With the ongoing discussion about WCOP's format, I wanted to start a separate conversation about the future of the tour circuit as a whole. Sometimes I think we spend so much time focusing on the individual tours that it's easy for people to forget that we're trying to plan an entire circuit, and I wanted to take a step back and talk a bit about the big picture: the official tournament circuit as a whole.
I wanted to bring up some thoughts I had about how a future Smogon tour circuit could look. Important disclaimer: this is definitely NOT supported by the TD team as a whole. This is me just talking about some potential ideas for how a tour circuit could look down the road. Again, these are NOT the views of the TD team as a whole, so please don't take them as such.
Talking to Ojama a few weeks ago, he mentioned the idea of having a three-pronged team tour structure where one tour focused on old gens, one focused on the current gen and one focused on lower tiers. I've got to say, I like that idea a lot (though maybe not necessarily in the exact fashion Ojama envisioned). If I were completely making these decisions on my own, I'd do just that: I would remove lower tiers from SPL, make WCOP all current gen OU, and replace Snake with an official version of LTPL (essentially a lower tier version of SPL, though if it became official I would want to change the name). I feel like this would fix a lot of issues. A lower tier-focused official team tour would make tier inclusion on the lower tier side far easier as opposed to having to pick and choose with what is included in SPL, while SPL without lower tiers would have the freedom to increase SM OU slots and incorporate every generation without needing to expand indefinitely or start arbitrarily excluding things. It also would satisfy my desire for balance: old gens and lower tiers would have equal inclusion in team tours, and WCOP would be the bridge between them: a team tour that used the "neutral" option of current gen OU so that it could focus on the community aspect of the tour.
Diving deeper into the above: SPL gets to focus on all generations of OU. It's the premier league, so it brings in all the all-stars past and present, and showcases every single generation of Smogon OU. It gets left with plenty of breathing room to expand down the road as new gens come out, while still keeping all the elements that make it a great tour. LTPL (again, change the name) keeps that tried and true format but instead shifts the focus onto the lower tiers, which are an incredibly important part of the current Smogon community. It will also help to grow and develop those tiers by encouraging players who traditionally remain in OU to start branching out into those tiers. I mean hell, some of the most creative teambuilding I saw in all of Snake came from Roro dropping into UU. Why not encourage that even further, while also expanding representation for lower tiers in official team tours? Meanwhile, in my eyes, the only representation that matters with WCOP is regional representation, not tier representation. Bringing geographical communities together—that's the whole point of the tour, right? Current gen OU makes it an even playing field across the board and keeps the focus on the communities, rather than the tiers.
Again, these are probably pipe dreams. SPL is a great tour and a lot of people have serious concerns with potentially fiddling with it, and not everyone likes the idea of scrapping Snake or making something like LTPL official. And, as we can see in the other thread, all CG OU WCOP is clearly not a super popular decision either. I also think any of these suggestions proposed individually would probably be met with an incredibly negative response, but I personally think that the overall effect would be a good one.
That covers team tours. For individual tours, I think that by far the best individual tour is stour. It's exciting, it's fun, it has a really cool live aspect that sets it apart from the rest. Even though my own schedule means I can almost never participate in it, it's definitely my favorite to watch. If it were all up to me, I'd try to figure out another tour that could capture some of what stour brings to the table to replace one of our existing individual tours (probably OLT; it has some good aspects but it's probably our least "essential" individual tour). I know ABR in particular has been pushing hard to get Frontier fixed up and working again, and I think it could be a great option. Six individual tours (counting stour twice, since it happens twice a year) and three team tours seems like the right balance to me; team tours are exclusive by nature, so there should be fewer team tours than individuals, and too many individual tours just gets exhausting. This makes the schedule easy to properly stagger also: an individual tour starting every other month, and a team tour starting every four months.
Why am I bringing this up? Well, because sometimes I think that during discussions about tours and formats, it's easy to just focus on the individual tour and not on the future of the tour circuit as a whole. Part of that is our fault as TDs; while I've expressed my vision of an ideal tour circuit to the other TDs (and was met with some serious opposition; I'm serious when I say that this is very much just my own opinion and one not shared by the TD team as a whole), I've been a TD for months and never actually brought it up with the community as a whole. The same is largely true for the others as well. Every member of the current TD team cares so much about tours, and every one of us has a vision of our own. I don't know if anyone particularly cares what mine is, but I think sometimes that vision can get lost in these discussions, so I wanted to bring it up here.
I also wanted to make a place where people can discuss how they feel the actual general structure of the official tour circuit should look in an ideal world. I doubt we'll ever come up with a solution that will make everybody happy, but I'd be interested to see what other people think the ideal official tour circuit should look like. How do you think the big picture should look?
I wanted to bring up some thoughts I had about how a future Smogon tour circuit could look. Important disclaimer: this is definitely NOT supported by the TD team as a whole. This is me just talking about some potential ideas for how a tour circuit could look down the road. Again, these are NOT the views of the TD team as a whole, so please don't take them as such.
Talking to Ojama a few weeks ago, he mentioned the idea of having a three-pronged team tour structure where one tour focused on old gens, one focused on the current gen and one focused on lower tiers. I've got to say, I like that idea a lot (though maybe not necessarily in the exact fashion Ojama envisioned). If I were completely making these decisions on my own, I'd do just that: I would remove lower tiers from SPL, make WCOP all current gen OU, and replace Snake with an official version of LTPL (essentially a lower tier version of SPL, though if it became official I would want to change the name). I feel like this would fix a lot of issues. A lower tier-focused official team tour would make tier inclusion on the lower tier side far easier as opposed to having to pick and choose with what is included in SPL, while SPL without lower tiers would have the freedom to increase SM OU slots and incorporate every generation without needing to expand indefinitely or start arbitrarily excluding things. It also would satisfy my desire for balance: old gens and lower tiers would have equal inclusion in team tours, and WCOP would be the bridge between them: a team tour that used the "neutral" option of current gen OU so that it could focus on the community aspect of the tour.
Diving deeper into the above: SPL gets to focus on all generations of OU. It's the premier league, so it brings in all the all-stars past and present, and showcases every single generation of Smogon OU. It gets left with plenty of breathing room to expand down the road as new gens come out, while still keeping all the elements that make it a great tour. LTPL (again, change the name) keeps that tried and true format but instead shifts the focus onto the lower tiers, which are an incredibly important part of the current Smogon community. It will also help to grow and develop those tiers by encouraging players who traditionally remain in OU to start branching out into those tiers. I mean hell, some of the most creative teambuilding I saw in all of Snake came from Roro dropping into UU. Why not encourage that even further, while also expanding representation for lower tiers in official team tours? Meanwhile, in my eyes, the only representation that matters with WCOP is regional representation, not tier representation. Bringing geographical communities together—that's the whole point of the tour, right? Current gen OU makes it an even playing field across the board and keeps the focus on the communities, rather than the tiers.
Again, these are probably pipe dreams. SPL is a great tour and a lot of people have serious concerns with potentially fiddling with it, and not everyone likes the idea of scrapping Snake or making something like LTPL official. And, as we can see in the other thread, all CG OU WCOP is clearly not a super popular decision either. I also think any of these suggestions proposed individually would probably be met with an incredibly negative response, but I personally think that the overall effect would be a good one.
That covers team tours. For individual tours, I think that by far the best individual tour is stour. It's exciting, it's fun, it has a really cool live aspect that sets it apart from the rest. Even though my own schedule means I can almost never participate in it, it's definitely my favorite to watch. If it were all up to me, I'd try to figure out another tour that could capture some of what stour brings to the table to replace one of our existing individual tours (probably OLT; it has some good aspects but it's probably our least "essential" individual tour). I know ABR in particular has been pushing hard to get Frontier fixed up and working again, and I think it could be a great option. Six individual tours (counting stour twice, since it happens twice a year) and three team tours seems like the right balance to me; team tours are exclusive by nature, so there should be fewer team tours than individuals, and too many individual tours just gets exhausting. This makes the schedule easy to properly stagger also: an individual tour starting every other month, and a team tour starting every four months.
Why am I bringing this up? Well, because sometimes I think that during discussions about tours and formats, it's easy to just focus on the individual tour and not on the future of the tour circuit as a whole. Part of that is our fault as TDs; while I've expressed my vision of an ideal tour circuit to the other TDs (and was met with some serious opposition; I'm serious when I say that this is very much just my own opinion and one not shared by the TD team as a whole), I've been a TD for months and never actually brought it up with the community as a whole. The same is largely true for the others as well. Every member of the current TD team cares so much about tours, and every one of us has a vision of our own. I don't know if anyone particularly cares what mine is, but I think sometimes that vision can get lost in these discussions, so I wanted to bring it up here.
I also wanted to make a place where people can discuss how they feel the actual general structure of the official tour circuit should look in an ideal world. I doubt we'll ever come up with a solution that will make everybody happy, but I'd be interested to see what other people think the ideal official tour circuit should look like. How do you think the big picture should look?