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PokeMMO World Cup 2nd edition - The general thread and donations thread


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Really good points Zeb. Dw, I read your whole post but I'll just quote to the TL;DR version.

 

8 hours ago, BurntZebra said:

1. Make the matchups 6v6 instead of 5v5 for balancing purposes. Adding a second OU match is the easiest solution most likely.

6v6 would indeed be better but I personally was afraid 5v5 would already test it a bit too much. I felt like 2 subs is a minimum that a team should have so that would make it 8 players signed up from each country. I'll be honest, I thought only about 6-10 countries could even do that but I'm pleasantly proven wrong in this regard for this event.

 

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2. Make wins worth 2 points, ties 1 point, and losses 0 points.

 

While I agree that this makes the most intuitive sense (isn't tie half of a win anyways?) but I thought that this would discourage people avoiding "the 5th game" just to guarantee points from that round. If the reward for a tie isn't good, then it makes most sense to do everything you can to make the last game happen. Now, it's important to note that only 2 teams per group qualifies so to be perfectly fair, no one should ever go for a tie if they want to qualify. So I'd say fair enough in this regard; especially if we would do a 6v6 format I'd say 2-1-0 is probably the most fair. We just thought the people found the PSL's 3-1-0 already fair so what wasn't broken shouldn't be fixed. But I'm glad someone started this conversation.

 

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3. Be more verbose in the process of the event, e.g. how playoff teams are decided, tentative schedule, etc.

 

Okay, this is entirely on us. We definitely should have done this and it's our mistake if we didn't do it clearly enough. Or I'm not sure if any of us did post it anywhere in the forums? Anyways.

 

The teams in each group play a round robin, the best 2 teams in each group qualify to the final stage which is a 8 team single elimination bracket. Then each week half of the teams move on and eventually we have the winner. Now, one thing we had not yet even discussed is that how will be the single elimination be formed? It was agreed that the 2nd seed will play 1st seed of another group - but we honestly haven't even decided "which group" yet. I think we need to make an official announcement of this soon.

 

Edit: The best teams in each group are defined by

 

1. Points (from wins/ties)

2. Individual games

3. Match against the tied team

 

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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.

Okay, this is a big one. I'll definitely take the blame for this one and we had a long conversation in this regard. There already was some discussion to allow coaching before PSL but eventually people realized it breaks the whole format because the credit management is so important in that event. Quite frankly it would make the strategy to buy the cheaper players completely obsolete since the select few would control everything. World Cup does not have this element so this is the first time it's really ever discussed whether it's straight up against the integrity of the game to have someone else to help you in a seemingly "single-player" game. The answer is, I don't know. And there's no general consensus about this regard. Take for example the World Cup of Poker, where one player is representing a country at the table but may call time-outs to discuss key decision with their team. In that regard the significance of the "team effort" is always there and it isn't just one player playing for the whole country. But at the same time I definitely understand your point that it isn't fair that you do not know who you are realistically playing. Problem I see is that whether it's allowed or not, people can still do it and proving anything definitely is impossible. Even when you could have the hosts to be in part of the official Discord group, anyone can just start a private call and do the same thing. And even when you see some seemingly new player do exceptionally well, how do you know they didn't just practice their ass off for last 3 weeks? At worst you would have accusations of rule breaking when that really wasn't even there.

 

Double edit: I'd like to also analyze the PokeMMO Team Tournament in this game. Do people consider it unethical if a player gets helped in some regard in a Team Tournament game? I don't think I've ever heard or seen this, it's almost assumed that in MMO Team Tournaments some level of help is going on in the team chat. And people don't really mind that. Now, does that mean it's "right"? Not necessarily. But the way MMO and Smogon approaches this issue is different and will forever be different because Smogon's environment isn't as team-centralized as MMO's and we quite frankly see the whole game of Pokemon different due to the fact that something like "teams" even exist. Different environments create different cultures and morals I guess.

 

Edited by OrangeManiac
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As for Team Tournament, these matches happen all at the same time and are most likely being played by the best player that team has, at best they’d get a 2nd opinion on risky plays by less skilled players. Compared to PSL and WC where you have a limit to how many good players you got per team and the match date and times are decided on by the players and thus will differ from their teammates. Its most likely that coaching will be abused in these situations

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10 hours ago, OrangeManiac said:

Really good points Zeb. Dw, I read your whole post but I'll just quote to the TL;DR version.

 

6v6 would indeed be better but I personally was afraid 5v5 would already test it a bit too much. I felt like 2 subs is a minimum that a team should have so that would make it 8 players signed up from each country. I'll be honest, I thought only about 6-10 countries could even do that but I'm pleasantly proven wrong in this regard for this event.

 

 

While I agree that this makes the most intuitive sense (isn't tie half of a win anyways?) but I thought that this would discourage people avoiding "the 5th game" just to guarantee points from that round. If the reward for a tie isn't good, then it makes most sense to do everything you can to make the last game happen. Now, it's important to note that only 2 teams per group qualifies so to be perfectly fair, no one should ever go for a tie if they want to qualify. So I'd say fair enough in this regard; especially if we would do a 6v6 format I'd say 2-1-0 is probably the most fair. We just thought the people found the PSL's 3-1-0 already fair so what wasn't broken shouldn't be fixed. But I'm glad someone started this conversation.

 

 

Okay, this is entirely on us. We definitely should have done this and it's our mistake if we didn't do it clearly enough. Or I'm not sure if any of us did post it anywhere in the forums? Anyways.

 

The teams in each group play a round robin, the best 2 teams in each group qualify to the final stage which is a 8 team single elimination bracket. Then each week half of the teams move on and eventually we have the winner. Now, one thing we had not yet even discussed is that how will be the single elimination be formed? It was agreed that the 2nd seed will play 1st seed of another group - but we honestly haven't even decided "which group" yet. I think we need to make an official announcement of this soon.

 

Edit: The best teams in each group are defined by

 

1. Points (from wins/ties)

2. Individual games

3. Match against the tied team

 

Okay, this is a big one. I'll definitely take the blame for this one and we had a long conversation in this regard. There already was some discussion to allow coaching before PSL but eventually people realized it breaks the whole format because the credit management is so important in that event. Quite frankly it would make the strategy to buy the cheaper players completely obsolete since the select few would control everything. World Cup does not have this element so this is the first time it's really ever discussed whether it's straight up against the integrity of the game to have someone else to help you in a seemingly "single-player" game. The answer is, I don't know. And there's no general consensus about this regard. Take for example the World Cup of Poker, where one player is representing a country at the table but may call time-outs to discuss key decision with their team. In that regard the significance of the "team effort" is always there and it isn't just one player playing for the whole country. But at the same time I definitely understand your point that it isn't fair that you do not know who you are realistically playing. Problem I see is that whether it's allowed or not, people can still do it and proving anything definitely is impossible. Even when you could have the hosts to be in part of the official Discord group, anyone can just start a private call and do the same thing. And even when you see some seemingly new player do exceptionally well, how do you know they didn't just practice their ass off for last 3 weeks? At worst you would have accusations of rule breaking when that really wasn't even there.

 

Double edit: I'd like to also analyze the PokeMMO Team Tournament in this game. Do people consider it unethical if a player gets helped in some regard in a Team Tournament game? I don't think I've ever heard or seen this, it's almost assumed that in MMO Team Tournaments some level of help is going on in the team chat. And people don't really mind that. Now, does that mean it's "right"? Not necessarily. But the way MMO and Smogon approaches this issue is different and will forever be different because Smogon's environment isn't as team-centralized as MMO's and we quite frankly see the whole game of Pokemon different due to the fact that something like "teams" even exist. Different environments create different cultures and morals I guess.

 

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). 

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Fair enough to pretty much all of that.

 

Personally, I hate coaching. If someone tries to coach me during games I probably either tell them to stop, go DND or block them depending how much I like them. To me it was just a personal preference but I never really judged anyone who either coaches or wants to get coached. The way I saw it is that often "coaching" is just a friendly discussion about the ongoing game. It's really vague when is it coaching and when is it just "stating the obvious" about the ongoing game play. But I digress.

 

If we can all agree that coaching is indeed bad and against the integrity of the game, sure. I don't mind rewriting the rules that it should be "discouraged". But if it's straight up against the rules, that would mean that allegations would require investigations and what comes to me, I have no willingness for that. (Probably because I would probably rule in the favor of the accused one unless something really indisputable, and really hard evidence of serious coaching arises). If it's just one guy making a careless comment in team/normal chat like "Dang that Hydreigon did a lot of damage", which technically is coaching, I wouldn't deem that a massive rule break worthy of a serious punishment. I'm not speaking behalf of all of the hosts about this, though. I'm glad for the conversation starter, though. Happy to see the inputs, especially because I was under the impression that everyone coaches and no one really deems it unethical.

 

What I'm mostly sad about is that all of this discussion started after the event started. But at the same time if the hosts wait for too long "they're killing the hype". But hey it is what it is. I think this topic is something the hosts should address as soon as possible. But changing rules afterwards would probably cause even more hassle.

 

Edited by OrangeManiac
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