flamencos diary update #3:
i think yovan has completely mentally boomed after losing to the french last week
i think yovan has completely mentally boomed after losing to the french last week

meaning that the guy was already barely active even before being benched, which we also considered it in our investigation, and as such found that he was TB worthydurza — Yesterday at 17:53
context is us bugging him to death
look at relative linecounts
of other ppl in the server
like me and danny and pinorska and grey and 5gen
There is no brink, the tier has already imploded this year due to poor leadership. I think 8 or 9 drivers/moderators/OGC leaders have stepped down since February. An admin request was filed quite awhile ago, but no action has been taken by senior staff to this point, and only one of the three ROs stepped down.Not gonna lie
Speaking from a "I'm not involved in the community" standpoint I always feel you'll never trust us hosts or anyone for that matter as long as the TLs or staff are somehow involved in the decision or are at the receiving end, and it's not my problem
Solve this shit yourselves but stop complaining every week, it's genuinely hell to work on anything on this tier
That being said, as a host standpoint we valued Swordstrike is TB material because he purposefully chose to step down and do nothing for the rest of the tour, and had zero linecount, which is what I don't want to happen in any team tour; you should be willing to play for your team at the best of your capacity, no matter who drafts you or how much Ls you get, and at least being willing to partecipate instead of being fodder; other than that, you literally said to me, and I quote
meaning that the guy was already barely active even before being benched, which we also considered it in our investigation, and as such found that he was TB worthy
On Apa, we didn't consider him to be TB worthy because he has SOME chat presence, has played his games without questions or drama, and we can't prove that he went with a 3 move mon purposefully, so we can only say he didn't care enough; he also didn't care enough about team presence and didn't communicate with non-french speakers, sure, but the most we can say about it is that he was unwilling to listen to their managers' requests and... not accepting external help?
We definitely considered it sellback worthy for the reasons above, but we deemed that it was too much to slap a TB on a situation we can't fully grasp even reading their discord
You can argue that he shouldn't have been sold back, but not every sellback is also a tourban
but my tl;dr is that can you stop shitting our work for once and blame everyone in this god-forsaken leadership for what happens anywhere in this forum or at least make it less obvious that this tier is literally on the brink of exploding internally and NOT get us hosts in this shit?
You can surely disagree with our decisions, I'm not telling you "no we're right + ratio" but people are already admitting of this behavior and it's genuinely tiring chief
Not much I can say here, you are free to ask my co-host too since we're in two taking decisions, and we already expressed ourselves as the hosters on this argument multiple times by this point anywayI am well-acquainted with ZU’s internal strife and the general thanklessness of hosting, so I am sympathetic to your position here, but with all due respect I think people’s concerns with the ruling extend beyond Smogon politics.
How does playing to the best of your capacity allow for accidentally having 3 moves, and not caring enough, as well as not listening to your manager? I’m confused can u elaborate on why this is justifiable?Not gonna lie
Speaking from a "I'm not involved in the community" standpoint I always feel you'll never trust us hosts or anyone for that matter as long as the TLs or staff are somehow involved in the decision or are at the receiving end, and it's not my problem
Solve this shit yourselves but stop complaining every week, it's genuinely hell to work on anything on this tier
That being said, as a host standpoint we valued Swordstrike is TB material because he purposefully chose to step down and do nothing for the rest of the tour, and had zero linecount, which is what I don't want to happen in any team tour; you should be willing to play for your team at the best of your capacity, no matter who drafts you or how much Ls you get, and at least being willing to partecipate instead of being fodder; other than that, you (Durza) literally said to me, and I quote
meaning that the guy was already barely active even before being benched, which we also considered it in our investigation, and as such found that he was TB worthy
On Apa, we didn't consider him to be TB worthy because he has SOME chat presence, has played his games without questions or drama, and we can't prove that he went with a 3 move mon purposefully, so we can only say he didn't care enough; he also didn't care enough about team presence and didn't communicate with non-french speakers, sure, but the most we can say about it is that he was unwilling to listen to their managers' requests and... not accepting external help?
We definitely considered it sellback worthy for the reasons above, but we deemed that it was too much to slap a TB on a situation we can't fully grasp even reading their discord
You can argue that he shouldn't have been sold back, but not every sellback is also a tourban
but my tl;dr is that can you (and I mean whoever is reading this in this community) stop shitting our work for once and blame everyone in this god-forsaken leadership for what happens anywhere in this forum or at least make it less obvious that this tier is literally on the brink of exploding internally and NOT get us hosts in this shit?
You can surely disagree with our decisions, I'm not telling you "no we're right + ratio" but people are already admitting of this behavior and it's genuinely tiring chief
i thought it'd be fun to do a quick lookback at my initial predictions of the teams from w1 and see how close to the truth i got. i'll be doing flamenco shoutouts in another post so dont look for them here.
also please note all that aside from a few statistical amendments, everything below was written prior to the flamencos' elimination.
the teams
sakuras
View attachment 450854
50% success ratio on this one. the SS core that i doubted oh so much ended up being the only successful part of tuthur's draft. i admittedly underestimated louna, and, no disrespect to the team's achievement intended, i also overestimated the rest of the ss pool.
what i did get right, albeit perhaps by luck, was placing this team at the bottom of my pr. in fact, by reaching -12 differential they have become statistically the worst zupl team of all time, joint with the tcb basculins from the first ever zupl.
was it a lack of support that caused this? poor piloting? truthfully i can't tell, their sm was underwhelming in large part due to predictably subpar builds that come with bad support but the bulk of their disappointing results came from oras and below. i won't pretend my experience building and testing these slots in this zupl has resulted in more than a very basic understanding of the tiers... though it is incredibly funny to me that such a staunch bw supporter (tuthur) ended up with a 0-7 slot.
stunkys
View attachment 450855
im trying to be less antagonistic so i'll just leave it at this: i hate everything about this philosophy. it's the opposite of everything a team tour should represent.
...with that out of the way, i once again nailed this prediction. my one oopsie was thinking ho3n would not contribute teams at all, as i recall was the case when he drafted me in a prior team tour.
from w1 through to w6 the stunkys went 5-3 or 3-5. in weeks where their carry slots pulled through, they won the week, and in weeks where they didn't, the team took a harsh loss. the team has now narrowly eked into playoffs almost entirely due to ho3n's impressive 8-0 record.
"ho3n forgot you need to win 5 games a week and spent all of his money on 4 players,"
cut me some slack and make it 5 players - i forgot roxiee, probably because it's bw.
"[ho3n] in my experience has 0 presence in team chats"
View attachment 450857
yep.
to his credit, ho3n is supplying 3 SS teams every week and building for himself, which is a lot of work. on the other hand, i'm informed that the server is quiet as a fart in space, possibly by design.
as stated above, this team only made it to playoffs on the back of ho3n's 8-0 record and i personally believe it'd be way more successful if the team chat was active, but it's impossible to say beyond gut instinct.
his managing style does not work for me at all, nor others i have talked to in the past - but it clearly works for others, and the person who supplied the above screenshot has gone on record saying they consider ho3n a good manager.
trevenants
"i like the trevs a lot; strong pilots, good builders across the board as long as fruits can stay motivated, and some underdog potential i expect to see brought out as the tour goes on."
"while they may have above average players in every slot i dont think they have the near-guaranteed winning slot that i think the other top 4 teams do."
i was way higher on the trevs than seemingly everyone else heading in but even i didnt expect a +16, with nearly every slot somehow going positive. this is statistically the strongest zupl team of all time, breaking the +12 differential record previously set by the first iteration of the fiery flamencos in the first ever zupl. to be honest i have no idea how they've been so consistent. it's pretty likely they'll be facing butterfrees in the finals - they already lost to them in w7 but i understand this was with a 'b team' roster. could go either way!
i also like a lot of the people on this team so i wont pretend im not biased when i say i hope it's them winning.
only thing i got wrong is beauts; they are historically put on awful teams and this one ended up being good enough that they didnt have to drop 20k lines in the discord and carry the whole team. props!
shiinotics
View attachment 450858
LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
yeah aside from that detail i got this one extremely wrong. the shiinotics put in work. for some reason i missed mz in the lineup entirely but yeah of course he'd pop off with lpy support and completely ruin my prediction post. it's not remotely surprising in retrospect, so that's my bad. as for the rest of the prediction, i didn't recognise enough of the oldgen pool at the time but they've overall been decent. the roster is just as boring to me as it was when i first made my prediction so i don't really have much else to say except i was wrong. at least i was right about their ss.
butterfrees
"in my mind the success of [the butterfrees] hinges on how well drud understands the current ss zu meta, and on how much jett truly cares about this tour after hanging on the cusp of burnout for what seems like years at this point. most of the team appears to be self sufficient"
another great prediction from me. old gen slots were self sufficient and collectively have gone very positive, while ss took up a modest but still respectable 10-11 which i bet is in no small part thanks to jett.
beheyeems
"[beheeyems] may just be the easiest team to predict in the tour, with an array of consistently ok builders and consistently ok players"
"i don't think there will be any huge losing streaks in this team, but i also don't expect any of these players to pop off. i hope they can prove me wrong."
another 50% success rate in my eyes. overall the team was below average, with a -10 overall and only one player grabbing more than 3 wins across 7 weeks, but wow ninja popped off in ss so props to him i for sure got proven wrong on that one.
sm vs bw
100% accurate prediction from me. hahahaha what a relief we didn't do 2 bw slots.
the expansion
View attachment 450859
this is going to be a controversial one so i saved it for the end. too late to back out now, fool.
there was a lot of external pressure to move zupl to 8 teams - some people like lily argued it was a good time for zu to capitalise on the "new blood" gained from the bw money tour and from the heightened interest that naturally comes from offering a custom avatar as a prize. many more people arguing in favour of 8 teams did not necessarily believe it was viable but were instead just wanted btboy to get an admittedly overdue managing position and weren't subtle about it.
we're now nearing playoffs, and i feel confident in saying "hee hee hoo hoo, told you so". diplomatically of course.
the current generation is as always, and perhaps incorrectly, assumed to be easiest for new players to slot into. many players who would not have been drafted under the 6 team system were put into ss slot 2 and or 3.
breakers in ss zu are universally crap at breaking through on their own due to poor matchup into extremely common defensive pokemon (sawk into palossand, exeggutor into articuno, etc.), so instead a lot of teams are being built to use toxic, sludge bomb, or knock off as their primary form of progress; rapidash, klinklang, thwackey, tangela, skuntank being a few notable examples.
without naming names it is very evident to me that a chunk of the ss pool is not familiar with this style of play and as a result the quality of the games was overall a huge dive compared to last year (im speaking purely from memory tbf maybe it was just as bad).
even outside of these semi-stall games, i saw players from multiple teams load up HO or cheese with a 6-0 matchup only to inexplicably fumble the bag in the worst ways imaginable. some of these games were glorified coinflips and only served to muddy the results of an otherwise reasonable zu tour, and as a result i don't believe that we were successful in raising the stock of zupl to that of other team tours.
feel free to argue with each other as much as you'd like over this one. i decided to try and gauge the public opinion and it was extremely unhelpful because everyone had different opinions, ranging wildly from an unnamed manager's "it was very manageable in the end" to an unnamed top builder and player's "it was even worse than i expected".
the future
Cursed Trevenants vs Lucky Stunkys
To Pimp A Butterfree vs Shiiny Shiinotics
Cursed Trevenants vs To Pimp A Butterfree
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