Hogg
grubbing in the ashes
As this is the time when everyone johns until week three WCOP slows down a bit, I thought this would be a good time to discuss the next big SCL topic: tiers!
We’ve already had a decent bit of discussion on this topic in the St. Patrick’s thread, so I don’t want to spend too much time reiterating what we discussed there. I’m on mobile right now, so linking the post itself is a pain, but based on the previous discussion I think a good starting point is ten playing slots, using the following format:
OU / OU / Ubers / DOU / UU / RU / NU / PU / LC / ???
As one of those involved in the original decision to remove Ubers from Snake and Slam (plz don’t kill me), I have to say that the state of Ubers is better than I have seen in years and years. The community is vibrant and active, the metagame is better than it has been in at least two gens (at least from this outsider’s perspective) and the games are genuinely fun to watch. Ubers has a long and storied history within Smogon and has been a part of its major tournament scene for over a decade, and they’ve clearly made great strides to overcome the many obstacles that have been tossed in their way over the past few years. I think it’s time for them to return.
It would be pretty easy to make the last slot a third OU slot and call it a day, but several people in the previous thread proposed another idea: including Monotype. Mono has been an official metagame for several years now, but has yet to be included in a trophy tournament. Now, when the official metagame policy was instituted, one of the explicit caveats was that becoming an official metagame did not guarantee tournament inclusion. I don’t want to imply that we should include it simply because of that official status. However, many of those within the Mono community have been lobbying for inclusion for years.
So, I’d like to narrow the debate to the following: third OU slot or Monotype?
This list is hardly exhaustive; I just wanted to include some of the talking points that I saw brought up when I queried folks. What do you all think? Please voice your thoughts, but also be respectful. Discussion of what to include or not include can be extremely touchy, so I’d like to ask everyone to both argue in good faith, and assume others are doing so as well. Criticism is OK (we can’t really have a discussion without it) but let’s not use it as an excuse to just mindlessly bash a tier, or assume that any criticism is a personal attack.
We’ve already had a decent bit of discussion on this topic in the St. Patrick’s thread, so I don’t want to spend too much time reiterating what we discussed there. I’m on mobile right now, so linking the post itself is a pain, but based on the previous discussion I think a good starting point is ten playing slots, using the following format:
OU / OU / Ubers / DOU / UU / RU / NU / PU / LC / ???
I think this past SPL demonstrated that ten is a great sweet spot for playing slots in a team tour. I know that words like “competitiveness” get tossed around so much that they start to lose their meaning, but for team tournaments, I think that there is always a delicate balance between team support and individual results. Too many playing slots and the former becomes all that matters (who cares about individual results, it’s more valuable to pick up players who can increase the overall team’s winrate by small percentages because with such a large number of games played, those incremental changes will be worth far more than one or two players putting in a great record). Too few playing slots and the opposite is true: there’s no incentive to draft anyone but the absolute superstars, because a single good or bad record has an outsized influence on a team’s outcome.
In my mind ten is the ideal balance. Every individual game still matters, representing 10% of the potential points in any given week, but it’s a large enough number of slots that managers get some flexibility in drafting people who might put out a lower individual record but in turn might boost the records of enough other players by one or two games over the course of a season that they produce value overall. The shift to ten players was by far my favorite part of this year’s SPL, and I would like to see us echo that for SCL.
As for the number of OU slots, four OU slots in Snake always felt just a bit off, and was one of the most common complaints about the Snake format. Especially if we’re talking about ten slots total, having just two or three dedicated to OU seems ideal.
In my mind ten is the ideal balance. Every individual game still matters, representing 10% of the potential points in any given week, but it’s a large enough number of slots that managers get some flexibility in drafting people who might put out a lower individual record but in turn might boost the records of enough other players by one or two games over the course of a season that they produce value overall. The shift to ten players was by far my favorite part of this year’s SPL, and I would like to see us echo that for SCL.
As for the number of OU slots, four OU slots in Snake always felt just a bit off, and was one of the most common complaints about the Snake format. Especially if we’re talking about ten slots total, having just two or three dedicated to OU seems ideal.
As one of those involved in the original decision to remove Ubers from Snake and Slam (plz don’t kill me), I have to say that the state of Ubers is better than I have seen in years and years. The community is vibrant and active, the metagame is better than it has been in at least two gens (at least from this outsider’s perspective) and the games are genuinely fun to watch. Ubers has a long and storied history within Smogon and has been a part of its major tournament scene for over a decade, and they’ve clearly made great strides to overcome the many obstacles that have been tossed in their way over the past few years. I think it’s time for them to return.
It would be pretty easy to make the last slot a third OU slot and call it a day, but several people in the previous thread proposed another idea: including Monotype. Mono has been an official metagame for several years now, but has yet to be included in a trophy tournament. Now, when the official metagame policy was instituted, one of the explicit caveats was that becoming an official metagame did not guarantee tournament inclusion. I don’t want to imply that we should include it simply because of that official status. However, many of those within the Mono community have been lobbying for inclusion for years.
So, I’d like to narrow the debate to the following: third OU slot or Monotype?
- PROS OF MONOTYPE:
- New blood. Monotype is a huge and well-established community, with the third-highest forum activity of any official metagame (it’s just a hair behind UU), and significantly more ladder activity than ANY lower tier (consistently breaking 250k battles per month). Adding Monotype could be an opportunity to bring in a significant amount of new talent that otherwise didn’t see a reason to become involved in the tournament scene.
- Unique format offers lots of opportunity for hype. This one is definitely subjective, but from talking to non-Doubles players, one of the most consistently exciting elements of Doubles in SPL was always getting to see the cool techs that Doubles players would come up with that either wouldn’t work or had never been explored in singles metagames. It led to a ton of hype around Doubles games, and as much as I like the current SPL format it's definitely one of the things I missed the most this year. Monotype is a bit similar in that way, with a lot of wild Mono-specific sets geared toward its unique format. There’s definitely opportunity for some extremely cool games with a lot of hype.
- PROS OF OU x3:
- Balance with SPL. If SCL is intended to be the showcase of current gen talent, while SPL showcases OU talent across all gens, then it makes sense to have some balance between the two formats. This would mean SCL was OU x3 plus seven non-OU tiers, while SPL was current gen OU x3 plus seven non-current gen OUs.
- Fewer siloed tiers. One of the oft-referenced issues with Doubles and to a lesser degree Little Cup in SPL was siloization: there just wasn’t a ton of cross-over between Doubles and other tiers/metagames, meaning many teams ended up with DOU as an isolated slot (or else they had to dedicate resources toward multiple players to support a single playing slot). Most other slots didn’t have this problem - in SPL there was almost always enough cross-over with players who played multiple gens, and you see the same thing with most lower tiers. Too many siloed tiers and drafting proper team support becomes a nightmare. SCL will already be including DOU and Little Cup, and Ubers will be seeing a return to an official team tournament for the first time since SSD1. Will adding Monotype mean too many siloed tiers?
- Avoiding potential ”matchup” issues. I’m a bit wary of including this one, but it was referenced several times, so I wanted to at least include it on the list. Is Monotype too dependent on matchups from team preview to be a valuable addition to the tournament? Several of the Mono players I spoke to actively sought to debunk this argument, pointing out consistency of winrates among top players and tournament games where players overcame terrible matchups to pull off a win, and almost every tier has matchup issues to some degree (see the current discussion on BW OU, for example), but it remains one of the most common concerns people voice whenever Monotype is discussed.
This list is hardly exhaustive; I just wanted to include some of the talking points that I saw brought up when I queried folks. What do you all think? Please voice your thoughts, but also be respectful. Discussion of what to include or not include can be extremely touchy, so I’d like to ask everyone to both argue in good faith, and assume others are doing so as well. Criticism is OK (we can’t really have a discussion without it) but let’s not use it as an excuse to just mindlessly bash a tier, or assume that any criticism is a personal attack.