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Kind of a 5am thought but since discussion about other matters is still open, I think the pink trophy (which is currently for Smogon Tour winner) would fit this new tournament better, pending final name of course but the idea of it being centered around "fairy gens" is the big element and so I think the pink trophy for the fairy tour is kind of fitting
We have opened up a forum vote for you to rank some of the choices of possible names; we have limited it down to a large handful of names, so please follow the instructions in the form that state to rank everything in your order of favorite to least favorite. This has been open and discussed both here and internally for a long while now, so there will be no additions or revisions to the list. As such, you can still post discussing the format and other matters, but discussion of new names has come to a close now.
Edit: Form has been closed and removed as of Wednesday the 26th. Thank you to those who voted.
After hundreds of responses, the results are as follows: Smogon Masters will be the name of the newest individual trophy tournament!
Fairy Cup finished in a close second followed by The Smogon Summit, Smogon Crown Pix, Smogon Vintage, The Smogon Apex, and Smogon Contemporary respectively. Thanks for everyone who provided ideas, feedback, and votes to make this possible.
I am currently very tired and in the process of doing too many things in too little time, so I want to open the thread up to discussion of where to go with branding/vibes surrounding Smogon Masters. I intend to reach out for art in the near future, begin drafting the eventual OP/formal announcement, etc. so any ideas are welcome. Perhaps something to do with the cliché surrounding becoming a Pokemon Master? Who knows. Would love to hear any thoughts, even if they are scattered.
I would still very much like to hear posts on SWISS vs Cups, too. I believe the current lean is towards the former as we already have numerous tournaments with cups, there is a scheduling burden with 3 tournaments that we already have across multiple other tours, SWISS is viewed pretty favorably throughout the TD team, and there have been some good points on it throughout the thread. It is still an open discussion though.
Just gonna throw ideas for the possible logo mascots but in my opinion the logos should be as such:
ORAS with Mega Metagross/ Excadrill, i'd favorite metagross since it's fits the generation's gimmick + it has the "tough" looking face of a logo mascot similar to those of classic, as a comparison
SM with either or Magearna, pretty much the first 2 SM introduced pokemon that come to mind when I see OU, although this time i'd favorite Magearna, due to Toxapex already being represented into another tour's mascot (SCL's Shoguns)
SS Dragapult is a certain here, present as a threat through all the generation's stages, has the already mentioned "tough" look and has actually a good design to work with, from my personal perspective, it's the ideal fit.
as a side note, i'm fine with either Swiss or cup, if being honest, both have their pros and cons but I think both are fine here!
i strongly prefer cups, i know we have a bit of an oversaturation of them in our tournament portfolio, but i really enjoy the thought of every old gen ou having its own trophy-stakes cup that you can freely join without wanting to participate on the tour as a whole.
say you really enjoy oras, but ss not as much, its nice to be able to join the biggest stakes oras tour in the site, even if winning it doesn't award you a trophy, and be able not to care about playing ss, say.
just my 2 cents!
@ below, that's fair, if its deemed by the tds and the community as a whole that making the tournament schedule more seamless is worth sacrificing the chance to have one big tournament for each OU then its all good! just thought id share this concern of mine
i strongly prefer cups, i know we have a bit of an oversaturation of them in our tournament portfolio, but i really enjoy the thought of every old gen ou having its own trophy-stakes cup that you can freely join without wanting to participate on the tour as a whole.
say you really enjoy oras, but ss not as much, its nice to be able to join the biggest stakes oras tour in the site, even if winning it doesn't award you a trophy, and be able not to care about playing ss, say.
This is a very valid point, but there is a lot of give-and-take with the delicate balance this circuit is starting to form. For example, none of BW-RBY have a live tour component like STour, which still exists in the Spring, and between that and potential inclusion in SWISS, it’s enough to justify not needing their own individual cup for SS, SM, and ORAS I would argue. Obviously it’s not flawless “circuit math” to add up a live tour and one slot in a Bo3 to equal a cup as it’s 2 tournaments vs 1 tournament, but each tournament is vastly different, but I think that a lot of people would be content with this compromise.
As an aside, the community has made it loud-and-clear that the circuit has become bloated with scheduling and logistical challenges, so eliminating scheduling to one series per week rather than up to three is seen as a valuable asset relative to Classic and Grand Slam, which frontload scheduling for numerous weeks.
Should the Swiss option end up being chosen, is it preferred to:
Have a top cut of less than a power of 2 and the best seeded players are given byes in playoffs;
Or that all x-y players qualify, and x-(y+1) players have a chance qualify based on seeding, resulting in a power of two-sized playoff? with x being an arbitrary number of wins and y being an arbitrary number of losses.
Or should both be an option depending on the turnout?
I know OSDT last year did the former, but I thought I'd ask. I think both have their pros and cons, but with the latter especially I fear people throwing games if they know they don't have enough resistance / whatever metric we use for seeding...
but the tl;dr is that, for option 1 with an x-2 cutoff and a 32-size top cut things are very restrictive, only powers of two work. and even for option 2 with x-1 being guaranteed and x-2 depending on your resistance we're fine if signups are lower than 513 or greater than 575. for both options we run into risks otherwise of having too many byes and byes propagating into win rounds like 1-1 and 1-2 and such...
Should the Swiss option end up being chosen, is it preferred to:
Have a top cut of less than a power of 2 and the best seeded players are given byes in playoffs;
Or that all x-y players qualify, and x-(y+1) players have a chance qualify based on seeding, resulting in a power of two-sized playoff? with x being an arbitrary number of wins and y being an arbitrary number of losses.
Or should both be an option depending on the turnout?
I know OSDT last year did the former, but I thought I'd ask. I think both have their pros and cons, but with the latter especially I fear people throwing games if they know they don't have enough resistance / whatever metric we use for seeding...
i think i would always prefer the first way. having to hope that your resistance is good is just not cool when you have no control over it. I don't think people throwing is the most important thing but it surely doesn't help.
other thoughts: swiss all the way (just the best tournament format in almost all respects, + cups is annoying) - edit: Lady Salamence's post below is the best explanation of why swiss is great I've ever seen
tbh i think that sort of cliche is super cringe & i don't really like it. i generally think these sorts of things don't really make sense.
i like the idea of working with smth like what Ampha or Gilbert arenas suggested, I think in particular elevating Clefable is a cool idea because it's a top force in all 3. i especially like Gilbert arenas's suggestion and it seems like it could look very nice. maybe have some sort of thing where on one side there's the sun, sword, and ruby and the other side has the moon, shield, and sapphire (with the sun side being daylight other side being night). feels like that would be really pretty to me :)
pink trophy good, keeps the fairy spirit alive like Vertigo was suggesting
We aren’t going to strip the color of a prior tournament like Smogon Tour and it’s pink trophy. That trophy has been with Smogon Tour for many years and the name isn’t even Fairy Cup, so a lot of the argument for it is no more. Smogon Tour will remain pink.
In a cup, having an off-day and getting a rough matchup can fully eliminates you from that cup. Additionally getting an act win or matching up against someone who drops advances you over half of the cup's remaining playerbase with no show of skill that comes with that advancement. In swiss, a single bad day will be at worst one third of your elimination, and matching up against someone who dropped or misses a scheduled time will be incredibly minor in the larger scale of your tournament run at large.
In cups, you get matched up against shiloh into soulwind into watashi very good players early on through pure luck of the draw, where someone else matches up against an account that joined the day they signed up and never logged in again. In swiss, each round this can still happen, but the influence of a single lucky or unlucky round on your tournament experience doesn't hold the same as compared to cups.
I also think that, as a spectator, Swiss provides a larger size of "notable games", because by R3 or R4 already you are seeing very good 3-0 or 4-0 matchups, and whoever loses that goes down to x-1 and still has plenty of other opportunities to play against other strong players. It also gives players who have been doing well compared to what might be expected of them more opportunities once they do hit the point where their skill is outmatched. Rather than being just eliminated, they're sent down into a lower pool and given more opportunities, and in theory more attention to their games as a single loss has only amplified their strength rather than removing them from the tournament.
Tried out some trophy colors, not the biggest fan of the current unused purple we have so I spiced it up a little. Here's the current lineup of trophies, with my newest purple at the end next to the current purple:
And here on a postbit:
<–>
Some other comparisons and a bonus fairier pink variant:
IMO the Peach trophy would boost signups by 7% alone. The other variants feel too similar to existing ones or lack contrast between the two shades used.
As far as logo mons Clef should be a given since it permeates all three gens, other good candidates would be MMeta, MLop, TornT, Weavile, any Tapu not Bulu, Dragapult, maybe Melmetal. Mons either successful in more than one gen or notorious in a specific one.
IMO the Peach trophy would boost signups by 7% alone. The other variants feel too similar to existing ones or lack contrast between the two shades used.
As far as logo mons Clef should be a given since it permeates all three gens, other good candidates would be MMeta, MLop, TornT, Weavile, any Tapu not Bulu, Dragapult, maybe Melmetal. Mons either successful in more than one gen or notorious in a specific one.
agree, also peach still has some of the fairy spirit which I think is still a reasonable reason to have it even tho Fairy Cup didn't win (and is really pretty).
I think there definitely should be at least one mega in there due to that being a huge ORAS and SM thing. Weavile is a really good shout, being reasonable to great in all 3. Clefable is a shoo-in as a top defensive asset.
This is a very valid point, but there is a lot of give-and-take with the delicate balance this circuit is starting to form. For example, none of BW-RBY have a live tour component like STour, which still exists in the Spring, and between that and potential inclusion in SWISS, it’s enough to justify not needing their own individual cup for SS, SM, and ORAS I would argue. Obviously it’s not flawless “circuit math” to add up a live tour and one slot in a Bo3 to equal a cup as it’s 2 tournaments vs 1 tournament, but each tournament is vastly different, but I think that a lot of people would be content with this compromise.
As an aside, the community has made it loud-and-clear that the circuit has become bloated with scheduling and logistical challenges, so eliminating scheduling to one series per week rather than up to three is seen as a valuable asset relative to Classic and Grand Slam, which frontload scheduling for numerous weeks.
Idea for the Masters format: double rounds for the Swiss.
That is, each player is paired with two other players each round and plays a Bo3 against each (like in the main rounds of the global championship format) (except maybe you don't allow people to be paired against the same opponent for both pairings). Each player will have a score of 2/2, 1/2, or 0/2 from those matches each double round and you do Swiss pairings for each double round.
This isn't the perfectly nice power of 2 Pascal's Triangle brackets like single round Swiss with the right number of signups, but it works perfectly well (for example in Chess where because of draws players have a score of 1/1, 0.5/1, or 0/1 for each round -- each just half of the double round Masters scores).
It would also enable every single signup to participate for any signup number witheither0 byesor 2 players with each 1 bye and 1 opponent (it could even deterministically award those byes to the finalists from the previous year if we wanted).
I ran a 17 Player Double Round Swiss as an example (in this players were not allowed to play the same player more than once throughout the entire duration of the Swiss, and there were a large number of rounds relative to the very small number of players, but even so it experienced minimal difficulties and got a clear top 4 after 2 double rounds and a clear top 2 after 3 double rounds):
Double Round 1:
User1 vs User10
User1 vs User12
User2 vs User6
User2 vs User15
User3 vs User17
User3 vs User13
User4 vs User9
User4 vs User11
User5 vs User13
User5 vs User14
User6 vs User16
User7 vs User17
User7 vs User9
User8 vs User14
User8 vs User12
User10 vs User15
User11 vs User16
Double Round 2: User17 vs User14
User17 vs User13
User13 vs User14
User16 vs User15
User16 vs User9
User15 vs User7
User12 vs User4
User12 vs User7
User11 vs User6
User11 vs User9 User10 vs User6 User10 vs User2 User8 vs User4 User8 vs User2
User5 vs User3 User5 vs User1
User3 vs User1
Standings After Double Round 2:
(4-0): 1 Player
User13
Double Round 3 Version 1: *Paired Up/Down
User13 vs User10*
User13 vs User8*
User17 vs User10
User17 vs User8
User16 vs User14
User16 vs User7
User15 vs User14
User15 vs User4
User11 vs User7
User11 vs User5
User9 vs User6
User9 vs User5
User6 vs User4
User12 vs User1 (Invalid) -> Could use this if players could have repeat opponents or if players out of contention were trimmed from the tour
User12 vs User2
User12 vs User3*
User3 vs User2*
Double Round 3 Version 2: (due to the small number of total players, the only way to get all new matchups is to have additional up/down pairings) User13 vs User10*
User13 vs User8*
User17 vs User10 User17 vs User8
User16 vs User14
User16 vs User7
User15 vs User14
User15 vs User4 User11 vs User7 User11 vs User5
User9 vs User5
User6 vs User4
User12 vs User6* User9 vs User1*
User1 vs User2
User12 vs User3* User3 vs User2*
Standings After Double Round 3: (These are not listed in tiebreak order)
(5-1):
User17
User13
(4-2):
User14
User11
User8
User6
(3-3):
User16
User15
User10
User9
User5
(2-4):
User12
User7
User4
User1
(1-5):
User3
User2
(I determined who won via a random drawing where UserX has a X/(X+Y) chance of defeating UserY)
I think you'd have to do some pairing up/down (where for example a player on 6/6 plays a player on 5/6) pretty consistently depending on how many times players are allowed to face the same player and the number of rounds compared to the number of signups, but that's very standard in Chess for example and much preferable to disallowing players who signed up from participating at all by a random drawing to a nice signup number.
For playoffs, it would be top 16 for any bracket size with either tiebreaks based on something like Sonneborn–Berger or some sort of tiebreak played out if we determine that to be unacceptable.
A huge benefit of this is that the tournament runs twice as fast as single round Swiss with the scheduling burden being equivalent to only 2 Cups from something like Classic or Slam. This enables a combination of getting in more rounds (for less variance), shortening the tournament (for help with the overall tour schedule and player burnout within the tournament), or making time to run a tiebreak to get an exact top 16.
A drawback of this format would be that it would be harder to determine when to eliminate players (vs setting X-3 as out in single round Swiss for a certain bracket size) and that players could become mathematically eliminated mid round (after playing their first set and not be motivated to actually play their second set).
Overall, given that this format runs the tournament quickly relative to others without sacrificing sample size or being an overly burdensome time commitment and enables All to play, I think it is well worth its drawbacks, which I see as mostly just being different from how things are usually run as opposed to competitively problematic.
The format of Smogon Masters 1 will be swiss like OSDT. It has been a success there, it received positive feedback in this thread, and we already have a couple of tournaments with cups being used to qualify, which require a lot of scheduling.
The specifics with the math and cuts are yet to be final, but this is in the works and will likely be finalized upon seeing the total amount of sign-ups. To be clear, each swiss round will be a Bo3 with SS/SM/ORAS. The logo for the tournament is not yet final, but discussions on it are in the works as well.
With the first edition now over, I think there are a lot of positive takeaways and a few negative ones. Overall, this tournament felt like a success and I hope it will become a staple moving forward.
Touching on the positives:
The combination of SS-SM-ORAS felt great and I think it has a lot of sticking power
Bo3 rather than feeder cups to ease schedule was awesome (scheduling 1 per week > scheduling 3 per week) clearly helped participants and I actually hope this sees more play elsewhere
Seeing the best from across the world participate rather than being restricted by live tours was a major step in the right direction for communities that were hurting and for players who predominantly play these tiers and wanted greater representation
Swiss is a good concept for tournaments as it avoids being out after a single loss while rewarding consistent performers over a longer stretch -- I find it to be a highly competitive product
Sign-up numbers were good and the later stages of the tournament featured a ton of great players
Swiss allows for easier split-hosting with blocks based on records, making it logistically friendly on the front-end (back-end team also did a marvelous job, but I am less qualified to talk on that)
Controversial perhaps, but lack of extensions and firm week long roung rounds ensured the progression of the tournament without any nonsense
As for some potential negatives, I will expand on them a bit more as they mostly can be rectified in the immediate future, which is encouraging and should keep this tournment headed in the right direction. Of course, note that these are only my opinions, too.
I think that the way in which match-ups were generated during qualifiers was flawed. Pairing some of the best players against each other in late Swiss rounds due to resistance/record calculation scaling (if that is the right way to say it) feels like it needs to change -- pairings within each record should be calculated differently. This should be fixable and I would like to think it can be implemented to future editions.
I think a few people had issues with the lack of extensions, but I do not personally view this as a negative and highlughted the pacing as a positive above. Obviously this is in the eye of the beholder, but extension culture has been abused a ton and this tournament being predictable in terms of length is a good thing to me.
In addition, I think we need to continue to discuss and work on finding optimal Swiss numbers to set tournaments up for success in the later stages. Playoffs starting at 64 felt a bit steep to me personally, but it was hard to avoid this time around and can be a discussion point for the future. Hopefully we can get to a different point next time around.
Finally -- and this is not a negtive of the format so much as a general statement, my understanding of Swiss and the math/process behind it is minimal. We had an amazing team of helpers make this possible and I just want to thank all of them as well as my co-hosts, who shouldered the bulk of the load and accountability. We have so many amazing people across this community and I am grateful to collaborate with them. Special thanks to a fairyFrozoidNyxvmnunesEledyr the TD team (no, they're not all evil) and various others I am likely forgetting.
Something that VGC tournaments have used in the past year is the addition of a 2nd day (in this case a 2nd phase) of Swiss rounds where records carry over. This rewards Swiss performances since you aren't hopping immediately into bracket, and while anyone could make the top 8 of Swiss phase 2, a 9-0/8-1 in phase 1 is definitely a well earned head start.
VGC uses 5 rounds of phase 2 Swiss into a top 8, up until 800 signups, where a 6th round is added.
If you don't want the tour to run for 17 weeks in total (understandable), something I noticed when looking at VGC tournaments of similar sizes was after 3 rounds of phase 2 Swiss at this tournament, there were 14 10-2 or better players.
Adopting this and then running a top 16 cut gives you one less swiss round a bigger cut size if that's preferable. In this case 7-2 players qualify by winning all three of their extra rounds while a bit of pressure is still taken off top seeds
If you want to add more consistency going into top cut (preventing seed 1 from losing to seed 64) I think this is one of the best ways to go about it. I looked at what happens with a 10th Swiss round and really nothing changes since you're just cutting to a top 32 with some play-ins still.
or Magearna, pretty much the first 2 SM introduced pokemon that come to mind when I see OU, although this time i'd favorite Magearna, due to Toxapex already being represented into another tour's mascot (SCL's Shoguns)
