Tournament NUSD/NUPL Debriefing Thread + On RBY/GSC NU

Luck O' the Irish

banned in dc
is a Tiering Contributor
As is tradition, here's the thread for post NU Snake stuff: post sets, teams, discuss games you played here!

Part of why this isnt the "NU Snake sets thread" is because I'd like to open up discussion on NU subtours as a whole: I think this tour felt less hype compared to other NU subtours and even tier subtours, and I think a constructive community discussion would be helpful so the community can improve its team tours, especially from an engagement perspective and, assuming we continue with two team tours in the calendar year, formatting perspective.

Some discussion points:
  • What were things you liked about this tour?
  • What were things you didn't like about this tour?
  • Moving forward, would you like a second team tour to be a Snake Draft? What other formats would you like to see?
  • What are things you'd like to see with respect to NU team tour engagement, and what do you think can be improved?
  • What are some other ideas you have for NU team tours?
Gonna post my own thoughts and sets later
 
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roxie

https://www.youtube.com/@noxiousroxie
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Greetings,

There are a few topics I would like to shine a light on so I would appreciate it if this thread was treated in a serious and uniform manner instead of shitposting. I am a person of reason and my vision with this community is growth in all aspects of NU. This is not the thread for you to bicker and say needless things like “SS NU is better than RBY NU I hate it, don’t include it” and I will not hesitate infracting you because I already “verbally” warned you not to and it's disrespectful. Please make sure you read the entire post before commenting/reacting to it. Anyone is welcome to post in this thread so let’s have a meaningful and civil discussion!

Improving Quality in NUPL

This is my first NUPL and one of the main things that questioned me is the SWSH representation. I feel as if our representation should be way more significant than what it is now and if you analyze our day-to-day community members, you will notice that many of us have very little experience in past generations. Some of us even admit “I have never played ADV / DPP / BW but I can try it”.

There was a recent NUPL Format discussion before the actual tournament started and I honestly didn’t have much to say and I didn’t feel obligated to say anything due to this being my first team tournament in NU. However, I do not appreciate the arguments of “GSC isn’t competitive, it's a terrible metagame!!” when people have been actually working on the tier in the last two-ish years. I will touch on GSC NU a little bit more below so in the meantime, I’ll continue to glue my point together further down.

The reasoning on why GSC should not be included inside of NUPL is because the majority of our base community is SS and as the generations go by, I see that players gain less interest. I feel like this also applies to current past generation slots in ADV, DPP, and even BW since there were fewer BW signups than ADV & DPP. This is a team tournament, not a slot tournament and I'd feel like it'd be better to go based on our current community player base for better team synergy and development in our most prestigious tournament. The Bo3 obviously has way fewer signups but I can point out 12 players on the same skill level that would work best for the slot. We even had Sensei Axew farming the pool this season.

- SS / SS / SS / SS / SM / ORAS / Bo3 (SS + SM + ORAS) + ?

Old Gen mains don't haha my post yet, I am not suggesting to remove you guys overall from team tournaments. I will like to suggest the format shown above for next year. This eliminates the "potentially not having enough people" in our most competitive tournament and helps develop the current generation especially with the shifts and tiering adjustments. I left a question mark as the last tier and sure, you can slap BW there but that defeats my argument in "potentially not having enough people" especially when it had fewer signups than ADV/DPP but I am fine with w.e. there.

On GSC & RBY NU

Before joining the NeverUsed community, I was looking for a tier to main alongside Monotype. I didn't want to join every single tier's room so I joined the Ruins Of Alpha room and starting playing and hosting tournaments and eventually started liking NU tiers. RBY NU and GSC NU were two of the tiers I played in the room. I eventually joined the GSC NU Quality Control team for like 1 week but said I'd join later (was a tad bit occupied with a lot of tasks but I still have interest in joining) and the RBY Discord, where they actively discuss the tier and provide samples teams. My introduction to the tiers was the same as me joining the base NU community, they were friendly, actively contributing, and welcoming.

The RBY and GSC NU communities have actively been working on bans within the past year to make the tiers as competitive as possible. Both tiers also have Quality Control teams and Analyses, Sample Teams, Discussion threads, Discord chats, articles, and so much more. The first question or statement that might come to mind is, why haven't they tried incorporating themselves inside of the NU community. Its because our community hasn't been very friendly or accepting to them. I find it very disrespectful for you guys to get rejected/denied from our community and in my eyes, a contribution to our tier is a good contribution. The tiers have been developing through RoA Tournament, Ladder, Forum Discord, and even Discord tournaments. As someone that has actually read and used your resources and articles in the past, I would like to thank the past generation teams for your hard work for shaping such tiers to what it is today. I see no negative in forming a mutual bond with the Ruins of Alpha community especially seeing how small this community is. If you see any negative in how this affects our tier overall, maybe you need to take a long walk and reevaluate your opinions. You aren't forced to like or play any of these tiers & that doesn't give you the right to shittalk about them in our literal NU Discord and make them feel unwelcome.

NU "Snake Draft" Rebranding and/or Replacement Tournament
I think we can both agree that the GSC/ADV/DPP/BW communities are pretty shallow and because the player base is so low, I personally do not think it should be included inside of NUPL. However, I am not saying that past generations should be removed from NU team tournaments completely. Snake-style tournaments feel way less competitive than auction-style drafts to me and I'd prefer for our "biggest" tournament to be way more competitive than our snake-based tournament. Having a choice to bid on two historically good NU players let's say Finchinator and Garay Oak (both 30k+ in NUPL) is way better than the first two teams just getting it handed to them.

I would like for this tournament to represent our past generations instead. Did you know that our NU Classic tournament happens right BEFORE NU Snake Draft? This gives managers an amazing idea of who recently/actually plays the tier and it gives players a chance to show their skill in preparation for the tournament.

- SS / SS or SS Bo3 / SM / ORAS / BW / DPP / ADV / GSC
- SS / SS / SS or SS Bo3 / SM / ORAS / BW / DPP / ADV / GSC / RBY

The formats shown above are the visions I see for this tournament. GSC NU is now included inside of our Homefield Tournament and hopefully NU Classic in the future. I am not a huge fan of the Snake-style draft but I think I can see a justification for both kind of? SS Bo3 is something I tossed in to support my "support current generation more" argument.

This was a long post and I wanted to add a lot more..thanks for reading.
 
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Hello.

I am Reece, and I’ve been on Smogon for just over a year now. Throughout my time, the has been two old gen metagames that have stood out above the rest to me and I’ve decided to call my two main tiers, GSC UU, and GSC NU. I’ve been extremely passionate about these two metagames and been very actively playing both to help others learn them. Recently I’ve been playing NU a lot in particular, as I still think its an under explored metagame all this time later. I’ve helped several people in the RoA communities learn this tier and helped make resources about them, including something similar to the famous guides that Borat made for GSC OU.

Now, compare this to what happened when I and a few others attempted to branch the tier out to the NU community. As roxiee eluded to, the NU community just shittalks this metagame any time its brought up, calling it uncompetitive, bad, shit, fake, etc without having a single good argument as to why, as 95% of the people in the NU community have never played a single game of the new GSC NU metagame in their life but somehow have all the stuff in the world to say about the tier when lazily calling it bad without saying why. Beyond the tier itself, even its players have got attacked for some reason. I’ve said this before, but the GSC NU metagame that was in NUPL(the tier before Raichu, Poliwrath, and Golduck were banned) was bad, but just because a previous version of a metagame was not good does not mean you should automatically be so ignorant to it getting better. So say BW OU is awful because the Genesect meta was bad? I’m sorry but if this is how your community treats one of your old gens and its players without having ever played said tier then that’s pretty silly. The “nobody plays this tier aside from 2 people” card has also been pulled out, which is considering GSC NU has its own community actively playing the tier, but any time they try to introduce it here its meet with ignorance, dejection, and hate, so its no wonder there is no overlap between both communities. GSC NU has a dedicated group of people playing it, with us spending time on keeping the Viability Rankings and sample teams updated, discussing the tiers state, and even uploading GSC NU analyses to SmogDex more recently. Its just disrespectful, childish, and disheartening to us to just shit on the playerbase of a tier and undermine it just because you don’t like the tier. There’s absolutely no reason for any of this hating on GSC NU players bullshit at all.

GSC NU is a pretty solid metagame, its very skill intensive and pretty diverse(over 70 mons on the VR!) with many solid Pokemon and playstyles to build. Not only that, its a very fast paced tier despite the reputation GSC as a generation has, with the tier being mostly dominated by powerful offensive Pokemon like Xatu, Dugtrio, Kingler, Primeape and many more. GSC NU is a much more fast paced metagame without Raichu/Poliwrath/Golduck, and with much less stall and all the other bullshit that made it previously bad. Xatu is far less centralizing than Raichu was, as there are many more mons able to reliably handle it and it can be broken through by many strong offensive Pokemon. The tier is a lot more diverse and fun to play/watch now. Offensive teams are far in a way the most dominant and stall is pretty mediocre in my opinion. There are things in this tier like Baton Pass that are healthy for the tier because its simply not broken but still good. The tier is generally pretty fun and I’ve seen positive feedback on it from many people trying it in the RoA communities. The unique matchups that the top Pokemon of the metagame have against each other make it really interesting to me. I’d really love to see this tier be expanded to more communities and would love to see itself grow. Regarding its inclusion in NU tournaments, it is true that its obviously not in the community at all currently(already stated why..), so that’s why I support the idea of an NUFPL. It introduces both GSC NU and RBY NU to the community and also helps with proving player skills, similar to how UUFPL introduced RBY to the UU community pretty well.

Edit: made post less dumb lol....
 
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Ren-chon

Lifesbane, 36 layers. How does it look?
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I honestly hate the idea of rebranding either of these tournaments (NUPL format, and Snakes name). Theres absolutely no reason why we should make such drastic changes to NUPL. Adding or removing a slot is fine but making it a newer gen-esche tournament would go directly against the whole purpose of the tournament which is exactly bringing together folks from all over, specially regarding ADV and BW. If we are to experiment changes to such degree, we should use NUSD as a testing ground instead of NUPL. NUSD was made just to be a fun tour that people can play after NUPL since every other tier has their own PL + Another team tour, usually being a WC, whilst NU just has one. Also for the sake of god please dont name it NU Farm League, the name alone basically turns the whole tour into a joke.

Now with that said, I gotta make it clear right away that Im not against the inclusion of GSC NU, RBY NU or whatever. The biggest issue is that those new tiers are only brought up when NUPL is just about to happen, and even the comments on this NUPLs format discussion thread talk about this. The problem isnt the tier being competitive enough or not, but rather that we had no idea how large the GSC NU community truly was as it was kind of "detached" from the NU community and moreso related to the GSC one, so adding the tier right away in NUPL without prior experimentation could go either really well or really, really bad, and unfortunately last time we tried things ended up on the messy end. However, I completely support the idea of adding GSC NU to Snake, after proper rebranding, to test out the waters. By rebranding NUSD away a bit from just current gens and opening up the possibility of trying new tiers could go a long way, with even the possibility of both GSC and RBY being added to the tournament (SS x3, SM x2, ORAS, GSC, and last slot being either Bo3 or RBY) as I believe their communities are different enough from the regular NU one that there would be no significant overlap of users that would play GSC/RBY or the other tiers, so theorically theyd be "self sufficient" in a way with no need to improvise slots. Gotta admit I dont know enough about the RBY NU community to ellaborate further though, but I do think we should 100% try GSC NU in our next team tour and, if that goes well, add it back to NUPL. But once again, changing NUPL to be a SS/SM/ORAS tour should never, ever be considered when we already have a 2nd team that follows basically the same scheme. Adding GSC to NUPL after proper experimenting instead of relegating it to our "class B" team tour is something that I believe would make both parties plenty happy.
 

Plague von Karma

Banned deucer.
Hi, I'd like to state a case for RBY NU. Just got told this existed. I'm not the biggest RBY NU player but I've been getting into it a bit more recently and think that it's not being given a fair trial.

I would love nothing more than to further bridge the RBY Community with CG communities, as has been attempted with UU in recent times. UUFPL was a lot of fun with minimal hiccups, and while some bad eggs wanted to stride in and rag on a generation they know nothing about, everything overall went quite nicely. In fact, further attempts are being made to bridge the gap, with Estarossa wanting to arrange workshop stuff for RBY UU. Since many of the UU players didn't understand Wrap, I've also been working on a guide to that alongside SBPC, just to aid in fixing the info divide. I can see this going over better with RBY NU, as the tier is much more "familiar" in playstyle overall...you have your type chart, your setup, etc. Repeating this would be very desirable.

On GSC & RBY NU

Before joining the NeverUsed community, I was looking for a tier to main alongside Monotype. I didn't want to join every single tier's room so I joined the Ruins Of Alpha room and starting playing and hosting tournaments and eventually started liking NU tiers. RBY NU and GSC NU were two of the tiers I played in the room. I eventually joined the GSC NU Quality Control team for like 1 week but said I'd join later (was a tad bit occupied with a lot of tasks but I still have interest in joining) and the RBY Discord, where they actively discuss the tier and provide samples teams. My introduction to the tiers was the same as me joining the base NU community, they were friendly, actively contributing, and welcoming.

The RBY and GSC NU communities have actively been working on bans within the past year to make the tiers as competitive as possible. Both tiers also have Quality Control teams and Analyses, Sample Teams, Discussion threads, Discord chats, articles, and so much more. The first question or statement that might come to mind is, why haven't they tried incorporating themselves inside of the NU community. Its because our community hasn't been very friendly or accepting to them. I find it very disrespectful for you guys to get rejected/denied from our community and in my eyes, a contribution to our tier is a good contribution. The tiers have been developing through RoA Tournament, Ladder, Forum Discord, and even Discord tournaments. As someone that has actually read and used your resources and articles in the past, I would like to thank the past generation teams for your hard work for shaping such tiers to what it is today. I see no negative in forming a mutual bond with the Ruins of Alpha community especially seeing how small this community is. If you see any negative in how this affects our tier overall, maybe you need to take a long walk and reevaluate your opinions. You aren't forced to like or play any of these tiers & that doesn't give you the right to shittalk about them in our literal NU Discord and make them feel unwelcome.
This is a fantastic analysis on the matter, but I want to add some more to it for those who still remotely question the prestige of these tiers, taking inspiration from Reeece.

I would like to emphasise that the tier has gone through some significant changes since the Golduck/PoliChu days - yes they got banned in RBY and GSC, funny how that works - namely that we're actively taking action to improve the tier. I'd wager that it's in a better state than ever, with Golem's drop drastically improving it as well. Whatever prick tries to bring up those Golduck/PoliChu days for RBY NU as an argument against it is just acting in bad faith.

Here's the progress RBY NU has had as a tier this past year, just for scale;
I ask you this: would you define RBY NU as a "niche format" with this factored in at all? If you define GSC NU as "niche" then perhaps you could define it as such, but crikey, what a comical notion that would be.

The playerbase for RBY NU has been quite stable for a while now, and any chance to grow it is appreciated. RBY has one of the most welcoming, can-do communities out of any place I have seen on Smogon. Everyone is very receptive, answers even mundane questions, and is willing to discuss anything, especially in the RBY Community Discord which is approaching 400 members! It has never been easier to get into RBY, with many on-site articles being updated for 2021 to make it even easier to dip your feet into the generation and its mainstay tiers. This is only going to improve as time goes on, mind you! Want to try RBY's formats? Hop in the RBY Discord in my signature, we even have a matchmaking channel with roles for you to ping for games. Or, enter the RBY Room on PS and ask around. You have plenty of options and it's really not difficult to find someone to spar with.

How about chucking RBY/GSC in an FPL format like UU did to test the waters, as has been proposed? I'm sure many people would love the chance to strut their stuff and further explore the tier. We've grown past the antiquated "lol RBY sux" discussion, let's discuss this rationally, yeah?
 

etern

is a Community Leaderis a Top Tiering Contributoris a Site Content Manager Alumnusis a Senior Staff Member Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnusis a Contributor Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnusis a defending SCL Championis a Former Smogon Metagame Tournament Circuit Champion
NU Leader
Including GSC and RBY in Classic sounds like a fair way of letting the community be an unbiased judge of whether or not they would fit well in our two major tournaments and generate high quality games / interest, so I'm all for that. If it goes well then adding them both to NU Snake or could be a reasonable progression, but it really (and always has) depends on whether or not there's sufficient turnout and interest this time around. While we're on the topic, Reece I understand that you feel very strongly about GSC NU, but nothing that was said by anyone was particularly egregious or offensive, so perhaps we can lighten up on the dramatics and understand that any tier attempting to assimilate into tournament culture is going to be heavily scrutinised, especially if it's a tier that received such poor reception from players and spectators alike the first time it was introduced into NUPL. You're free to disagree with arguments people have, and I'm sure nobody is doubting your love and undying dedication to bringing GSC to a wider audience, but in the same vein we are also allowed to have opinions on it. Not every opinion that goes against another is biased and lazy, at the end of the day we all (MOST of us anyway :toast:) just want to see some fun tournaments that retain their integrity and entertain everyone involved.

On the NUPL Format proposal, I have to agree with Ren-chon here that I can't support such drastic changes to NUPL. I think we'd lose a lot of charm and detract from the legacy it's built up over the years by axing so many tiers which have a devoted pool of people that come around to play ADV / DPP / BW every year. NU Snake on the other hand is new, and can be moulded any way we want realistically, which is nice considering that we have the potential to include new tiers into the mix. Though if people are against that, maybe it's worth brainstorming some other ideas like a third tournament? Just have to be careful that you don't oversaturate the circuit with nonstop team tours, or else people are gonna burn out and lose interest even faster than usual.

Don't have much else to add right now, but it's cool to see this discussion happening and hopefully once NU Classic is announced and underway we can get a better idea of how to approach things in regards to inclusivity / format.
 

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