Implemented The Alt Rule

[MAVERICK SHOOTERS]

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

Some Examples

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.

 

[goldmason]

Gm.

TDs have already been internally discussing this and have landed on amending the alt rule to only globally voiced accounts. We are still discussing legacy accounts and other smaller details. Gonna lock this.

Edit: reopening since that's easier than a new thread

 

[lax]

If I realized this thread was made at the time, I probably would've commented on it

Apparently a lot of people didn't see it too, cuz 14 people liked this OP on Feb 2 and apparently TD's already decided on changing the rule prior bc it got implemented 8 minutes later. By my calculations, this isn't a lot of time for people to respond and voice any concerns

A big issue I have with this rule is that it enforces concrete thinking. What is concrete thinking, you might ask? Well, here's a definition from webmd:
"‌Concrete thinking is a more literal form of thinking that focuses on the physical world. Concrete thinkers may take information at face value without thinking beyond or generalizing the information to other meanings or situations.‌ While concrete thinking is needed, relying exclusively or too much on this style of thinking can impede learning, empathy, and the ability to relate to others."

I think it's incredibly easy to identify bad faith actors and ppl trolling, but what about people who've been using alts for years on end? Personally, I've used the account "Lax D Stax" since Gen 9 started which has been, unfortunately, 4 years now coming up on 5. I've played the majority of my team tournament games on this very account, and it's not simply about "creative expression" and more an identity I made for myself. When I first started playing important tour games like official playoffs and tiebreaks, using accounts like "lax on stax" was a part of my identity. It's fun and shows the community a piece of my personality.

Now, prior to "Lax D Stax", I've used many many different and wacky names, and I can get how that can be confusing to the average tournament watcher, all 100 of us. I get why 21 people (the likes on mason's post) (not serious) think this rule is a positive thing to simplify the times for new viewers, but context matters, for literally everything.

(Using the examples in the OP) Nat actively pushes rules to their very limits, being proud of the changes she's created in the tour policy space. This is something I find different from DCA wanting to hype his team up and use an homage to his manager PDC. What stops TD's or hosts from going "Hey, next time you obviously troll and rule-push, we'll infract you"? Why can't we give more consideration and go "Hm, THE DCA SHOW vs. Attribute is probably.. DCA vs. Attribute".

I feel like it can be completely up to host and TD discretion on if a name is allowed and maybe can even be limited to 1 or 2 names you can use in a season to "creatively express yourself" (wording I don't agree on that the OP used). They can get approved or even issued a global voice if the player determines it's the main account they'd like to use, forfeiting their original account's global voice. This is something I requested and was denied. To me, it's obviously Me, lax, who is playing on a voiced Lax D Stax account, but it's "less recognizable than my forum name".

If a new community member sees Lax D Stax vs THE DCA SHOW, how confusing is it really gonna be? If you have a new interest in Smogon tournaments, you probably will check the forums or ask someone else about the history or significance of a particular game. Or, you already know it because it's not really like people randomly find Smogon and instantly start investing themselves into tournaments. Everything starts from the groundwork with maybe watching replays of tiers you like from PS, then following a specific player whose teams you really like. Or, you love the tier UU, enjoy the ladder and the PS room, then start playing tournaments from other people's suggestions. There is no real "just found smogtours, WTF is a 'THE DCA SHOW'? I'm not watching anymore."

A lot of people will see this and think who even cares? If you're a player and you express(ed) yourself through your name, your nicknames on mons, your playstyle, and the pokemon you use, you probably care even a little bit. I think even the tiny bit of care should enable an exception to a rule that was really created for no useful reason.

 

[Mareep]

Hi I solved this months ago but got rejected immediately because "just obey the Alt Rule" but since we are revisiting it and all..

When you want to play on an alt but still use your custom avatars, you simply use the /nick function - I am asking for the implementation of a different command (/alt or /alias are my suggestions) that creates a "status" showing your original account like the below;

I have seen like three people use the existing /status command ever on PS! and figure either replacing it directly (ideal solution) or implementing a similar textbox using the /alt command below the alt name is easy enough and solves the never ending Alt Rule debacle. And, to respond to Hecate's "incredibly easily abused" argument, just simply make it not easily abusable? Again, either replace the /status command with this 1:1 (ideal!) or keep the status as it is and make this different by changing the font or text color or something.

At this point if you're playing against somebody in a tour and they are on an alt, and you don't trust them, there are plenty of ways to verify the alt. Why not make their alt information readily available while allowing the players to express themselves?

 

[Triangles]

Lax post is completely right. Every single move that TDs have made in the last 10 years has been directed at removing all individuality and personality from the tournament scene. When you try and make competitive Pokemon into a uniform product, you deny what it essentially is - a community of individuals doing it for the love of the game. Let players alt to their heart's content

 

[QT]

Nah, I’m sorry, the Alt Rule was a really good change, and if anything I would expand it to include more tours. It’s an improvement as a spectator and as a competitor, along much the same lines as the increased mandates of replays in individuals.

Since the broader benefits have already been brought up multiple times in previous threads, though, I’m going to focus more on my personal experience. I don’t religiously follow every tournament on this site - that would be completely impossible on my schedule, and I’m not really interested in the effort that would take, but I am pretty often on smogtours for things and I will watch games while I’m waiting for my opponent to show up or for a teammate’s scheduled game to happen and so forth. And people having recognizable names is a big improvement for my experience as a spectator here. I’ve come to recognize a number of players over time I didn’t know before, both on the explicit level and on a “hey that looks familiar” sense. And this has gotten much better since the most recent alt rule change, just as in turn that was a big improvement over the previous Wild West.

It’s also good for tournaments I *am* following, though. When matches get linked in, way, the OM tournaments discord, chart will do a popout with the players names, and there’s a world of difference between being able to see who is playing and figuring out if I’m interested to go spectate and having to spend a few minutes digging to find out. It means I end up watching more games, because I’ll watch everything I expect is worth watching rather than everything that’s worth digging for and then watching. To the extent that the alt rule is redundant here, it’s that a lot of people will follow the rule even when it’s not enforced, and that one person would usually be recognizable even if their opponent isn’t; when it’s not the rules, though, you can and do get plenty of both, which is worse than the sum of its parts.

 

[Leni]

I think the biggest argument for keeping a recognizable, fixed player identity is pretty simple: you shouldn't have to guess who is playing. The goal shouldn't be to make it possible to figure out who is playing. The goal should be to make it obvious who is playing.

This matters especially for newer players, who won't necessarily know everyone's alts, but honestly there are enough players in these tournaments that even older players can't be expected to recognize every unrelated account. If I see a game and have to think "wait, who is actually playing this?", I think we've already made things unnecessarily complicated.

It also creates unnecessary work for TDs/hosts. If people can freely switch between unrelated alts, someone has to/should keep track of who is behind which account in officials. With this many players, maintaining a separate list just so people can figure out who's who seems like a completely unnecessary task. As far as I'm aware, TD team is already drowning to their workload somewhat.

I think sports are a pretty good comparison here. Players obviously have nicknames and can be known by something other than their actual name, but when you watch a game, you still know which player you're watching. That's how I think it should work here too This isn't about taking away anyone's personality or creativity. You can still name your pokemons whatever you want for example.

A consistent account removes that guesswork for opponents/spectators/whomever may be watching the game live or later, while still leaving plenty of room for everyone to have their own identity. This also makes it much easier to verify that the person playing is actually the right player, rather than a shared alt abusing the system and cheating. No way TDs double checks every alt nor have the interest to do so.

 

[ninjadog]

This is not a major thing but I'm a big fan of the alt rule as it makes looking up replays spoiler free possible, the hosts in officials generally do a good job updating the replay thread but sometimes games are missed or it just isn't updated (eg. shadow vs nat happened 24 hours ago and isn't on there) and you can inadvertently see spoilers visiting the forums, so by searching one of the players' names on the replay site is how I watch all of my teammates' (or other games I want to see) matches that happen whilst I'm asleep/busy.

 

[lax]

I’m gonna be honest that ninjadog’s post is the only one that makes sense to me. Wanting to watch a spoiler free game is valid. Just like how suspect accounts are linked to your main, I wonder if there’s a workaround. I know chaos is working on a tournament game history that does circumvent this.

The others, I don’t. We shouldn’t pretend that there is a large casual community of players that watch tournament games. If there are, recognizable alts such as (sorry to keep using this) THE DCA SHOW aren’t going to confuse people already in touch with tournaments.

These tournaments should be made for the players convenience and rules should be built around such. There are cases of rule exploitation such as me going “primal axe” “la xola” (idk) or something random that very clearly can be called out and prevented from happening again.

To me, I think it’s fair that you shouldn’t need to Guess who’s playing, and there’s an easy way to allow both to happen simultaneously. We just have to expand the context behind the situation and think extra hard about whether enforcing such a concrete rule actually benefits the site.

We should allow people to be themselves. It’s incredibly easy to create a rule saying “it has to be a recognizable alt including your forum name, dependent on TD/host ruling” and there might be one or two bad faith actors like there always have been, but is that really worth completely eliminating anyone else? Is this really a pain to the host if not many people actually care about fucking with the rules? You might get 2 cases a whole year of rule exploitation regarding a username.

Have live viewer numbers gone up since the rule was created? Are more people now watching because it’s “simpler”? We play this site for the love of the game. Let’s not restrict players even further for no real reason.

 

[Expulso]

I think the rule should distinguish between recognizable names ("LAX D STAX," "THE DCA SHOW"), which are totally fine, and names that obscure your identity ("asjdkjsjekke," "dorapult"), which are against the spirit of the rule. Unless the name that "obscures your identity" is your official voiced alt.

 

[lighthouses]

this to me just comes down to what it always does with these tournaments where we want to have a hard set of rules that must be followed absolutely for everything and just never look at anything in a case by case basis
this is something that is really obvious and easy to enforce by just applying common sense, something like 'we now allow alts but we reserve the right to punish obvious breaking of the rules' where in this case imo the Nat example is an obvious case of just taking the piss the kdca alt is fine

 

[Bernardo]

Kind of crazy we're discussing this in 2026, ngl. How can we, as a community, not have this figured out yet? It's not like we've only been around since 2004...

Not taking shots at anyone, just that to me it feels like we're as a community in a constant cycle of trying to make rules while also wanting to avoid, at all costs, the conflict that comes with having rules. At the same time, we're adamant about not changing anything because change can generate new situations.

This is such a mundane and trivial matter with such an easy fix. First, what's the root of the problem? TO wants the players to be identifiable, both to make things easier for themselves and for the viewers. That gives some sort of credibility to the tour being taken seriously, and you want that in anything competitive.

Players, in the end, have this as a hobby and want to have fun, while also having the competitive advantage of making scouting mildly harder (remove hidden replays from S-tours., since I touched the subject).

In the end, not even the biggest sports in the world are that strict, and I think that says a lot when, in some shape or form, we try to model ourselves after them. And yeah, both Lighthouse and Expulso are just right. Make the rule say the name must be recognizable, and let's use common sense. It really isn't that hard.

A few examples of what I was talking about in traditional sports:

 

[Éric]

I think the rule should distinguish between recognizable names ("LAX D STAX," "THE DCA SHOW"), which are totally fine, and names that obscure your identity ("asjdkjsjekke," "dorapult"), which are against the spirit of the rule. Unless the name that "obscures your identity" is your official voiced alt.

i agree completely and i would add the christian dior shit giannis always pulls and others here too. you guys really dont realize how useful being able to identify who are these people is as a spectator. i think lax might be envisioning a complwtely casual spectator community and thus why he thinks theres very few people like that, but the reality is that the vast majority of official smogon tournament watchers are the random mainers you wouldnt know but they know you, and to us some form of alt rule means we have enough context to understand what we are watching and what it means. as i said i do agree w expulso and lighthouses in that theres alts and alts. i can infer from context who lax d stax is, or even distinguish the serene grace alts where he would just capitalize and separate random letters. my good friend juansg has been playing w the alt dazzle dazzle for longer than hes had a smogon account but they wouldnt allow him to voice it when he got drafted in this scl, which sucks but i understand it bc the lc community knows who dazzle dazzle is, but the rest of scl doesnt and that would take away from their experience watching

 

[obii]

as someone who is more of a casual spectator nowadays, im pretty confused because the issue of identifying who is playing is as simple as "who is dazzle dazzle?", to me that feels like a non-intrusive solution that doesnt get in the way of creative expression cus idk... i dont think my experience is more valuable than the actual people playing the tournament, it feels almost entitled. if smogon's priority is to optimize casual spectator enjoyment, then maybe? but do we have actual evidence that this does improve the spectator experience aside from second-hand anecdotes? in my experience, some of my fondest memories spectating are seeing players play on cool alts, there's a different level of hype seeing welliou play on tribal chief, or giannis on christian dior because these names carry a persona with them that goes beyond just recognizability. back in 2019 i believe, seeing "laximus prime" play against my teammates felt a lot more hype than if it was just "lax", seeing "POSHO THE THUNDER" play stour finals is a lot more fun than seeing just "posho". is this a big thing? no, not really, in the same way recognizing players is not a big thing either, but i did want to talk about the other side of the spectator experience

im not sure if others feel similarly but i guess i come from a time where a nickname is tied to a player's identity just as much as their username/smogtours alt is. there was a period of time where if you said "the kingpin" or "the goat", everyone would know who you're talking about, so its a similar extension

knowing whos playing frankly seems like such a non-issue that im pretty surprised it seems to be valued more than letting players take on personas and add a lot more fun to the storyline of tournaments.

i understanding wanting some form of rule to prevent nonsense alts by bad actors, but i just dont see why we need to, for lack of a better term, automate rulings for a situation that clearly requires human judgement

edit: is there anything wrong with mareep's proposed solution above? seems like a technical fix is the obvious one instead of going back n forth lol

 

[shiloh]

The alt rule is something thats been on and off since it was first added to tournaments in 2022, this isn't something that been brought up lightly or without discussion. The reason for the rule changing during SPL is because the subjectivity of deciding alts was still not clear enough and was ending up with people not liking how the rules were being applied even though when theres a level of subjectivity to a rule there will never be agreement, kind of by definition. To make it easier for the hosts and TD team the idea of keeping it just to voiced alts was much more appealing than removing the voice rule as a whole, because the last time the community was surveyed 88% of the community wanted an alt rule of some kind, and the TDs do as well.

TDs discussed it as well, and we are not planning on changing the current alt rule from being voiced alts only and adding back in layers of subjectivity that would be litigated on a week by week basis. It also goes against the point of having an alt rule if someone is able to use a different name 9 weeks of a tournament, even if their username is easy to identify within those 9 distinct alts. We did discuss bringing back some element of subjectivity to the rule, and make it a step further than the last time by forcing the username to be even more clear, but at this point it would be the third back and forth with us changing the rule and as with anything that will have some form of subjectivity there will be inevitable cases where people claim bias for alts being allowed / not allowed, etc. We have no desire to deal with that again when we believe the voice rule works as intended and makes the rules much easier to enforce.

However, we do understand that people being able to change alts for team tours has been a part of Smogon culture for a long time (i played all my official tour games on an alt that wasn't my main for like 5 years straight). The way to get around that isn't by changing the alt rule though. We are going to update the Smogtours voicing rules to let people change their voiced accounts once a year, instead of being locked to whatever your Smogon username is. The voiced alt still has to have your smogon username prominent and easily identfiable, i.e lax d stax is allowed but la xd stax would not be. This lets people still have some freedom with their tournament alts while keeping them easy for spectators to keep track of, and over the course of a tournament as well its much easier to follow if you are just associating one alt name per person, instead of potentially 9. Anyone who tries to abuse the alt rule by changing the spacing of their name for games or anything like that will just be lose voice on that account and be forced to use their main one.

We hope people are happy with this being the change we will have going forward as it lets us keep the alt rule as it is right now because it is a lot easier for us to enforce and apply and makes the rule a lot easier to understand. Just because we we are a community of individuals doing something for the love of the game doesn't mean that we should not update and change our ruleset to become more inviting for the broader community and make things like the spectator experience more optimal, even at the cost of changing parts of our systems that we have had for years. When 90% of the community is asking for something like an alt rule it isn't just the TDs choosing to do this out some hatreds towards personality or individuality, its to try and stay modern and not get into the mindset of stagnation or defaulting to the status quo just because thats what has worked in the past.

We also aren't set on this being the way to implement the rule as well, we are fairly strongly against any subjective handling of the alt rule itself due to the fact we've tried that twice now and both times it has not worked out. We can see that to some people it looks like we still will have that subjectivity since we are letting people change their voiced accounts, but that is only going to be once a year for each player instead of once a week, and it becomes much easier to deal with if they have to get the account voiced before the game since we can let them know the alt would not be allowed by just not voicing the account, instead of shifting it to being a warning or infraction after the game has taken place.

---

Here are the old threads as well if people wanted to go through them, the last one has the survey results:

Implemented Thread 'please ban alts in team tours'

Feb 27, 2022

there is enough creative expression in nicknaming your pokemon. it makes the game less enjoyable when i do not know who is playing and have to hunt for the battlers. standardizing alts benefits spectators, prevents players from being goofy, keeps the chat from being clogged with the same question repeatedly, and is just generally better.

please!

• dice
• Replies: 26
• Forum: Tournament Policy Archive

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Implemented Post in thread 'ending the alting rule debate'

Dec 19, 2022

The alt rule for the upcoming SPL is simply to not use any inappropriate alt names during your battles, and this will be moderated as it always has been.

You are allowed to use alts in battles. It is encouraged, but not mandated, to identify yourself at the start of the game when using an alt.

In addition, please be sure to verify the identity of your opponent before challenging or accepting.

• Finchinator

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Implemented Thread 'Bring back the alt rule.'

Jul 1, 2024

Okay team I've been saying I'll make this thread for months but I have finally written it.

Bring back the alt rule.

"But Theia, what is the alt rule?"

Well before it was that you have to play on a name that matches your forum name or a name you specifically signed up with.

This was done for a couple of reasons:
- Reduce confusion bc people don't know who's playing a match
- It's reportedly more hype to see people playing on their main names and not some dumb shit
- Sogeking had a nasty habit of faking being people's opponents
- Mostly that first thing though

The problem was that the...

• Maia

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Implemented Post in thread 'Bring back the alt rule.'

Jan 10, 2025

The Alt Rule is coming back.

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

The purpose of The Alt Rule is to improve the spectator experience.

• Knowing players' identities enhances engagement and makes tournaments easier to follow. Spectators find random or obscure names confusing.
• Ensures replays are easier to locate and watch, improving the experience for future viewers.
• Using recognizable accounts...

• freezai

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[Bernardo]

We are going to update the Smogtours voicing rules to let people change their voiced accounts once a year, instead of being locked to whatever your Smogon username is. The voiced alt still has to have your smogon username prominent and easily identfiable, i.e lax d stax is allowed but la xd stax would not be. This lets people still have some freedom with their tournament alts while keeping them easy for spectators to keep track of, and over the course of a tournament as well its much easier to follow if you are just associating one alt name per person, instead of potentially 9. Anyone who tries to abuse the alt rule by changing the spacing of their name for games or anything like that will just be lose voice on that account and be forced to use their main one.

I think this is a reasonable solution. I would just suggest to make it once every 6 months or 2x every year i don't know what would be best ... People are dumb and we will have people regrating their change every once in a while and since we have main tours where we have this in mind SCL and SPL would be fair for players to be able to set a new acc before each one at least.