Reflections of an SPL Host

Truth be told, I should've never hosted SPL. This is not to say that hosting it was a mistake—which is not to say that it wasn't—but there really was no reason why things should have played out the way they did. It goes back as far as season 6, when a certain other SPL host, for his own reasons, made sure that I would not be managing, and it continues through season 7 and the beginning of this eighth one, where fate interfered with my plans twice more, but it does not stop there. It does not stop with Valentine's attempt to recruit me as his Little Cup player, of all things, and my growing fear of being a dusty old man on his way to playing his worst season either, serious as those concerns might have been. Things were, more or less, still on track until the following happened:

RE: SPL 8 hosting

As some of you have known through various channels, I will not be in a position to host the main season of SPL 8. I've recruited a very viable replacement host for myself though. Prague Kick will, starting from week 1 onwards, be the main host for SPL. He has plenty of hosting experience on Smogon and was awarded CC badge not long ago in part for that, and has also successfully hosted the Italian equivalent of SPL, meaning that he is probably more qualified for this job than I am. I'll still do the auction and things leading up to week 1 though.

^_^

In hindsight, of course, there's really nothing wrong with this post, and Prague Kick proved to be a very competent host, but hindsight is a luxury of our current perspective. In those cold December days, it was a catastrophe: Why is Isa not hosting? Why is the replacement not another TD? Can Prague Kick really run SPL? Who is Prague Kick? Some of these questions would be answered in the following weeks, but for the moment they sent the majority of managers off on a frantic search for a different host, the problem being that no one in their right mind would ever agree to host SPL. That's where I step into the frame.

You can guess the next 10.

Nothing is ever that easy though, and this rather clumsy first attempt was followed by a heated debate that did involve tournament administration but was mostly about integrity and memes. After around two days of no-holds-barred negotiation, the contents of which can unfortunately not be revealed at this time, it was decided that I would run the show together with Prague Kick. This, of course, presented me with an entirely different problem: I had never actually hosted a tournament before, and the Smogon Premier League is not exactly known for running smoothly. It is, after all, the tournament in which heated rivalries are born, time-honored friendships die, heroes become villains at the drop of a stat; the tournament in which Oglemi had burned our 5000 auction credits three years earlier (he never even apologized), the tournament in which I, myself, had once publicly called out the host for indulging in "kindergarten shit" by banning a friend of mine (I would do this again any time, but it should still have been a red flag). I knew all of this when I signed up for the job, but it did not bother me, and looking back now I can't quite figure out why. That's for later, though; I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Cold

First order of business was the auction, and being the host already proved to have its benefits. Usually, I would spend the auction either drafting or worrying about who might draft me, but for once I wasn't going to be on any team, and Isa was still in charge at this point. This meant I could focus on what was actually happening, such as the Raiders saving BKC, who was already screaming "not the frogs, not the frogs!" into his microphone, from the Falcons (more on them later) for the respectable sum of 34k while neglecting to buy a GSC player, or McMeghan landing on the Tigers (who were known for picking a category such as "VGC player" or "top pick of two seasons ago" and then buying a boatload of people that fit the bill) just as he had been prophesizing, and the Wolfpack stacking up enough players to field two rosters, and the Classiest miraculously managing to secure two players on the level of Earthworm and FAJI. Overall though, I must say that the auction was rather uneventful; LonelyNess wasn't there to hand over the reins to a rogue bidder, Oglemi wasn't there to use !reset for no reason, I wasn't there to spend 24k on a failed upbid, nobody got an entire family banned with a joke bid, and there were no Warhammer shenanigans either.

The same would hold true for most the first four weeks, with the notable exception of Valentine, manager of the Cryonicles and the SPL equivalent of a mosquito in your room. Aside from the occasional scheduling dispute, I was free to enjoy spectating games without anyone bothering me, often in Discord calls with old friends of mine, among them McMeghan, Pokémon phenomenon and connoisseur of all things "so gooud", and bro fist, Scooters manager, who always made sure we were paying attention. "Look," he would say, "he dodged!" "Look, look at him, he got 'em up!" "Look, dude, look, he dodged again! Look!" Commentary of this kind is not rare in SPL, and being the host gave me a new perspective on all of it, because it lifted the red-tinted glasses of team affiliation from my eyes. Normally, everyone including me is swept up by the current, and lines of morality are drawn along the roster grids, so that one's teammate is a saint even when he is dodging games and one's opponent is a monster even when he is doing nothing in particular. My new position forced neutrality on me, so I was free to appreciate every turn of events for what it was and not what it meant for my team. I quite liked this bird's-eye view, but while enjoying the silence of this unusually calm season, I could occasionally hear the faint buzzing of Valentine's latest shenanigans, namely his insistence on waiting until the very last second to make a substitution or fielding players in dubious tiers and leaving everyone in the dark about whether they would really play in the end. Of course, these were not serious offenses, so we couldn't do anything about them, but much like mosquito stings, they itched, and people complained about them. This left me wondering about what motivated him in the first place: was there really anything to gain by juggling his players? If so, was this minuscule advantage really worth making use of loopholes to the annoyance of absolutely everyone else? Whose mans is Valentine? I would find answers to the first two questions later, but for the moment my contemplations were cut short because the man had been generous enough to promote ghosting among his players and get himself tourbanned. No complaints there.

What followed was a rather turbulent week by midseason standards, not least because midseason is normally the deadest thing. Expecting this to be the case again, I was in for a rude awakening when, shortly after the start of the auction, we were notified of a rule that was supposed to have been implemented and made the mistake of adding it. Naturally, all hell broke loose, and we were immediately swamped with complaints of people whose auction plans we had apparently wrecked. Fair enough, lesson learned, rule reversed. Far more interesting was soulgazer's confrontation with the harsh realities of managing an SPL team. Not only did he have to fear for the validity of a last-minute bid because the Smogon clock was off by 8 minutes (of course we had to clean up this mess as well), he also made the mistake of bidding on Mizuhime, who did not want to be on his team and was not welcome there either. With the Raiders not offering more than peanuts, a potential trade was preemptively vetoed by the TD team, leaving her stuck in limbo between the Falcons roster and the Raiders Discord chat. All this, combined with the Falcons' poor showing, completed soulgazer's development from "i dont even mind playing either i just wanna try managing one time." to "srsly never. let me manage again", an impressively quick collapse even by SPL standards. All-star week also happened, but not even the all-stars care about that.

This also happened.

The Heat

Getting back into the day-to-day business, we were soon confronted with the first timer decision, Axel10 vs Genesis7. Timer decisions are fun because whoever timed out will claim it was a disconnect and whoever won will not give a damn, leaving the hosts to figure it out. The ruling for this states that "if you timeout with more than that limit time [between 60 and 120 seconds] remaining, we'll assume it is a DC, whereas the opposite is a true timeout," which I naively took to mean that there are also other means of determining a DC. After a rather tedious discussion on the matter it turned out that this was not intended and people who disconnected with a low timer are indeed just out of luck. This annoyed me both because it seems half baked and because it meant we argued for nothing, but it was still worth it because it also meant we didn't have to deal with the case anymore. Felt bad for Axel though. The reason I'm recounting all of this is because between this game and week 8's Eternal Spirit vs Welli0u, both of which were ripe with people explaining what we should be doing and asking why we were taking so long, I was beginning to figure out a kind of formula for how to deal with these and other disputes: instead of bothering with overly complicated justifications for everything, I could just go along with popular opinion on these situations, which is always to do the obvious thing. Running the game through this formula, it quickly becomes apparent that since Eternal Spirit had disconnected, he obviously deserved a rematch, and since Welli0u's opponent had timed out, he obviously deserved the timer win, which left me wondering what the hell I was even needed for.

Or I would have, had it not turned out that people needed me to schedule their games. One might think that meeting on Smogtours to play one game of Pokémon within 7 days is an easy task, but a couple weeks of SPL really put that assumption to the test. Indeed, I can barely remember a single week that passed without us having to handle a scheduling dispute. This might seem odd when you consider that there were barely any activity calls all season, but that's the fun part of it: as soon as we were done figuring out the situation and made it clear that we would not just hand out activity wins or force subs, the games miraculously happened without a hitch. So whenever we had to hold people's hand through the scheduling process (which does not become easier when you run everything through a third person) we did so knowing that we could achieve the same result by vanishing into another dimension until Monday morning. I was beginning to realize something rather uncomfortable, something that I really should have known all along, but I wasn't quite there just yet.

Meanwhile, the teams (minus the Classiest) were still competing for the playoff slots in a remarkably close race, mainly because the Raiders had managed to go undefeated until week 9. This made them rather unpopular with the other competitors, but no confrontation was quite as severe as the one with the Scooters, a series that showcased another facet of SPL: its heavy strain on human relations.

All of these people were friends, and while large parts of this collage might look like harmless banter, I assure you that not all of them remained on speaking terms afterwards. Usually, I would've been involved in this in some way, but in my new role I found myself quite removed from all the drama. The Mazinger, for better or worse, was unaffected, and so I continued passing the time watching Smogon's top players go at each other both verbally and with plays ranging from "so gooud, so gooooud" to "he's so bad he's so bad he's so bad he's so bad, look, look at him, he's so bad!"

Meanwhile, despite my complaints above, I have to admit that there really was not a whole lot of trouble that warranted host action compared to other seasons, to the point that McMeghan was heralding this one as "the freest SPL to host of all time", so things were really still going quite well in the second half.

Eventually, though, reality caught up with us, and after going to sleep expecting to put the playoffs up in the morning, I was confronted with the fact that Lord Outrage had managed to time out in the final game of week 9, with both semifinal matchups depending on the outcome. This put me in one hell of a spiral, because not only did we have to figure out how to call a timer loss without seeing the timer, we had to do it right now, like, right now right now, because everyone was waiting for the playoffs to start. Unfortunately, a proper decision required us to interpret the ending of the game by comparing a screenshot of it with the PS source code and then ask Zarel for confirmation because we did not actually have the technical knowledge to make absolute statements about any kind of source code, which took its time. To make matters worse, keen observers had already run the situation through the formula and determined that FAJI obviously deserved the timer win while Lord Outrage obviously deserved the rematch, so we were facing increased pressure from the public. There was also the fact that the obligations of day-to-day life do not go on hold to make time for administrative decisions on Pokémon tournaments, meaning I found myself in a double bind of futile escapism in which I could not relieve stress from hosting in real life because there was work to do and could not relieve the stress from said work online because there was a tournament to host. So when I replied to a comment about the decision with a reasonably hostile tirade about why things might not be all that obvious, I realized that it had gotten to me. The Mazinger, for better or worse, was no longer unaffected. The situation was only somewhat salvaged when Zarel informed us that not even he knew what the timer was at on the last turn, forcing us to default to a timer win, which was a godsend because our calculations had put us right into the gray area between timeout and DC. Oh well, I thought, only two more weeks, blissfully ignorant of the trial still to come.

The League That Would Not End

Before that, though, we went through rather relaxing semifinals, mostly remarkable because the Raiders had managed to play an undefeated season only to start the playoffs with five straight losses. Of course, losing has never been able to suppress the unflinching optimism of SPL players; "man, were gonna fucking go 0-5 to 7-5", I saw a certain Raider say, "this is gonna be great". It wasn't all that great in the end, though. The final series looked equally smooth at first, the Tigers securing a 6-2 lead against the Scooters, but it all seemed too easy, and my fears were confirmed when Steve Angello, who was already running late for his game versus TheThorn, informed us that he was sitting outside of his house and could not reach his computer because he had forgotten his key. This led to an awkward session in which I passed messages between the teams, who appeared unable to communicate on their own, and tried to let the Tigers know that they really should look into getting a sub ready right now, like, right now right now. They seemed dangerously nonchalant about it though, and I was beginning to worry that, despite the 6-2 lead, the series was not going end on Sunday.

My fears grew more real when I failed to persuade TheThorn into staying awake to complete the game (the words "good night" had never before been so devastating), and they gave me the ability to accurately predict the remaining three games. 6-5. I realized that this season refused to end, that it was not giving up without a fight. After another Monday ruined by an administrative decision, I was once again able to predict the outcome of the last game, which I do not wish to discuss any further, and we moved on to the tiebreaker. We set the deadline at three days, the same as every other tiebreaker, but of course the immediate reaction was to call for two more days, because the logical consequence of running behind the schedule is further delay. We mostly held our ground, and luckily, the SM game happened on Friday. Less luckily, my increasingly firm belief that this season was never going to end enabled me to correctly predict the outcome of the subsequent ADV game, bringing us to 1-1, with the aforementioned scheduling conflict forcing us to extend the tournament by yet another day. Finally, I was able to predict the last game too, because it was Mazar vs Gunner Rohan. The Circus Maximus Tigers were crowned as the SPL 8 champions, and I was finally free.

During all this, though, I had been seriously worried about what would happen if the players just decided to ignore the deadline; clearly we did not want to give out activity wins in the final, so what was stopping them? I thought about this, and about the scheduling conflicts we kept having to solve, including in the tiebreaker, and about Steve's key, and about how I had been the only one who seemed worried about the game not getting done, and it seemed to me that SPL had become—or maybe always had been—a twisted kind of bizarro-bureaucracy in which we (the hosts; the institution) were forced to cater to the players' whims and random twists of fate, constantly on the run from one Discord window to another. I also found what I think is the answer to the question regarding Valentine's ways, which is that of course any advantage gained by juggling was worth pissing off everyone else, because things like civility or the comfort of others never even enter the equation. The only goal, the only factor, is the elusive red trophy, and anything that has a chance of getting you even a pixel closer to it is automatically worth it. I should have known this from the start, given that said trophy is the main reason I'm still around, but somehow, becoming the host had made me forget. This realization also explained why we always had to handle the scheduling conflicts: if you're not at a disadvantage, the effort you put in to get the game done smoothly does not increase your chance of winning, so why bother? It explained why everything was always obviously in the favor of whoever was making the statement: adapting your stance to reality does not increase your chances of winning, so why bother? It explained why Steve Angello had been on Smogtours yelling at the Scooters to find a sub despite being the one who had missed the time, why reyscarface (the apex predator of SM OU; some say that Stephen Hawking is the reyscarface of theoretical physics) went on dubiously lengthy shopping trips right before his games, why cbb kept ragging on seemingly random sets only for his players to use them the same week.

While realizing all this had cleared up my confusion, it also presented me with a new question: I had nothing to gain by hosting, in fact I even gave up the chance of a trophy for it, and since I myself was not the trophy, nobody gave a damn about me anyway, so why did I bother? But then I thought about how despite all the trouble, and despite never having won the trophy, SPL was still my favorite thing on Smogon, and about the people I've gotten to know throughout the years and the great times we had in various team chats, about the games, the quotes, the legends every new season gives us, and about how great it felt to find out I had been drafted for the first time, and now I believe that if hosting the tournament gave at least one person the chance to experience those same things, it was worth every minute. I have to believe that. This marks the end of our journey, and I hope that my reflections could shed light on the human element of this very unique Smogon experience, but more importantly I hope that Oglemi finally apologizes for burning our damn 5k.

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