★ UU Circuit 2025 Open Mic

[Estarossa]

he has much to say

~~~
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Hey everyone! While the 2025 circuit has technically already begun with the ongoing UU Masters, I'd like to take the opportunity to discuss the current circuit and how it can be improved.

Right now, there are seven tournaments:

UU Masters
UU Open
UU Ladder Tournament
UU Classic
UU Homefield Advantage
UU Last Chance Qualifier
and of course, UU Championships at the end of the year!

Each one has a different format or point value attributed to it. Many changes have been made over the years; Masters was made double elimination, Homefield Advantage and LCQ were both added, and well, we've run into an issue where the circuit is now just very bloated.

It's very difficult to account for the overlap now. There are 11 UU tournaments throughout the year that we host in-house between these 7 and the 4 subforum team tournaments. We're running into the problem of our circuit ending later than every other tier's, with it finishing up in March this time around and February last year - we'd like to push that back to January at the latest, so we'd like to hear your opinion on these solutions:

A) Cut a tournament or two.
This would likely mean either Last Chance Qualifier or Homefield Advantage, or removing Classic from the circuit even though that's been an unpopular view in the past.

B) Introduce heavy tournament overlap.
This would mean more tournaments running at a given time, so more games to potentially schedule and play per week. We've been careful around this before due to our team tournaments also overlapping quite heavily (+ the possibility of SCL/WCoP UU games), but we're open to trying it out if need be.

C) Anything you guys can think of!
We don't have every solution on our own and the purpose of this thread is to get a pulse, so if there's something we haven't thought of that you'd like to mention then please do. Super open to any ideas!

As always thank you for all the effort y'all put in and please feel free to ask any questions you may have!

NOTE: This is explicitly NOT ABOUT TEAM TOURNAMENTS! So please don't speak on those :sob:

 

[a fairy]

Hi, someone who runs circuits but has no idea what she's talking about most of the time:
Many circuits run stuff overlapping heavily. Draft right this moment has I think 5 tournaments running all at the same time? I don't think 7 is too much for a whole circuit, to be honest, but introducing more overlap to y'all's circuit schedule will help if y'all are running over your cup, I think? I'd not shy away from that stuff. The same folk in Top 16 of one tour will not care about the early rounds of farming another tour, and the folks who care about the early rounds of one tour aren't likely to be in Top 16 of an earlier tour.

 

[BigFatMantis]

Here is what the plan was for last year's circuit:

Here is what actually happened:

UU Masters - Signups went up January 15 - ok sure, no problem, MAYBE could have put them up a week earlier or so but no big deal.
UU Open - We have no control when the opens go up that's not up to us, no problem
UU Ladder Tournament - Cycle 1 went up May 5th - that's great! We followed this to a tee
UU Classic - The first cup signup (RBY/GSC UU Cup) went up August 5th. That is not July. This is where it started to fall apart.
UU Homefield - Signups went up September 17th? That is definitely not August.
UU LCQ - This went up on DECEMBER 7th, not October at all, and not even November.
UU Champs - Because we didn't really follow the schedule, this went up on February 6th.

The circuit tournaments we have are fine, we just are not following our own schedule that we set for them. Get the actual tournaments up on time, without issue, and the circuit is going to be ok.

 

[DugZa]

I'm a big fan of circuits and want them to improve in any way possible so I'm compelled to make this post. To put it bluntly, its not really a debate that UU has the worst run circuit out of all the official circuits; most in part due to poor management by the mods (sorry Lily and Viv, you guys are cool but it has to be said). The fact that there is no schedule for a 2025 circuit yet and a discussion thread is only posted in March is proof of this (circuit schedule for 2024 was only posted in April etc etc. so its a recurring trend). The 2023 circuit playoffs got dragged until February of the following year while 2024 took it to a whole new level and went until mid-March of the following year. Not to mention, completely forgetting to host one circuit tour for two whole months until I tagged about it in the hosts channel is embarrassing to say the least.

I don't think the number of tours is the issue at all; the Ubers circuit for example has 10+ tours but circuit playoffs started on the 2nd of December and the winner was decided by the 30th; worst case would've gone into the first week of January if there was a finals extension. Comparatively, 6 circuit tours (excluding playoffs) is not much and most of the issues with UU circuit are due to poor planning and/or execution. As BigFatMantis alluded to above, the proposed dates were not followed as planned and everything fell apart from there. That's where the mods need to focus on and do better.

If a tournament really needs to be cut then I'd suggest one of Homefield or Last Chance. Masters (seasonal equivalent of other circuits), Open, Ladder Tournament and Classic are all staples at this point. Homefield and Last Chance are the most expendable so removing one of those two would be fine, probably Homefield coz you don't really need a second old gen tour in a CG circuit.

 

[691]

If it's really necessary to cut down 1-2 tours, I think it's essential to make adjustments to the Classic. The Classic rewards players who are competitive across multiple old gens, but unfortunately, eight generations are just too many. I don't think it's healthy that you can only see 5 out of 8 games in every bo5 during the playoffs. A straightforward approach would be to split the Classic into Classic(Gen1-Gen5) and Masters(Gen6-Gen8), then decide whether to keep the previous names or come up with a cool new name.

 

[Pak]

LCQ is easily the most droppable of anything listed. There’s a reason basically all individual tournaments have one week deadlines. For a quick example, I joined this year to hopefully improve my seeding even after qualifying. I got an opponent on the other side of the world round 1, I had work all three days before the deadline, and I basically just had to drop if I didn’t want to jump thru a bunch of hoops to get it done. I’m not saying “remove this because i had a bad experience” but it exemplifies the kind of problems you run into with a gimmicky format like this. There are plenty of opportunities to get circuit points as is and I don’t really see this tour as necessary.

What I care much more about is UU Classic. I said even before adding RBY that it was way too big of a tournament for what it is. Sure it’s part of the circuit, but in what universe should a circuit tour incentivize joining 8 (EIGHT!!) separate individual tours to participate? I understand that only a certain amount of cups give points towards playoffs, but that’s just a crazy amount of Pokémon for one tour. You can also probably count the number of people who reasonably understand every gen included in the tour on 2 or 3 fingers.

When gen 10 drops, are we moving to 9 individual cups? OU was running into similar problems once SM came up. It was awkward for a bit, but over time they settled into keeping Smogon Classic as gens 1-5 then eventually introducing Smogon Masters for gens 6-8. We could end up doing something similar, especially now that RBY is firmly in the fold. I would understand if there’s push back to making two separate old gen exclusive tours contribute to circuit points, but it’s just an idea. I don’t have a perfect solution, but classic is in desperate need of tweaking imo.

 

[Lizzie]

My own experience playing these tours is that the points are too weighted towards the first half of the year and theres a weird lull in the latter half (+ i disagree with old gen inclusion but ppl always fight to keep it for some reason so w/e). If we do cut something it should really be both homefield and lcq, and they should be replaced with a cg tour thats not single elim so theres a decent point builder in the latter half of the year. But I think kerping 7 tours is fine, I just would change the order somewhat. Personally I think something like below makes the most sense, but the main thing i want is uult in the latter half of the year:
UU Masters
UU Open
UU Homefield Advantage
UU Ladder Tournament
UU Classic
UU LCQ

Alternatively strongly support scrapping homefield or lcq for any tour thats not single elim but don't expect ppl to support that either. Seeing as pak brought up splitting classic in two I'd like to add that this is fine but current classic points should split between the two tours and we shouldnt make homefield a pseudo fairy gen tour, cups should run for all tiers. Accept that doing any of this would lead to more overlap.

Edit: imo either keep current tours but consider changing order a bit and allow for overlap more. Or scrap lcq + homefield, make classic two type C tours, and add another type B tour.

 

[Petros]

LCQ is easily the most droppable of anything listed. There’s a reason basically all individual tournaments have one week deadlines. For a quick example, I joined this year to hopefully improve my seeding even after qualifying. I got an opponent on the other side of the world round 1, I had work all three days before the deadline, and I basically just had to drop if I didn’t want to jump thru a bunch of hoops to get it done. I’m not saying “remove this because i had a bad experience” but it exemplifies the kind of problems you run into with a gimmicky format like this. There are plenty of opportunities to get circuit points as is and I don’t really see this tour as necessary.

I definitely support cutting this one out, it just feels like a very watered down version of the UU Open.

A purely oldgens tour like the UU Classic giving points towards the playoffs that only include SV UU strikes me as odd, so maybe consider doing something about that too.

Generally I am a believer of quality over quantity. I don't think there's a need for individual tournaments running all year round, much less overlapping, if they don't bring anything unique and relevant to the table.

 

[Estarossa]

I'll keep this thread open for the year, cus there's not much reason not to, but right now here's where we're at:

-Scheduling is an issue that will be fixed (see my post responding to DugZa above).

-We're going to drop LCQ, at least for now until we can rework it into a way that we're happy with. The no johns style of the tournament was brought up as an issue for like, people with lives, and that does ring true for a lot of us. On top of that, the low amount of points it gives means it doesn't actually guarantee you a spot in circuit playoffs... which is something I have an idea for, but it'll have to go through the rest of the TD team so I'll refrain from suggesting it for now.

Feedback on Classic is appreciated. It's been part of the circuit for so long that I don't feel great unilaterally nuking it right now, though, so we're gonna keep it this year. We'll make another post in this thread around the time of Classic for more feedback though, since it'll help us in future years.

For now we're going to finish up scheduling all the tours for the year and getting hosts prepped in advance. If you'd like to host any of them, feel free to hit me up! I'll be handling UULT as of right now but if anyone's super enthusiastic to do so please do reach out, I'm not married to it at all! Classic will be overseen in-house but we're always looking for cup hosts, and we currently don't have anyone for Homefield.

Thanks for the feedback y'all! Here's to a hopefully better run of things this year. I'll post a finalised circuit schedule hopefully within the next couple days at most.

 

[Estarossa]

as promised previously classic would be running as standard this year, but I'm very much in favour of taking the routes that I proposed last year and that users like Pak have revisited similar concepts this year too in their posts. Classic signups have gone up now so its potentially time for people to start discussing how they'd want it to look next year i guess. There's two vibes here to me,

a) Classic gets split into Classic (1-5) and Masters or whatever we'd call it given we already have a masters (6-8, +9 when gen10 hits)

b) Classic becomes 1-5, Homefield becomes 6-9 only

My personal preference does tend to lean towards b because it bloats up our tournament schedule less, means we don't have to obliterate the amount of points classic and the fairy gen version each get, and helps reduce some of the like insane aspect of the amount of tiers you can end up playing in homefield and lets it specialise more into that like modern gens niche.

Definitely interested in hearing peoples opinions in general though and if they have preferred routes, or would prefer to see classic remain as is too.