Other CAP Media

[HeaLnDeaL]

approved by Birkal

This section has been largely based on EpicUmbreon29's reply to a private CAP social media conversation (prompted by GreenGogoatttt). It has been modified to serve as a PRC discussion topic.

CAP Social Media
This PRC topic aims to discuss which avenues CAP should take to better its social media presence. The vast majority of people want CAP to be successful with its social media, but the list of priorities varies. What type of content should CAP media provide? What platforms should it support? How in tune with Smogon as a whole should CAP media be? How should CAP media be organized and to what level should the content be regulated? Does CAP need its own media coordinator?

I'm going to be rather blunt here because I simply don't know how else to phrase this. Sparktrain, Snobalt, and myself all volunteered to help produce and post CAP content on facebook back when the facebook media sign up thread was made. None of us were ever contacted back. At times, it feels like CAP is snubbed by the media outlets of Smogon. I don't find a particular amount of fault in Smogon as a whole in this isolated incident, and elsewhere we've had some success in being able to get CAP content out there through avenues such as Flying Press. I truly believe that most of Smogon wants to see CAP do well, but there's a big gap in both CAP's communication with Smogon media outlets and in CAP's communication with its users in trying to get quality material to be shared across social media. I hope for us to try and fill those gaps here in this thread, and I think one of the biggest things that can help us is to create a role in CAP leadership that serves as our media coordinator. The responsibilities of this position could include communicating with the heads of Smogon media areas and ensuring that we are represented as well as reviewing and encouraging content from the CAP community at large.

The purpose of CAP social media will be defined as expanding the presence of the CAP community as it relates to Smogon and Pokemon Showdown by creating informative and entertaining content. Potential formats for this include, but are not limited to, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.

CAP specific social media can not only raise awareness and bring in more participants, it can help those involved to stay updated on things like metagame trends and poll results. In general, improving the CAP experience will be important moving into the future to promote continued success. Our potential challenges include finding dedicated users who are willing to create content of consistently high quality and can be trusted to represent CAP positively. Determining who will have direct access to accounts to post CAP content, but this would largely have to be discussed with Smogon media leaders should we decide to work more closely with Smogon media outlets.

How independent we want CAP media to be from Smogon media is a primary concern. At this time, there are three main levels of unity that are possible that I can foresee. We could try to have all of our content going directly through CAP media, i.e. we'd have someone posting directly on Smogon's Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube based on the content we'd like to have posted. To the other side of the issue is for CAP to be much more separate with its own facebook page, its own youtube channel, and its own twitter; this method would let us control out content at a greater level without bothering Smogon media too much, but it could risk to isolate us from the rest of Smogon. The middle proposal would be to have our own twitter, facebook, and youtube pages the contains the content that we want and to have our media coordinator ask Smogon media outlets to share or retweet our content on their official platforms. This could potentially give us more control over our content while ensuring that our messages get out to Smogon as a whole as well and could let us have some "CAP only" messages while having some other messages shared with all of Smogon. Which method to use is up to discussion, and new ones are also allowed to be proposed. Please note however that there is no way for us to have our own Flying Press and any articles that we want would inherently have to go through them.

We also need to consider some implications of CAP social media advertising and changes in poll demographics. Should we advertise both CAP main process discussion threads and polls? If we advertise polls on social media with direct links, will it lead to more uninformed voters? What should we do to protect our polling in the face of increased social media?

Below are are possible media methods that we'd like to explore and a list of potential content. This list is not exhaustive and not written in stone but is meant to give a snapshot of things we'd like to support. If you're interested in providing content for any of these areas, please let us know : )

media ideas

YouTube
Overview: The YouTube channel will cover metagame events in CAP, as videos better suit the sharing and commenting of battles and explanations of how the metagame works. Coverage of the creation process itself should probably be as unbiased as possible in order to prevent changes in voting.

Potential Content
reCAP: A video series that aims to quickly summarize the discussion of the most recent thread in the process, covering the main arguments and the slated options. This would help people catch up with the project if they fall behind and keep the information fresh in general.

Welcome to CAP!: A video series that explains the role of each CAP Pokemon in the metagame more briefly than a full analysis in order to give new players a crash course in the meta and lower the barrier of entry.

CAP Highlight Matches: These videos could provide coverage of important CAP matches (example: CAPTT, tournament grand finals) in order to demonstrate top-level play and provide general entertainment.

CAP Podcast: CAP players talk about their observations of and thoughts on the current metagame and other recent occurrences around CAP to provide a personal perspective.

Twitter/Facebook
Overview: Twitter and Facebook would primarily update people whenever there's important CAP related news and link users to the appropriate pages. It could also be used to share any work related to CAP, such as art or other channels with coverage.

Potential Content
CAP Process Updates: Users can receive tweets updating them on when a discussion or poll opens or what option won in a poll as soon as it happens.

CAP Analysis Updates: Users are alerted when a new analysis goes up for a Pokemon in the CAP metagame.

CAP Tournaments: Alerts can go out whenever an official tournament on the forums is open for signups or an anticipated match is going to happen.

Related Content: Any other work related to CAP that could be showcased.

Flying Press
Overview: Flying press has already been quite receptive to promoting CAP articles. In the past, we've had both metagame articles and creation process summaries. We can expand upon CAP youtube content here with more nitty-gritty details or we can offer unique content.

Potential Content
CAP Metagame Pokemon of the Month: An analysis of major CAP metagame threats could go out monthly or bimonthly to give readers a much more current viewpoint into the top threats of the metagame.

CAP Creation Summaries: After a new CAP is made, an introduction article could serve to advertise it to the community and to give a summary of its intended functions.

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Interested Users
If you're interested in contributing to CAP media, feel free to reply to this thread!

 

[emma]

God Bless the Mods :DD

How independent we want CAP media to be from Smogon media is a primary concern. At this time, there are three main levels of unity that are possible that I can foresee. We could try to have all of our content going directly through CAP media, i.e. we'd have someone posting directly on Smogon's Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube based on the content we'd like to have posted. To the other side of the issue is for CAP to be much more separate with its own facebook page, its own youtube channel, and its own twitter; this method would let us control out content at a greater level without bothering Smogon media too much, but it could risk to isolate us from the rest of Smogon. The middle proposal would be to have our own twitter, facebook, and youtube pages the contains the content that we want and to have our media coordinator ask Smogon media outlets to share or retweet our content on their official platforms. This could potentially give us more control over our content while ensuring that our messages get out to Smogon as a whole as well and could let us have some "CAP only" messages while having some other messages shared with all of Smogon. Which method to use is up to discussion, and new ones are also allowed to be proposed. Please note however that there is no way for us to have our own Flying Press and any articles that we want would inherently have to go through them.

I personally think we should we either have someone directly post on Smogon's Social Media accounts or get our own but get Smogon to share out content. I do not think going solo is the best option because I do not think we would get enough attention and end up isolating ourselves. At the very least we would need Smogon to share our initial launch in order to get people interested, since nobody would know about our Social Media without it. An alternative is advertising it in the Smogon Discord channel but even then people who just follow Smogon on Social Media without being a big part of the community would not know about us.

So between those two options, I personally think we should start up out own Facebook / Twitter / Youtube and get Smogon to share our posts. I do not think much publicity will be lost by having our posts retweeted / shared instead of it being directly on Smogon Media, since people will still see it nevertheless. This gives us more freedom which is important. The only problem I see is getting Smogon to share everything we ask them do, but I sure they will agree as CAP is part of Smogon and they want to get as many people interested as they can.

We also need to consider some implications of CAP social media advertising and changes in poll demographics. Should we advertise both CAP main process discussion threads and polls? If we advertise polls on social media with direct links, will it lead to more uninformed voters? What should we do to protect our polling in the face of increased social media?

This is something to be aware of. If we go with having our own Media Accounts and getting Smogon to share some of our content, I think we should tweet out / put on our own Twitter / Facebook each new thread that goes us. This includes both submissions and voting. I think we could have Smogon repost the submissions phase, but not the voting phase. I think this gives us the perfect balance of getting ourselves out there and keeping polls fair.

I of course would like to help. I can do basically anything you want me to do since tweeting things out is not that difficult. I think maybe having a group of people to commentate games would be fun as it gives exposures to the CAP Metagame and group calls are fun to do on their own :)

 

[snake]

I'm not sure about social media - I don't use much of anything (aside from Smogon forums of course), but if I have any ideas/support other ideas, I'll let you all know.

However, I'm happy to write up Flying Press articles and help make scripts for YouTube videos. I'll just need a topic and a deadline.

 

[Blackdrakon30]

I am willing to help with articles; however I will need guiding possibly for the first few since I'm a decent writer but might not have enough experience in the topics. As similar to the case of Snake_Rattler, I don't have much experience with Media stuff, but I'll tell everyone if I think of any.

I have a couple thoughts relating to the polls (EDIT: That aren't relevant for here technically as per request below of HeaLnDeaL) :

Hide

1. We should not post direct links to process polls on the social media. As you mentioned, this would most definitely lead to less informed voters and less intelligent decisions as a result. The Discussion threads seem like they should be posted in media as it would generate overall awareness of the CAP process. Furthermore, there are less significant consequences in the long run if people are uninformed or new in the discussion threads as compared to the polls.

2. In order to protect our polling, I'm going to throw out a fairly radical idea. Perhaps we should have an authority lock, similar to how the PRC is run. If we could have a time participated requirement, or some sort of approval committee for who could vote, that would help eliminate voters who aren't knowledgeable of the discussion whatsoever. Essentially people would gain capability to vote in the polls after participating with knowledgeable or relevant inputs in at least two (Or however many) discussion threads. This idea seems like it could work, although this concept definitely has obvious flaws.

There are certainly other ways of protecting our polls, and we should definitely look into other options.

 

[HeaLnDeaL]

Just want to say really quickly that this is not the place to talk about changing CAP polling practices. Polling was mentioned in the OP in regards to protecting our polls from waves of new uneducated voters from social media. Our social media should work with our polling system rather than the other way around of changing our polls just to work around social media

 

[Fiend]

I'm not really the best to comment on social media and how to optimize it, but I'm with GreenGogoat in that we should not isolate ourselves. And because of that I think the best option is the first one proposed, I don't think we should even need to worry about 'annoying' social media people either.

We also need to consider some implications of CAP social media advertising and changes in poll demographics. Should we advertise both CAP main process discussion threads and polls? If we advertise polls on social media with direct links, will it lead to more uninformed voters? What should we do to protect our polling in the face of increased social media?

I feel that advertising polls is a bad idea. Advertising the process itself is fine, but linking users to polls will almost certainly will, and in the event it does not, it will instead lead to a rise in votes based on the user and not the content (e.g Jas will get more votes than Greengogoat due to being Jas).

I think it's all a good idea, and I'll help pick up any slack there is here. If we want this to go well, well past the initial excitement or whatever term belongs here people need to productively contribute.

 

[Ignus]

I'm actually against creating a separate page for CAP related stuff, if only because I don't see enough CAP related content coming through as of now. I don't think it's necessary for us to have our own outlets when our actual process is so slowly paced - due to the fact that it takes us so long to finish a single project (this is deliberate, of course), a CAP facebook/twitter page wouldn't have nearly enough content to really justify its own page.

Instead, I'd prefer to have someone post to the main Smogon pages whenever the next discussion thread pops up, maybe with some background on what previous threads and polls had decided on. Even if we have to do that through the publicity thread in IS, I don't think that's particularly a bad thing. Not having a dedicated facebook poster isn't the end of the world.

That said, if we have a group of people who are consistently submitting CAP articles to places like the Flying Press, my opinion would change. But as of right now, I don't think our small community needs its own page. I understand the opinions of "We want to control our own content!", but we should wait until the content is coming in a steady stream first.

So, basically:

• organize people to post content to the avenues we already have open (Flying Press, link beginnings of discussions in publicity threads, possibly get someone to write synopses of previous stages)
• If the content is working well, is consistently produced, and is 'too much' for the primary Smogon media channels, then we make our own pages. Not before.

All that said, if you need another pair of fingers writing articles, I'm alive. I'd be interested in doing some rundown articles on previous CAPs especially, including 'war stories' on the CAPs creation process. I'm sure plenty of people would enjoy reading a full rundown on some of our previous projects.

 

[HeaLnDeaL]

Also, just an idea, but individual media platforms could be chosen to be used by CAP or not. We might, hypothetically, decide that CAP doesn't need its own facebook and have cap posts on facebook just go through Smogon's facebook, but we may at the same time choose to have a CAP youtube to better organize our content into certain playlists or categories that would be harder for a general smogon youtube channel to do (and then ask smogon for us to like/share/list/whatever it's called our channel on their main page and vice versa). So, just something to consider I guess; we don't have to treat the individual platforms as if they are chained together.

That said, I appreciate the discussion so far. It seems like the consensus is that CAP should not isolate itself from the smogon community. If this stays the consensus over the next few days, I might make an update about this being a guiding direction force that will then help us decide some of the smaller details.

 

[darmico]

I ditto everything snake_rattler said about not knowing much about social media but willing to help, and for the idea of making are own social media, I think that we should just post off of smogon because more people are familiar with it we could get more publicity.

 

[Mova]

Even though I don't know much about social media anymore, I try my best to promote CAP's existence on my DeviantArt page. Since I post little (if any) CAP-related art, maybe that greedy art-sharing site isn't the best place to advertise...

 

[BP]

Although I am not against it and I would love to help run something and inform the community on our project I think trying to get smogon to help at this point in time is a lost cause.

HeaLnDeaL said this in his main post:

I'm going to be rather blunt here because I simply don't know how else to phrase this. Sparktrain, Snobalt, and myself all volunteered to help produce and post CAP content on facebook back when the facebook media sign up thread was made. None of us were ever contacted back. At times, it feels like CAP is snubbed by the media outlets of Smogon. I don't find a particular amount of fault in Smogon as a whole in this isolated incident, and elsewhere we've had some success in being able to get CAP content out there through avenues such as Flying Press.

Smogon does not give a damn about us because we are not directly affiliated with them. The only reason why we have any credit on our side In my opinion is because DougJustDoug is a huge contributor to smogon. I think currently we are biting off more then we can chew.

I think we should wait before we take on bigger media outlets such as Facebook and maybe stick to the flying press for now. As it stands I think we should focus on getting our Analysis on Smogon's official DEX. By this I mean our CAPmons. This would expose us to a lot more players and it would also give us more credibility. Because honestly the only time I've ever looked at the Flypress was to read the cap stuff that was posted.

User Opinions on CAP Popularity

I'm not entirely sure if this is important or not but I asked some of my PU squad on what they thought of why our user base is so small this is what they had to say:

ShuckleDeath "I think the problem with cap is its not a metagame you can play on the cartridge"

gasquakee "maybe this is me being ignorant to the situation but i think there's a psychological significance to a pokemon that's been designed by gamefreak vs a pokemon that's been designed by a random collection of people. That's what puts me off at least, not even just the look but the moveset etc,"

NOVED "there's just not a lot of interest in playing with fake pokemon. especially right now, everyone is hyped up to play with actual new mons in sun/moon. not sure if that's possible if i'm being honest with you I think the main appeal of CAP is mostly in the creation process the community working to make a mon is cool but it's hard to convince people to play the meta. also another thing i can tell you, not specifically about CAP but battle spot has also had decent periods of unpopularity and tournaments are a good way to get people interested in playing. Like a tour on the forums i should specify, not like a room tour tho that does have the same effect on a smaller scale.

blunder because it's not official. it's not advertised a lot either and it's just easier to focus on the actual metagames with real pokemon


[hide/]

 

[Conni]

I think CAP articles are a good idea, as they give detailed explanations and insights on CAPmons that allow new users to read and understand somewhat easily.
I also have to agree with Broken Phobias for now as the hype for Sun Moon is still very large and I think that maybe we should start off with articles first.
I'd love to help write CAP articles as I have experience with the normal TFP processes and such, although maybe someone with more metagame knowledge than I do can start off or help write about the CAP metagame and competitive aspects.

 

[Mova]

It would be really nice to see more CAP articles in the near future, such as those that explain the process, the metagame, and so on.

Speaking of which, would animated stories or parodies of the Playtests be plausible anytime soon? I was looking forward to a CAP movie since the end of Cawmodore's project.

 

[Sundar]

Agreeing with Conni, writing up articles would be a great idea in trying to help users to better understand the CAP metagame to better associate them with the community. I can understand that there is a large portion of the Smogon community that don't currently know about what is CAP, or what are the qualities of CAPmons. CAP Articles discussing about each CAPmon can help users who are not familiar with the CAP community to better understand the good qualities of these type of pokemon, as they are just not made as if it were for fun, but were made with the aspect of competitive analysis towards the CAPmon itself. I would like to help out as well in writing articles to better associate users to understand the concepts of each CAPmon as well as for another cause.

I personally think we should we either have someone directly post on Smogon's Social Media accounts or get our own but get Smogon to share out content. I do not think going solo is the best option because I do not think we would get enough attention and end up isolating ourselves. At the very least we would need Smogon to share our initial launch in order to get people interested, since nobody would know about our Social Media without it. An alternative is advertising it in the Smogon Discord channel but even then people who just follow Smogon on Social Media without being a big part of the community would not know about us.

So between those two options, I personally think we should start up out own Facebook / Twitter / Youtube and get Smogon to share our posts. I do not think much publicity will be lost by having our posts retweeted / shared instead of it being directly on Smogon Media, since people will still see it nevertheless. This gives us more freedom which is important. The only problem I see is getting Smogon to share everything we ask them do, but I sure they will agree as CAP is part of Smogon and they want to get as many people interested as they can.

I agree with the statement that GreenGogoatttt had given because that it is mandatory to have someone to incorporate CAP-based articles in the official Smogon Media pages to help new users not familiar with the Create-a-Pokemon Project to better associate with the community as well as help to contribute to any future CAP Processes. But then, agreeing to your other statement that getting Smogon to share any CAP articles may get complicated, it is important to figure out the time at which we can be able to get these articles released into the media to help inform users about what is going on in the CAP Community.

We also need to consider some implications of CAP social media advertising and changes in poll demographics. Should we advertise both CAP main process discussion threads and polls? If we advertise polls on social media with direct links, will it lead to more uninformed voters? What should we do to protect our polling in the face of increased social media?

For the first and second question, it is recommended to advertise the CAP main process discussion thread and polls, and it wouldn't lead to more uninformed voters, because that as I have seen in the last CAP 22 Process, the people who lead the specific project none-of-the-less incorporated the current information about what the CAPmon will be like, to better keep people informed on the current step of the CAP Process. For the third question, if it were to be a problem however, I would recommend that they should be redirected to a link if they are new to the community and don't understand how the process works so then these new users joining the community can understand before submitting a concept based on a specific part of the CAP Process in making a new pokemon (like Ability, Stats, etc is what I'm referring towards).

 

[Kyubics]

First off, I just want to say that CAP Media is something that definitely that needs to be improved upon, and this thread is a great start for doing this. How many people do you know that found CAP by accident? I certainly did. Attracting new participants, even if they aren't fully fledged competitive battlers yet (that can come with time), is vital to the survival of this project. However, as mentioned in this thread, there seems to be somewhat of a stigma surrounding CAP, perhaps dissuading some more experienced users from joining the project. Increasing the quantity, variety and prevalence of our outreach within the Smogon community would, in my opinion, help to change some people's stereotypical view of the CAP Project.

This, however, would mean that any content we create would have to be of a consistently high standard. YouTube videos, for example, are a great way to reach out and get lots of information across in an interesting and engaging way, but they are difficult to produce to a high standard and are easy to criticise and damaging to popularity if they are produced poorly. If CAP can do them well, then YouTube is a good route to go down, and the ideas in the OP seem to be perfect for what we need. If we can't, then we should focus on other, safer ideas instead.

One avenue that I think we should definitely pursue more is the Flying Press, as many others have said. This is advertised on a huge scale by Smogon anyway - on Facebook, Twitter and to all the users with a SFP Subscription - without us having to do much at all. I don't think that Smogon would need much persuading to share our articles considering that they promote any that are published anyway. In my opinion, this is both the easiest and most doable change at this point in time, so writing more SFP articles is where I think we should start, and I would love to help with it. Furthermore, they require far less work than YouTube videos to produce and run almost no risk of reflecting badly on the CAP Project.

The most difficult part of this is in regards to us using Facebook and Twitter. I honestly doubt that we would be allowed to use the main Smogon Facebook or Twitter accounts for three reasons:

1. These Smogon pages do not currently post anything outside of articles, tournaments, completed analyses and metagame changes (such as suspect processes or usage stats). To suddenly start to advertise a whole new area would be a big change that would take a lot of persuasion, and it could be argued that it would open the floodgates for other areas on Smogon to ask to be advertised in this way.
2. The kind of updates proposed would be quite frequent during a CAP Process, often every few days, which is just about as often as the Facebook page posts anyway. I don't think people would appreciate that much CAP information, especially because:
3. The content could be thought of as very repetitive. While fine for someone that does follow CAP, we have to remember that the things we post through the official Smogon outlets would be seen by everyone; I don't think that so many people want to hear all of the ins and outs of the process.

It is for these reasons that I don't think that we should try to post directly from the Smogon social media accounts. Rather, as some other people have suggested, I think we should have our own accounts. In counter to some of the arguments that suggest we would be too isolated, I propose that we try to get the Smogon account to announce our launch and then share some of our initial content to help us get off of the ground. As we go along it would be great to get them to share some more significant announcements and important discussions/poll results. I don't know how likely this would be, especially after reading Broken Phobias' above post, and in my opinion, I don't think we can get this to work without some cooperation from the main Smogon accounts. Perhaps we could hold off attempting to start social media pages until the next CAP Project, where there will be much more content to post about and much more activity to attract new users. In the meantime, we could start to reach out with articles to try and improve our image so that Smogon may be more likely to work with us.

As it stands I think we should focus on getting our Analysis on Smogon's official DEX. By this I mean our CAPmons. This would expose us to a lot more players and it would also give us more credibility. Because honestly the only time I've ever looked at the Flypress was to read the cap stuff that was posted.

While I originally agreed with this idea, I can now see it causing a bit of a problem. I don't think that some people would like non-official Pokemon to be on what is otherwise a very factual and realistic database. The official Dex does more than just analyses, it includes data on all the Pokemon, moves and abilities that may also have to be edited to fit CAP Pokemon - for example if you searched for a Pokemon that knew the move Stealth Rock, Tomohawk would have to come up for you to be able to go to its analysis. If it is possible for us to include just the analyses, maybe it would be more likely that we could get them on there. Otherwise, I think the best thing to do is better promote the analyses on the site that we already have.

In conclusion, in my opinion:

• We need to change our image
• YouTube is great but hard to do
• Flying Press is a good place to start (please let me help :3)
• Using the official Smogon Facebook and Twitter accounts is not the right thing to do; we should have our own but with cooperation from Smogon
• The official Dex might not be for us, but we can try to promote better what we've already got.

 

[snake]

In whatever articles, YouTube videos, whatever we have, we need to include a little blurb that, for CAP Project, briefly explains what we do, that we build for OU or CAP (depending on what we decide), etc., or for the CAP Metagame, says that we are a metagame of old CAPmons + OU mons, etc.
This way, people will be on the same page and not read an article with a bunch of misconceptions about who we are. It doesn't have to be long; just a few concise sentences will do (I can write them up if this idea is supported.)

 

[SHSP]

I agree a whole lot with Kyubics here- flying press seems like a great route as it stands, it fits what I imagine we should go for. It's easy to digest, piques interest, doesn't force CAP on anyone as something like the smogon twitter would, and we can go a lot of different routes on it- be it metagame, process, any real aspect of CAP. I also like Snake's idea of a constant sort of description that makes it easier to understand what we are and how we work.

On Youtube, I agree it would be harder to pull off high quality work and we really should only go down this route if we are sure we can pull it off. It's a double edged sword, high risk, but high reward. I know I got into CAP based off of a Youtube video and I'm sure it could be a huge proponent of pushing us out into public eye. Perhaps we should organize one main Youtube source, a la Lumiose Station, where we have multiple people produce content under one banner?

 

[HeaLnDeaL]

Flying Press is something we've used in the past and I would obviously love for CAP to continue working with them to produce articles. After talking with a few people the other day, it seems that the best content for articles would be to continue the introductory information on new CAPmons like we did for Kerfluffle and to add in additional Metagame Spotlight articles, similar to how OU, UU, etc have been doing. The consensus in this thread broadly supports Flying Press, and thus I think it's safe to conclude that we will continue writing Flying Press articles.

The other media outlets are for the most part generally supported, but the avenue in which to run them is far from a consensus. We have not reached an agreement on whether we want to have our own separate accounts that Smogon can retweet/reshare/etc from or if we want to run everything through Smogon media sources. As far as Twitter and Facebook go, I personally don't know what is best (though I'd love to here more arguments). Regarding YouTube, however, my current thought is that having our own channel would simply allow us to organize our content in a much more efficient manner. YouTube offers the ability to sort videos posted into playlists, allowing us to potentially have multiple playlists for subjects such as CAP Process in Review, Ladder Battles, Playtest/Tournament Matches, CAP Metagame 101, etc. I would imagine if we go through the official Smogon YouTube channel we would only have access to a single "CAP" playlist (though I think YouTube allows us to even have our own channel and to let the Smogon channel put select videos from us into a playlist on their page?). Of course, the major downfall to not going through Smogon for videos would be a dip in video viewership... but perhaps this would be for the best while we are still working to get consistent quality? And I also want to say that either way we should keep quality a top priority. The major motivating factor behind this whole thread was because GreenGogoatttt started making YouTube videos about CAP. Since then I have tried to work with him and give him pointers to improve his quality. In the past, users such as hendrix96 and Tadasuke have also made some pretty nice quality CAP ladder videos. We definitely have a past to draw from and to set a standard of quality from, and it's just a matter of making sure the new video kids reach that level of quality. As always, I'd love to here further thoughts though.

 

[Kyubics]

As it's been quite a while since we made a decision regarding the Flying Press, I was wondering when we could get going with some articles? I don't see any reason that we should continue holding back, even if we are undecided about other media outlets. Obviously, there may be some intermediary stage or stages before we start writing, such as deciding specific content or subject areas we want articles to include or be about. But at the very least, I don't see why we can't get started with these first steps.

 

[HeaLnDeaL]

Because OU bans are still frequent? It's hard to write content for a metagame if it's not going to look the same in a few weeks from now. OU can get away with spotlights and whatnot because they have the writers to keep pushing out new material whenever the meta changes. I'm not saying we don't have any writers, but I think it might be asking too much to assume that we can keep up with the same schedule frequency of OU, which lends our most recent stuff to get outdated faster as OU makes bans.

In order to keep our material up to date for as long as possible while still actually creating content, I propose that we will write our first CAP Metagame Spotlight right after the results of the Duggy suspect are in.

I also propose that we aim to make an article regarding CAP updates after the first few updates are done so that we can a) explain our reasoning behind updates and b) share the first few examples of updates. If the updates remain significant enough, it could potentially turn into a mini series of articles.

 

[BP]

I also propose that we aim to make an article regarding CAP updates after the first few updates are done so that we can a) explain our reasoning behind updates and b) share the first few examples of updates. If the updates remain significant enough, it could potentially turn into a mini series of articles.

HeaL has brought up a very interesting point regarding CAP Updates. When we do finish said Updates I propose we interview the Update Leaders on the CAP they helped update. This could be a great outlet for attention. I can just imagine a twitter post "After years of the same CAP mons, CAP has decided to update the existing mons!" or something to that effect.

Regarding the OU banning I agree with HeaL that it would be inefficient to write articles about a meta that is still so young. It makes 0 sense to start right away and it makes us look sloppy and premature. We could elect writers for the articles however but this would again wouldn't be the best decision as IRL issues may arise and stop the Elected writers from writing.

 

[snake]

A good article might be threats not as good in CAP because of certain CAPmons. For example, Rockium Z Landorus-T doesn't see as much use just because Flyinium Z is so much better at breaking Tomo. Just a thought.

 

[Mova]

As snake mentioned, we could use some more articles that relate to OU better than the CAP Project does now, except that they focus on the CAP metagame while trying to make connections to the standard metagames. Speaking of which, we could compare and contrast CAPs that share types with Alola-native species, such as Nihilego and Mega Crucibelle, Mollux and Salazzle, and so on.

 

[LucarioOfLegends]

I agree with the stance of a new Youtube channel for CAP, since we actually need to differentiate ourselves from Smogon a bit. The last time (and only time) the Smogon Youtube channel mentioned us was during Necturna, and that just for the art submissions. While I still think that connecting ourselves to Smogon through Facebook and other social media is a good idea, since they consistently update stuff about their metagames, sharing a Youtube channel with Smogon is an incredibly large crutch for our growth as a community. And even if we aren't technically apart of Smogon's Youtube channel, they can still share our videos. So, we should at least get an independent Youtube channel for CAP.

As for TFP, I know at least a few people including myself are working on articles heavily focused on CAP, although mine is more satirical instead of introductory. With that said, I believe there is a shelved article about a introduction to CAP if anyone wants to claim that. As for future ones, I think the more comparisons to OU the better. While there is a thread about building mons not in OU, the OverUsed is still a very good place to draw newcomers because of the numerous similarities between the metagames and the size of their general player base, so it would be worthwhile to draw newcomers from there. Totally on board with the comparison of threats from OU to CAP, like the Rockium Z Lando vs Flyinium Z Lando argument that snake presented. Another idea would be to highlight the metagame superpowers of CAP, such as Tomohawk, Colossoil, and Volkraken, and possibly the best ways to beat these mons.

 

[Deck Knight]

We're going to start ramping up soon, starting on July 6th. Here's a basic outline of some of the things discussed in this thread, some resources we might need, and a general plan.

YouTube Channel:
To start we can use it for process announcements, such as "X thread has opened."
We don't need to begin intricately. For example I'll try filming a sample of an announcement with just my voice and a CAP as the background art to draw people in (calling dibs on Cyclohm.) It's a good way to brand ourselves and displays our uniqueness.

From there we'll need people that want to be announcers / hosts to record the various segments. I'd anticipate we need 3 people for this just so we can cover for anyone who misses their deadline.

Facebook: For now we should probably just use Smogon's page rather than branching out on our own.

Twitter: We can either draft them for Smogon or start our own and ask for Retweets, but if we do our own we need someone to run it.

We can come up with more advanced content later, lets focus on basics for this upcoming CAP.