BurntZebra

I'm not really sure if I agree with your arguments here. I agree that if the managers are selected, and 7 of the 8 are top tier players and 1 is terrible, then yeah, that one manager is probably at a disadvantage, but at the same time, not allowing managers to play either decreases the pool of good managers to choose from, or it decreases from the quality of the player pool, both of which we have seen in the past seasons. One potential option if this were an auction format is to have managers price each other and decide if they want to purchase themselves to play, the caveat being that they can play in any tier, not just a manager vs manager tier. This option is typically seen in the lower level smogon leagues that have a smaller playerbase, where if the managers didn't play, there would be a severe skill gap in the player pool. I'm not sure if this is really feasible in a snake format since each manager pick is essentially the same value, unlike the auction where one manager could be valued 5k more than another manager. Ultimately, allowing managers to play allows for the greatest selection of managers to choose from, since you no longer need to decide between getting to play or just managing, especially considering having 8 top players not being able to play can dramatically affect the overall skill level of a certain tier or just general skill level overall. As for the Snake vs auction discussion, I think it's sort of silly to pretend that the unique thing about PSL is the auction. At the end of the day, SPL and Snake Draft are not terribly different outside of having different tiers to play. PSL in PokeMMO is unique because it is one of the only long-term team-based tournaments and is probably the only truly competitive one, seeing as World Cup had a myriad of problems that made it not competitive. The difference between auction and snake is usually the auction allows for a larger variation in the skill levels of players, e.g. buying 2 players for 30k each and then buying 8 players for 2-4k each, while snake *should* have a steady decline in the skill levels of players as rounds progress of the draft. Snake is also typically a tad bit more exclusive, but that really depends on what the rules are that Coolio comes up with. We have also had a snake draft in the past (season 7/8 I believe) for the first 2 rounds, and then had auction for the rest, so there is some precedent for a draft already. I haven't read the OP since reading rules is for chumps.

me vs zenor in 10-15 minutes

I figured I'd take a shot at building a sand team in the current meta. I tried to make it have some unique features to make it stand out from other sand teams that have been made before. https://pokepast.es/1d433f1789fb2e9d -> the team _______________________________________________________________________________________ So you wanted to keep hydreigon, so that was my starting point for the team. I'm no expert on hydreigon sets, so this set can probably be changed if you would like. Focus blast allows you to 2hko blissey with rocks up and kill stuff like porygon2/tyranitar that are able to survive specs dragon pulse easily. U-turn is for momentum vs chansey, since odds are, you won't be able to kill it normally. Next up is the sand component of the team. I wanted tyranitar as the sand setter because it has more offensive potential and has some unique switch in opportunities as well, compared to hippowdon. Fire blast can be used to nail steel types and breloom on the switch. Stealth rock because every good team has rocks. I debated if I wanted crunch or not on the tyranitar, since I wasn't running dark pulse on hydreigon. Without dark pulse on hydreigon, I figured reuniclus might get too annoying, so I stuck with crunch, and added stone edge to round out the coverage and the ability to ko togekiss. The ev spread is slightly random, but it does give you speed to outspeed blissey, bulk to live a +2 aura sphere from togekiss, and enough attack to deal out some damage. I saw another team posted here with chople berry excadrill and I liked that idea, so I went with it here. Chople berry serves one primary purpose, which is to let excadrill survive a mach punch from conkeldurr and then ko with a +2 earthquake. Chople also helps with the special lucario matchup, as excadrill can live a +2 life orb vacuum wave with chople. After adding the first 3 pokemon and seeing they are all weak to fighting, and knowing that sand teams are often weak to rain, I decided to go with a slightly unorthodox choice of slowbro. Slowbro is one of the bulkiest physical walls available still and gives you answers to physical lucario, mamoswine, conkeldurr, and kabutops. Scald and thunder wave try to limit what is willing to come in vs slowbro, and psyshock is just to have some offensive capabilities vs blissey, conkeldurr, breloom, and tentacruel. At this point, I felt the team was quite weak to scizor and excadrill was being completely walled by skarmory, so magnezone seemed like the next logical choice. Scarf magnezone gives the team some speed and will hopefully remove scizor and/or skarmory. Magnezone is also the primary switch in to bulky waters and togekiss. I was looking over the team and realized it was still fairly weak to fighting and had some potential flaws vs scizor still, so I went with salamence. Originally, I was going to do a special attacking defog roost salamence, but I think the physical dragon dance set takes advantage of the team more. Magnezone is able to trap skarmory and allow salamence to do severe damage. Roost seemed like an interesting option, as it let salamence switch into attacks a little more carefree and not have to worry about stealth rock damage as much. If skarmory is trapped, then dragon claw and earthquake have perfect coverage for everything else. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ As for flaws of the team, there are a few that came to mind that I haven't tried to adapt to yet. First is shed shell skarmory. It will evade magnezone trapping and thus will stick around all game to wall both excadrill and salamence. There are a few ways to remedy this. One way would be to drop roost on salamence for a fire move to threaten skarmory more. Another option would be to run a knock off user on the team that can bait skarmory to come in and remove its shed shell so that magnezone can trap it. This is more difficult because nothing on the team learns knock off, so a pokemon change would be needed. The second flaw would be bulky waters. Milotic is very annoying for the team as it is not prone to being trapped and has recovery, which makes it difficult to wear down. Milotic is able to switch in on salamence, slowbro, excadrill, and tyranitar. Remedies for this would be to add toxic on slowbro over thunder wave, so that if milotic comes in vs slowbro, it will be put on a timer and be easier to wear down. This is a double-edged sword since it will make salamence/excadrill do less damage to milotic as well. Another option is to make either salamence or excadrill life orb sets. +2 earthquake from life orb excadrill will ohko milotic, but will make you worse vs conkeldurr. +1 life orb dragon claw from salamence will put milotic in range of being killed off by an excadrill earthquake.

I went ahead and made this team, even though I'm not technically a builder, I think butler said something about TC people getting a free pass. https://pokepast.es/2994c60ce9db5be1 I'll go through my build process. First I went with your taillow set as the starting point of the team. Guts taillow is fairly strong, but it has more trouble getting past normal/flying resists than other flying types, so the team needed some ways to deal with steel types and rock types. Trapinch was the obvious next pick, as it is able to switch in vs onix and magnemite safely vs any attack and ko with giga drain or earthquake respectively. Trapinch also traps tirtouga and pawniard, but it seems that shell smash tirtouga is the more common tirtouga set so trapinch isn't the first switch to tirtouga in a normal game. The next pick for the team is mienfoo, which has been the most consistent LC mon in the past 3 gens of LC, so there's not much surprise here. Mienfoo can tank almost any hit in LC and deal damage between fake out, uturn, and high jump kick. Knock off also makes it easier to break misdreavus / frillish / porygon / vullaby for the rest of the team. U-turn and trapinch can potentially eliminate certain threats that switch into mienfoo. Before I added any more defensive backbone to the team, I figured I should figure out the other part of the bird spam for the team. There are a few choices. Doduo, rufflet, archen, drifloon, etc. I went with drifloon because it has some unique options that no other flying type provides. First, it has unburden, which allows it to outspeed all of the boosted and unboosted meta, after it uses its item. Second, it has many movepool options to break whatever you need. Acrobatics is a given if you're running flying gem. Knock off helps vs porygon/vullaby/flying resists. Thunderbolt hits vullaby / tirtouga / other water or flying types. Shadow ball also gives another stab move. The moveset can probably be changed around. Hidden power fighting can be used to hit pawniard / onix / porygon. Destiny bond can be used to remove any pokemon. Next pick for the team had to be a stealth rocker, since every LC team needs a rocker. The top two choices were tirtouga and pawniard, as they resist ice/normal/flying, and have good overall bulk. I just went with tirtouga because I think it's quite good at what it does and is somewhat underutilized in this pokemmo LC meta. The last pick felt like it needed to be some kind of hazard removal, since there was taillow and drifloon that are weak to rocks. I went with vullaby since it gives an answer to misdreavus and is just bulky overall, while also giving defog to the team. I did make a different version of the team, but I didn't like the feel as much for some reason, maybe because it didn't have a fighting type on it. https://pokepast.es/bd84dc7920ff7287

I didn't go through and sub quote anything so it's not terribly clear right away as to what I'm replying to exactly, but shouldn't be too difficult to decipher. I didn't go through and see how many players each team had, I just noticed that some teams had 10+ players, and the fact that OU is the most popular tier in terms of number of players, so slapping on an extra OU slot is definitely the easiest way to reach the 6 games. I guess looking at some of the teams more closely makes me more worried about the competitiveness of the event. IMO some countries that did get a slot probably shouldn't have gotten one. Even if you have 7+ players in your country shouldn't automatically make you eligible to play in this, since I think there might be some "large" skill differentials between some of the teams (I can be very easily be proven wrong since I don't know some of the newer player base now). I guess this is more of a fundamental problem with a world cup with a relatively small sample pool. Even Smogon faces the same issue, where US East has won for the past like 3 years. No real way to solve this problem without artificially manipulating teams or to have more players play this game that are closer to reaching the asymptotic skill ceiling of Pokemon. People could risk and try to no contest to get a tie instead of a loss, but this comes down to sportsmanship of the players to get their games done, and to the hosts for them to be careful with activity win/no contest decisions. This hasn't been *too* much of an issue in PSL for the most part and even when it does occur, there is usually some solution to avoid no contest calls. On the topic of the 3-1-0 scale, obviously teams should go for a win if they want to be the best, but it gets complicated when a team wins 5-3 one week, loses 0-8 the next week, and is then ahead of a team that ties two weeks in a row. Do you value a win with an overall -6 point differential more than two ties with a 0 point differential? If your answer is yes, then the situation is even more extreme in a 3-1 scale, since 3 ties = 1 win, so wins are worth an astronomical amount more than a tie, considering there are only 3 weeks played. If you do end up keeping just 5 tiers, then the 3-1-0 scale is less important since ties will only occur when a no contest occurs, which shouldn't happen too frequently hopefully. I'm still not sure if I agree with the logic involving the world cup aspect and coaching. If anything, the fact that it is a team event should emphasize each individual on the team. If a world cup team is entirely coached by one player, the team essentially becomes that one player, which is the opposite of what we want with a team event. Ideally the team helps before the match and potentially after the match, while letting the individual player still be a valuable part of the team. I think for a while, there was a negative connotation associated with coaching in team tournaments. Best example is Frags+Aw in team tournaments in 2014/2015, where the outside view was that frags was winning the tournaments on his own basically and made the wins less impressive because of that. There is also a division between players on their stance on coaching. Some players don't want to get coached because they feel adequate on their own or feel like it would discount their victories, knowing that someone else is partially responsible for your win, so I wouldn't go out to say that most teams get coached now adays. Also I will disagree with your point about Smogon. Team based events are actually the most popular and hyped events on Smogon. This is true for the large scale tournament scene with the Smogon Premiere League, but it is also true in the microcosm that I am most involved with, which is the LC community. Sure there are individual tournaments that get a lot of players, but the main attraction is the team based formats, because of the exclusivity/higher average skill level of players participating. In an individual tournament, the performance in a lot of the early rounds are diluted out by the masses of players that sign up that don't play at the same level as the top level players, so it's essentially like watching a high school sports game for most of it, while the team tournaments are like the NFL (or insert national sporting association here).

I guess since I'm involved in this tournament now due to my patriotic duty to make America great again, I'll give my input on certain aspects of this event to hopefully give some useful suggestions and give some wisdom to a rookie host (Roxxass). The first thing I noticed about the event is that the matches are 5v5, which means there will be no ties (unless there is a no contest), so there is a huge point differential between wins and losses, even though there is only 1 game differential between a win and a loss (rather than a 2 game differential with an even number of games, e.g. 5-3 or 4-2 in an 8 game series or 6 game series respectively). Challonge's default setting is 3 points for a win, 1 point for a tie, and 0 points for a loss, so there are big opportunities for some big point differences. Personally, I like a system where win=2 points, tie=1 point, and loss=0 points. This system also assumes that there are even numbers of players on a team, so that ties aren't a rare occurrence (hopefully anyways). In my years of playing and observing pokemon tournaments, I've never seen an odd number of tiers used before, and for good reason, as it leads to imbalance in a round robin environment. The second thing I noticed about this event is that there isn't much on any thread about how playoffs work. I imagine the highest point team of each division gets to playoffs (so that 4 teams total are in the playoffs). If this isn't the case, then I have some problems with two teams having already dropped out and 6 teams getting a free 5-0 victory, since that will artificially inflate the score of those teams in comparison to other teams that didn't get a free win (e.g. if you look at the points of all the participating teams as a whole, instead of a group-by-group basis). The fact that two teams have already dropped out within the first 2 days of the event starting is slightly worrying and makes me think more thought should have gone into what teams were chosen for this event. I do understand that a round number like 16 is optimal for this event and the goal of this event seems to be geared toward being inclusive rather than exclusivity. Other numbers of teams such as 12 could also work, such as splitting teams into 4 groups of 3 teams, but I suppose it is too late now for that. Just food for thought for future tournaments. The last thing I noticed (actually probably the first thing I noticed when I read the threads) is that coaching is allowed for the entirety of the tournament. This was already discussed somewhat extensively during the last season or two of PSL, so I'll be brief with my thoughts. I think allowing coaching is a tempting option because people are likely doing it even when they aren't supposed to be doing it, but coaching hurts a lot of the competitive integrity of the game as well. One of the main components of any strategy based game is anticipating what your opponent is planning, and a key aspect of that is to know the skill level of your opponent. If you get matched up vs randoboy42069 who has been first rounded in every tournament he's ever entered, your expectations are going to be different than if you're playing someone who has 20 tournament wins. But with coaching, you don't know what is going on behind the scenes. You have no way of knowing if you're playing randoboy42069, or if you're playing the best player on the opposing team, or if you're playing the best player in the game, since anyone can be making the plays. This makes the players on a team as good as the best player on their team (if they choose to coach). Ultimately, this is me just waxing poetic about my stance on coaching, since there aren't enough systems in place to discourage coaching if it was against the rules for tournaments, compared to Smogon, where ghosting (same thing as what we call coaching here) leads to year long tournament bans for nearly all tournaments on Smogon, as opposed to here, where if you are caught in PSL, you are placed on the very spooky black list, where there's an 85% of you not being on the black list next season. tl;dr: suggestions: 1. Make the matchups 6v6 instead of 5v5 for balancing purposes. Adding a second OU match is the easiest solution most likely. 2. Make wins worth 2 points, ties 1 point, and losses 0 points. 3. Be more verbose in the process of the event, e.g. how playoff teams are decided, tentative schedule, etc. 4. I won't ask that the coaching being allowed thing to be removed, since I think ultimately it is a host preference thing, but my stance is that the aspect of your team helping should be limited to teambuilding, testing, and discussing before the match. Once a match starts, a single player is responsible for their own actions.

Houndour is not a good mon in a tier with many good stealth rock setters (onix, tirtouga, ferroseed, dwebble, pawniard) and its immunity to fire is fairly irrelevant. Its usefulness as a psychic answer is not useful considering abra is not as good without magic guard. It also adds to a team's fighting weakness which is rarely good since we're lacking some fighting resists (regen foongus/slowpoke mainly). Murkrow and misdreavus are probably the 2 most banworthy mons that exist in LC currently, so I'd say discussion should be mainly on those for now. Murkrow has insane versatility and great base stats (also hitting 19 speed), which makes predicting what moves it has very difficult. It also has stab sucker punch to ruin the days of any scarfers that try to revenge it. Misdreavus seems slightly more manageable personally. Running knock off on timburr/mienfoo will cripple misdreavus bulk a lot (and knock off is a god move in LC anyways, even with low base power). It also has the trade off of running speed or bulk. Sure it can hit 19 speed, but it'll also be a lot frailer vs scarfers/things that can tank a hit. It also doesn't have nasty plot so its offensive presence is a lot less than what it would be with nasty plot. Another food for thought. Shell smash users. I only watched the finals match of the recent lc tournament so I don't know how much shell smash users were used, but they are quite powerful and difficult to stop. Shellder, clamperl, tirtouga, dwebble are a few that come to mind. Shellder has reasonable physical bulk, which allows it to set up on certain physical attackers, and it has flexibility in its moveset to some extent with its last slot. Clamperl has insane power behind it, but is more difficult to set up/not get revenged by sucker punch etc. Surf+hp fire coverage gives you all the coverage you need at +2 sp atk. Diglett can be used as a support for any shell smasher. It can remove pawniard, a troublesome pokemon for smashers due to its typing and stab sucker punch. It can memento on a threat to allow a shell smasher to set up. It can pick off anything low hp that is slower than it. Diglett will be one of those annoying mons in LC that will be extra annoying without team preview. You'll have to second guess pressing volt switch with magnemite or chinchou, fearing the diglett popping out from its dirt hole. I'm not sure if diglett will outright be banworthy, since it has low power and low bulk, meaning it has very little that it can outright ko, even if it gets in safely. It's definitely something to watch out for in the future, most likely for potentially unhealthy teambuilding constraints, but I guess we'll have to see how the LC meta evolves.

252+ SpA Kingdra Draco Meteor vs. 252 HP / 252+ SpD Lapras: 75-88 (31.6 - 37.1%) -- guaranteed 4HKO after Leftovers recovery 252+ SpA Kingdra Draco Meteor vs. 252 HP / 252+ SpD Deep Sea Scale Clamperl: 51-61 (35.9 - 42.9%) -- guaranteed 3HKO shell armor new meta

I've seen some magnetons lurking around in NU, so escavalier isn't exactly the safest option, even if it decides to run drill run. Escavalier's recovery is pretty much limited to a rest sleep talk set, not sure if people run that or not. It's probably decent but you miss out on pursuit trapping. If it doesn't run rest, then linoone just needs to wait around until escavalier is 50-60% to set up, which is pretty doable. Mismagmius is an option, but it has to be running timid, and it can't be running a sub cm set or else it will lose. Linoone can always run jolly to mess up haunter as well, although I imagine jolly linoone will miss out on some kos. Both ghost types are also prone to pursuit trapping, although not sure how prevalent that is. Defensive normal resists have existed in every meta where linoone was banned, so I wouldn't say that's a compelling argument to me on why it's not overpowered. Crustle/amoonguss/tangrowth/armaldo/golem all fall to the flail set you love so dearly, although flail means you're giving up seed bomb, which probably doesn't matter too much anyways. Sturdy users could work, but unless you have fairly dedicated hazard removal, stealth rock/spikes/toxic spikes will most likely ruin any plans with sturdy. Also it seems like you're forgetting that linoone is usually the last pokemon revealed in the match, late into the game, so the odds of someone keeping a sawk at 100% throughout the entire match on the off chance that the opponent might be running linoone, is pretty slim. My main issue with linoone is that it has a +2 priority stab extreme speed, which makes it very deadly vs an offensive team. You might think, oh if I'm running offense, then linoone won't have a chance to set up, but that's generally incorrect, unless you run 6 things with fighting coverage or strong stab moves. An offense team can't just rely on a priority user or a scarf pokemon to deal with linoone, unlike other set up sweepers, which can be dealt with scarfers or +1 priority. We're probably not going to take any action with NU currently since we're still ironing things out in OU and UU before we really touch NU, so whatever can go wild in NU currently.

252+ SpA Life Orb Blissey Psychic vs. 0 HP / 0 SpD Conkeldurr: 146-172 (81.1 - 95.5%) -- guaranteed 2HKO easy solution

Maybe because no one good plays randoms

well if it isn't craig who isn't a doctor

According to my calculations, with your current speed, you have a 63% of successfully escaping on your first try. To have a 100% to escape, you would need a speed stat of 72. These percentages and values were made assuming PokeMMO uses this formula to calculate escape chances. Edit: To clarify: A=Your Pokemon's speed, B=the wild pokemon's speed, and C is a multiplier for how many attempts you've made at escaping (first attempt = 1, second attempt = 2, and so on). If the F value is greater than 255, then you will always succeed at escaping.

Lmao " Mazar would also be punished under regular circumstances, but the TD team does not condone the beating of dead horses."

gotta keep a textpad/pastebin of all the importables. I made that mistake before