Well i suppose i wouldnt be able to tell a very good story if i didnt join! #notdead
Also HYPPEEEEEEE!!!!! first one ill be able to play.
Also HYPPEEEEEEE!!!!! first one ill be able to play.
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UnderUsed Majors I Discussion Thread
- Thread starter IronBullet
- Start date
$5 says it's gonna be the new gen by the time this is over and nobody's gonna care lol
Still excited to join though
Still excited to join though
We picked this date because it wouldn't have any conflict with SuMo release, even if we have to deal with unexpected delays mid-tournament.
I'll be here waiting for my $5
that depends on how many people sign up and how hard everyone johns the finals but youre probably right
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What's the significance of this? Didn't really understand the selection process and why it's being done.
Looking forward to playing, been hoping for more UU tour activity for a while so this was very welcome!
To make sure top players don't end up in the same pool. Diversifying the pool leaders will help even out the difficulty of each pool.
oh ok, sometimes I think in tours like this the random aspect is better cos who doesn't love a group of death, but fair enough :P
Thanks for answering so quick!
Thanks for answering so quick!
It's a couple of hours early, but I've got limited internet this weekend and I figure better early than late....
Sign-ups are up in the Circuit Tournaments sub-forum!
Sign-ups are up in the Circuit Tournaments sub-forum!
For those signing up im intrested in what core people are going to build around to do round 1. I know the krok+syl core will be everywhere but what else will we see to stop that or to be anti meta.
We'll definitely see a rise in the amount of builds utilizing the Celebi+Sylveon+Krookodile cookie cutter core, as you've already mentioned. You can also check monthly usages for different pokemon, movesets, etc here and this should give you a good idea of what you'll need to prep for if you want to get far in this tour. At this stage all we can do is make educated guesses regarding the usages of certain pokemon in UU, and these guesses will of course become more and more solidified as we notice common teambuilding trends and tendencies throughout this tour.
When does the pools phase of the competition start and how long will the round last? I've signed up but I'm away from any internet access from the 19th-23rd inclusive and was wondering whether I should retract my signup or not.
You should be fine if this holds true.
You'll be okay, no sweat :)
As Leo stated, stage one will last 2-3 weeks, depending on pool size. Once sign-ups close and we have a hard figure, we'll be able to say for sure.
That said... sign-ups are closing soon! Tell your friends! Tell your family! This is your last chance to participate in the FIRST EVER UU Majors!
That said... sign-ups are closing soon! Tell your friends! Tell your family! This is your last chance to participate in the FIRST EVER UU Majors!
Sign-ups are now closed. There will be a total of 16 pools, with 10 players per pool.
Pools will be drawn publicly in the PS! UnderUsed room on SUNDAY, September 18, 2016 at 11 AM EST (GMT -4). Pool leaders will also be announced at this time. Once pools are drawn, we will post the opening of Stage 1.
Hope to see some of you there!
EDIT: To clarify, since a few people have asked - it is not required that you be there for the pool selection. We're just doing it publicly for a bit of fun, for anyone who wants to watch. The pools will be posted on Smogon once they are drawn.
Pools will be drawn publicly in the PS! UnderUsed room on SUNDAY, September 18, 2016 at 11 AM EST (GMT -4). Pool leaders will also be announced at this time. Once pools are drawn, we will post the opening of Stage 1.
Hope to see some of you there!
EDIT: To clarify, since a few people have asked - it is not required that you be there for the pool selection. We're just doing it publicly for a bit of fun, for anyone who wants to watch. The pools will be posted on Smogon once they are drawn.
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Okay, so... I have a lot of interconnected questions/concerns about this format. The main issues I have with this format are as follows:
1) Why do only 2 players advance out of a 10-player group stage? This is the biggest issue I have. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single eSports tournament where the group stage attrition rate was anywhere even close to this high. Normally, 40-50% of players in the group stage advance to the bracket stage. This holds true across League of Legends, DotA, StarCraft, CS:GO, and more. While Pokemon may not be a major eSport, there's a good reason that the vast majority of professional tournament organizers handle their group stages so as to allow roughly half the players or teams to advance to the bracket stage.
2) Why is the pool size 10 players? Is there no concern that, since only 2 players out of 10 advance, that players will stop caring once their record definitively prevents them from advancing? A ban from the next official tour is hardly an effective deterrent when half the people signed up for this ORAS tour won't even care about playing an old gen tour. Being banned from the next UUPL might work as an effective deterrent, assuming that the player who decides to stop playing is of sufficient caliber to be a prospective draft pick (which could very likely be the case when every group is a group of death because four out of five players who sign up fail to advance to bracket stage). Banning from next year's UU Open for dropping out of UU Major would be absolutely stupid because it's 9 months away and punishing someone for that long for an infraction this minor would be utterly ridiculous.
3) Why is there nothing even resembling seeding (besides the selection of 16 pool leaders out of 160 participants) to ensure that, since only a tiny fraction of the players in the tournament will even make it out of group stage, that pools are relatively even and we don't get 1 pool leader and 9 players who aren't in or near the top 32 competitors in this tournament?
Before anyone tells me "but we have more players than [eSport tournament of choice]," so what? We've hosted larger tournaments. I don't see how increasing the size of the bracket stage so that more than 20% of the players who signed up advance would cause any major problems.
1) Why do only 2 players advance out of a 10-player group stage? This is the biggest issue I have. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single eSports tournament where the group stage attrition rate was anywhere even close to this high. Normally, 40-50% of players in the group stage advance to the bracket stage. This holds true across League of Legends, DotA, StarCraft, CS:GO, and more. While Pokemon may not be a major eSport, there's a good reason that the vast majority of professional tournament organizers handle their group stages so as to allow roughly half the players or teams to advance to the bracket stage.
2) Why is the pool size 10 players? Is there no concern that, since only 2 players out of 10 advance, that players will stop caring once their record definitively prevents them from advancing? A ban from the next official tour is hardly an effective deterrent when half the people signed up for this ORAS tour won't even care about playing an old gen tour. Being banned from the next UUPL might work as an effective deterrent, assuming that the player who decides to stop playing is of sufficient caliber to be a prospective draft pick (which could very likely be the case when every group is a group of death because four out of five players who sign up fail to advance to bracket stage). Banning from next year's UU Open for dropping out of UU Major would be absolutely stupid because it's 9 months away and punishing someone for that long for an infraction this minor would be utterly ridiculous.
3) Why is there nothing even resembling seeding (besides the selection of 16 pool leaders out of 160 participants) to ensure that, since only a tiny fraction of the players in the tournament will even make it out of group stage, that pools are relatively even and we don't get 1 pool leader and 9 players who aren't in or near the top 32 competitors in this tournament?
Before anyone tells me "but we have more players than [eSport tournament of choice]," so what? We've hosted larger tournaments. I don't see how increasing the size of the bracket stage so that more than 20% of the players who signed up advance would cause any major problems.
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My guess is that we have like 1 full month to get this done so they have to cut the rounds and using the first round to drop entrys is the easiest
I agree with everything Amaroq said and to just add one more minor point on top of that, scheduling with 9 different people simultaneously is going to be a complete nightmare and just thinking about it is giving me a headache. Seriously, ugh.
While I'm still looking forwards to the tournament I really think 32 pools with 5 players per group and a 64 person bracket at the end of the group stage would be all around better.
While I'm still looking forwards to the tournament I really think 32 pools with 5 players per group and a 64 person bracket at the end of the group stage would be all around better.
Mabye instead of scheduling 9 people at once they would be split up into certain time frames? Like 3 people be scheduled the first week (depnding in how long the stage is)
Regarding seeding, there's unfortunately not really any way to objectively seed for stage one, as this is the first time UU has ever held Circuit Tours. It's the goal of many of us (myself included) to eventually be able to have a UU Leaderboard like some other tiers do, which will allow us to properly seed tours like this, but that's something that we can't do until we have actual data to seed from. I could certainly go through and try to eyeball "fair" pools based on my own perceptions of players, but doing so would be neither fair nor objective. Creating pool leaders from players who have shown notable tour success in the past guarantees that you won't end up with a pool with, say, Omfuga, Hikari and dodmen; beyond that, it's up to chance.
(But yeah, it'll be great to go with proper seeding in the future, and that's a goal for future tours once we have better data.)
As far as people dropping out, certainly that's a concern, which is why we have said that people dropping out because they lost a couple of games could potentially lead to being banned from future UU tours. There's also the issue of bragging rights, as at the end of stage one, each pool will be seeded from 1 through 10 - so even if you won't advance to the final 32, you might still stay in to keep yourself from ending up last in your pool. Also, as I mentioned before, part of the reason we're starting Circuit Tours is so that we can eventually create leaderboards and have actual properly seeded tours. Tanking yourself by dropping out and taking losses for all your remaining games can end up biting you in the ass down the road.
As for why we're keeping the elimination portion of the tournament fairly small, there are a couple of reasons. The first is that we're running up against the deadline of Sun/Moon's release, as well as other major tours that we don't want to have any conflict with. This format is entirely new for us, and I'm sure we'll run into some unforeseen delays. Keeping it a bit on the smaller side for our first tour ever gives us some more wiggle room without causing issues with the tour schedule and other Smogon events at large. The second reason is that we want to avoid player fatigue, which is a problem many of us have noticed with the more standard Seasonal formats. Winning a tournament should be exciting, not a slog, but there was concern that a large round-robin event followed by a large double-elimination tour would turn into just that if we weren't careful. The round-robin qualifier gives everyone a chance to play and to prove themselves, while the smaller elimination bracket at the end lets the top players duke it out for the very top spot.
Re: Finding True Love's suggestion of 32 pools with 5 players, that's really not feasible at all. Pools of 5 players would mean that every player only plays four games in the qualifying stage, which would mean that we would see a huge number of ties, and losing or winning one single match due to hax or matchup would pretty much always be the difference between qualifying and not. It's really hard to get accurate results with so few games, and it not only takes away much of the prestige of being one of the top players in your pool, it also makes the ranking of pools more or less meaningless. If we'd had another ~50 players sign-up, we might have considered 32 player pools with 7 players apiece, but that's really the smallest pool size I personally would consider for a tour like this.
Basically, I agree with Amaroq as far as goals for these tours in general, but for the above reasons it wasn't feasible for this first iteration. But if this tour is successful, I'd expect it to keep getting bigger and better in the years to come.
(But yeah, it'll be great to go with proper seeding in the future, and that's a goal for future tours once we have better data.)
As far as people dropping out, certainly that's a concern, which is why we have said that people dropping out because they lost a couple of games could potentially lead to being banned from future UU tours. There's also the issue of bragging rights, as at the end of stage one, each pool will be seeded from 1 through 10 - so even if you won't advance to the final 32, you might still stay in to keep yourself from ending up last in your pool. Also, as I mentioned before, part of the reason we're starting Circuit Tours is so that we can eventually create leaderboards and have actual properly seeded tours. Tanking yourself by dropping out and taking losses for all your remaining games can end up biting you in the ass down the road.
As for why we're keeping the elimination portion of the tournament fairly small, there are a couple of reasons. The first is that we're running up against the deadline of Sun/Moon's release, as well as other major tours that we don't want to have any conflict with. This format is entirely new for us, and I'm sure we'll run into some unforeseen delays. Keeping it a bit on the smaller side for our first tour ever gives us some more wiggle room without causing issues with the tour schedule and other Smogon events at large. The second reason is that we want to avoid player fatigue, which is a problem many of us have noticed with the more standard Seasonal formats. Winning a tournament should be exciting, not a slog, but there was concern that a large round-robin event followed by a large double-elimination tour would turn into just that if we weren't careful. The round-robin qualifier gives everyone a chance to play and to prove themselves, while the smaller elimination bracket at the end lets the top players duke it out for the very top spot.
Re: Finding True Love's suggestion of 32 pools with 5 players, that's really not feasible at all. Pools of 5 players would mean that every player only plays four games in the qualifying stage, which would mean that we would see a huge number of ties, and losing or winning one single match due to hax or matchup would pretty much always be the difference between qualifying and not. It's really hard to get accurate results with so few games, and it not only takes away much of the prestige of being one of the top players in your pool, it also makes the ranking of pools more or less meaningless. If we'd had another ~50 players sign-up, we might have considered 32 player pools with 7 players apiece, but that's really the smallest pool size I personally would consider for a tour like this.
Basically, I agree with Amaroq as far as goals for these tours in general, but for the above reasons it wasn't feasible for this first iteration. But if this tour is successful, I'd expect it to keep getting bigger and better in the years to come.