★ Kick-off Tournament Feedback

[Rissoux]

Good evening, sub-forum!
This thread serves to close out the inaugural tournament hosted by the Draft League sub-forum on Smogon. Please provide positive feedback, but if you have issues we want to hear about them respectfully and constructively (don't just complain, tell us what you would have liked to see implemented to change what you complain about). Thanks for taking the time to fill out the form, we hope to see you sign up for more tournaments this circuit season!

Points of Discussion:
1. Rate your tournament experience
2. Do you plan on returning to compete in a future sub-forum tournament? Why or why not?
3. What is something about the tournament experience you'd like to change, if at all?
4. Anything further you'd like to state, please do so.

Reminder that the tournament followed this rough schedule:
- Sign ups on the forum
- Drafting pools in the discord
- Battle pools
- Brackets

 

[Choomie]

1. As expected there were a lot of drops and inactivity from New sign-ups but it was nice to mingle with the Smogoons.

2. If you see me on the forums in the future it won't be for the right reasons. However, the people need their Champion so I won't let them down. L

3. I'm suspicious of your staff members. All of them.

4. The anti-Mafia agenda stops NOW!

 

[Dorron]

1. Rate your tournament experience
Ignoring that I didn't like my draft because I never like it, it was brilliant. Loved drafting, building and playing. Hosts were very communicative and helpful.

2. Do you plan on returning to compete in a future sub-forum tournament? Why or why not?
I'll probably play any draft gen7+, I simply love the format

3. What is something about the tournament experience you'd like to change, if at all?
It was quite a surprise to me that I didn't battle the same people I drafted with, but I don't know if that's just me that I hadn't played any draft tour for a long time. Otherwise I think it would be great to specify it in the main thread or wherever it should go.

4. Anything further you'd like to state, please do so.
Keep it up lads, it is working wonders and I hope it keeps like this.



Also, as a side note, this might be asking a lot, but it would be great to have some highlight games each round of every tour. Draft is a beautiful format to watch and showcasing big plays might catch the attention from new people or make old people come back.

 

[Rissoux]

1. As expected there were a lot of drops and inactivity from New sign-ups but it was nice to mingle with the Smogoons.

2. If you see me on the forums in the future it won't be for the right reasons. However, the people need their Champion so I won't let them down. L

3. I'm suspicious of your staff members. All of them.

4. The anti-Mafia agenda stops NOW!

Thanks for the feedback Choomie, I believe your mistrust is well placed and even though you may not be on the forums in the future for the right reasons we are thankful you're on them to begin with.

 

[Rissoux]

1. Rate your tournament experience
Ignoring that I didn't like my draft because I never like it, it was brilliant. Loved drafting, building and playing. Hosts were very communicative and helpful.

2. Do you plan on returning to compete in a future sub-forum tournament? Why or why not?
I'll probably play any draft gen7+, I simply love the format

3. What is something about the tournament experience you'd like to change, if at all?
It was quite a surprise to me that I didn't battle the same people I drafted with, but I don't know if that's just me that I hadn't played any draft tour for a long time. Otherwise I think it would be great to specify it in the main thread or wherever it should go.

4. Anything further you'd like to state, please do so.
Keep it up lads, it is working wonders and I hope it keeps like this.



Also, as a side note, this might be asking a lot, but it would be great to have some highlight games each round of every tour. Draft is a beautiful format to watch and showcasing big plays might catch the attention from new people or make old people come back.

Sad to hear you won't be joining us for ORAS! The main reason we didn't allow drafting pools to also become battle pools was due to the sheer number of participants, some people would invariably land in a pool where they were given a distinct advantage through both parts of the tournament. The theory is that it's much more difficult to get a pool where you're able to draft a crack team AND also easily go 4-0 in pools, thus we split that up into two separate groups of people. We can add this distinction to the ORAS OP and others moving forward, why not.
It may be a cool recap function to do the replay highlights for a smaller portion of the tour - say top 128 or 64, just because any previous stage there's too many replays to watch back in my opinion. Thanks for the suggestions Dorron!

 

[termnal]

1. Rate your tournament experience
I had a ton of fun and it was a great way to get used to the format. Some teams were a little busted but thats just gonna happen with so many new people
2. Do you plan on returning to compete in a future sub-forum tournament? Why or why not?
Yea I think these kinda of tournaments are great because the time commitment is a bit less that most leagues and the drafts are shorter which makes it easy to participate in
3. What is something about the tournament experience you'd like to change, if at all?
I think maybe larger draft pools would be interesting especially in a metagame with a larger pool of viable mons. I also think double elimination could be interesting, like the seasonal tournaments, instead of pools. I don't know if it would be better but I think it would be interesting to try out
4. Anything further you'd like to state, please do so.
I really enjoyed seeing the usage stats and would love to see the final usage stats from the entire tour

 

[Jordy004]

1. Rate your tournament experience
This tour was a lot of fun. Losing by timer a couple rounds into playoffs sucked lol but that was on me. Definitely the most well-organized league I've played in.

2. Do you plan on returning to compete in a future sub-forum tournament? Why or why not?
Yes, I'm planning to at least join the usum and ss cups as I enjoy those gens a lot. The team tour seems like a very interesting concept with this format and I love team tours so I'm stoked for that as well.

3. What is something about the tournament experience you'd like to change, if at all?
Nothing comes to mind really. Like Dorron mentioned it was a surprise to see there were separate draft and battle pools, but in the end I didn't mind them.

4. Anything further you'd like to state, please do so.
Shoutout to RoiDadadou for answering any questions I had quickly and handling an annoying act situation I was in well

 

[henguinie]

1. Rate your tournament experience
Tour was fun. Early inactivity is to be expected from any smogtour but I think the aspect of discord being required was maybe a turn off for some people. I personally don't use discord or the smogon site often and I get it makes drafting and scheduling a lot more convenient but for the less committed it was probably a little too much.

2. Do you plan on returning to compete in a future sub-forum tournament? Why or why not?
Yeah I'll be participating in sub tours until I get a placement so embarrassing I never come back. I'm interested to see if I can hold my own against people who play draft regularly.

3. What is something about the tournament experience you'd like to change, if at all?
Only thing I would say is to have draft be outside of pools. Just give people a certain amount of points and let them pick whatever they want. The fact that people who were in pools with inactive people get an automatic advantage because they have a higher chance of getting what they wanted felt a little unfair. Especially since this was a kickoff tour and the next tours will be past gen, people will automatically gravitate towards the same things: new pokes they want to use or old pokes that haven't been available in a couple gens. Oh yeah and let me win next time

4. Anything further you'd like to state, please do so.
The fact that draft is a discord centric format that is really hard to get into if you aren't already in, I think having more forum tours outside of the main ones would be better for integrating more people into the format. Also, running a draft league is a totally thankless job even if people say thank you, so good on the people behind this for continuing to put as much work into it as they're putting in because if I had to deal with even half the complaints I saw I would've quit. And I haven't seen whatever complaints were being dmed to them which I'm guessing is a whole lot more

 

[Éric]

i had a really bad hosting experience, my friends got really screwed up multiple times, and i think that should be imperative to fix.

draft screw up

i already told tj ab this when it happened but basically one host literally skipped a friend of mine just because, and subbed him out for no reason. he was later on readded when he (rightfully) complained, but many draft rounds had already passed and he could only get a really shitty team. nothing was done about this that i know

sand veil

if you really think that forfeiting a game where a strategy was used unknowingly and unwillingly by one player, that didnt affect the matchs outcome at all and that was legal in the played format!!! is good hosting i have some things to tell you. this happened multiple times too which is the worst part

acts

the same friend that got his draft screwed up by a host also lost a game because he claimed an act after talking to his opponent once every week (of the three of pools) in the public draft discord, getting no response whatsoever and posting the proof on the thread, just to get told that he wasnt “insisting enough” somehow

i understand that this is voluntary work and all that, but id appreciate it if this hosting problem was fixed for future tours, since it really hurts the competition

 

[Theia]

Skipping over most of the other posts itt because I want to address the one above

i already told tj ab this when it happened but basically one host literally skipped a friend of mine just because, and subbed him out for no reason. he was later on readded when he (rightfully) complained, but many draft rounds had already passed and he could only get a really shitty team. nothing was done about this that i know

This is 100% on us, mistakes happen, we're human, and we were shuffling around almost 1500 people through all stages of this tour. Sorry this happened and there's obviously not much we can do about it now.

if you really think that forfeiting a game where a strategy was used unknowingly and unwillingly by one player, that didnt affect the matchs outcome at all and that was legal in the played format!!! is good hosting i have some things to tell you. this happened multiple times too which is the worst part

This is mainly what I want to address. The fact that I have to explain to you why it's not "bad hosting" to not let people break the rules is kind of silly. It is 100% on the player to read and understand the rules, which were on the draft documents from day one and listed in the OPs of every pool and week thread. It's not "bad hosting" to enforce these rules when they are broken, it's bad playing to not read, understand, and obey them. This is akin to if Garganacl got banned from SV OU and therefore from a week of a tour, stours wasn't updated to reflect that change until the week was over, and someone brought Garganacl after being explicitly told not to do so and went "but it's legal in the format so I should win actually!" If you think this should be changed, I'm sure the Tournament Director team would love to hear your arguments about why we should allow people to break explicitly stated rules.

the same friend that got his draft screwed up by a host also lost a game because he claimed an act after talking to his opponent once every week (of the three of pools) in the public draft discord, getting no response whatsoever and posting the proof on the thread, just to get told that he wasnt “insisting enough” somehow

I asked tournament staff and none of us are sure what situation you're talking about here, so if you could clarify this for us, it would be appreciated.

Thanks for your feedback, hope to see you in future tours.

 

[TRowePrice667]

1. Rate your tournament experience:
Honestly had a lot of fun for an individual tour, which is something I usually didn't like playing. The mixture of Smogon + Draft was great and a long time coming.

2. Do you plan on returning to compete in a future sub-forum tournament? Why or why not?
Yes, I plan to keep supporting this venture as I think it is an overall benefit to the community as a whole.

3. What is something about the tournament experience you'd like to change, if at all?
Redraft in higher bracket, Probably like Top 32 or 16, there were some busted teams because of how different in skill level and experience the draft pools were and all that came down to luck. If a redraft is done in higher bracket it could even teams out more and put more on skill in building and playing than just on luck in drafting.
An argument could also be made for seeding or double elimination but those are pipe dreams and logistical nightmares (imagine being seeded to play a pool opponent round 2) so honestly I have no complaint there.

4. Anything further you'd like to state, please do so.
Ohio

 

[Professor Shuckle]

1. Rate your tournament experience
Pretty solid. Came into this blind (hadn't played or followed the meta for SV at all) so had low expectations. Encountered no issues so no complaints.

2. Do you plan on returning to compete in a future sub-forum tournament? Why or why not?
Yes, Smogon collaborating with draft is pretty epic and these tours are mostly low effort, low commitment for me so why not?

3. What is something about the tournament experience you'd like to change, if at all?
Re-drafting from Round of 32 stage onward. If you get lucky, your draft pool could have a bunch of new players and you end up with a broken draft. This would mitigate that.

4. Anything further you'd like to state, please do so.
Looking forward to better tiering for future tournaments.

 

[Lady Salamence]

1. Rate your tournament experience

I had a lot of fun. I'd never played Draft before, but there was enough resources and questions answered to help me understand things as they went. Battle pools were by far the most chaotic part, I understood the need for putting pools together to avoid organizational messes, but it made it more difficult for me to filter through messages from other pools that didn't pertain to me, especially when I'd wake up to a few dozen messages in the channel after not checking it much the day before.​

​

But really, I had a good time. First draft, first real SV experience, which I think is the case for a number of folk as well - I got pretty far entirely by getting help from people who knew what they were doing. The drafting process was fascinating and enjoyable, I probably spent more time planning out strategies at each point of the draft process than I have teambuilding for most tournaments I've played in.​

2. Do you plan on returning to compete in a future sub-forum tournament? Why or why not?

Yeah for sure. Draft brings a new dimension to playing Pokemon that heavily leans into theory, which I enjoy. So long as they're there, I'll keep playing in them, even if I'm likely to drown in pools often.
​

3. What is something about the tournament experience you'd like to change, if at all?

Would like to change, not really no. I think there are probably lateral changes or minor improvements that could be made. But all in all, I don't think any tournament is perfect or the best it could be, and striving for a tournament with no problems or complaints or participant wishings is a task beyond Sisyphus. For me myself, I had fun working with other folks on building teams, but that's an out-of-tournament thing that can't really be enhanced or encouraged in a tournament structure without making it a team tournament.
​

4. Anything further you'd like to state, please do so.

You're welcome to substitute in any inside joke you want here, but I don't really form opinions easily or often so I don't have much to say other than, "played in it, would play again" - this was a fun experience and I hope future ones continue to be.​

 

[Rissoux]

Hey y'all, wanted to take a moment to address some of the other concerns mentioned in the following posts:

TRowePrice667 Professor Shuckle - We tried to make redrafting work for the Classic Cups but because were unable to for two reasons: we received more interest than we originally anticipated, and the year's schedule isn't currently built to support the sort of timeline adjustment redrafting would necessitate. We built the schedule with 256 player caps in mind, and if USUM/SWSH meet the same sort of player turn out that ORAS did, we'll need to shift 3 weeks to the right. Redrafting adds another 3 weeks into that equation and the rest of the calendar isn't set up for a 6 week deviation that makes sense to us. We'll be trying to redraft in the C tier tours (LC/LT) as they're more flexible to try it out. Thanks for the recommendation, hope that explanation made sense.

Lpow12 Larger draft pools are likely not to be done anytime soon because of the nature of tour sizes. Eight pokemon rosters are standard for a reason; tournaments are less investment and are supposed to be done on a tighter schedule. Larger drafting pools and larger team rosters are antithetical to that expeditious nature we're looking for. Nothing says we won't try it out, but this is a pretty tried and true system we're operating of. Thanks for the suggestion!

henguinie Free drafting absolutely could have it's place in a tournament at some point but likely won't anytime soon. As the name states, "Draft League" usually means people are drafting teams in the standard snake draft order. To your second point, there is absolutely nothing to do from a tournament administration standpoint about certain participant's engagement levels. All we can do is plug names in who sign up and replace those that don't make the same pick quotas as everyone else. "Inactive" does not mean that the player slot in that draft pool never made picks, so people in pools with fewer replacements did not have a better chance of getting what they wanted as you stated. Thank you for the thoughts.

Have a good day and best of luck if you're in the ORAS tournament that started today.