that can come from PLs for individual metas. The other two are naturally related to each other, and I will cover this in more detail later in the post.
I think the key here is to do with scheduling the tours at good times. In theory, OMs as a section should have much more leeway to add more tours like this because the playerbases that are housed by the section are largely separate to each other. The closest comparison I can offer here comes from RoA, a section that faces similar challenges to OMs when it comes to incorporating several formats into a cohesive forum/tour schedule etc. Looking through RoA's tour calendar, you can see mentions of both RoAPL (which sticks to OU formats over multiple gens) and "Gen-centric Premier Leagues" such as RBYPL/GSCPL etc that still focus mostly on the OU format of that gen, but also branch out to include other formats from the same gen. Similar logic can be applied to OMs (if you reverse mentions so that OU = current gen and "other formats" = old gens). It's worth noting that another benefit of PLs in individual metas is that we gain a consistent, sustainable way to support old gens in tours (though classic already helps with this a little bit, having a team tour also helps fill the niche).
Obviously, we dont want any individual PLs to cross over with each other, nor do we want any of these PLs to cross over with OMPL or OMWC, however it is probably possible to schedule these events fairly close to each other. While there is a small portion of the community who are involved in practically everything to do with OM tours, and most of those people likely won't be able to/won't want to sign up for all of these PLs too, for the rest of the community I don't think it's too much to imagine that high level players of one main OM would mostly be able to handle playing OMPL, OMWC and their own meta's PL, while other competitively inclined players who aren't currently getting drafted for OMPL or OMWC would still be able to sign up for and probably get into their main meta's PL. Overall, even though some players will definitely have to skip some tours, I don't think this is enough of a negative to fully discourage the idea, and either way if a top player really wants to set aside their time for just one or two tours a year, they'll still be able to prioritise OMPL/OMWC without a problem.
Personally right now I'd support a tour format with 6 teams and 5 or 6 formats, preferably 5 imo to give the tour a fixed length and also err on the side of caution when it comes to player signups, probably with the top 2 teams going straight to finals after the round robin stage. This would leave us with an actual tour length of 6 weeks and an overall tour length of 7-8 weeks (depending on the length of signups) which in itself shouldn't be too committal.
The first thing I will say on this is that finding players shouldn't be an issue. The format I mentioned further up would probably leave us with a bit more than 42 draftees (consider that the drafting process will be much less bloated with the tour being shorter and everyone playing the same OM meaning most teams should only really need like 2 subs, though I'm sure some managers will opt for extra people. Factoring in the various groups of players that wouldn't normally be considered in OMPL, as well as a few people who are crossing over from other OMs, and also factoring in the natural interest that Smogon users have in signing up for PLs, the main OMs should be fine on this front. Another important thing to note is that we still have a lot of control over this factor even just from our hosting decisions. For example, AAA and STABmons both have monotype metagames that have seen tour representation, and those could be included if necessary (or just very popular) to bring interest to the tour. BH and AAA both have huge untapped subcommunities (Sinnoh Remakes Clan for BH and the Francophone community for AAA) that go largely unnoticed in an OMPL format but with the right choices (particularly manager-wise) can be involved in the tour. MnM's individual tours regularly get about 60 signups apart from during the DLC 1 dip in activity that hit OMs in general very hard. NFE already hosts their PLs so I won't talk much about that, but there may be some need for communication in the future just to make sure we don't do something stupid. Camomons I won't speak on much as I'm not too involved in the community, but even in the event that we're not sure whether Camo would garner enough interest, we'd still at least be able to scout potential interest by paying attention to the level of signups for other main OM PLs. As a final note on signups, I've never seen a tour hosted in the Unofficial Team Tournaments section struggle for signups, so maybe we could ask for permission to host in there?
While I dont find the playerbase itself to be a likely issue, I would be more concerned about finding managers and hosts. I feel like we're in a better position to host extra tours now than when we had TI hosting everything so that's good, and I'd also support willdbeast's suggestion of having a hosting guide somewhere as it's just a good idea to have as many viable hosts as possible in general. As for managing, I don't think I could accurately predict how many solid signups we would get, mostly just because we don't have that many dedicated community members for each OM and I wouldn't be able to guess how many of the other respected OM users or generally experienced managers elsewhere would be interested in signing up.
In any case, with OMPL being in May and stuff already happening right now, there's like at least 4 months until we could even run one of these PLs, which would give us plenty of time to iron out the kinks in the plans I've suggested, as well as more time to discuss the idea in general.
I generally agree with the content of this post, but what I will say is that Redflix and Think are still somewhat outliers just because they were way more enthusiastic than most people are about mons even if they enjoy it. It would be hard not to notice these people anyway because they put themselves out there so much to the point where they were easily the most visibly invested people in their respective metas starting from the very beginning of the gen and went on to earn council spots in those metas as a result. There are some others in a similar position like TNM or Atha or indeed qways, but the point is still that those guys all have a natural drive to play tons of games and contribute to discussions that isn't matched by most users on this site. As for examples like yourself (and also me, ITH, multi etc) we all came up through MnM at a point in time where the community was very small, yet also going through a huge boom in its playerbase. We were all at the same point of novelty and discovery of OMs which is frankly pretty lucky, and looking at the current position the MnM playerbase is in, it's also pretty unlikely to happen again for a while, with most of the people from the 2018 boom still around and playing/contributing, just slightly less than they were 3 years ago. I don't think we necessarily need to rely on circumstances like these to get people into competitive OMs, which is why I'm interested in ways to get people into OMs, preferably in a way that lets them communicate with others instead of just leaving them to sit there with an unfamiliar meta and stare at resources until they build something good. I think it'd definitely be beneficial to have a more systematic approach to involving people in OMs to go with what we've been doing for the last couple years which is effectively going out looking for people that take an interest and actively trying our best to involve them in things (or alternatively just shilling OMs to our friends cause we like to talk about them so much). This is especially relevant now as the OM community has been gradually getting more organized over the last few years, and our avenues for exposure are at an all-time high (TC change, Smogon cord adding a tour-announcements channel, already existing stuff like mentions in PS news) so right about now feels like a good time to continue developing as a community where possible.
One final note that I'll add, circling back to the second section of Think's post is that just about any problem in OMs can absolutely be helped by this kind of thing, just for the simple reason that it brings more people into being invested in the tier which helps in all areas. In my experience, most of the reason our councils are slower on things like resources compared to other councils in bigger communities is that we don't have the same luxury when it comes to choosing who would be an absolute model council member, and naturally have to compromise to an extent, whether that be through adding strong players with questionable work ethic, or by adding weaker players who may be worse at expressing accurate opinions. Either way, having a larger pool of "general community members" helps with just about everything.
Not going to touch on the above topics because Think and stresh covered it perfectly, though I will throw my support behind the ideas they touched on.
I'm going to keep this post short since there's really not much to touch on for either of these suggestions, but I just want to put them out there.
Team Dump Threads/OM Bazaar
Basically with this first suggestion, I think that we have moved past the point of "Post x tour" threads. They have been quickly deteriorating in activity in the past years and get archived after a month or so, which makes them a hassle for people to find for very little reward. I'm proposing that we get rid of these type of threads, and rather encourage people to post in OM Bazaar or relevant metagame threads. This will allow for more discussion, and is more permanently available for people to refer back to. Overall, I think this would be a much better option than having post tour threads.
More Prefix tag options
This next suggestion comes with the growing amount of threads we've been seeing that do not have a prefix relevant to their purpose. I propose that we add a 'Project' prefix to cover the multiple projects we have in the forum at the moment. Additionally, I think that it'd be beneficial to add a 'Suspect' prefix given the amount of metagames that run suspects in this forum, it'd be much easier to spot them on the list of threads and in the archives. Lastly, while I don't think this is as necessary as the previous two suggested tags, I do want to propose adding Camomons and 2v2 tags to the forum, as they are permanent ladder OMs. It's unclear at the moment whether or not the specific metagame tags are intended for Circuit metagames, or if it's for permaladder OMs, so some clarification on that would be beneficial, whether the prefixes are added or not.
Those are my only suggestions for now, I will be back soon probably with more proposals, but I wanted to get these two out of the way before I forgot/something big potentially came up. Have a good one!
I'm going to keep this post short since there's really not much to touch on for either of these suggestions, but I just want to put them out there.
Team Dump Threads/OM Bazaar
Basically with this first suggestion, I think that we have moved past the point of "Post x tour" threads. They have been quickly deteriorating in activity in the past years and get archived after a month or so, which makes them a hassle for people to find for very little reward. I'm proposing that we get rid of these type of threads, and rather encourage people to post in OM Bazaar or relevant metagame threads. This will allow for more discussion, and is more permanently available for people to refer back to. Overall, I think this would be a much better option than having post tour threads.
More Prefix tag options
This next suggestion comes with the growing amount of threads we've been seeing that do not have a prefix relevant to their purpose. I propose that we add a 'Project' prefix to cover the multiple projects we have in the forum at the moment. Additionally, I think that it'd be beneficial to add a 'Suspect' prefix given the amount of metagames that run suspects in this forum, it'd be much easier to spot them on the list of threads and in the archives. Lastly, while I don't think this is as necessary as the previous two suggested tags, I do want to propose adding Camomons and 2v2 tags to the forum, as they are permanent ladder OMs. It's unclear at the moment whether or not the specific metagame tags are intended for Circuit metagames, or if it's for permaladder OMs, so some clarification on that would be beneficial, whether the prefixes are added or not.
Those are my only suggestions for now, I will be back soon probably with more proposals, but I wanted to get these two out of the way before I forgot/something big potentially came up. Have a good one!
hello, I have come with suggestions for the room star thing that I'd like to change, and hopefully, simultaneously reduce the tedious part of upkeeping the daily tournaments thread.
also, before I get into it, I really just wanna say sorry to Think, I know that I said that I was gonna let you help out with the daily thread, and then I do this, which is inevitably gonna take away from the work that you wanted to take on, I swear that the timing of this isn't intentional at all
What is the problem?
There is no problem necessarily since the system is perfectly fine and needs no change exactly to keep functioning. My problem with this mostly lies in the fact that maintaining the thread is long and boring work. Like even if you did this every day, you'd have to be there for every daily tour to start, and be there to grab the replay on time. If you're not able to do that, you'd have to settle for crawling through logs to find the replay. And that in itself is also boring as fuck. There's also the minor issue of daily tour players being able to hide their games even though it's supposed to be public. With all that said, I looked into alternative methods to handling the daily tournaments.
What do I want to do?
The question was stated above, so I'll say what I plan to do, perhaps with some workshopping by people here, but I plan to implement eventually at least, a leaderboard for the OM room. The leaderboard would come from Scrappie, as that's the main way I know of that has a leaderboard. It would allow more people to shoot for the chance to get room star, first of all, since I intend to allow every serious tour count towards it. We can also exclude non-serious tours from the leaderboard, allowing us to have fun at dead hours, mess around on some days, and not have the results necessarily affect the leaderboard standings. This would also reduce the importance of the daily tour results, and cause us to not be frustrated when it comes to getting tour replays. It would also allow people to feel like they can ask us for tours, and have more tours towards the leaderboard.
What do I want to achieve?
Mostly, I want to make it easier for different people to achieve the room star rank. I also want to reduce the boring work that comes with maintaining the daily thread. I would also hope to try and solve some of the daily tour issues that I've seen in the past about going for the star, by allowing every serious tour to count towards it, and establish a healthier and more diverse competition from people at most hours. I'd also like to bring a little bit more activity in terms of tours, since every serious tour will count towards the leaderboard, and it'd be nice to have tours made by people other than two of our room modsyou know who you are
I'd be happy to work on this more than I already thought of, but I would vastly prefer being able to move to leaderboards so we can have some diversity of who's going for room star, andgive more chances for our eternal room star to retain it I'm still open to suggestions to change this, but there are no major reasons to oppose then I'd like to move onto implementing the leaderboards when I can.
also, before I get into it, I really just wanna say sorry to Think, I know that I said that I was gonna let you help out with the daily thread, and then I do this, which is inevitably gonna take away from the work that you wanted to take on, I swear that the timing of this isn't intentional at all
What is the problem?
There is no problem necessarily since the system is perfectly fine and needs no change exactly to keep functioning. My problem with this mostly lies in the fact that maintaining the thread is long and boring work. Like even if you did this every day, you'd have to be there for every daily tour to start, and be there to grab the replay on time. If you're not able to do that, you'd have to settle for crawling through logs to find the replay. And that in itself is also boring as fuck. There's also the minor issue of daily tour players being able to hide their games even though it's supposed to be public. With all that said, I looked into alternative methods to handling the daily tournaments.
What do I want to do?
The question was stated above, so I'll say what I plan to do, perhaps with some workshopping by people here, but I plan to implement eventually at least, a leaderboard for the OM room. The leaderboard would come from Scrappie, as that's the main way I know of that has a leaderboard. It would allow more people to shoot for the chance to get room star, first of all, since I intend to allow every serious tour count towards it. We can also exclude non-serious tours from the leaderboard, allowing us to have fun at dead hours, mess around on some days, and not have the results necessarily affect the leaderboard standings. This would also reduce the importance of the daily tour results, and cause us to not be frustrated when it comes to getting tour replays. It would also allow people to feel like they can ask us for tours, and have more tours towards the leaderboard.
What do I want to achieve?
Mostly, I want to make it easier for different people to achieve the room star rank. I also want to reduce the boring work that comes with maintaining the daily thread. I would also hope to try and solve some of the daily tour issues that I've seen in the past about going for the star, by allowing every serious tour to count towards it, and establish a healthier and more diverse competition from people at most hours. I'd also like to bring a little bit more activity in terms of tours, since every serious tour will count towards the leaderboard, and it'd be nice to have tours made by people other than two of our room mods
I'd be happy to work on this more than I already thought of, but I would vastly prefer being able to move to leaderboards so we can have some diversity of who's going for room star, and
Hello, everyone. Posting out of great concern for a metagame that still hasn't been given the respect it deserves. And yes, I had to enlarge the font size because I feel this needs an urgent response / discussion / whatever it may be, especially that OMPL is drawing near.
The Dismal State of the Camomons Ladder
While Camomons has been a permanent ladder format in Showdown since November (all thanks to The Immortal and the rest of the OM leadership team), its ladder activity is in a perpetual limbo. Even with the on-going Spectrier suspect which could've sparked some ladder activity, I still have to wait for over an hour to get a match, which is the most painful experience I have ever partaken in my entire competitive Pokemon career. I'd understand more active OMs like Almost Any Ability, Balanced Hackmons, and Mix and Mega having more stringent requirements; at least the ladder is active enough to get those in a matter of time.
I understand that the playerbase is low to make it happen, sure; in the first place, there's a reason why Camomons became a permanent ladder format in Showdown, right? Making the metagame a permanent ladder format is a stepping stone in the right direction, but the maintaining the hype after making the metagame permanent is not. I have proposed two ideas to spark some activity: one was outright denied because "a minor tour in an attempt to have more people play this won't give people much more motivation to play and top the ladder than just for the sake of topping the ladder itself", and another one being held back because it's still in the middle of large tours (OM Grand Slam Playoffs), OMPL is nearing, and tour fatigue is real. I'd understand tour fatigue, for sure, but how much opportunity it would get for newer players to experience this metagame that hasn't been touched on for a good half-year?
Ideas Gone Untapped
One way to spark some activity in the Camomons metagame is to wait until the OMPL's conclusion, which takes a good two months before any action takes place; this means that no (Smogon-sanctioned) Camomons-focused (emphasis added) project/tournament running for the past year since the Camomons Live Tour. All these led me to the most outlandish idea I have ever proposed to the current higher-ups, especially that one of my ideas for a Camomons-related tour got held back because OMPL is drawing near: remove Camomons from OMPL IX and WCoOM IV only to be reinstated in the following iterations of OMPL and WCoOM and add Camomons as one of the playable metagames in OM Grand Slam and Seasonal Tournaments. The Camomons council may not agree with my idea here, but removing Camomons in OMPL IX and WCoOM IV leaves it with five official slots, which makes it a great opportunity to double all of those slots to provide more opportunities to people deserving of those slots. I actually don't mind not playing for OMPL because Camomons isn't there, but I'd rather work on projects and tournaments to keep this metagame alive and at least giving it official representation OM individual tours next season.
With that in mind, I appreciate your replies here, or if you guys wanted a more focused discussion, just give me a ping in Discord (Other Metagames and Camomons Discord servers) or leave me a Discord message on Euphonos#9726. Thank you for bearing with my rant today because I've gotten annoyed by the dismal ladder activity since yesterday.
The Dismal State of the Camomons Ladder
While Camomons has been a permanent ladder format in Showdown since November (all thanks to The Immortal and the rest of the OM leadership team), its ladder activity is in a perpetual limbo. Even with the on-going Spectrier suspect which could've sparked some ladder activity, I still have to wait for over an hour to get a match, which is the most painful experience I have ever partaken in my entire competitive Pokemon career. I'd understand more active OMs like Almost Any Ability, Balanced Hackmons, and Mix and Mega having more stringent requirements; at least the ladder is active enough to get those in a matter of time.
I understand that the playerbase is low to make it happen, sure; in the first place, there's a reason why Camomons became a permanent ladder format in Showdown, right? Making the metagame a permanent ladder format is a stepping stone in the right direction, but the maintaining the hype after making the metagame permanent is not. I have proposed two ideas to spark some activity: one was outright denied because "a minor tour in an attempt to have more people play this won't give people much more motivation to play and top the ladder than just for the sake of topping the ladder itself", and another one being held back because it's still in the middle of large tours (OM Grand Slam Playoffs), OMPL is nearing, and tour fatigue is real. I'd understand tour fatigue, for sure, but how much opportunity it would get for newer players to experience this metagame that hasn't been touched on for a good half-year?
Ideas Gone Untapped
One way to spark some activity in the Camomons metagame is to wait until the OMPL's conclusion, which takes a good two months before any action takes place; this means that no (Smogon-sanctioned) Camomons-focused (emphasis added) project/tournament running for the past year since the Camomons Live Tour. All these led me to the most outlandish idea I have ever proposed to the current higher-ups, especially that one of my ideas for a Camomons-related tour got held back because OMPL is drawing near: remove Camomons from OMPL IX and WCoOM IV only to be reinstated in the following iterations of OMPL and WCoOM and add Camomons as one of the playable metagames in OM Grand Slam and Seasonal Tournaments. The Camomons council may not agree with my idea here, but removing Camomons in OMPL IX and WCoOM IV leaves it with five official slots, which makes it a great opportunity to double all of those slots to provide more opportunities to people deserving of those slots. I actually don't mind not playing for OMPL because Camomons isn't there, but I'd rather work on projects and tournaments to keep this metagame alive and at least giving it official representation OM individual tours next season.
With that in mind, I appreciate your replies here, or if you guys wanted a more focused discussion, just give me a ping in Discord (Other Metagames and Camomons Discord servers) or leave me a Discord message on Euphonos#9726. Thank you for bearing with my rant today because I've gotten annoyed by the dismal ladder activity since yesterday.
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I think having more prefixes would be extremely useful. OMotM/LCotM suspects would benefit a great deal from this especially, because they don't have their own meta tags to use when conducting suspect tests--but in general, with more concurrent suspects happening as of late, it'd be nice to have them be as easy to identify as possible (especially for people who don't peruse the OM forums enough to be familiar with all the threads we have).
To me, the same line of reasoning applies to the permaladder OMs and projects. It just seems like a given at this point, really. The only potentially feasible problem I could see with this is tag clutter, but I don't think any of ith's tag suggestions above would be applied to any threads that aren't important enough to warrant having them anyway.
Hey all! Just giving an update on how things have been going since this post. To be honest, the community came together and far exceeded my expectations on helping out with this issue, thanks a lot! We got 6/10 of the listed OMs through submissions and playable. Really proud of u all for getting that done, it couldn't have happened without you all!
I do want to take time to narrow down the remaining OMs that we haven't had return yet in hope of getting these last few ones brought back as well, focusing more on ones that I've seen community outcries for.
Fortemons: Mentioned this one in my first post, but recently there's been more and more interest in this metagame and it's gotten some pretty big discussion from our seasoned contributors and people in the OM Room. If any OM needs to return, it's this one. Based on previous conversations it seems like there's some people interested in it, so nudge nudge on making that a reality.
Dual Wielding: Also mentioned this one previously, it's the reason I'm writing this post actually. Following an extended conversation in the OM Room today it's clear that there's a lot of interest in exploring this meta. Still wonder about Heavy-Duty Boots and luck based items but it'd be neat to see this meta back
Metagamiate: One I forgot to mention in my first post due to the lack of Return/Frustration, Metagamiate has more depth than I anticipated on further inspection, and it seems to be one that the community has taken interest in as well.
I think these few metagames deserve priority over other returning metagames, but I don't mean this to discourage trying to bring back some others! If you're a contributor interested in leading one of these metagames, feel free to look into it and read up on how to submit a metagame! Thanks again to the community for the support and for making our section appeal to more people!
Also I plan on trying to post here more often, even if it's just small updates like this. Hopefully you all appreciate updates like these, thanks for reading!
Heyo, I'm back again with something I wanted to discuss: the current tour schedule. My hope is to highlight the strain on tours and presumably tour players with the current schedule and how some slight changes could help lift some of these worries. Also I'd like to talk about changing the format for one of our team tours to better align with what other sections have done.
Tour Schedule
What's the problem?
Right now, we have a ton of tours going on, and have had nonstop tours all year. OMPL is currently going on with 3 seasonals (4 on sunday) going on and multiple smaller tours in submissions. Additionally, the tour schedule has OM Snake Draft (more on this later) set for August 6th, which if you do the math at best (presuming no tiebreakers which lol) we get 1 week in between the end of OMPL and the start of Snake Draft. Idk about any of you but I am a firm believer that there needs to be more breathing room between major team tours.
Here's a table on the current tour schedule and tours we'd like to fill over the rest of the month:
What do I want to do?
I've been talking this over with the submissions team for a while now, particularly how it's difficult to find space for the smaller tournaments right now. What I'd like to suggest is to move our remaining team tours back a few weeks each in order to lighten the load a bit during the next 2 months. After August, we only have OM Swiss and WCoOM, and in December currently there's only the Championship. While WCoOM running into the Championship isn't necessarily ideal, it is the lightest workload period currently and would be more preferable to the current situation, imo.
What I'm suggest is moving OM Snake Draft back from August 6th to August 20th, and World Cup from October 8th to October 29th. This change would give us more breathing room, while not pushing them back so far that we experience the same issue as last year where World Cup didn't end until January. Team tours are much more malleable than tours that count towards the circuit, so I do not think there will be any issues with moving the date back. On the topic of team tours being more malleable...
OM Snake Draft
What's the problem?
OM Snake Draft was brought up as a format to focus on our non-ladder formats and give light to them. The structure of this tour has been modeled after Smogon Snake Draft, which as of this year has been abolished and renamed for the more favorable auction format which has been deemed more fair. OM Snake Draft has had similar issues to Smogon Snake Draft, particularly with draft order playing a huge role in how teams are formed and resulting in lopsided teams. In my opinion, this has been made more severe in the past with metagames that very few people play, and made it so getting a main in some tiers impossible in some cases. Also, running the draft through discord the past few years has been clunky to put it lightly, and while our hosts have worked hard to make it run smoothly in the past it's just not a good format.
What do I want to do?
I think that OM Snake Draft would benefit from following official tournaments and abolishing the Snake format in place of an auction. I think the rest of OM Snake Draft runs smoothly (I expect we'll have another polling thread about which tiers to include this year closer to the tour) and nothing should change there, but changing the draft format would solve a lot of problems.
If this change comes to fruition, we should probably think of a new name for the tour... anyone got any ideas lol? We tried to come up with names but there's not many ways to highlight less played OMs in a title without some negative connotation. PM me on Discord if you have any ideas.
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These are my only suggestions for right now, obviously nothing is set in stone if I'm posting here so please give it a read and feel free to share your thoughts. Thanks for reading!
TL;DR Move OM Snake back 2 weeks and World Cup back 3 weeks to accommodate for the large amount of tours going on right now, also change OM Snake Draft to an auction format and change the name to reflect what official tours are doing
Tour Schedule
What's the problem?
Right now, we have a ton of tours going on, and have had nonstop tours all year. OMPL is currently going on with 3 seasonals (4 on sunday) going on and multiple smaller tours in submissions. Additionally, the tour schedule has OM Snake Draft (more on this later) set for August 6th, which if you do the math at best (presuming no tiebreakers which lol) we get 1 week in between the end of OMPL and the start of Snake Draft. Idk about any of you but I am a firm believer that there needs to be more breathing room between major team tours.
Here's a table on the current tour schedule and tours we'd like to fill over the rest of the month:
Current Schedule:
- NFE Seasonal - April 4
- Mix and Mega Seasonal - May 2
- Premier League - May 14
- Balanced Hackmons Seasonal - June 6
- Almost Any Ability Seasonal - July 4
- STABmons Seasonal - August 1
- Snake Draft - August 6
- OM Swiss - September 26
- World Cup - October 8
- Championship Playoffs (Top 16) - December 5
- Almost Any Ability Ladder Tour (early August, once AAA seasonal has started to die down)
- BH No Imposters Tour (unsure, probably as BH Seasonal dwindles down)
- OMM Trios (early July)
What do I want to do?
I've been talking this over with the submissions team for a while now, particularly how it's difficult to find space for the smaller tournaments right now. What I'd like to suggest is to move our remaining team tours back a few weeks each in order to lighten the load a bit during the next 2 months. After August, we only have OM Swiss and WCoOM, and in December currently there's only the Championship. While WCoOM running into the Championship isn't necessarily ideal, it is the lightest workload period currently and would be more preferable to the current situation, imo.
What I'm suggest is moving OM Snake Draft back from August 6th to August 20th, and World Cup from October 8th to October 29th. This change would give us more breathing room, while not pushing them back so far that we experience the same issue as last year where World Cup didn't end until January. Team tours are much more malleable than tours that count towards the circuit, so I do not think there will be any issues with moving the date back. On the topic of team tours being more malleable...
OM Snake Draft
What's the problem?
OM Snake Draft was brought up as a format to focus on our non-ladder formats and give light to them. The structure of this tour has been modeled after Smogon Snake Draft, which as of this year has been abolished and renamed for the more favorable auction format which has been deemed more fair. OM Snake Draft has had similar issues to Smogon Snake Draft, particularly with draft order playing a huge role in how teams are formed and resulting in lopsided teams. In my opinion, this has been made more severe in the past with metagames that very few people play, and made it so getting a main in some tiers impossible in some cases. Also, running the draft through discord the past few years has been clunky to put it lightly, and while our hosts have worked hard to make it run smoothly in the past it's just not a good format.
What do I want to do?
I think that OM Snake Draft would benefit from following official tournaments and abolishing the Snake format in place of an auction. I think the rest of OM Snake Draft runs smoothly (I expect we'll have another polling thread about which tiers to include this year closer to the tour) and nothing should change there, but changing the draft format would solve a lot of problems.
If this change comes to fruition, we should probably think of a new name for the tour... anyone got any ideas lol? We tried to come up with names but there's not many ways to highlight less played OMs in a title without some negative connotation. PM me on Discord if you have any ideas.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
These are my only suggestions for right now, obviously nothing is set in stone if I'm posting here so please give it a read and feel free to share your thoughts. Thanks for reading!
TL;DR Move OM Snake back 2 weeks and World Cup back 3 weeks to accommodate for the large amount of tours going on right now, also change OM Snake Draft to an auction format and change the name to reflect what official tours are doing
As someone who has been quite involved in the OMSDs (managed twice and played in one - unbeaten as a player for the record) I don't really see any huge problem with the format. The draft order does give an advantage but considering the prestige of the event, ie not that prestigious, it's not that big of an edge in my experience. It's definitely a less competitive format than an auction but I feel like that's kinda part of the charm of it that it's more about the metas and the fun than being hyper competitive for the managers.
The draft in discord is kinda messy I agree there, but there's no reason we can't just do it on PS right? (can even just use the auction bot if there isn't a snake draft bot, tho i imagine there is one)
If you do want a word to refer to the metas in it without being derogatory then "Underrated" could be a good one? Covers the fact that they aren't the top most "respected" OMs per se but does so in a way that implies that it isn't due to a lack of quality.
Post inspired by this thread
It's no secret that I'm probably one of the most cynical people when it comes to the competitiveness of this game, but I think this is a conversation worth having regardless considering this past OMPL. I think it's worth talking about if OMPL and OMWC games should be Bo3 rather than Bo1. To clarify, I'm not really on either side of this, but a lot of the thread that was posted resonated with me because this last OMPL, I've been seeing some people lose matchups which they.. arguably shouldn't be losing? And it's very frequently been out of control. Be it due to the luck that happened in Zesty vs Anaconja, or the matchups that either Jordan or Andy got. There's many more examples as well, not just in this tournament, but in other tournaments as well. That being said, there's definitely consequences too, and I'm not really sure what side of the issue I'm on (leaning keeping things Bo1 tbh but I wanted to throw the idea out there because it feels like this idea gets thrown around in some discord channel, talked about for an hour or so and then dies)
Pros
-reduces the factor matchup plays in a team tournament
-an argument against this is that teambuilding and prep is just as important, if not more important, than how you play in the game. Pokemon is a game of two dimensions, and outplaying in the teambuilder is definitely as much of a skill that deserves to be recognized
-that being said, outbuilding over two or three games consistently is definitely possible and it's less likely to just be a result of getting lucky with one matchup. in addition, it could be said that no team should lose straight up because they got an unwinnable matchup (and tbh some teams won some matchups in this tour that I'd argue should've been unwinnable but that's another conversation)
-reduces the likelihood of getting cheesed out of a game
-gonna redirect you guys to the last point. knowing how to play your cheese and when to cheese and what cheese to use and if you even need to cheese is still pretty important, it isn't nearly as skillless as people make it out to be
-i also don't think it's even close to being as skillful as a "normal" game, so to speak, and I think dissuading the use of cheese by converting to a bo3 format would arguably improve the competitiveness of our tours
-reduces the impact that hax plays in a game
-playing to your outs in a bad matchup is definitely a skill, and sometimes that involves going for these RNG aspects of the game which always feels scummy but you have no better choice.
-again, with that being said.. more games means that even if you get a bad matchup, you can still luck your way out of it and get ahead, but it isn't the end all be all. there's more opportunities for the "more skilled" player to win.
-develops the meta further?
-honestly, this is a pro I don't really stand by. I feel like metagame development should always be on the people who want to see it be developed and I don't really think these guys who just come back every tour should be forced to help progress it even further
-on the other hand, they're already developing the metagame and bringing a new perspective, this is just more.
-soldifies a team's chances of winning a slot they should be winning
-really, this is just up in the air. There's so many factors in a game, and going bo3 only tackles a few of them. Even stuff that's as out of left field as how someone's feeling that day can impact who the "favorite" to win the series is?
-even so, one could argue that the curbing of how factors players don't really have agency over is a net improvement even if it isn't a full solution
Cons
-time
-this is something that's dissuaded me from ever going bo3 in any team tour game during my time in tournaments. it's already tough to pump out one team I'd feel confident winning with against my opponent, and two more seems out of the question entirely.
-you could argue that by building more teams, you can employ more than one angle of trying to outprep your opponent. funnily enough, I think this actually doesn't work in practice and makes everything more of a matchup grab. I think sticking to one plan of attack employed three ways would net more wins than sticking to three plans of attack employed one way. there's also the reuse argument, I'm not sure how well that works in practice though? I hope someone elaborates on it and that we can have our own conversation about it on this thread
-reduces the chance of "spice picks" getting drafted in a tournament
-something I really enjoyed seeing this tournament was lesser known players getting drafted. you could argue this happened because the playerbase was dire, and that's probably a factor? that being said, switching to bo3 means you wanna be more confident in your slot, which could translate to spending more money on said slot and leaving less room for spicy picks on your team.
-i don't really think this is a concern that'll pan out in practice at the start. I think a switch to bo3 would reward smart drafting, and sometimes that involves getting good/spice picks for cheap. We'd have to see how it goes, though.
-again, time, but different this time
-if you play a bo3 in standards, it's probably going to take you less time than if you're to play a bo3 in OMs. this is because we have metagames where everything gets shore up, or everything gets regenerator, or everything gets those two things + furscales. things tend to be bulkier or more sustainable overall, and so if you're making a bo3 happen, you have to take a lot more time out of your day than if you want to make a Bo1 happen.
-i can't really think of an argument against this consequence that doesn't involve "yeah true but it's worth it" because a lot of our top players are also very busy people with full lives, and bo3 is asking a lot of them. my game vs highlighter back when I was a heliolisk took around an hour. my Camomons game vs chlo took around an hour back in that OM Snake draft. The thought that I'd have to play through three of those is just unnerving to me.
-less tour players signing up (?)
-not sure if this is likely to happen or not......... If I'm a tour player, this is just some side thing I'm doing for fun, but if it swaps to bo3 then I can't really justify the consequences above when I could be spending time playing OU or something that'll net me a trophy instead. I'm not 100% sure on this point, I haven't thought much about it, so I guess it's on you guys?
---
Again, I think I'm leaning Bo1, but I think it's worth having a more in depth conversation about this because I know there are a lot of people who have varying opinions and forums are a lot more organized than discord where you have some random pop in to pepega once in the middle of a convo. Bbye
It's no secret that I'm probably one of the most cynical people when it comes to the competitiveness of this game, but I think this is a conversation worth having regardless considering this past OMPL. I think it's worth talking about if OMPL and OMWC games should be Bo3 rather than Bo1. To clarify, I'm not really on either side of this, but a lot of the thread that was posted resonated with me because this last OMPL, I've been seeing some people lose matchups which they.. arguably shouldn't be losing? And it's very frequently been out of control. Be it due to the luck that happened in Zesty vs Anaconja, or the matchups that either Jordan or Andy got. There's many more examples as well, not just in this tournament, but in other tournaments as well. That being said, there's definitely consequences too, and I'm not really sure what side of the issue I'm on (leaning keeping things Bo1 tbh but I wanted to throw the idea out there because it feels like this idea gets thrown around in some discord channel, talked about for an hour or so and then dies)
Pros
-reduces the factor matchup plays in a team tournament
-an argument against this is that teambuilding and prep is just as important, if not more important, than how you play in the game. Pokemon is a game of two dimensions, and outplaying in the teambuilder is definitely as much of a skill that deserves to be recognized
-that being said, outbuilding over two or three games consistently is definitely possible and it's less likely to just be a result of getting lucky with one matchup. in addition, it could be said that no team should lose straight up because they got an unwinnable matchup (and tbh some teams won some matchups in this tour that I'd argue should've been unwinnable but that's another conversation)
-reduces the likelihood of getting cheesed out of a game
-gonna redirect you guys to the last point. knowing how to play your cheese and when to cheese and what cheese to use and if you even need to cheese is still pretty important, it isn't nearly as skillless as people make it out to be
-i also don't think it's even close to being as skillful as a "normal" game, so to speak, and I think dissuading the use of cheese by converting to a bo3 format would arguably improve the competitiveness of our tours
-reduces the impact that hax plays in a game
-playing to your outs in a bad matchup is definitely a skill, and sometimes that involves going for these RNG aspects of the game which always feels scummy but you have no better choice.
-again, with that being said.. more games means that even if you get a bad matchup, you can still luck your way out of it and get ahead, but it isn't the end all be all. there's more opportunities for the "more skilled" player to win.
-develops the meta further?
-honestly, this is a pro I don't really stand by. I feel like metagame development should always be on the people who want to see it be developed and I don't really think these guys who just come back every tour should be forced to help progress it even further
-on the other hand, they're already developing the metagame and bringing a new perspective, this is just more.
-soldifies a team's chances of winning a slot they should be winning
-really, this is just up in the air. There's so many factors in a game, and going bo3 only tackles a few of them. Even stuff that's as out of left field as how someone's feeling that day can impact who the "favorite" to win the series is?
-even so, one could argue that the curbing of how factors players don't really have agency over is a net improvement even if it isn't a full solution
Cons
-time
-this is something that's dissuaded me from ever going bo3 in any team tour game during my time in tournaments. it's already tough to pump out one team I'd feel confident winning with against my opponent, and two more seems out of the question entirely.
-you could argue that by building more teams, you can employ more than one angle of trying to outprep your opponent. funnily enough, I think this actually doesn't work in practice and makes everything more of a matchup grab. I think sticking to one plan of attack employed three ways would net more wins than sticking to three plans of attack employed one way. there's also the reuse argument, I'm not sure how well that works in practice though? I hope someone elaborates on it and that we can have our own conversation about it on this thread
-reduces the chance of "spice picks" getting drafted in a tournament
-something I really enjoyed seeing this tournament was lesser known players getting drafted. you could argue this happened because the playerbase was dire, and that's probably a factor? that being said, switching to bo3 means you wanna be more confident in your slot, which could translate to spending more money on said slot and leaving less room for spicy picks on your team.
-i don't really think this is a concern that'll pan out in practice at the start. I think a switch to bo3 would reward smart drafting, and sometimes that involves getting good/spice picks for cheap. We'd have to see how it goes, though.
-again, time, but different this time
-if you play a bo3 in standards, it's probably going to take you less time than if you're to play a bo3 in OMs. this is because we have metagames where everything gets shore up, or everything gets regenerator, or everything gets those two things + furscales. things tend to be bulkier or more sustainable overall, and so if you're making a bo3 happen, you have to take a lot more time out of your day than if you want to make a Bo1 happen.
-i can't really think of an argument against this consequence that doesn't involve "yeah true but it's worth it" because a lot of our top players are also very busy people with full lives, and bo3 is asking a lot of them. my game vs highlighter back when I was a heliolisk took around an hour. my Camomons game vs chlo took around an hour back in that OM Snake draft. The thought that I'd have to play through three of those is just unnerving to me.
-less tour players signing up (?)
-not sure if this is likely to happen or not......... If I'm a tour player, this is just some side thing I'm doing for fun, but if it swaps to bo3 then I can't really justify the consequences above when I could be spending time playing OU or something that'll net me a trophy instead. I'm not 100% sure on this point, I haven't thought much about it, so I guess it's on you guys?
---
Again, I think I'm leaning Bo1, but I think it's worth having a more in depth conversation about this because I know there are a lot of people who have varying opinions and forums are a lot more organized than discord where you have some random pop in to pepega once in the middle of a convo. Bbye
I'm posting here following some discussion in the OM discord to make my proposal more visible, since there was some support for it.
RE: Bo3 vs Bo1
While reusing is a possibility, its viability varies between metas. Something like AAA has a lot of hidden information that you have to be able to guess or scout over the course of the game, so playing with an already revealed team puts you at a significant disadvantage vs your opponent (presumably using a new team). OTOH, Bo3 definitely increases the competitiveness of the tour since it decreases the impact of hax/MU/etc. Not to mention, Bo3 means more games, which means more meta development and more fun for spectators.
There seems to be a clear tradeoff between having to put in more time, but reducing feelbad losses die to hax/MU or keeping it as is and requiring less prep time but also keeping the weaknesses of Bo1. With that in mind, I propose the following: keep the regular season Bo1, but make playoffs Bo3. This feels like a best of both worlds approach, because it keeps the current level of commitment for the regular season, preventing burnout happening before playoffs are even decided while ensuring the most high-level and high-stakes games (playoffs) get to be more competitive as they are played in Bo3 instead of Bo1. Especially since in playoffs if you lose the week, you're out - so every game matters a lot more than the regular season season where you get 6 more chances to turn your record around. I think time pressure is also less of an argument when players only have to prep 3 teams once or twice (instead of 7-9 times).
TL;DR: The most reasonable implementation of Bo3 is to keep the regular season Bo1 and make playoffs Bo3. This minimizes the cons of Bo3, while maximising the pros as it increases the competitiveness of the most important games.
If this idea gets support, Redflix's proposed to first test it out in the upcoming OMWC instead of next year's OMPL, which I agree with.
RE: 7 week seasons and burnout
This is something i discussed with motherlove in DMs a few days ago that feels semi-related to the issue of Bo1 vs Bo3. 7 weeks of non-stop prep is a long time. Long enough that some people end up losing steam towards the final weeks. Personally, I've played as a starter in 3 7-week team tours, 2 of them i played all 7 weeks and both times I would have really appreciated a midseason break week to unwind and recharge. And I don't think I'm the only one, but i could be wrong here. So my suggestion is basically to consider having a break week after W4 of OMPL, similar to the SPL break week during the midseason auction (without the midseason auction, since idt it makes much sense here). The schedule would therefore look like this: W1-W4, break week, W5-W7, playoffs. I know this prolongs the tour by an additional week, but I think the break would improve the experience as instead of a 7+week season your season is split into 2 smaller parts, which should (in theory) make it easier to keep motivation and engagement high, while avoid burnout.
RE: Bo3 vs Bo1
We discussed this a bit in the OM discord yesterday and I think most of us agreed on the pros and cons that Volk listed. It's hard to prep 3 good and new teams every week over the course of a 7 week season, especially if you're a playing manager that's helping other slots as well. Personally, not hard enough that I wouldn't be able to do it if I was just playing, but I couldn't have done it this season as a playing manager.
While reusing is a possibility, its viability varies between metas. Something like AAA has a lot of hidden information that you have to be able to guess or scout over the course of the game, so playing with an already revealed team puts you at a significant disadvantage vs your opponent (presumably using a new team). OTOH, Bo3 definitely increases the competitiveness of the tour since it decreases the impact of hax/MU/etc. Not to mention, Bo3 means more games, which means more meta development and more fun for spectators.
There seems to be a clear tradeoff between having to put in more time, but reducing feelbad losses die to hax/MU or keeping it as is and requiring less prep time but also keeping the weaknesses of Bo1. With that in mind, I propose the following: keep the regular season Bo1, but make playoffs Bo3. This feels like a best of both worlds approach, because it keeps the current level of commitment for the regular season, preventing burnout happening before playoffs are even decided while ensuring the most high-level and high-stakes games (playoffs) get to be more competitive as they are played in Bo3 instead of Bo1. Especially since in playoffs if you lose the week, you're out - so every game matters a lot more than the regular season season where you get 6 more chances to turn your record around. I think time pressure is also less of an argument when players only have to prep 3 teams once or twice (instead of 7-9 times).
TL;DR: The most reasonable implementation of Bo3 is to keep the regular season Bo1 and make playoffs Bo3. This minimizes the cons of Bo3, while maximising the pros as it increases the competitiveness of the most important games.
If this idea gets support, Redflix's proposed to first test it out in the upcoming OMWC instead of next year's OMPL, which I agree with.
RE: 7 week seasons and burnout
This is something i discussed with motherlove in DMs a few days ago that feels semi-related to the issue of Bo1 vs Bo3. 7 weeks of non-stop prep is a long time. Long enough that some people end up losing steam towards the final weeks. Personally, I've played as a starter in 3 7-week team tours, 2 of them i played all 7 weeks and both times I would have really appreciated a midseason break week to unwind and recharge. And I don't think I'm the only one, but i could be wrong here. So my suggestion is basically to consider having a break week after W4 of OMPL, similar to the SPL break week during the midseason auction (without the midseason auction, since idt it makes much sense here). The schedule would therefore look like this: W1-W4, break week, W5-W7, playoffs. I know this prolongs the tour by an additional week, but I think the break would improve the experience as instead of a 7+week season your season is split into 2 smaller parts, which should (in theory) make it easier to keep motivation and engagement high, while avoid burnout.
I love the idea of a break week!
I really like both of your proposals, I think I'd like to see some more discussion and have some of the consequences fleshed out, though, before we talk about implementation. Thanks for your reply!
Personally I like your proposal, but for the sake of playing devil's advocate - You could argue that playoffs games are even more intense, so while time pressure is reduced, there's still some pressure added from regular season by virtue of it being playoffs. Furthermore, while you can know who you're likely to play before playoffs and start thinking about your building in advance, in practice this doesn't really work. Almost every OMPL, I feel it's come down to the wire as to who exactly is in playoffs -- there's always some team that tryhards early and ends up getting locked in before the last week or two of regular season (looking at Spindas), so you could prepare for them, but if you're not even sure if you're making playoffs or if you're not on that team, there isn't really much point. The benefit of offering a Bo3 in playoffs, though, is that you've already prepared for their metagame slot before (even if they sub out, you should be prepping for the builder imo) so it's a little easier to decide what to use -- but is it easier enough to offset the added pressure of it being playoffs? Furthermore, I can't help but worry that some players would sit out for playoffs if they were bo3, meaning someone'd probably have to put work into finding another player to take over. What about that?
I really like both of your proposals, I think I'd like to see some more discussion and have some of the consequences fleshed out, though, before we talk about implementation. Thanks for your reply!
I'm glad my proposals have been received positively!
The idea of building in advance is a bit foreign to me, to be honest, so I can't really give a good response to this. Personally, I used a team I had prepped a weak early exactly once this OMPL (w5, because i built it after locking in my w4 team and even though i liked it better than what i prepped i didn't want to switch teams last minute) and even then i still tweaked it a bit before my game. I've mostly been prepping on a weekly basis and was under the impression that everyone did the same. So I don't really think prepping in advance is very feasible regardless of Bo1 or Bo3, but I do understand that it might be more attractive when you're playing Bo3 since you need to build 3 good teams instead of just one. The biggest barrier to building 3 good teams as opposed to one might actually be the increased amount of testing needed - let's assume that you want to play 3 games with a team to get a feel for whether its playable or not, if you need to prep 3 teams you now need 9 tests as opposed to 3, which is a significant increase. But I think it's still doable within a week, if you have at least 2 days where you're reasonably free.
I think this is a reasonable concern. And there's probably two ways to address it:
1) Tough luck. It's the manager's job to make sure their player is either motivated enough to stick out the 2 weeks of Bo3 in playoffs, or to cover the player's prep by building for them or asking a sub to do it instead. In practice this means don't draft tournament players if you can't motivate them to start building for themselves throughout the tour or if you (or a sub) is unable to cover their prep throughout the whole tour.
2) That's a big issue. We shouldn't make this tour even less desirable for people who aren't very motivated to play in it to begin with, because that describes (on average) 1-2 starters per team.
At the end of the day, I think it's the managers' job to adapt to the draft "meta" (ie. how viable is the strategy of drafting tour players and feeding them teams? - the more Bo3 games, the less viable this strategy is because at a certain point you need to build more teams than you are capable of doing). But then again, if the value of tour players gets low enough you might be able to draft an extra sub to provide building support so this issue seems to be self-correcting.
OTOH, if you were talking about people who are invested, but don't have the time to commit to a Bo3 because of irl concerns - I think that's a more significant problem and one we would probably want to avoid. In that case I think it would be helpful for the people that fall into this category to voice their opinions on the matter.
I hope I didn't misunderstand any of your concerns and answered them adequately and of course, thanks for the feedback!
I heavily oppose bo3 in playoffs, and think it's probably the worst of both worlds. I think one of the biggest positives of having a Bo3 format is team freedom; you can run concepts that might be great or might be bad, and you're not really sure until you see them in action. I had a bunch of cool teams like a psyterrain spam that I wanted to make use of but couldn't justify staking the week on. However, in playoffs you still can't really use those, because the stakes are enough higher to more than compensate for a Bo3. Which also ties into the other problem that these stakes bring on. It's readily possible to only recycle teams for early rounds of individual tours, but once you start getting into the higher rounds that becomes a steadily worse and worse strategy, because your teams become known and the players you face are better and better and there's more incentive to cteam.
There's also the issue that it also comes at the end of the tour. I might have the freshness and interest to make three teams a week for multiple metas early on, but by the time week 8 comes around you've probably already whipped out most the unique ideas that have been sitting in your builder and cool techs you want to try out and made use of them, and there's not that much left. Maybe you can compensate for this by grabbing players from disqualified teams to help out, but if we're being real here they don't split up evenly among teams and even if you can grab a bunch there's no telling how invested they'll be.
There's also the issue that it also comes at the end of the tour. I might have the freshness and interest to make three teams a week for multiple metas early on, but by the time week 8 comes around you've probably already whipped out most the unique ideas that have been sitting in your builder and cool techs you want to try out and made use of them, and there's not that much left. Maybe you can compensate for this by grabbing players from disqualified teams to help out, but if we're being real here they don't split up evenly among teams and even if you can grab a bunch there's no telling how invested they'll be.
Good evening,
This post is a bit of an update on my last post regarding the tour schedule and a shift in plans for the future. At the time of my last post, we had an overwhelming engagement in tours and interest in running new ones, which was very exciting. Since then though, we've noticed a sharp decline in participation in these tours, as well as a lack of interest by those who are signing up. This has been seen across the board, from user-hosted tours to team tours to even tours from our official circuit. After talking with people, it seems to be that there's a bit of a burnout for a lot of people in the community right now, which is most likely the cause of this issue. It's been a long year so far with everything going on in the world and so many major changes to our community, and I think the effects of so much happening is starting to show on a lot of people.
With that said, it is very important moving forward for us to do our best to prevent burnout and try to improve overall engagement with each tour. As such, we've decided to postpone all non-circuit tours until further notice. User-hosted tours are a major part of what goes on in our forum and something we greatly appreciate, but right now it would not be fair to our contributors to have them host tours that aren't getting the engagement they deserve. As of right now, this does unfortunately include the upcoming AAAPL that was planned for December. I do want to note that these tours are not cancelled by any means, we just want to ensure that they'll be hosted at a time where the community gets the most out of them. Our hope is that less tours for the next few months will give people a chance to feel a bit less overwhelmed and hopefully rest, and we can all come back stronger!
Regarding AAAPL specifically, I do think there was a good amount of interest there from discussions and even past posts on this thread when it was first brought up. Recognizing that, I do hope that we see improvement on community motivation and end up being able to run the tour this year. As it stands right now, I don't see it happening but depending on how World Cup of OMs goes that may change. I encourage you all to do your best in expressing interest in tours so that AAAPL can happen, but make sure to put your mental health first!
We will continue to gauge how people are feeling in the upcoming months, and hopefully user-hosted tours will return soon. I hope everyone is putting their health first, and would love to hear other suggestions on how we can tackle the issue of burnout together! Thanks for reading!
This post is a bit of an update on my last post regarding the tour schedule and a shift in plans for the future. At the time of my last post, we had an overwhelming engagement in tours and interest in running new ones, which was very exciting. Since then though, we've noticed a sharp decline in participation in these tours, as well as a lack of interest by those who are signing up. This has been seen across the board, from user-hosted tours to team tours to even tours from our official circuit. After talking with people, it seems to be that there's a bit of a burnout for a lot of people in the community right now, which is most likely the cause of this issue. It's been a long year so far with everything going on in the world and so many major changes to our community, and I think the effects of so much happening is starting to show on a lot of people.
With that said, it is very important moving forward for us to do our best to prevent burnout and try to improve overall engagement with each tour. As such, we've decided to postpone all non-circuit tours until further notice. User-hosted tours are a major part of what goes on in our forum and something we greatly appreciate, but right now it would not be fair to our contributors to have them host tours that aren't getting the engagement they deserve. As of right now, this does unfortunately include the upcoming AAAPL that was planned for December. I do want to note that these tours are not cancelled by any means, we just want to ensure that they'll be hosted at a time where the community gets the most out of them. Our hope is that less tours for the next few months will give people a chance to feel a bit less overwhelmed and hopefully rest, and we can all come back stronger!
Regarding AAAPL specifically, I do think there was a good amount of interest there from discussions and even past posts on this thread when it was first brought up. Recognizing that, I do hope that we see improvement on community motivation and end up being able to run the tour this year. As it stands right now, I don't see it happening but depending on how World Cup of OMs goes that may change. I encourage you all to do your best in expressing interest in tours so that AAAPL can happen, but make sure to put your mental health first!
We will continue to gauge how people are feeling in the upcoming months, and hopefully user-hosted tours will return soon. I hope everyone is putting their health first, and would love to hear other suggestions on how we can tackle the issue of burnout together! Thanks for reading!
Hello everyone! Quick update time!
Just as an update to this, we have added a "Suspect", "Project", and "2v2" tag! Additionally, I went ahead and retroactively applied the appropriate tags for each metagame. Thanks for the patience with this!
Hi,
Just wanted to update everyone that throughout November, OM Submissions will be temporarily closed. With BDSP coming up mid-November, the mod team wants to avoid having an influx of metagame submissions before we have a complete understanding of how the implementation of those formats to Showdown will work. Any existing submissions will still receive approval/rejection as normal, and once things are smoothed out we will be sure to open them back up again. Thanks for bearing with us!
Just wanted to update everyone that throughout November, OM Submissions will be temporarily closed. With BDSP coming up mid-November, the mod team wants to avoid having an influx of metagame submissions before we have a complete understanding of how the implementation of those formats to Showdown will work. Any existing submissions will still receive approval/rejection as normal, and once things are smoothed out we will be sure to open them back up again. Thanks for bearing with us!
We now have OM-specific tiering guidelines! Feel free to ask a forum mod if you have any questions regarding them.
I'd like to address the recent removal of Camomons from our team tours. I'm going to touch on a few different points.
1) Axing a ladder immediately after a tournament concludes is the exact worst time to do so
This has been covered in depth by a loser in his post in the discussion thread so I won't go in depth, but I felt it needed to be restated. And sure Camo plays were (even) lower than other OMs, but that's not at all necessarily due to anything intrinsic to Camo. Or at least not solely due to that.
2) No official individual tour representation -> no incentive for tournament players to pick up the meta -> no influx of new players
This has already been said, but it appears I need to restate it, since it wasn't even brought up in the announcement that Camo is getting removed from our team tours. Camomons was never given the same treatment as the other 5 core OMs, so holding it to the same standard as those is unrealistic. Everyone who joins the OM community (or any smogon community tbf) learns sooner or later that ladder results don't command much respect. Prestige is instead reserved for team tournaments and circuit tournaments. Now, as a newcomer to the OM tournament scene, if prestige is at least part of what you're looking for (and don't tell me we just play this game for fun. If that were true we'd stick to playing friendlies all the time), you're better off picking up AAA, BH, MNM, NFE or STAB than Camo, because they let you participate in OMGS and circuit championship playoffs. This is very evidently true, so we now see that from the get go the incentives to pick up Camo just weren't there, at least compared to the other 5 OMs. In practice this means that Camo ends up being played mainly by players that the concept already appeals to, as opposed to this group + tournament players that decide to stick around after trying it out and having fun with it in a circuit tour. This leads us to the next point.
3) Removing Camo without first giving it a chance to be part of the OM circuit is unfair and unreasonable
I've already brought this up in my post in the discussion thread but you can't treat a meta as second rate for basically the whole generation and then act surprised when it's less popular and less succesful than its 5 counterparts. Maybe Camomons is intrinsically less appealing, i can't say it isn't with certainty. However, the only way to truly know that is to give it the same treatment that the other oms get. While deciding to include GG (Camomons' stated replacement) in the circuit is a step in the right direction, it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of the Camomons council and community. Why were we never given this chance? If nothing else happens, I think we at least deserve an acknowledgment from OM leadrship that this treatment of Camomons was wrong. What this also means is that we can never really compare Camomons to its replacement (whether that be GG or w/e else) because said replacement is (rightfully!) getting a leg up right from the beginning with its inclusion in our circuit.
This is precisely why I felt (and still feel) the best way to approach this issue was to give Camomons another shot, keep it for the 2022 tour season while letting it be part of the circuit and then revisiting this issue in a year (or even as soon as post OMPL). If Camo is still not doing well even after steps are taken to incentivize players to take it up, then I see no reason to drop it and I would readily accept the decision to do so.
4) This decision was rushed to a ridiculous extent
The discussion thread went up on Friday, you didn't even let OMWC reach the finals stage before putting it up. In addition, the thread has been closed after less than 5 days of it being up. That's less time than tour signups get for God's sake. I don't believe that everyone who had a stake in this decision has made their opinion known. And I think that they might have responded faster if they knew this was getting concluded so hastily lol. I had been planning to ask Siamato to chip in, for example. I understand that you had to get the circuit set up and everything, but what was stopping you from just stating that the 6th meta is getting an Open in january and deciding what this meta is going to be in the weeks leading up to the New Year?
5) The way this situation played out makes it seem like the thread was purely a formality
The thread was supposed to be about gauging community opinion on whether camo should go and what to replace it with in case it does go. The impression I got from the thread was that Camo had pretty solid support to stay. There were multiple users who were either neutral to it staying or had made strong cases for it to stay. When I saw TI give his support for Camo I was pretty sure it would stay, lmao. But then I woke up today to see that the thread was already closed and the decision to replace Camo has already been made. From the outside, this seems to me like Camo going away was already decided even before the thread was made and that thread was just a formality. Which, is imo not ok, some others might say its fine, but in any case at least make it clear that you are already sold on dropping Camo. Don't give us false hope.
I didn't make this thread to rip on GG. It's unfortunate that the situation is such as it is and in order to get Camo its spot back I need to deprive GG of their spot. But it seems to me that there's a decent amount of other community members that share this sentiment, that agree that Camo should have stayed. Obviously leaders have the final say, but the leaders don't really play in these tours so the tiers should cater to the playerbase, right?
I think Camo should be given another shot. If you guys can't do that, that's fine, I understand. But at least address these points (particularly the one about tour prestige that Camo missed out on since it wasn't included in the circuit - im sick of people citing lack of interest among good players as a reason to drop camo when its been explained multiple times what that can be attributed to) and acknowledge that its unrealistic to expect a meta to meet your standards of popularity and success when its been treated as second-rate (by second rate i mean it didn't get a spot in the circuit) since its addition to team tours.
EDIT: adding something to clariy a point (im purposely not hiding my quip cause i dont wanna misrepresent the argument, would have been better to not say that tho):
1. unofficial forum tours are not the same as circuit tours
2. beginning of gen 8 camo tours had very solid turnout, this last one was the only one with bad turnout
3. what numerous chances?
1) Axing a ladder immediately after a tournament concludes is the exact worst time to do so
This has been covered in depth by a loser in his post in the discussion thread so I won't go in depth, but I felt it needed to be restated. And sure Camo plays were (even) lower than other OMs, but that's not at all necessarily due to anything intrinsic to Camo. Or at least not solely due to that.
2) No official individual tour representation -> no incentive for tournament players to pick up the meta -> no influx of new players
This has already been said, but it appears I need to restate it, since it wasn't even brought up in the announcement that Camo is getting removed from our team tours. Camomons was never given the same treatment as the other 5 core OMs, so holding it to the same standard as those is unrealistic. Everyone who joins the OM community (or any smogon community tbf) learns sooner or later that ladder results don't command much respect. Prestige is instead reserved for team tournaments and circuit tournaments. Now, as a newcomer to the OM tournament scene, if prestige is at least part of what you're looking for (and don't tell me we just play this game for fun. If that were true we'd stick to playing friendlies all the time), you're better off picking up AAA, BH, MNM, NFE or STAB than Camo, because they let you participate in OMGS and circuit championship playoffs. This is very evidently true, so we now see that from the get go the incentives to pick up Camo just weren't there, at least compared to the other 5 OMs. In practice this means that Camo ends up being played mainly by players that the concept already appeals to, as opposed to this group + tournament players that decide to stick around after trying it out and having fun with it in a circuit tour. This leads us to the next point.
3) Removing Camo without first giving it a chance to be part of the OM circuit is unfair and unreasonable
I've already brought this up in my post in the discussion thread but you can't treat a meta as second rate for basically the whole generation and then act surprised when it's less popular and less succesful than its 5 counterparts. Maybe Camomons is intrinsically less appealing, i can't say it isn't with certainty. However, the only way to truly know that is to give it the same treatment that the other oms get. While deciding to include GG (Camomons' stated replacement) in the circuit is a step in the right direction, it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of the Camomons council and community. Why were we never given this chance? If nothing else happens, I think we at least deserve an acknowledgment from OM leadrship that this treatment of Camomons was wrong. What this also means is that we can never really compare Camomons to its replacement (whether that be GG or w/e else) because said replacement is (rightfully!) getting a leg up right from the beginning with its inclusion in our circuit.
This is precisely why I felt (and still feel) the best way to approach this issue was to give Camomons another shot, keep it for the 2022 tour season while letting it be part of the circuit and then revisiting this issue in a year (or even as soon as post OMPL). If Camo is still not doing well even after steps are taken to incentivize players to take it up, then I see no reason to drop it and I would readily accept the decision to do so.
4) This decision was rushed to a ridiculous extent
The discussion thread went up on Friday, you didn't even let OMWC reach the finals stage before putting it up. In addition, the thread has been closed after less than 5 days of it being up. That's less time than tour signups get for God's sake. I don't believe that everyone who had a stake in this decision has made their opinion known. And I think that they might have responded faster if they knew this was getting concluded so hastily lol. I had been planning to ask Siamato to chip in, for example. I understand that you had to get the circuit set up and everything, but what was stopping you from just stating that the 6th meta is getting an Open in january and deciding what this meta is going to be in the weeks leading up to the New Year?
5) The way this situation played out makes it seem like the thread was purely a formality
The thread was supposed to be about gauging community opinion on whether camo should go and what to replace it with in case it does go. The impression I got from the thread was that Camo had pretty solid support to stay. There were multiple users who were either neutral to it staying or had made strong cases for it to stay. When I saw TI give his support for Camo I was pretty sure it would stay, lmao. But then I woke up today to see that the thread was already closed and the decision to replace Camo has already been made. From the outside, this seems to me like Camo going away was already decided even before the thread was made and that thread was just a formality. Which, is imo not ok, some others might say its fine, but in any case at least make it clear that you are already sold on dropping Camo. Don't give us false hope.
I didn't make this thread to rip on GG. It's unfortunate that the situation is such as it is and in order to get Camo its spot back I need to deprive GG of their spot. But it seems to me that there's a decent amount of other community members that share this sentiment, that agree that Camo should have stayed. Obviously leaders have the final say, but the leaders don't really play in these tours so the tiers should cater to the playerbase, right?
I think Camo should be given another shot. If you guys can't do that, that's fine, I understand. But at least address these points (particularly the one about tour prestige that Camo missed out on since it wasn't included in the circuit - im sick of people citing lack of interest among good players as a reason to drop camo when its been explained multiple times what that can be attributed to) and acknowledge that its unrealistic to expect a meta to meet your standards of popularity and success when its been treated as second-rate (by second rate i mean it didn't get a spot in the circuit) since its addition to team tours.
EDIT: adding something to clariy a point (im purposely not hiding my quip cause i dont wanna misrepresent the argument, would have been better to not say that tho):
1. unofficial forum tours are not the same as circuit tours
2. beginning of gen 8 camo tours had very solid turnout, this last one was the only one with bad turnout
3. what numerous chances?
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Thanks for your post! I'll try my best to touch on the points you made where necessary and hopefully clear up some things. I have almost always defended Camomons in the past so I think this is best said coming from me.
Metagames have been given a shot in OMGS for individual tours first typically, even Camomons did have an Open in gen 7 that had poor turnout and received some backlash (which is likely why it was never given a chance in gen 8). Camomons struggled to grow after being given the same chances that the other metas thrived in and has seen backlash from the community every step of the way. While I never cared too much about the latter part with backlash, it does reach a point of backlash where people aren't trying out the meta and it contributes to the former issue.
I can certainly sympathize with the bad taste feeling of Godly Gift being immediately given those things given how much work we put in for years to get Camo those things, and I feel it breaks the natural progression that I mentioned 2 paragraphs above. However, this change was largely user-requested, including from people in the Camomons community. This change is a step in the right direction so being mad about it just because it's not the meta you wanted is a bit illogical, though again I do understand the frustration.
We did not give a time frame for the thread since we did not have one in mind- we simply wanted opinions and waited until we got a substantial amount to form a unanimous decision. I cannot speak for everyone but my personal thought process throughout the thread was as follows: I went into this thread looking for strong posts explaining why the future of whichever supported metagame is looking up. I saw a lot of great post from Inverse and Godly Gift explaining that their community was growing and they were excited to have an opportunity. I didn't really see that from the supporting Camomons posts, it was more defensive. I understand that having your spot at jeopardy does lead to some defensiveness, but I only really saw one snippet that talked about the future of Camomons rather than its past. I apologize if that was a bit rambly, I'm not great at expressing my thought process sometimes. I'm not sure what the others' thought processes were but I'm sure they were looking for similar justifications from community members.
The thread's existence does show that the OM mod team was already considering removing Camomons prior to posting it; if we weren't then there'd have been no point in the thread and it would have given other metas false hope. If you feel that it makes the thread a formality then you feel that way, I'm not going to argue semantics. Also a little unsure about when you wanted the decision to be made as "the weeks leading up to New Year's" is right now given we're only about 2 weeks out.
Camo is certainly welcome to another shot down the road, I obviously would love to see it rise up again. However for the time being, Godly Gift is going to be the 6th meta.
I hope that Camomons will turn back around to be a growing community again, but to do so this idea that people are out to get Camomons and never give it a chance needs to stop.
I agree that the details behind the removal of the Camomons ladder were poorly communicated, even I was unaware it was happening at the time. Obviously, I was fully aware of the issues the ladder had in activity and never reaching an acceptable level of plays and had expressed frustrations about it to the leadership, but I did not expect it to be removed without communication. That being said, there's never a good time to remove a ladder and lack of communication in the situation had no effect on the decision or the metagame's activity. No matter when the ladder was removed it would have continued down the path it went on.
Going to respond to these together since they touch on the same issue. While I definitely understand the frustration regarding Camomons never making it in the official circuit, I'm a little unsure what you mean by it being unfair that it wasn't automatically included. Going back to the past few years of circuits, it's been universal that metagames enter the team tour scene prior to having individual representation. Metagames have naturally progressed after being introduced into team tours and that is when they receive individual tours. AAA did not have Seasonals until 2020 and STABmons and NFE did not receive them until 2021. You say that it hasn't been given the same treatment as its 5 counterparts when in fact, it is getting the exact same treatment as them in terms of how the metagame (should have) grown.
Metagames have been given a shot in OMGS for individual tours first typically, even Camomons did have an Open in gen 7 that had poor turnout and received some backlash (which is likely why it was never given a chance in gen 8). Camomons struggled to grow after being given the same chances that the other metas thrived in and has seen backlash from the community every step of the way. While I never cared too much about the latter part with backlash, it does reach a point of backlash where people aren't trying out the meta and it contributes to the former issue.
I can certainly sympathize with the bad taste feeling of Godly Gift being immediately given those things given how much work we put in for years to get Camo those things, and I feel it breaks the natural progression that I mentioned 2 paragraphs above. However, this change was largely user-requested, including from people in the Camomons community. This change is a step in the right direction so being mad about it just because it's not the meta you wanted is a bit illogical, though again I do understand the frustration.
Again, going to respond to these together since they touch on the same thing. I'm sorry that you feel as though this decision was rushed or feel that the thread was purely a formality. You're entitled to your own opinion and I'm not really sure there's much I can do to try and sway this perception, but I do want to at least try and assure you that this decision was carefully thought out and did take the posts in the thread into account.
We did not give a time frame for the thread since we did not have one in mind- we simply wanted opinions and waited until we got a substantial amount to form a unanimous decision. I cannot speak for everyone but my personal thought process throughout the thread was as follows: I went into this thread looking for strong posts explaining why the future of whichever supported metagame is looking up. I saw a lot of great post from Inverse and Godly Gift explaining that their community was growing and they were excited to have an opportunity. I didn't really see that from the supporting Camomons posts, it was more defensive. I understand that having your spot at jeopardy does lead to some defensiveness, but I only really saw one snippet that talked about the future of Camomons rather than its past. I apologize if that was a bit rambly, I'm not great at expressing my thought process sometimes. I'm not sure what the others' thought processes were but I'm sure they were looking for similar justifications from community members.
The thread's existence does show that the OM mod team was already considering removing Camomons prior to posting it; if we weren't then there'd have been no point in the thread and it would have given other metas false hope. If you feel that it makes the thread a formality then you feel that way, I'm not going to argue semantics. Also a little unsure about when you wanted the decision to be made as "the weeks leading up to New Year's" is right now given we're only about 2 weeks out.
Camo is certainly welcome to another shot down the road, I obviously would love to see it rise up again. However for the time being, Godly Gift is going to be the 6th meta.
I'm a little unsure why you included this in your post. Nothing Kris said is untrue or unfair, and this screenshot only shows you trying to discount his statement for some arbitrary reason. People in the Camo community have had a habit of discounting the OM Mod team's opinions (especially mine in the past due to me formerly being the tier leader) and every post doing so has done nothing good for the metagame. I made this post myself because I care about Camomons and if people have a problem with me simultaneously caring about a metagame and understanding what's best for the section as a whole, then they have to deal with it. I feel like this shouldn't have to be said but posts that attack others don't help the metagame you're posting about.
I hope that Camomons will turn back around to be a growing community again, but to do so this idea that people are out to get Camomons and never give it a chance needs to stop.
Hey everyone! As gen 9 approaches, I'm gonna be going over some tentative plans for the remainder of generation 8, as well as some general updates.
Generation 8 Plans
First off, I wanna thank everyone for being so great :) really like the spot we're in at the moment, tiers feel generally healthy (or councils are working hard to address issues) and everyone is working hard to help with resources and tiering, and we've even opened up almost all of our C&C sections again! Can't thank everyone enough for supporting the community! Let's keep it up and bring this energy into the new gen! One topic I did want to bring up was metabashing
Generation 8 Plans
- OM Submissions & Tournaments Submissions
- The most important thing to note is OM Submissions will be closing up July 1st, 2022. This gives everyone 2 months to submit any OMs they'd like to see happen this generation. After that, we'll no longer be accepting any submissions for Gen 8 OMs as anything after that point likely won't be able to get any attention. After they're closed, OM Submissions won't open up again until sometime shortly into Generation 9, so have something to look forward to!
- Similar to OM Submission, tournament submissions will also be closing some time before Generation 9 starts. We don't have an exact date for the closure of the Tournament Approval Thread, but our goal is to have all tours have their signups posted before September 4th. We hope you all submit some more fun tours as we do have some free space between now and that date to fill up! We'll likely close the thread once we've approved enough tours to fill up all of the time slots, but we'll see.
- World Cup
- Mark your calendars, World Cup of OMs will be starting August 28th! We're very excited to have the 5th iteration of this tour this year, especially with Anything Goes returning to the tour and 2v2 Doubles and Godly Gift making their debut! This is a good shakeup to the past few years and we hope for this one to be our biggest World Cup yet!
- Circuit Playoffs
- Given Gen 9 will not be coming out until very late into 2022, Circuit Playoffs will be played in Generation 8 metagames. This follows what we have done in the past and ensures that the circuit will remain consistent.
- Generation 9
- As it stands, we don't have any information to share about the transition into Generation 9 yet. This will come closer to the release date as we get more information about mechanics and prepare more directly to move to a new forum. Stay tuned!
First off, I wanna thank everyone for being so great :) really like the spot we're in at the moment, tiers feel generally healthy (or councils are working hard to address issues) and everyone is working hard to help with resources and tiering, and we've even opened up almost all of our C&C sections again! Can't thank everyone enough for supporting the community! Let's keep it up and bring this energy into the new gen! One topic I did want to bring up was metabashing
- Constructive Criticism vs Metabashing
- This topic is probably one of the most relevant things in this post at the moment, and I'd like to drop a gentle reminder that metabashing is never okay. If you have complaints about the state of a particular metagame, then providing constructive criticism is always the course of action you should be taking. Metabashing accomplishes nothing and provides no content that's valuable to the councils whose hard work you're bashing. If there's no constructive criticism you can provide, then maybe just accept that you aren't a fan of the meta and leave it at that, there's so many metagames that you're bound not to like them all, but bashing a metagame just because you don't like it isn't okay either. Spread kindness and thank your council members for the hard work they do :)
- Mini "tours" thread
- This suggestion is in its very infant stage here but the goal I'd want to accomplish for this idea is have a place for more casual games and fun team events with your friends. This thread would be a hub for groups or individuals looking to play a set of games, an exhibition team match, or something like play 8s. I feel like with the circuit becoming official, we've kind of lost a little bit of the casual and fun aspects of exploring new ideas in OMs and hopefully, if this idea gets fleshed out, it will help supplement that missing piece. If you have any thoughts on this idea or suggestions for how it'd work I'd love to hear them.
- "Fun" OMs
- Everyone knows those metagame suggestions that sound fun on paper but in reality are either super complicated or completely unbalanced. The most popular example of this would be the original Shared Power. Shared Power has been able to reach some sort of stability in its updated concept while maintaining its massive popularity. But what do you do when a metagame doesn't have the spontaneous success Shared Power has. Overly complicated metagames tend to get rejected more often than not, and the same thing goes for unbalanced meta concepts. The latter has historically been off putting to the masses while having dedicated mega-fans, while the other tends to be popular with the masses but generally disliked by those who want a more competitive metagame. Both of these types of metagames tend to get pushed aside for differing reasons, but does it have to be that way? There's really not a suggestion here from me but I'd love to open up a discussion on our current standards when it relates to these types of metagames. Is having very complicated metagames a benefit to the section, or do you think our current standards gatekeeps ideas that might cause more trouble than they're worth?
- The future of Tier Shift
- I'll start out bluntly- Generation 8 Tier Shift as a concept has been a complete failure this generation from my perspective. This is not meant to be a knock at anyone running the tier, but with the cards Gen 8 dealt us, this metagame was almost destined to fail. However, one thing this generation showed from my perspective is that we can't just blindly go in and give the same Tier Shift boosts every generation without considering what the power level of tiers are. A major blunder of Tier Shift this generation in my opinion is going with the +10 boosts to every stat but HP. Currently, the tier is almost all ZU, PU, NU, or even NFE Pokemon because the power creep this gen has made these lower tier Pokemon almost as strong as Uber Pokemon. Going back to the +5 boosts would have been largely preferable in having a varied and balanced metagame that people were interested in, or at least having a discussion on it.
- On top of boosts being adjusted, Tier Shift is going to require a group effort to keep up with the tier shifts or else the metagame is just going to stay stale. If we go multiple shifts without the meta even being discussed let alone played, there becomes very little incentive to really get into the metagame. It'd be great if as a group we could give this metagame some more support next generation because I do think it has the potential to be a top OM again with the right engagement. One example that leads me to this conclusion is how popular the metagame is amongst the Tournaments room regulars. It's clear people like this concept so we need to do our best to nurture the meta next gen.