According to the implementation of last year's alt rule thread,
In Official Smogon Team Tournaments, a username must now meet one of two conditions:
-Voiced account on the Smogtours server
-Closely resembles Forum Name and contains Forum Name in an identifiable way
Simply speaking, this compromise hits in the middle and serves neither side, nor the spectators anything meaningful. The current rule allows for players to use any alt names approved by tour hosts which resembles their name for the purpose of "creative expression". This allows for players to use new alt names every week to make scouting take more steps for opponents, makes it worse for viewer experience as they are not able to identify the players, and match just loses the aura seeing big names playing in the biggest tour with random nicknames, let's take last week's example from SPL:
(Just the most immediate example I could find, nothing against the player as it's allowed for now)
A regular viewer is simply not going to be able to tell that the player who is playing is Nat even if it is in the alt name, which makes it confusing for people not in the loop to understand who is playing. This aside, viewers not in the loop of tournament scene are much more likely to remember seeing a player playing on their main account every week making it much easier to follow a player's run and remembering who they are instead of having to figure out.
Now while there are some decent example of it actually being used to have a little bit of creative expression, taking example from last week of SPL again:
A play on PDC's alt (The PDC Show) with close resemblance to kDCA's forum name (which he almost got infracted for while the above one was allowed?), my argument would be that this doesn't really serve any purpose, people have 6 pokemon and nicknames for actual creative expression if they do want to do that, and it is something that actually does show creativity that people will remember, I don't think anyone is remembering random new nicknames every week of someone.
Another point is that the alt rule highly favours people with short usernames and they can get away with random names
Joke messages, but something they can easily do if they wanted to
So even the creative expression middle ground doesn't serve purpose to people with longer names and caters heavily to shorter username accounts
Even if someone may like to play on new alts every week because they enjoy doing that, I do not think the cons and annoyance has even close to enough benefit of just changing the rule
My Proposal:
In Official Smogon Team Tournaments and Playoffs of Smogon Trophy Tournaments, a username must now meet one of two conditions:
-Voiced account on the Smogtours server
-Matches the Forum Name exactly [for people who want to keep their legacy voiced acc's and want to play with their forum name]
Tl;dr The current alt rule is in the middle, either allow all alts which should be a non starter, or do it so people only play on voiced account or matching their forum name, this makes it easier for viewers to follow, big names playing is immediately recognizable, makes scouting for opponent easier, the previous reasoning for allowing some "creative expression" to give some leeway with alt names was just not real and has served no purpose.
In Official Smogon Team Tournaments, a username must now meet one of two conditions:
-Voiced account on the Smogtours server
-Closely resembles Forum Name and contains Forum Name in an identifiable way
Simply speaking, this compromise hits in the middle and serves neither side, nor the spectators anything meaningful. The current rule allows for players to use any alt names approved by tour hosts which resembles their name for the purpose of "creative expression". This allows for players to use new alt names every week to make scouting take more steps for opponents, makes it worse for viewer experience as they are not able to identify the players, and match just loses the aura seeing big names playing in the biggest tour with random nicknames, let's take last week's example from SPL:
(Just the most immediate example I could find, nothing against the player as it's allowed for now)
A regular viewer is simply not going to be able to tell that the player who is playing is Nat even if it is in the alt name, which makes it confusing for people not in the loop to understand who is playing. This aside, viewers not in the loop of tournament scene are much more likely to remember seeing a player playing on their main account every week making it much easier to follow a player's run and remembering who they are instead of having to figure out.
Now while there are some decent example of it actually being used to have a little bit of creative expression, taking example from last week of SPL again:
A play on PDC's alt (The PDC Show) with close resemblance to kDCA's forum name (which he almost got infracted for while the above one was allowed?), my argument would be that this doesn't really serve any purpose, people have 6 pokemon and nicknames for actual creative expression if they do want to do that, and it is something that actually does show creativity that people will remember, I don't think anyone is remembering random new nicknames every week of someone.
Another point is that the alt rule highly favours people with short usernames and they can get away with random names
Joke messages, but something they can easily do if they wanted to
Even if someone may like to play on new alts every week because they enjoy doing that, I do not think the cons and annoyance has even close to enough benefit of just changing the rule
My Proposal:
In Official Smogon Team Tournaments and Playoffs of Smogon Trophy Tournaments, a username must now meet one of two conditions:
-Voiced account on the Smogtours server
-Matches the Forum Name exactly [for people who want to keep their legacy voiced acc's and want to play with their forum name]
Tl;dr The current alt rule is in the middle, either allow all alts which should be a non starter, or do it so people only play on voiced account or matching their forum name, this makes it easier for viewers to follow, big names playing is immediately recognizable, makes scouting for opponent easier, the previous reasoning for allowing some "creative expression" to give some leeway with alt names was just not real and has served no purpose.
