[PSL 8] Finals - Congratulations to the Hungry Salamences!!

[SweeTforU]

3 ou

2 uu

2 nu

1 dubs (bo3)

1 LC (bo3)

1 dpp

[XPLOZ]

As a member of the disappointing community, I can tell you that it's 100% laziness.

I'm so lazy that I will most likely stop playing showdown after this season. 

 

 

More seriously, I feel like PSL is too long, the hype lasts some weeks but after it's just boring. 

Change the pattern, make it 6 teams, every team faces each other and the winner is the team with the highest number of points (like the Six Nations Championship).

More elitist, simpler, faster.

[Moetal]

I feel the number of teams and number of players should be increased, rather than decreased. Back in like PSL6, because of big teams and large number of teams, there was like at least two matches a day, constant hypes and excitement. Pages of hypes and trash talking follows every match. It was fun to follow. This season on the other hand, multiple days can go by without a match, many people don't even post results and no one asked for results till like hours later because of how stale this became. Just my two cents.

[Suneet]

3 OU

2 UU

2 NU

1 DPP

1 Doubles (Bo1)

1 LC (Bo3)

 

Edited August 31, 2017 by Suneet
fuck off sweet you time travelled to steal my response

[Gunthug]

Keep in mind that we generally see a dip in interest in this game as a whole the further away from an update we get. That has had at least a minor impact on this season, I think 

[LifeStyle]

If Doubles still gets Bo3, it should be played without changing teams between rounds. If the reason for Bo3 was to make up for getting haxed or w/e people were crying for, it makes 0 sense playing different teams each round. Players should only be allowed to change which mons lead each match.

[gbwead]

3 minutes ago, LifeStyle said:

If Doubles still gets Bo3, it should be played without changing teams between rounds. If the reason for Bo3 was to make up for getting haxed or w/e people were crying for, it makes 0 sense playing different teams each round. Players should only be allowed to change which mons lead each match.

That would be ideal, but it's impossible to do unless the teams are linked to a third party before each duel is played. This would also mean scheduling the duels with 3 people, not only 2.

Edited August 31, 2017 by gbwead

[Kamimiii]

ew counter items and no scouting and knowing sets already

 

would be sooooooo shit 

 

it would resume some games to a 50/50 "will i do the same move as earlier / setup my mon knowing u know i have dragon dance"

 

No, just no this would be awful, litterally horror 

Edited August 31, 2017 by Kamimiii

[Suneet]

bo1 doubles pls, bo3 sucks

Edited August 31, 2017 by Suneet

[LifeStyle]

Just now, gbwead said:

That would be ideal, but it's impossible to do unless the teams are linked to a third party before each duel is played.

Ye probably need someone to control that shit

Where the no lifers at

[gbwead]

bo3: dubs 1 + dubs 2 + lc is the only way.

[LKrenz]

20 minutes ago, Kamimiii said:

ew counter items and no scouting and knowing sets already

 

would be sooooooo shit 

 

it would resume some games to a 50/50 "will i do the same move as earlier / setup my mon knowing u know i have dragon dance"

 

No, just no this would be awful, litterally horror 

this is exactly what i think, I'd preffer to do it bo1 instead of bo3 without switching teams

Edited August 31, 2017 by LKrenz

[LifeStyle]

4 minutes ago, Kamimiii said:

"will i do the same move as earlier / setup my mon knowing u know i have dragon dance"

I think this kinda works both ways tho, its not like only 1 of the 2 players has this "advantage"

I mean Id rather just see bo1 but if we gotta go bo3 cuz of "hax" then idk how changing teams compensates for that. Imo instead it compensates only for lack of matchup (which can be related to how well you prepared your teambuild)

[Laz]

6 minutes ago, gbwead said:

bo3: dubs 1 + dubs 2 + lc is the only way.

???

[gbwead]

Just now, Lazaro23 said:

???

A best of 3 for 2pts with 2 doubles duels and 1 LC. Obviously with different players involved. 2 wins in Dubs means you get the 2 pts. 1 win in Dubs + 1 win in LC means that you also get the 2 pts.

[LifeStyle]

gbweed xddddddddddd

[Laz]

4 minutes ago, gbwead said:

A best of 3 for 2pts with 2 doubles duels and 1 LC. Obviously with different players involved. 2 wins in Dubs means you get the 2 pts. 1 win in Dubs + 1 win in LC means that you also get the 2 pts.

Can't we make it simple and either keep dubs bo3 or change it to bo1 ?

I'd love to see the LC tier in the next Psl though, probably as a bo3 as matches are short and hax heavily affects the outcome?

Edited August 31, 2017 by Lazaro23

[gbwead]

LC players should be involved in some way, but most people don't want to give them a full point, so by including LC in a Bo3 format, it's mroe acceptable hopefully.

[Kamimiii]

14 minutes ago, LifeStyle said:

I think this kinda works both ways tho, its not like only 1 of the 2 players has this "advantage"

I mean Id rather just see bo1 but if we gotta go bo3 cuz of "hax" then idk how changing teams compensates for that. Imo instead it compensates only for lack of matchup (which can be related to how well you prepared your teambuild)

Its different because game1 you lose because your opponent outplays you, by scouting the team, the sets, predicting switches, guessing which are the non revealed mons, playing knowing half the opponent team and evaluating risks to do a predict. It turns the advantage of the first player into a total non sense shit fest where everyone is gonna try to predict or it's simply gonna totally destroy one of the players if he has a bad matchup. Early plays matter a lot in doubles and you can lose the game turn 1 if you get outplayed, that won't happen if both players know the opponent teams, or will happen for no reason cause overpredict. If the opponent has 1 mon that fucks your team you can just sack one thing into it when you have the chance, whereas if there is still 2 unrevealed mons you won't do it cause then you're opened to other threats. Doubles don't need team reveal as you can win the game no matter what happens if you do the correct plays, so why would you want a set reveal, and 2 more games of it after the first one.

 

Fuck I don't even wanna talk about it, it's the worst idea ever, just forget it please. All of this because some players are lazy to do 3 teams, when they have access to thousands of tournament games. Just pick a RMT that won a tourney if you're too lazy to build yourself. Might aswell pick a solid team pre built imo if we're going into that, but no bo3 with same team, it's a non sense.

 

 

Edited August 31, 2017 by Kamimiii

[LifeStyle]

too lazy didnt read

bo1 when

[BlackJovi]

too many essays

[Laz]

6 minutes ago, BlackJovi said:

too many essays

Too bad I already finished my studies, i could have offered some yen to someone to do my homework essays for me lol

[KaynineXL]

4 Groups, 4 teams

 

Top team of each bracket go into the champions league :)

 

Qualifiers:

Group A

Team 1

Team 2

Team 3

Team 4

 

Group B

Team 1

Team 2

Team 3

Team 4

 

Group C

Team 1

Team 2

Team 3

Team 4

 

Group D

Team 1

Team 2

Team 3

Team 4

 

Champions League Knock Out:

Group A - Team 3 vs Group B - Team 4

Group C - Team 1 vs Group D - Team 1

 

Champions League Finals

Group A - Team 3 vs Group D - Team 1

 

It's a little like Orangemaniacs setup, but we've got our PSL style auction where we can make our own teams instead of having dead players that are the same country as you. This would also be real interesting because nobody would truly know how good the other teams are in the other groups until they fight in knock outs. There would be 16 teams, which is a lot... The quality of games are down, but we definitely have the players to sustain the games. It sounds real cool, not sure how we could pull it off though. 

[Torinnnnn]

29 minutes ago, Lazaro23 said:

Too bad I already finished my studies, i could have offered some yen to someone to do my homework essays for me lol

RMT plz ban

[BurntZebra]

59 minutes ago, Kimikozen said:

I want to give some thoughts on SM OU and showdown tiers in general. In my opinion, the reason why SM OU turned out to be a shitty tier is for 2 factors.

1.

  Hide contents

 

The skill level of the players was very low for a PSL level calibre player.  I don't mean this in the way that players were consistently making bad plays or having no game plan, but rather there was a massive lack of knowledge about Gen 7 specific mechanics and even more importantly, some of these players had an extremely low grasp on the metagame and the changes that occurred during the season. First, to state the obvious, in PSL the players should know basically all the mechanics of their respective gen. Not knowing the mechanics of the new terrains, or not even knowing abilities that some Pokemon get is pretty ridiculous. I will give this a pass as Gen 7 is complicated as fuck and its the first time its in this PSL. But hell, I know a bunch of players who don't even play SM and just spectate during PSL who know the gen 7 mechanics better than some of the players. Secondly, the metagame knowledge was very low, and adaptions to the evolving meta were almost nonexistent during the weeks of SM. To give an example of this lack of metagame knowledge, the teams brought during the first week were pretty standard. The standard for the smogon SM OU metagame around the time of PSL week 1 were either stall, or bulky offense that had a few stall breakers. SPL Cancer stall or Ciele/IlovePinkMons stall were the common stall builds (I gave Cogeid both those teams, and he used those to victory the first 2 weeks of SPL.). And for bulky offense builds, the standard offensive mons to break stall and other offense builds were SD Z Bulu and Lando, Protean Gren, Setup Mag, Garchomp, Mega medi, mega pinsir builds, etc. These teams typically had AV Mag, AV growth, or helmet lando as the pivot/tank. The tier had massive metagame changes, yet most of the players did very little to adapt. The metagame shifted HEAVILY to bulky balance, which had mons like Clefable/Toxapex/Celesteela/Mega venusaur/Mew/Mega Scizor/Zapdos. The new offense included Mega-Charizard,  Kyurem-B/Koko, Trapping with Tran/Dug and many more innovations that were popularized by tournaments like SPL, WC, and OLT. But I noticed, in PSL we kept seeing the same Tangrowth bulky offense, the same exact bulky offense webs RMTs,  and Tapu fini balance builds. A lot of these builds phazed out of the metagame hard, yet they still were getting more usage than the new innovations. I have to give massive props to Raptori, who was imo the best SM player of this season. He really impressed me with his psychium Z gren which is a cool metagame item to beat the more common Toxapex and Keldeo as the main Greninja counters. I can also respect all of the players who made their own teams, and tried to work best in such a hard tier to make their own teams in. I'll get to that in point 2.

 

 

 

 

2.

  Hide contents

 

The tier is currently in a rough state for teambuilders and has massive centralization problems. It is literally impossible to effectively prepare for every single different archetype of team in this metagame, and there is always more of these archetypes popping up as new mega evolutions and new metagame innovations come to fruition. I'll give a brief list of all of the archetypes, these include: Stall, Rain, Webs, Aurora Veil HO, Celetsteela/Pex/Clef or Celesteela/Pex/Mew balance, Dugtrio trap, Volt switch, Zard-Y balance, Volcarona sweep, Magearna sweep, and probably a fuck load more that are currently slipping my mind. The ones I put in bold are the archetypes that are especially stressful on teambuilding, as you need to put 1 OR MORE mons on your team that are dedicated to fighting these archetypes. The reason why everyone that played SM used a known entity smogon team/ tourney winning teams at least once is because they are some of the few effective teams at actually dealing with every single one of these archetypes. I shit on Frexa for never building his teams, but that was simply just for hype and to make a cool narrative. It is so fucking hard to teambuild in this SM metagame and have a team that doesn't lose at team preview. Hell, during that match I brought my the standard.zip version of SMOU Rain except I put taunt stallbreaker Lele > Hawlucha to break stall. I think SM OU is going to slowly start to correct itself over the next few months as the official ladder tournament ends and before the smogon snake draft starts. I expect Dugtrio to go, which eliminates matchup losses to stall and other bullshit that make the tier uncompetitive imo. (sry I think revenge trapping 50% of the tier is kinda bullshit.) Magearna should also be taking its leave, as it is just way to centralizing to stay in the tier. It can wall, pivot, sweep, provide trick room support, and carry a z move for every single one of its counters and basically not have any downside. Scratch that, it gets revenge killed by dugtrio jajajaja.

 

 

 

 

It is of my opinion that we should wait to see how the tier evolves and what bans occur over the next few months before PSL 9. If the tier stays the same, scrap it. If the players that want to play the tier in the next PSL don't prove their level on the ladder or replays, scrap it. I do agree with gunthug though that the level of the tier should raise next season similarly to DPP. I actually didn't play DPP except for last season so I am trusting he is probably right that DPP used to be shit. Finally, sorry for the wall of text but I think it is important. I also made HUGE generalizations and left out a bunch of shit in the metagame part that is very important and very hard to articulate if you don't play the tier, but you get my point.

 

TL;DR SM OU was shit. its shit bcuz players didnt know metagame/mechanics and the tier is fundamentally broken rn for teambuilders. give it a chance but if no changes occur, scrap. DPP is best showdown tier but imo only 1 DPP pls.

I agree with some of what you're saying with some players *cough telf* having a general lack of knowledge about the tier, which causes it to be less competitive, since there are just some blatant misplays or misunderstanding of sets of pokemon. But on the other hand, SM OU has an infinite amount more resources than any PokeMMO tier as there are thousands of replays from "good" players, either from SPL, WCOP, Smog Tour, OU Ladder, or anything other smaller tournaments really, along with forums that are heavily based on competitive play (teambuilding activities, RMT's, up-to-date viability threads,  up-to-date pokedex of competitive pokemon and their sets, etc).

 

So once you have a basic understanding of competitive play from this game, the skill pretty much transfers over as long as you put in the effort of looking at the resources available to anyone. Even if you get into a battle and you're not sure of something, there's a lot less of a time constraint on showdown than an in-game battle, as the timer is off by default, and even if it is on, it is very generous with the amount of time you get, so there's always time to do some research (either in the 10 minutes before the match starts, or just during the match).

 

I think teambuilding was fine overall in general, as in we can't really expect pokemmo players to revolutionize gen 7 SM OU the same way as a very select few individuals on Smogon do, although rotom-w+muk+ a few other pokemon had a bit more usage than necessary. Even if you look at higher level play on Smogon, you will notice 80% of the time, players are just using recycled teams from previous matches. This is the same for DPP as well.

 

Also SM OU was fairly stable the whole time PSL 8 was going on, bar a few megas being released, which didn't have too much of an impact on the tier in general. Personally, I don't think SM OU was that much below DPP in terms of skill, especially considering this was SM OU's first season, while DPP has been around for 4 or 5 seasons now. There are some good players in each tier that take advantage of the resources given to them, to allow them to teambuild better teams, and there are the players that don't invest enough time into the tier to learn about teambuilding etc.