Tournament VGC Classics PL III - Format Discussion

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VGC Leader
It's finally the season for every boomer's favorite teamtour: VGC Classics PL! For those unfamiliar, this is a team tournament put on by Smogon VGC that features exclusively metagames of past years, giving those mostly forgotten formats a little bit more life each year.

Formats
Last year the formats featured were the following. Formats in bold are expected to return for this year's edition.
  • 2013
  • 2015
  • 2016
  • 2017
  • 2018
  • 2019
  • 2022
  • 23 Reg D
As you can see, 2013, 2015, 2022, and the gen 7 metas are expected to return. However, they aren't guaranteed if the playerbase leans towards something else. 2016 and especially Reg D are what's on the chopping block here. While I will guarantee that at least one metagame for gens 5-8 each will be present, there's no reason to force a gen 9 meta into the tour if it's not something people want. Anything that has been used for "VGC" tournaments is fair game to suggest as a potential slot. So 2009, 2014, Gen 8 Series 7, or Gen 9 Reg C are fair game, Spikemuth Cup or Orre Cup would not fall into this category.

EDIT: Rotating format slots are NOT on the table for this edition of the tournament.

Structure
The first two editions of this tour were 6 teams, 8 slots. However this year we will be offering a custom avatar to the winning team. Is this enough to expand? If we stay with 6 teams, would people prefer a top 3 or top 4 playoff?

We've done a flat self buy price of 15K for managers wanting to self buy with a limit of 1 selfbuy per manager core. This has worked pretty well so far, but could be changed if people have thoughts.

Surely missing a few things on format discussion but if people remember something I forgot feel free to post about it.

Tentative Schedule
Format Discussion will be open until the end of next week. From there, Manager Signups and Player Signups will open simultaneously. The plan is for manager signups to be open for only one week (Aug 4-10) while player signups run for 2.5 weeks (Aug 7-21) with the draft taking place sometime the weekend following (Aug 22-24) and week 1 commencing promptly after (Aug 25-31).
 
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IMO dropping 2016 for 2009 and 2015 for 2014 would be ideal. The Gen 4 metas just got updated with functional no preview so that would be great to see in an actual tour, and it would give a very underplayed format some love again. As for 2015, I just truly think that it is a less interesting and fun metagame than 2014. (Ik Lucien Lachance has even more to say about 2015.) I also would be fine dropping the Gen 9 format, but that doesn't matter a whole lot. If there is a Gen 9 format, I would say Reg C or F deserve the spot.

As for structure, I think it could be interesting to expand to 8 teams but I have no way to judge interest in this kind of thing. Either way, top 4 seems the best for playoffs.
 
Tbh I think that Reg D is a great format for a classics tour as it was a format that was really only present for Worlds and Pittsburgh and is still a bit underexplored in my opinion. Also, playing with Tera is nice as it is more familiar and arguably more balanced than the other generational gimmicks. Although I don't think that a Gen 9 format is necessary, I believe that if we do end up playing in Gen 9, Reg D is the best call.
Edit:
I believe that 8 teams is nice as it gives more opportunity to players, and 8 is a nicer number to my OCD brain than 6 is. :P Top 4 Playoffs definitely makes more sense in my opinion.
 
Seconding Radio's suggestion to drop 2015 for 2014. I can only speak to my experience in the previous two leagues, but I've yet to have a dedicated 2015 player (nor someone who wanted to be). There were a few people who said they would be okay with playing it but it was seldom their first choice. We've given the other Gen 6 formats an opportunity to be featured; it's 2014's time.
 
I don't have a stake in what formats stay/leave really, I personally believe that we should have at least one SV format though, just so we can leave the draft more accessible to new players.

8 teams is ideal and I do believe we will meet this threshold this year (especially since there's a CA now), however it might be better to decide 6 teams vs 8 teams after the manager signups are over. Looking at last years signups, we only got 7, which wouldn't be enough for 8 teams, and we could risk having lower quality managers. There is this thread on possible fixes for the format if we do end up having 6 teams.

also, what's the current plan going into playoffs in terms of tiebreaks assuming we do end up removing the SV slot?
 
Also, the addition of 2009 or 2010 would be great to add some variety to the format pool. Recently there's been a lot of interest for these formats and Showdown mods just modified the code to allow bring 6 pick 4 without team preview, which is a huge advancement that the players have been asking for a long time. There's the argument gen 4 players would rather play 2013, but I feel there could be room for the two formats. I mean why are both 2017 and 2018 allowed? We could chop 2016 which has little interest imo and allow 2009/2010 without any problem
 
Lucien Lachance said:
Seconding Radio's suggestion to drop 2015 for 2014. I can only speak to my experience in the previous two leagues, but I've yet to have a dedicated 2015 player (nor someone who wanted to be). There were a few people who said they would be okay with playing it but it was seldom their first choice. We've given the other Gen 6 formats an opportunity to be featured; it's 2014's time.
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I want to say Rookie and maybe 1 other person signed up for 2015 specifically, but it definitely was the least popular and least interesting format in my opinion.

I don't have any other strong feelings towards gen 4 formats but I think Reg C would be cool for the gen 9 format, I like having a relatively current option for newer players to capitalize on the growth of the game
 
I agree with Radio, Lucien, and Charlie that 2014>2015. 2015 is a fantastic format for skill expression and battle complexity, but not for teambuilding expression. 2014 with its variety of offensive threats makes for a better than CHALK mirrors.

I wholly agree with 2009 as a format. Generation IV has seen more activity in the past year. 2009 works better than 2010 for three reasons:
  • The newly modified challenge code works as-intended for no-preview 2009, but requires out-of-code enforcement of 2 Restricted/battle for 2010
  • Due to the lack of a functioning code until recently, no-preview 2009 hasn't seen as much exploration as team preview 2009
  • 2010 (4thGS) has seen some exploration in the West, and is the most commonly played retro VGC format in Japan. There are plans for future tournaments in multiple communities, so it already has activity.
For SV, I would really like to see Reg. A. It was an underexplored format due to only one set of Regionals before the shift to Reg. B.

Disclaimer: My opinions on 2014-2016 are based on my experience in those years, not on any post-generation metagame shifts that have taken place since then.
 
2015 is one of my favorite formats. Theres a lot less room to build in 2014 but the gameplay is far more interesting imo. I have nothing against 2014 though.

2016 sucks and so much of playing that format was memorizing gameplans. That’s one of the worst experiences in a retro tour. Ideally you can pick a team, play a few warm up games, and go battle. That’s not effective in 2016.

I think reg C is a far more interesting format than reg D. In fact, I’d go as far as to say reg D is one of my personal least favorite formats of the generation. I’d also be interested in reg H coming back, that was the retro format tournament we had at NAIC and it had like 200+ people playing, which is unheard of for a side event. People really like the format and it really did keep developing until the end (I brought my Toronto team, the last regional in the format, and quickly found out I had no matchup into wolfe’s Toronto winning team, since it didn’t exist when I built mine).


I also don’t care for 2022 - I think 2016 and 2022 is a little too much gs cup (we’re not cutting 2019 ty).

I’d be down to see a gen 4 format - I’m very curious what people teambuilding in that format come up with.

My ideal would be gen 4, gen 5, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23.

That being said, I also think three gen 7 formats is probably too much. It’s when I started playing irl and love those years but also I think we could cut one of those pretty reasonably. I’d be ok cutting 2018 for 2014, which leaves us with a max of two formats per generation.
 
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