Take a step back and think about what adding a BO3 slot was meant to achieve; it's intended to be a prestigious slot with the best players and the most competition that celebrates our three flagship OMs; AAA, STAB, and BH. We've had multiple changes in leadership since this decision was made so I want to ask plainly - is this still the generally held belief among staff? Because if it is then our tiebreaks should reflect that, and there are multiple ways to do that.
- Three fixed tiers, AAA, BH, and STAB.
- One fixed tier, that being BO3. Both teams then pick a tier.
- Literally just a single BO3 slot between two team figureheads.
If, however, you guys no longer believe in BO3, then why insist on this cursed path? Would people complain if we just replaced it with a second AAA slot? I'm biased; it's the only non-randbats tier I enjoy in this bloody cursed generation, but it's also hard to argue against it being the biggest tier OMs have while being very easy to pick up, and I promise it's not too late to revamp the tour.
Also, since I've gotten Isaiah's blessing to post this, I want to once again suggest we have MNM replace BH. I won't deny BH has more ladder players and a more active forum thread, but I don't like seeing it in the BO3 slot for multiple reasons, the biggest and most relevant one being that it's not intuitive. You can't pick up and play the tier like you can AAA/STAB/MNM/GG and there's no getting away from that. Yeah, you can "just learn" if you want to spend a week or two grinding ladder and being unofficially tutored, but frankly that's a drag and we don't have enough competent BH players for that to be feasible in a team tour format. Akira said earlier today "bh pool is gonna be so ass this year tho cuz bo3 stealing half of the players" and frankly I think it's the opposite - people like Lily that would otherwise be strong drafts
aren't going to sign up for BO3 because it's too much of a commitment.
Previously I said that it'd probably be fine eventually if we agreed to stick with BO3 as people would be forced to learn BH over time, but our playerbase numbers are volatile - people join and leave all the time, and I no longer think this is feasible.
OM mainers
don't understand BH. They don't exist at all, for the most part. There's QT and FC,
maybe pannu and Clas if you wanna stretch it, but that's it. Just check discord logs for messages sent in 2024:
Akira: BH and Inheritance channels only.
Chessking: BH channel only.
cityscapes: BH channel only.
Tea Guzzler: BH channel only.
TTTech, Ivar, abriel: nothing. not in BH nor the other channels. This last batch of players do not actively contribute to discussion, nor to resources, they swing by whenever a tour starts up and clean house because they're good at the game, and there is nothing wrong with that! But there's no significant difference between these people and other "tour players" like hariyana grande, stareal, and Lily except that one batch has put the time in to learn BH and the other batch hasn't, and logistically I think it's too much to ask players to pick up BH on the fly with such a scarcity of both time and resources. We do not have 16 viable BH clickers and patching up that deficit with new players is realistically not happening whereas we can get battle-ready MNM (or even GG) players sorted in a day.
TL;DR having accessible tiers leads to having high level games. Gatekeeping "tour players" and tribalism does not.