Tournaments 2024 RBY Circuit Discussion Thread

[Amaranth]

Our (OU) circuit currently is comprised of:
Inviduals
Four traditional 'main' tournaments, in the form of Winter Seasonal -> Global Championship -> Cup -> Summer Seasonal
One 'extra' tournament, tried for the first time last year in the form of RBY Majors

Team
One official (SPL)
Two all-gen tours from RoA (RCoP + RoAPL)
Two full-RBY tours (RBYWC + RBYPL)

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There's a big discussion point ahead of 2024 that I want to get people's opinions on, and it's the Majors Slot.
Majors was tried, and it was honestly a lot of effort from a hosting perspective. I don't think we're ever going to see the screwups that other gens had when trying to run this format, however it's the smallest tournament in our circuit, so it doesn't really feel worth it from an effort perspective.

If you feel strongly in any of the following ways:
A- Keep Majors, it was very good and definitely worth the effort
B- Replace Majors with a big Swiss tournament (same format as OSDT/Smogon Masters, for reference)
C- Replace Majors with some other format (please specify which)
D- Axe Majors, give players some breaks, four huge tours a year (x2 seasonals + x1 GC + x1 Cup) is enough
then please share your opinions in this thread.
Other thoughts on the individuals would be welcome too, but the four Big Ones that we have currently seem to be well-liked as is, so unless people strongly want something different it all seems good to me. I could see an argument for replacing one of the Seasonals with a Swiss, too, so if that's something you'd like to see that would also be a worthwhile opinion to share.

A minor sidenote about teamtour timings:
It's something for the boring bureaucrats (ie me) to decide moreso than the community, but I want to sort of pre-announce that RoAPL and RCoP will be moving a bit. The final schedule will be something like SPL->RBYWC->RoAPL->RCoP->RBYPL. We're going to make sure there's minimal to no overlap between these tournaments, while keeping RBYWC and RBYPL to the familiar timings, but if you strongly disagree with this for one reason or another, by all means voice it here.

 

[oakdeon]

the majors is a very nice tournament and I think we should maintain it and recruit staff.
If the tournament were to be removed, a ladder tour format would, in my opinion, be something interesting and require less work time.
But this remains my personal opinion.

 

[NotVeryCake]

My unqualified opinion is to replace Majors with a bigger swiss tournament. As Majors didnt have much draw to incentivize players to sign up.

 

[Prof_J]

I feel B. I would tell you C if I was creative enough to think of something :). A swiss-format is less grueling for Type C and something the community at large is already familiar with. Here's why I think that:

In isolation, the Majors format was fun. However, I thought it counted too little for circuit points. I know we needed a C-type tournament to replace the live tours, but that made it feel like you were scrapping extra hard for the least amount of points you could get this season. 3x as hard at least...you are fighting 3 opponents in the first round, and then maybe a tiebreaker to get out of pools. Then after that it becomes a mini-cup.

Now, one way to look at this is: "Well, something like that counting for less is good, that means you have less to lose from an early elimination." Is that really a great reason, though?
Now I actually have another thought. This may sound wild, but: keep Majors and make it count for more? I think if Majors was bumped up to Type-B and Type-C sort of went extinct, it gives more incentive for the players who aren't already playing RBY all the time, for any reason. IDK if that's even on the table, though....my impression of Type-C existing was that it was the only proper way to classify the live tours, since they should never have counted as much as a seasonal. You know I don't host or run these circuits, so IDK if there is a reason a classification C needs to stay, or if it was a relic of an older format. Just thinking out loud towards the end, here.

 

[Melbelle]

keep majors but maybe make seeding more objective (put it in middle of 2-3 tours in and use circuit points). if a top player doesnt have any points bc they didnt sign up for any past tournaments then so be it, they get unseeded. just for the sake of not having the bracket influenced by (the host's) opinion.

dont like swiss a lot, prefer if it was another single elim tournament (maybe also better than majors) but i guess the point of this 5th slot is to be something special. prefer a tour to not a tour regardless of format.

 

[gastlies]

I think we should stick with 5 tours because 5 means one bad tour isn't gonna kill you while each individual tour is still important, so I'm against D. My issue with Swiss is that I feel like people with losing records will drop or give wins making the 'lower record' rounds more barren, so I would rather just stick with Majors (i like mel's idea of objective seeding).

 

[Acetylaldehyde]

I have 3 thought-trains to share here. 1) my thoughts on majors (tl;dr, I like it, but it's not very balanced), 2) a proposal to make cup worth less, and 3) a question about circut points.

First off: Ssnls offer a simple, balanced tour of double elimination that gives you a few chances to show consistency. It's straight-forward, works, although is perhaps boring and slogs as a spectator. GC is fun, exciting, and about as close as one can get to a large scale balanced smogon tour that I've seen. In those tours, we have the strongest sense of competition to allow the consistently best their chance to thrive. Cup and Majors currently do not add to this, both being extremely variable on opponent/pool draws. With that in mind:

1) Majors

1) I quite liked majors, but it is objectively less balanced/fair than the ssnls and gc. Pool play into single elimination creates exciting pieces at every stage of the tour. It acts like a soccer/football world cup; pool play creates pseudo elimination dynamics, allowing faults only to the point of the best players/teams in the pool. Thus, every game is important, but not necessarily deciding, which stirs up drama as a spectator. However, pools are intrinsically unbalanced; that's just the nature of them. Some pools will have many top players, others only have 1+randoms. I don't think objective seeding actually makes this better, but it does make it easier on the host and eliminates a source of implicit bias, so sure. Follow this up with single elimination, and the best players have a difficult time staving off the randomness. But, this can make it fun as a spectator or lesser known player, as you'll see unexpected teams have a chance at deep runs (remember Morocco??).
From a purely competitive and balanced perspective, this isn't a great format to support a circut in which we are giving players a chance to show who is the best of the year. However, I believe that the competitive pursuit of a game like this is only fun as long as the game is fun. So I like this being a Type C tour worth the fewest points, that has some other dynamics and entertainment we don't see elsewhere in the circut. Whether that's worth the energy of hosting is up to the hosts and admins.
Real quick before I move on, I want to address Cake's point that "Majors didnt have much draw to incentivize players to sign up." I actually think the problem was the opposite; Majors drew far too many signups of people who didn't actually care. This tour had more dead games and dropouts than I've ever seen. With fewer more committed players, we would've seen fewer more competitive pools (imo). So I don't think we need to find a way to bring in more people here by making it worth more points, and I think it makes sense leaving it as a Type C.

2) Devalue Cup

2) 第二十五夜 and I were talking about how to fix cup (single-elimination sucks, and the tour is worth so many points that a major source of points is determined heavily by MU rng). Ultimately we decided you can't fix it w/o redesigning classic, which we're not gonna touch. However, I did have an idea out of this: while we can't change the format of cup, can we change how much it's worth?
Why don't we make Cup a Type C worth the fewest points (since it draws many people who don't care about circut anyway), and replace Majors with a more balanced Type A format? Could be swiss, or a gc-style, or something else (don't really want to speculate atm because this post is already too long). This way, the most random, unbalanced format is still worth the fewest points, and the circut is mostly decided by more balanced formats (ssnl, gc, & whatever replaces majors). It would also make Majors worth redesigning and running, since it would be a Type A tour. Maybe there's some politics or behind the scenes reasons why this is a terrible idea, so feel free to point it out.

3) Point distribution elitism?

3) I'm curious about the circut point breakdown throughout the season. I'm sure other people have done the math and thought much more about this, so excuse my naivety for a moment. I've felt that too many points are concentrated in the top ~5-10 finishes. The circut far more rewards a single great finish over consistently good finishes. I do think a top ~2/3 finish should nearly guarantee one a place in the top 16, especially if they are playing in most tours. But another benchmark I see, is that if one were to finish top 16 in every tournament, that should also land a place. Currently, if one were to finish definitively top 16 (as in 13-24 doesn't cut it, so you'd need top 12 in those tours) in every single tour, one would have 3300 points, landing them 14th. Good. However, that is decided by Cup being a three person finals, and 7th-12th giving 1200 pts. If Cup were two person finals, 9th-16th would only give 600, landing this theoretical person with 2700 pts, which is a few places behind Tarvold's 2830 16th place circut finish. Thus, whether or not this player makes playoffs, is decided by how many people sign up for RBY Cup. Which sucks.
Are we fine with this? Is this situation simply a sacrifice for math that makes this more fair in a way I don't see? Or do we want to prioritize single great finishes over multiple good? [I have no skin in this as I wouldn't have made it either way; I'm just curious]

 

[Amaranth]

However, I did have an idea out of this: while we can't change the format of cup, can we change how much it's worth?
Why don't we make Cup a Type C worth the fewest points (since it draws many people who don't care about circut anyway), and replace Majors with a more balanced Type A format? Could be swiss, or a gc-style, or something else (don't really want to speculate atm because this post is already too long). This way, the most random, unbalanced format is still worth the fewest points, and the circut is mostly decided by more balanced formats (ssnl, gc, & whatever replaces majors). It would also make Majors worth redesigning and running, since it would be a Type A tour. Maybe there's some politics or behind the scenes reasons why this is a terrible idea, so feel free to point it out.

On this: Cup is Type A because it brings players that other tournaments, for better or worse, simply don't. You could argue that ABR doesn't deserve to be in circuit top 16 if he just shows up for cup all year..... but if he wins all of Cup, and does damn well in circuit, I think it'd be a shame to cut him out.
For better or worse, Cup is (after SPL of course) the best link our community has to the greater Tournaments community, and that's a playerbase worth tapping into when possible, imo.

 

[King Billu]

the majors is a very nice tournament and I think we should maintain it and recruit staff.
If the tournament were to be removed, a ladder tour format would, in my opinion, be something interesting and require less work time.
But this remains my personal opinion.

I agree with this that majors should be removed for some sort of ladder tournament being 4 cycles of 4 or 2 cycles of 8 for qualifying. Most other circuits current gen have ladder tournaments so I don't see why RBY can't have one and I'm sure a lot of players would join and be interested

 

[emma]

Feedback has been taken into account and turned the RBY 2024 Tournament Schedule. Thanks everyone.