I'll cut quickly to the chase with this one. This tournament will be an invitational with 16 users that I will handpick from the signups. Tournament tiers will be SM Ubers, SM OU and SM UU. Players will play a Bo3 for the winner, if players cannot agree upon a starting tier you will start with SM OU with the loser picking the subsequent tier.
Now for the title: some of you may have heard this but I'll acknowledge it in full here; smash.gg (a very large, very professional competitive gaming/tournament website) has been in talks with our tournament scene to see if we can integrate with their system. Isa and I have been having weekly meetings with a representative on their end in order to learn their system and ask for changes to their protocol/software offerings to better suit competitive Pokemon. The representative that we are meeting with is herself an avid Pokemon player and understands our game very well, while we've gone to some lengths to explain our tournament circuit.
There are many potential upsides to integration with smash.gg but nothing is set in stone yet and nothing will be until many more conversations with community members and administration here on Smogon. However, we have reached a point in our talks that I believe it is worthwhile to hold a public tournament (I forced the TDs to sign up for one, but I want a more general population one now) to see where there are faults or issues when it comes to operating their software.
So! that said please feel free to signup. I am not going to be picking solely friends or anything along those lines - instead I want a fairly diverse group of players in order to get as many "issues" in feedback as possible. This tournament will be hosted on smash.gg so you will of course need to create an account over there. I am currently working on a "How To" post for signing up/entering tournaments on there, but I would like to hold on posting that until I see what issues users have in attempting to do it on their own.
When signing up for this tournament you must fill out the following form. I won't even bother looking at anything that doesn't fit this format:
***************************************
Username:
Smash.gg Username:
Timezone:
Availability on Weekends:
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Weekends are important due to one particular factor with smash.gg's hosting system. In short, smash.gg is set up a lot more like an "in-real-life" tournament where players must check in and arrive for their matches at certain times. As most of you should know by now, Smogon has a relatively peculiar scheduling system compared to literally every other competitive game I have ever heard of - in that we don't have designated times and our round-times are incredibly long (in comparison). For this tournament round times will be predetermined, on the weekends, and function quite similarly to a LIVE tournament. So basically, you need to be active on the weekends.
Once I have chosen the 16 players I will post a link to the tournament allowing them to sign up. What I would like to ask from the chosen players is the following: PLEASE note any difficulties, confusing things, etc. you have when attempting to play in the tournament. As the administrator of the tournament I can fix a lot of fuck ups, that's not a huge problem, but I want to see WHERE there are problems so I can bring it up in our meetings and work on potential solutions.
Some new features that would come with integration would be the following:
- A non-biased, public seeding system
- Hugely increased visibility for our major tournaments
- Public brackets
- Less stress on tournament hosts as the software is fairly hand-holding
- Player profiles: twitch, twitter, PS profile, etc. all linked to a smash.gg account
- Replays linked to individual rounds: you'll be able to search back through rounds and see what games were included in what match
Don't be shy about reaching out to me with ANY issues you have in signup. I need to know these in order to get these things changed or better explained.
That said, have fun with this. I plan to host a few more Invitationals along this line to get feedback and search for fault lines, so if you don't get selected now don't worry too much about it. I'm not gonna bother to copy and paste all the standard tour stuff because this is a pretty "outside the circuit" tournament - obviously no SC points will be awarded or whatever, but I ask that you take it seriously and play your games to the best of your ability regardless. What we are working on now has a lot of potential to take our already massive tournament circuit to a pretty high level but we need to work with accuracy and deliberation if it is to work well - this is my first step in a public effort to that extent and I am relying on the players of our scene to work with me.
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