Unofficial Metagames World Cup (or other format) - Format/Confirmation Thread

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a fairy

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Pushed this off long enough. I haven't heard any folks weigh in against the concept of a UMWC in my chats in the UM Events server, nor have I heard of any notably strong ideas for non-UMWC uses for the final CA we have for this year. While it hasn't been approved by US yet, Imperial as the UMs RO has kindly confirmed that if we do a UMWC, we can assume that the third room CA could be allocated to this tournament.

So, let's talk about UMWC.

Format (Tiers)
We have six formats in UMs right now. Six is a decent number for team tours, but I do wonder if it is too small - I can't imagine it'd feel great being the second best ZU player in US Northeast, for example, and missing out on the tour. Ten, like we do for UMPL, feels difficult to me as well. Ten seems like a fairly large reach for many regions, especially when factoring in 3-4 subs being required alongside ten starters. It works for UMPL due to the nature of how teams are formed, but when you're limited to a country or region of the world to gather your players, it seems to me that aiming that high would be dangerous.

My suggestion would be eight slots - one for each UM, and then two flex slots that each team can select their preferred UM to fill with. You can see something similar in 1v1's currently running OGPL, where each team can select a valid 1v1 generation each week that becomes one of the eight slots in the tour. The big question to this would be its effect on the tournament format, but thats below.

Other possibilities include doing a(two?) homefield-style Bo3, or having slots change through the tour in a randomized, equitable, and pre-determined manner. What I want to avoid is locking in two of the six tiers for those slots throughout the whole tour, as determining which tiers it should be I worry will be an impossible-to-determine objective mean of selecting which tiers.

Format (Tournament)
There are a number of ways to run a WC. As this would be the first of its kind here, we have a lot of leniency in how we want to approach this, given that we don't have a WCOP-styled tour with prior well-performing teams jumping to a later stage. I am not a fan of WCs personally as a person, so I am not very knowledgeable about the ways a community can run a WC. I don't have any suggestions or lead-ups here, what do people think in regards to this? Are there formats that easily match into the flex slot concept that would be the (imo!) simplest solve to the tiers question?

When?
We have a period of time between now and June where we will be hosting one UM circuit tour. ZU's WC starts in a month, and I'd really like to avoid cannibalizing each other if possible. If we go for later in the year, 1v1's WC starts Sept1, but that would be overlapping with UMPL, so that region of time would be not ideal for UMWC anyway. If we were to start signups for UMWC in, say, a week, would we be able to get underway enough that by the tiime ZUWC spins up and gets through signups and such, we're already far enough along that we don't have too many problems? I don't think so.
In my mind, the following three options are the most viable:
- Late May. Get signups up towards the end of May, hopefully far enough along through ZUWC as to not cause too much overlap. This would be using UMWC as a means to bring attention to and hype the Seasonals, while also letting us run it as soon as reasonably possible given the ZUWC context.
- Late June/early July. Get signups up while most seasonals are well underway, but still finish up towards the start of UMPL. This would allow Seasonals to attract attention to UMWC. Exactly when would be a bit of a question depending on how long the tour would be expected to run.
- Nov/Dec, towards the end of UMPL. I don't believe this would conflict with any WCs, though it might interfere with AG if they want to turn AGWL into a WC in the future. This would give us more time to plan and discuss, but I do worry that it might be too far away for people to feel motivated by, and could also mean that late autumn/winter begin to feel like "team tour season" for the multi-format UM tours.

Other
There might be more to cover that hasn't come to mind. This tour isn't assured to happen, though I've heard almost exclusively positivity and excitement regarding the concept. This is an open discussion and I want to hear thoughts. Please make your thoughts known regarding UMWC, thank you!
 
I think that a umpl style format would be good as 6 slots does feel too little. For the issue this creates with fielding enough players I believe that multi-region teams/rest of the world teams are an option, as they also alleviate the issue of barring players from participation due to their region which I feel is kinda rough.
 
late may is def my favourite, but if we're ordering late may > nov/dec > late june/ early july

i have actually no clue how wcs work so i got nothing for this point, but

i def like 8 slots with 2 flex, it seems great and i've found it interesting. umpl style is probs second best, tried and true. six is bad but i feel the hfa idea is the worst of the options.
 
Im pretty unfamiliar with WCs, but I like the idea of the hfa bo3. Bo3 was easily the highlight each week of the recently-ended UbersUUPL, and the format being hfa means that the rest of the team could pitch in to help the bo3 slot.
 
Late May seems like a good starting point, for the reasons listed in the op.

Also want to say eight slots with two flex slots seems reasonable, to allow each team a little wiggle room for the sake of maintaining competitiveness.

Go US Midwest (or whatever equivalent based on map)
 
Curious what the formats would be for lineup. NFE had to pretty much cancel the olympiad for a lack of players (maybe it was too many rando slots for a tour that should've been just SV who knows). Of course someone in the NFE circles can correct me if I'm wrong but the majority of the players are US and France, with a couple of outliers in various countries. I've always felt World Cups while fun for some teams can feel heavy imbalanced for some which dampers the experience so interested what countries could field what. I assume AG would be fine and some other formats like ZU (I know nothing about it besides Sputnik approving of it).

Edit: Also agreeing with BFM probably better to do this earlier in the year if people are genuinely interested. The tour schedule gets more busy as the year goes on.
 
I'm not a huge fan of world cup as a tour format and think resources are better spent introducing a different one (PU has very successfully been running blind drafts for example, which are absolute fire). The issue with world cups is that ultimately a lot of player sentiment is that you're playing birthplace roulette. It can be quite a frustrating tournament if you happen to not be from the strongest world cup team, or if you end up "forced" to team up with players you don't get along with. It's a really fun concept don't get me wrong, the feeling of fighting together for your region to come out on top sounds really cool, but in reality it's a tour that tends to require cutting and shifting of regions just to keep up the pretense of being a competitive format.

tldr: world cup is decent as a for fun tour but will never be my pick for a major team tour or anything awarding a prize, blind draft is poggers and should be looked into as an alternative if an extra UM team tour is desired.

also I'm 5 weeks into 1v1 OGPL 3 with flex slots, and can vouch for the system. It adds an extra dynamic as a manager to have to consider flexible players when drafting, and a strategic aspect of critically looking at opposing teams' lineups to determine optimal flex positioning.
 
I'm a fan of blind draft, theoretically, and there are for sure concerns with WC, like AM mentioned above and "birthplace roulette" - though I'm not sure PU is a great example, isn't their PUWC much more popular than their PUBD?

My concerns with a BD are that I'm not sure it'd be all that different than PL? Maybe the flex slots would be another distinction? But otherwise it kinda just feels like the same tour with very similar slots and players.

edit: @BFM - I really want to avoid cannibalizing ZUWC, though if we end up doing a BD or something else, that's a possibility since it'd be less overlap?
 
a fairy said:
I'm a fan of blind draft, theoretically, and there are for sure concerns with WC, like AM mentioned above and "birthplace roulette" - though I'm not sure PU is a great example, isn't their PUWC much more popular than their PUBD?
Click to expand...
Just listing PUBD as an example of blind draft working as a format in case anyone wants to read up on how it works, not saying it's preferred over wc there, mb.

a fairy said:
My concerns with a BD are that I'm not sure it'd be all that different than PL? Maybe the flex slots would be another distinction? But otherwise it kinda just feels like the same tour with very similar slots and players.
Click to expand...
It's hard to say, I think flex slots and blind drafting definitely make a difference in feel, but I can see teams ending up very similar in the end. OGPL definitely doesn't feel similar to 1v1PL but that's mostly in the slot distribution. I don't think it's feasible to create an UM team tour with particularly different slots from PL (unless you want to include weird stuff like old gens or focus the tour on smaller UMs instead of distributing the slots evenly between all UMs)
 
Felucia said:
It's hard to say, I think flex slots and blind drafting definitely make a difference in feel, but I can see teams ending up very similar in the end. OGPL definitely doesn't feel similar to 1v1PL but that's mostly in the slot distribution. I don't think it's feasible to create an UM team tour with particularly different slots from PL (unless you want to include weird stuff like old gens or focus the tour on smaller UMs instead of distributing the slots evenly between all UMs)
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Yeah, the slots can't change too much, at least my instinct - I have to imagine the most popular version of every UM is going to be the CG one. So the WC brings the distinction of having a different playerbase by nature of the roster restrictions, and a different tournament structure. BD or other team tour formats I worry is just going to look like UMPL with one less slot of most tiers and two flex slots, or two Bo3 slots, or whatever. I'm open to giving it a shot if people want to head the direction of a BD or a Snake, but that's the primary reason that a UM Champions League wasn't the forefront of discussion - WC itself brings a fresh shift in perspective and allows different groups of players to have roster slots.

Again - I'm open to all ideas. I want this tour, whatever it ends up being, to be a success. I am very much less motivated by the idea of assigning the CA to Circuit HFA or Swiss, I think that a second team tour of some kind is going to be a good thing as opposed to just dumping it on an already existing indiv tour. Something I mentioned in DMs with Felucia is the idea of a flex tour, where every slot is flex, but that'd probably need protections so it doesn't become "oh cool six slots of [one of the most popular UMs] on every matchup every week", I dunno.
 
My main concern with UMWC is the idea of "flex spots" in the pools. I don't see how that would possibly work out so if someone has some experience in that or an explanation, that would be great (i understand this wouldn't be as big of a deal in playoffs because there are set lineups of 1 team vs another).

I also do have the concern about the "birthplace roulette." We could see a very strong imbalance in player base from each country. Like a fairy also said, it would suck to be the 2nd best AG player or insert UM here in your country and not get to play.

I think a BD might be preferred if a team tour is what we are really aiming for, I just worry about all of this overlap with the 6 different UMs and their respective communities when it comes to all these team tours. I fear there could be some burnout and less interest when there's say 3 team tours each year for ZU on top of another 2 from UMs as a whole. This is obviously different for some communities like the newly added Uubers and NFE, but it's just something to consider. I wish we got this CA before Slam started because we could have just added it there, but unfortunately it's just how things panned out.
 
posting in favor of UMWC, i think it's fine to have the 2nd yearly teamtour be a less serious format if it can be meaningfully distinct from UMPL. and while i can't speak for other tiers, i do know that despite being one of the smaller UMs and sharing a large percentage of its playerbase with 1v1, 2v2 has high level players available in almost every wc region except like solo australia so i feel that concerns about regions not being able to field players might be a little overblown. as far as tiers go i dont think flex slots really work in a pools-style tournament so id honestly say just stick with the UMPL 10 and allow UMWC to be a more-relaxed-but-still-competitive entry point for some promising new tournament players (doubling up on every UM for 12 slots would be better for this but i dont think anyone else would agree to that).
 
Don't run a World Cup

The random assignment of players to teams absolutely sucks at literally every level in literally every way. I've seen firsthand super-teams form effortlessly, tiers forced to endlessly drawing and redrawing and re-redrawing maps, obfuscating who is in or would be in what team based off of current signups and grandfathering, people who absolutely have no desire to be near each other forced to be on a team. I'd recommend never running a WC because it's truly just an endless headache.

I'd really be more interested in a draft style format with a pools style stages if we really need to differentiate between PL.

a fairy said:
Format (Tiers)
We have six formats in UMs right now. Six is a decent number for team tours, but I do wonder if it is too small
Click to expand...
UMPL tier format is fine for a WC. Pools is differentiable enough as a stage 1 so it's fine. Alternatively if you have the player base, you can just double it to 12 and force every team to field 2 players per tier. Seems fine too.


a fairy said:
My suggestion would be eight slots - one for each UM, and then two flex slots that each team can select their preferred UM to fill with. You can see something similar in 1v1's currently running OGPL, where each team can select a valid 1v1 generation each week that becomes one of the eight slots in the tour. The big question to this would be its effect on the tournament format, but thats below.
Click to expand...
Assuming you want to do this, I'm fairly positive this is incompatible with a pools style stages system that most WC's use.

Also as the host of OGPL, yea flex slots are cool, but everyone's going to have to be somewhat flexible with how deadlines work because you have 2 deadlines every week. It's fine, just annoying.
a fairy said:
Format (Tournament)
There are a number of ways to run a WC. As this would be the first of its kind here, we have a lot of leniency in how we want to approach this, given that we don't have a WCOP-styled tour with prior well-performing teams jumping to a later stage. I am not a fan of WCs personally as a person, so I am not very knowledgeable about the ways a community can run a WC. I don't have any suggestions or lead-ups here, what do people think in regards to this? Are there formats that easily match into the flex slot concept that would be the (imo!) simplest solve to the tiers question?
Click to expand...

I mean this is the real advantage of running a WC vs a different draft tour.

Pools stage(s) are just so different that it's exciting. If you remove this aspect of WC in favor of weeks, you're definitely going to have a just strictly inferior version of PL.
 
a fairy said:
My suggestion would be eight slots - one for each UM, and then two flex slots that each team can select their preferred UM to fill with. You can see something similar in 1v1's currently running OGPL, where each team can select a valid 1v1 generation each week that becomes one of the eight slots in the tour. The big question to this would be its effect on the tournament format, but thats below.
Click to expand...
Was not personally a fan of flex slots in ogpl, although that can partially be attributed the inclusion of gsc - a non-developed tier that produced very low quality games. Putting my opinion on the tier selection aside, i think they failed to be dynamic and function as "flexible slots".
-1 team drafted gsc-tierlocked larry and picked gsc every week
-1 team drafted the only gsc mainer and never let it not get played
-1 team never stopped picking oras once optimized lineup was figured out

Especially in a multiformat tour, it is a certainty that a significant amount of teams people will just pick what they have a surplus of in every situation. This isn't strictly a bad thing and, on paper, creates parity. But I am still not in favor of it - A week where a team with stacked AG support and a team with no AG players will still be unbalanced, but now that 2nd team is less encouraged to pick up the slack and will just hedge their bets against the rest of the tour after saccing 2 slots in a week.

Part of the appeal of a world cup is that the teams are unbalanced. People might need to learn a new tier, people might get to team with strong players they don't typically get to land in the same cord with. Speaking as UMPL CHAMPION crow crumbs, I think our umpl cord was one of (if not the) chattiest in the tour and we still had a very low amount of interaction between people from different communties. I had fun ofc but cross-community interaction was part of the reason I signed up and it never really had a reason to materialize.

It's likely correct for a tour like WCOP to strive to balance everything (with past motions like all SV OU slots etc.) since it has a higher standard of competition as a trophy tour but this tour is multi-format by conception and will already inevitably have a jagged balance. I think flex slots might create a more balanced tour numerically but it doesn't change the actual week-to-week experience of imbalance and might exacerbate the issues with an unbalanced tour.

I don't believe homefield would share my gripes with flex slots but I'm unsure how viable it is, thats for other people to decide. I will say that its a total non-starter with 1v1/2v2 included and should at least only include 6v6 tiers.

I'm personally in favor of just running UMPL slotting or 8 slots+2 hf if people are on board with that.

Late May seems most preferrable.

Edit: Just wanted to clarify this post is written with the assumption that wc is getting ran. Blind draft with such rigid tiers is a potentially scary prospect but I could see it being fun. Don't particularly like draft pools.
 
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i shared my thoughts in discord but to reiterate, i think we should definitely go ahead with UMWC as our 2nd team tour this year. the concerns with imbalances are fair and all, but i really don't think we should be worried about that. the key to winning a tour is motivation, and people are more motivated to play for their countries/regions than some PL team. im sure most, if not all, teams will be able to field a viable roster with multiple solid slots, and for formats that teams don't have a mainer for, the team can figure out the metagame together! it's a perfect opportunity for newer / non-UM players to play and learn UMs and shine. i am of the opinion that UMs are not very hard to pick up, so i'm sure players will be fine. absolutely not a fan of a PL-style tournament, we already have UMPL so we should do something satisfactorily different from it (and no, changing draft format to BD etc. doesn't work--at the end of the day, it's still basically UMPL unless u decide to change how the tour is run, which i cant say im a fan of bc weeks-->playoffs is good). give UMWC a shot this year imo. if it doesn't work out well, we can discontinue it starting next year and go ahead with a standard tour like BD.

as for tier format, i like 6 slots + 2 flex. bo3s are a headache to figure out because teams need to build a lot more teams than usual, not to mention it realistically won't be a bo3 bc you have to play a bo5 inside the bo3 with 1v1 / 2v2. don't rly have any opinion on the tour format itself.

we should start this as early as possible imo so may sounds good.
 
I'm not a fan of wc and really would not want to see flex slots in a wc format, and have no idea how that would even work when it comes to pools, but if we do wc can we start it soon? I know that multiple tiers have their subforum teamtours during summer, so it would be nice to not have this tournament extend into that.
 
The more I think on this, the more I'm inclined against a World Cup, since the format has problems and I'd rather not rush into a botch job structure-wise. sleid has brought up very good points about WC and flex slots really not meshing well together, and I'm not particularly convinced by any of the 10, 12, or 6 slot arguments. I'd rather this tour not stumble out the gate, since if it is reasonably successful I'd like to be able to include it by default in future years' schedules.

There's also the question of timing - folks want this tour soon it seems, but frankly I have zero interest in running a WC on short notice and kneecapping ZUWC that is spinning up now. I am currently inclined to run a blind draft with one slot for each UM and two flex slots. I'm open for more conversations, for sure, but the soonest a WC could reasonably start would be late May - literally any other format, snake draft or friend tour or blind draft or flex tour or something would be able to run sometime during the spring reasonably.

Many UM team tours are actually coming to a close soon - 2v2PL, AGWL and ZUOL are all in their final week of regular season or already in playoffs. It seems to me we have a good opportunity to fill some empty space in the larger TT environment, as well as our own UM Circuit, with a team tour that would inform as to the level of support for a second multi-format team tour generally speaking. We can revisit a WC in the future when we are not pressed for time and can position it well alongside UMPL and individual format WCs.

I intend to lock in a decision sometime next week regarding format and timeframe, pending discussion with the UM circuit team and a sanity check with UM format leaders + PS US. Nothing is explictely off the table right now, but given the difficulties with a WC format and schedule wise, I think I'm much more inclined to revisit it for a future year unless someone has The Vision on how and when to run a WC that doesn't seem likely to fall on its face. Remember that whatever we do needs the formal CA approval.

As a final note, I want to thank everyone who weighed in inside the thread, in Discord chats, or private messages! It's been great to see the level of conversation and the thoughts thrown around, it's helped guide my own thoughts and my convos with others and how I've approached making this tour a reality. Thank you all as this conversation continues and reaches its eventual conclusion!
 
Blind Draft is so tasteless, doesn't make it that different from a PL; managers bid and get players to play for their team. Players probably already know what they are doing in the tiers and know how to play it.

As someone who has been captain and player for many World Cups (WCoP and others like NDWC, MonoWC, RoA Olympics...), these at least give a chance for people not that familiar with the tiers to play with people they share their language with (something pretty important English speakers will never get to experience, but being able to type in your native language and chill while preparing for a tour game is way better than doing so in a foreign language for a lot of reasons). It's even a cool way to introduce them to the tier and have a new "fresh playerbase" ready to bring heat (could mention Latios in Ubers UU, which had been barely used until better players started to play the tier in ~UMPL and proved it was a cool Pokemon). I also enjoy the idea of being the manager and going to sleep without being worried about an American / whatever person with a very different timezone scheduling at my 4 am and not being able to send a sub, which won't happen in a World Cup. Not to mention that sometimes certain countries / groups of people have way more noticeable tendencies when building, which can give an advantage to regions being able to spot and abuse them.

About the format, I like either 6 tiers or 6+2, with these two having three random tiers each week. Anything different from this is trolling.
 
As someone who managed in NUCL (That sort of spearheaded the flex slot format for tours) I'd like to say that planning the draft was way more dynamic and considerably harder than a standard format PL. Thus, I'm not convinced that having a Blind Draft format auction (that, being real, is just less competitive) plus Flex Slots in a possible UMBD is a good idea. Honestly, I think the tournament being a flex slots based one is already a good enough differential from UMPL >and also the different number of slots<

I wasn't going to say anything regarding World Cup but since I voiced the above it won't hurt: A standard World Cup format seems fine for me, I think it would be quite fun and pretty competitive as well, but please don't merge WC+Flex that seems eeky af as many people voiced on how tf would this work on pools (that is what makes world cup unique and different)

methinks: UMCL (Stands for UMPL but with + or - slots and flex picks, no blind draft) >> UMWC >> UMBD
 
Definitely don't do a blind draft yeah, that's just UMPL but worse. And definitely don't do a weird mix of blind draft and CL or the tour is basically unplayable.

World Cup is the better choice for inclusivity and I don't believe there's many downsides that don't already exist in other world cup formats, and they do them anyways and have a good time. CL format is prob ok but I don't know how many people can flex effectively for this, I feel it wouldn't be what you're all hoping for once it starts.
 
Okay.

There is no decision that will make everyone happy. There's probably no decision that will even make the majority of people happy. So, let's make a decision, have a good tournament, and towards the end of the year, we'll have a more in-depth conversation about future year second team tours if this goes well. I want to thank dhelmise and sleid for the conversations in the circuit planning channel, as well as every tier leader who talked to me personally and in this thread, advocating for their tier and what format they believe is best for this tournament. And of course, I want to thank every member of all the communities who weighed in over Discord chats, this thread, and on Showdown.

We are going to be running a blind draft tournament with 1 slot of every UM SV tier and 2 flex slots. A World Cup was uniquely unpopular much to my surprise, with many in leadership (UM circuit and UM tier leaders) strongly advising against the idea for a number of reasons. While some of these reasons are surmountable and some amount to opinions, for an experimental foray into whether a second UMs team tour can stand on its own, there was enough push against a WC and enough real logistical questions that didn't have strong answers that making this experiment struggle with logistical identity. Additionally, there was a significant amount of support for flex slots and for a blind draft enough to make me feel confident that this was the approach to use for a one-time tour before deeper conversations in the future.

I recognize that there will be people who do not agree with this decision. I recognize that people will have opinions about the specifics, thinking that another path should've been taken. I wish that if you find yourself in either camp to please understand that there was no decision that could possibly have been made that would've not just replaced you with someone else in your position. In the end, this is an experimental tour bestowed on us by the sudden ability to offer a third CA.

The default expectation at the start of the year was that the part of UMs that is collective can only support/should only support one team tour, to ensure that we do not unfairly impose on the individual UMs and their team tours. The desire for the part of UMs that is collective to not impose on the individual formats continues to be what I try and reach for when decision-making, which is part of why there wasn't already a second team tour. This year's is a test to see if a second collective tour does not negatively impact the formats, after a wide range of encouragement and support to do something.

I appreciate everyone that has weighed in, from internal circuit chats to forum mod and tier leader discussions to open conversations inviting all. I want to ensure that this tour is not just a repeat of UMPL, and I believe that a smaller blind draft with flex slots fits in well in the comfort zone of a tour that will not bring much logistical complexity, can establish a distinct identity from UMPL, and can be used to guage support for long-term second team tours in the collective section of UMs.

I ask everyone to recognize that this is not the be-all-end-all, and in future years, we can run other things with more time to have conversations and coordinate with each UM's schedule. However, for right now, for this year, I am convinced following all the conversations that this is the way to go. Captain and player signups will go up later today. Thank you all.
 
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