Tournaments

This is not a huge thing and I won't treat it like one, but why not have tournaments running at all times? We sort of treat them as this unicorn event, but like, I don't see the harm in normalizing that. I was thinking about how to accelerate the growth of people who don't feel comfortable applying for gyms yet, and one way to do it is to just engage them in more competitive battles. I think tournaments are more friendly to new or improving battlers than gym, e4 or LD as well.

It's not a need compared to other sections, but teasing out more activity anywhere is cool to me. Plus, the short turnaround makes it easier to stomach sitting out one that you don't like or are busy for (both of which applied to me for devo). I like the idea of transitioning from gimmick to normal to gimmick, with sign-ups for the next tourney starting in the second to last or final round.

Maybe the concern is finding people who are willing to commit time to running tournaments, or stuff like that, but I mean if that's the case, then I'll do it myself. I think if people have more to do, then people get better quicker. Rising tide lifts all ships. Activity circulates. Positive chakras abound. Heyo.

 

In a perfect world there probably would be tournaments running at all times. The issues are settling on an idea (people often like new ones which are hard to come up with/balance), and having enough active people to a) discuss/develop/decide on the idea b) host the tournament [diligently] and c) participate in said tourney [also diligently]. We dont have very many concrete tourneys, so we're always trying to think of and balance new ones the issue is usually activity. Sometimes coming up with new ones is almost a necessity (like in the case of thinking of something specific to gen 7). I think any stigma against them or the fact that they seem like unicorn events is an unintentional side effect of lack of activity.

That being said, activity is picking up so maybe and hopefully this will change?!

 

We've had some tourney-like things in the past that ran for extended periods of time, and despite their being prizes and such, activity and interest in it died out fairly quickly, within the month.

That's not to say that it wouldn't be a bad idea, just that it's hard to maintain something for a long time. Also back-to-back things don't always work out. We've had some tournaments and writing competitions and such be right after each other and members have expressed burn-out as well.

 

Yeah, this is fair. I guess, optimistically, having constant tournament engagement leads to more activity and more people to fill the spots who want to sit out a tournament, but obviously I can't say that happens for sure. But hey, I think ten tournaments with 15 battlers each can be a better thing than three tournaments with 30 each (numbers out of my butt, probably not entirely realistic, but I hope the point gets across). If you feel burn out, then sit one out, not every tournament has to be a huge bonanza, and with prizes you could even conceivably have some control over the scope of the tournament by, say, giving out prizes to the top 60 percentile of finishers instead of top 30 (again, #s out the butt). With more tourneys, it's easier to pick and choose your own participation.

But yeah, it's worthwhile to ask how many people are interested and can sustain interest.

 

Could always bring back URPG Ladder for a tournament-like environment, though to be honest I don't know where it ended up in the first place.

 

That's the main one that didn't last beyond a month even with prizes haha. People got burned out.

 

Not a fan of ladders tbh if we're trying to promote competition. What's weird about ladders and activity is that you expect them to create more activity which they do for maybe a week or two and then so many people start battle dodging that it actually ends up hurting activity. I think our main focus should be on creating more concrete tourney concepts that can be repeated throughout the year. Some that we have are:

-Gym Tourney
-Budget Tourney
-Battle Factory
-Risk lmao jk RIP puupies
-Devo
-FFA?!
-Duel Peninsula (which was basically ladder anyway)
-GBA. Ew. This should not even be a tourney concept imo.

aaaand those are all I'm aware of. Not a very extensive list and certainly not enough to fill out a year. I also don't like many of those tourneys. 2 are rental, 1 is devo which I dont like, one is ladder, and the other 2 are cancerous (I still liked FFA tourney but lol activity for that and also our popcorn supply is too low to sustain that amount of drama).

Is there a reason we dont just have like a normal tourney of regular battles? Or maybe a doubles tourney (not multi; doubles)? I know it sounds boring but it's something and it also feels weird to have all these "gimmicky" tourneys without one plain one.

 

Yeah I dislike ladder. One way to avoid burnout is to avoid creating winning circumstances that force you to battle once a day instead of once a week.

Said this earlier: "I like the idea of transitioning from gimmick to normal to gimmick..."

If you hold more tournaments, the thinking is that it becomes easier to hold standard ones more often, because not every opportunity to host a tourney has to be unicorn event with some funky rules.

 

Let me say that I am 100% in favor of holding more tournaments--no need for any frills like special rules--and it's probably the simplest answer to this thread.

In addition, I wonder if there are other ways to promote competitive battling that don't also involve us saying "These two people must battle this week, or else the whole event grinds to a halt." I like the fact that a ladder system allows for a competitive environment that doesn't have time limits or require certain people to be online at the same time. After hearing your concerns, I agree it's probably not a good fit for URPG, but I'd love to brainstorm some other ideas that have those two specific qualities.

 

The trick is balancing battling too much (I won the Keldeo ladder and I will never try it again) and the standard match-up battling, which I can see growing stale. I do like the Battle Competition system in Sun/Moon, where I think it's activity based to a degree but also capped at ten battles a day, so you have to battle well within those instead of losing your way to 3rd place like SLC (miss u). Four to seven battles a week makes sense for that kind of tourney in URPG I think.

The issue with a battle cap for URPG might just be that people will start avoiding the good battlers, since everyone does that to Ash K. already in regular battles. I also dislike the "can't turn down challenges" rule because like shit, sometimes I just don't wanna battle (which I don't think should mean I should just sit out the tournament entirely). It works in Sun/Moon because you can draw a random opponent whenever you do want to battle. But I'm sure there are other acceptable solutions for URPG.

 

So I mentioned earlier on Discord, may as well say it here as it's tangentially related to tournaments.

One of the main tournaments as listed above my Swift is the Gym Tournament, which theoretically can host 36 people which looks good when we compare to the turnout of the last few tournaments (which were around 18 people). The big problem, in my point of view is that it requires you to have a gym, and given we have only 2 gyms of each type it can kinda become problematic to newer people.

For example: Ash K., WinterVines, Monbrey, Ataro and Neonsands have been hosting their current gyms for as long as I've been a member of the URPG - which isn't something bad in the context of the Gym Challenge, active and commited leaders are good and should be encouraged - but it also takes up one slot for Flying, Poison, Fire and Steel in the Gym Tournament. If the other slot is occupied and you happen to like Poison types you're SOL.

My point is, I fail to see a reason to have a "Gym Tournament" instead of (or at the very least, alongside) a "Monotype Tournament".

Not to mention that last gym tournament there was at least one person who got a gym just for the tournament and then dropped it, so I'm sure there are people who aren't gym leaders that would like to participate.

Perhaps more on point, considering not only we've been seeing an activity rise (we've had two 20+ people live FFAs recently, battle chats 5, 6 and 7 were recently created) and we're planning an outreach event that theoretically will bring more new people in, I don't think there's a reason not to have more tournaments. If the worse happens and people get burnout we can just lower the prizes accordingly, or not host one for a month or something to give people time to rest.

(And during the month we have "normal tournament" we can already begin discussion of next month's gimmick)

 

Not a fan of changing Gym Leader tourney. I'd be down for some kind of monotype in addition, but the whole point of GL tourney is that it is amongst Gym Leaders. In and of itself it is a variation of monotype.

Also I do want to say something and you'll have to excuse if I put this a bit bluntly but sometimes if you're a new member that can't fully enjoy a certain tourney: too bad. In some and I would even argue most cases tournaments should be difficult to newer members. It gives them something to work towards and I'm also not for catering to new members just to inflate tourney sizes. We have tourneys that are fully accessible to new members like Budget and Battle Factory but if the reason it is so difficult to think of new tourneys is that it's too difficult to balance for new members then it might be time to shelve that as a priority until we have more things going. I'm not saying fully discount them, but don't let it get in the way of new ideas.

To be fair, FFAs are a terrible way to gauge activity because I'm sure a good chunk of the participants only did that one FFA and aren't active otherwise. That being said you're right about the battles so let's keep that up!

One more thing, to clarify I believe the "burnout" point was in response to ladder tournaments specifically. I guess it also applies to normal tourneys as well but to a lesser extent.

 

There's a difference between "cannot fully enjoy a tourney" and "literally cannot participate, not because you do not have the items or Pokémon for it but because the rules are set in a way that you literally cannot enter" as is the case for Gym Tournament alone.

I'm bringing up Gym Tournament because the last time I asked about a Monotype tournament I was told "there was no need because we have Gym Tournament", which I disagree and this topic came.

And tournaments could be something for newer people to work towards if there was any kind of set scheduled instead of "hey, we feel like hosting a tournament" - which, at least as far as I can tell. I am not - neither is Nitro, I believe - saying we should make tournaments easy or whatever, just that they should be more frequent. Not to mention that we said newer members, which - at least, the way I intended, my bad it if came out wrong, - entail users that aren't exactly newbies and already have at the very least a decent idea of how URPG Battling works and a decent team.

 

Monotype tournaments suck because everyone just picks Water and Flying for the most part. We did that in the past and also as an extension of the Gym Leader Tourney while including OI. It was a drag.

Also, there's a difference between not wanting to battle anyone when you're not supposed to deny challenges and then denying one person to battle another (which is often what happens). Usually if someone doesn't want to battle that day, nobody pushes it. But often they use it as an excuse to avoid battling "good" people and then battle other people later/as soon as the good people leave. Which is unfair and a bit of a jerk move.

Also, I like Gym Leader Tourney because it does prompt people to try out a type. We have so many unfilled that newer people should apply or try to apply for one that has an inactive leader. They're a great way to learn. I would even be down with letting a newer person have a couple more rentals than normal/not owning 4 of their type.

But Swift is also right in that Tournaments don't often cater to new people--that's not what they're designed for. Tournaments are designed to seek out the best of the best and make them earn it. An event/something more casual/participation-based is what we need for newer people, which is a slightly different mentality than another tournament. Tournaments are not supposed to be easy.

 

I think monotype sucks, I like gym tournaments because I like the idea of ONE SINGLE inclusive event for gym leaders (go get you a gym!), but if we hold enough tourneys in the year, then hey, we can do both.

(people holding out for the one gym they like are idiots or extremely patient)

That is literally what I said, and I'll add a 'But' for clarity: The issue with a battle cap for URPG might just be that people will start avoiding the good battlers, since everyone does that to Ash K. already in regular battles. [But] I also dislike the "can't turn down challenges" rule because like shit, sometimes I just don't wanna battle (which I don't think should mean I should just sit out the tournament entirely).

Both can be true and I'm already well aware of how you feel about people avoiding "good" battlers (I agree). I'm certain if we put our minds to it, we can do activity tournaments that don't force you to accept all challenges -- worst case scenario, I'm wrong and I'll live and sit those out or something. But I'm sure there's some way to match people who want to battle, maybe through some kind of blind live queuing format or maybe even a bot.

This is also true, and not a point I'm overly concerned with. But I think that as far as an entry point to competitive battling, the one-battle-per-week format is relatively friendly towards new people. I could be wrong, but it seems easier for new people to sign up for a tourney and do those battles -- not necessarily winning them, but hey, maybe you get lucky and get matched up with someone not so good -- instead of challenging Gym, or LD, or anything else of status. Not sure if that's clear, or even correct, but it's how I feel.

tl;dr: tournaments don't need to cater to new people, but I do believe some new people might find them less intimidating than Gyms -- all it takes is one win, one lucky matchup, to build some confidence

 

@Nitro; Obviously I was agreeing with you and then expanding on other peoples' points/clarifying. All cards should be on the table if we're gonna brainstorm. You don't throw any ideas out in those.

If they need a lucky match-up, then the solution is probably to do what Dojos did and have their own circuit while they build up experience and funds. Not the same exact system, but something similar. Activity permitting. Not disallowing them to battle other people, but identifying who is in the same boat as them.

But differently this time, as I think a year or whatever it was was too long for the initial Dojos to be barred from the rest.

 

Ahh, my bad! Then yeah, I guess I'm agreeing with you haha.

 

And, again sorry for putting this bluntly: the difference between the two is irrelevant. I believe there should be tourneys where new people can't participate. I obviously dont think all tourneys should be this way, but there should be some; even many. I know people don't like when we compare URPG to the games but the same logic applies:

To enter a competitive Pokemon VGC tournament you need to level grind, you usually need to beat the game, you need to EV train, you may need to breed, you may need to spend a lot of time searching for the Pokemon/natures/etc you want, etc. The same is true for URPG. If you want to be successful in the Battles section and participate in upper level tests of skill, you need to invest time and effort. [/QUOTE]

I dont mind developing another monotype tourney idea, but we have some roadblocks as Winter pointed out.

As I already explained the lack of tourneys is due to lack of activity of interest. We cannot simply snap our fingers and have tournaments become more frequent, haha. Even just thinking of the next tournament requires activity. And before you say "If you cater to new members you get more tourney participation" ideally we do not want to have to this as--like I said before--it severely limits our options for tournaments which also in effect limits the amount we can have.

I'm not sure I understand your last sentence. Regardless of how we define "new members" they fall into either the category of being able to feasibly participate in the tourney [without automatically being fodder] or not. If someone is new or has recently started over and already has a good team and skills (which has happened before) there's nothing stopping them from entering. If someone has been around for a long time and has barely accrued any Pokemon or just doesnt feel confident enough to enter, they don't have to either.

 

I have always liked the concept of Ladder because it did reward continual activity, but I also agree that it produces burnout and can be won by whoever battles the most.
I think the issue with this was the point system - it's essentially always about earning points. ELO is one attempt at addressing this provided a cap is also applied.

A ladder would need to be based more on position than score. It should be about climbing the ladder to the top spot, not about accumulating a higher score through activity. A King of the Hill style competition.

 

More tourneys is something I feel just about everyone wants but I think the problem mostly arises when it comes to getting a host to actively run. It's not even that hard to run but it': hard to commit that you'll definitely be around and quite actuve for a month or two. That being said I can probably runa. tourney or two over xmas most likely if needed.

I actually think most of the tourneys in URPG are really successful and there's a nice balance. Perhaps having a calender of tourneys would. e a better approach just to ensure we don't go 6 months without one and then have 3 overlapping which does happen every now and again. Even a tourney every two months or so is not so hard to do I'd think.

My suggestion:

Gym: January/February (tradition)
Devo: March/April (Tie in with Easter, New Life, etc.)
Risk/Ladder: May/June (long term tourneys, people are more active for. Other tourneys can be run alongside if particular demand)
FFA: July/August (tradition + guaranteed tournout)
Battle Factory: September/October (New school year is the best time to try out new Pokemon and strategies!)
New Gen Tourney if applicable or Budget: November/December (Great way to round off the year and who isn't budgeting for all those xmas gifts eh?)


For the time being I think a budget gen vii or battle factory gen vii tourney or a you can use any gen vii mons with max ems and your own items tourney would be nice, then have gym tourney later in jan/feb