Post by Ortheore on May 20, 2020 10:39:09 GMT
Hi all, new site so I thought I might dump some ideas that I had reflecting on my experience with PP and just thoughts on how things can be done better.
Articles and Analyses
A massive problem with articles and analyses (AAs) both on Smogon and PP is that they become outdated over time and there's little or no systems in place to address the issue. At the very least any work needs to have a date attached and some way so users can flag an AA that they feel is out of date. The ideal solution would be a technical one though- something that automatically flags AAs that have gone some predetermined period of time without a substantial edit, though I don't know if that would be feasible
The other thing I want to raise is to support AAs both as polished works in and of themselves, but also has the basis for discussions. The discussions that surround AAs can sometimes be as valuable as the AA itself, as it can bring to light new ideas which can then be debated and also cover topics that wouldn't make it into a more structured/polished AA, whether due to being controversial, nuanced or whatever other reason.
Tournaments
There are two major problems with how tournaments are handled by the community as I see it. The first is that for hosts, handling activity is an awful experience that makes you really hate hosting tournaments... at least that's how it was for me. The second is that single elim is the status quo, which in turn creates a fairly crap experience for at least half of all entrants- playing two or three matches and getting sent packing sucks when you might not have any other competitive matches lined up until the next tournament in like a month or something.
The issue with single elim is easily solved- run literally any format that either doesn't eliminate at all, or is some mixture of elim and non-elim (e.g. group stage followed by single elim). However, these formats tend to run into one major issue- activity. Activity tends to plague these formats a lot more because in cases where it's ambiguous or players have made a half-assed effort to schedule, these players often remain in the tournament to cause more issues. In single elim, they would be swiftly DQ'd. So in this way, the issue of tournament format arrives at the issue of activity
Activity really sucks. A single mistake will generally result in someone getting pissed off and hassling you over the issue, which is never fun, but that comes with the territory. The real issue is that a lot of people are just really terrible at scheduling. Vague and unhelpful posts are common, and with Discord being popular, people will often schedule privately and then expect you to know how that went without them presenting any evidence. I have two ideas for potential ways to address this, one of which is unlikely to be feasible.
Simple
I'd like to propose that we change how we handle activity to put the onus on players to resolve the situation, rather than hosts having to interpret terrible and unhelpful evidence. My proposal is this- if you believe you should get an activity win, you would be required to publicly request an activity win. If no-one requests activity, then either both players get DQ'd, or you flip, depending on the format. If both players request activity, they would then be in a position where they have to present evidence and state their case for an activity win (or an extension).
I think this would be a reasonable change- if you are active, then posting a single sentence is far from a burdensome expectation. That said, there would definitely be some backlash because it would take some getting used to- as a transition measure maybe sending out a mass PM or something a day or two before the end of the round reminding people of this rule would help. For hosts, I believe this would make resolving activity FAR less painful to deal with, as it becomes way more objective unless there's a genuine dispute. This also resolves the issue I discussed in the paragraph on tournament format- where inactive players can remain a disruptive presence in a tournament simply by half-assing their scheduling
Technical (probably not feasible)
My other thought is that forum software is probably not the optimal tool for scheduling matches. I would eventually like to create some sort of software that automates the match scheduling process. Something that automatically generates a private thread between opponents that the host can also view and shares their timezone and default availability. A check-in feature would also be good, and some sort of Discord integration would probably be ideal. There are heaps of other features that could also be added, enough that such a software/website could feasibly be useful in a more general setting- it's actually one of my ideas that's shortlisted as a project to work on if I decide to stop screwing around and take some of my projects seriously as a potential business. I even seriously enquired about developing something along those lines as a Xenforo extension, but that didn't pan out
Unfortunately, I don't know how feasible it would be to create this kind of software. I don't know anything about the software this forum runs on (their site mentions it's mostly coded in Perl, which isn't ideal bc I've never used it), or what kind of access I would need to develop such a program. The other catch is that the rate at which I'd likely to develop this kind of thing would be roughly as speedy as your average snail.
This isn't smogon
An unfortunate reality that will impact our tournaments is that this isn't smogon. For a lot of people, they won't check this site regularly because they won't be as invested in this one as they are with smogon, especially since smogon is, for better or worse, the nexus of competitive pokemon. We would need to implement measures to address these things, such that people that don't regularly check the site either know what's going on here, or at least know that there are updates here for them to check- this would make tournaments run a lot better.
Minor things
- I can't find a way to navigate to the main site from the forums. I feel like there ought to be a way, even though I probably would only use the forums
- Iirc there's a typo on the main site in the navbar where it says participate
- I already dislike this forum software- making this list shouldn't require a popup, and I can't seem to use keyboard shortcuts like ctrl+U for formatting. I suppose that's the compromise you make with free forum software?
- I hope we're able to further customise things down the line- threads being shown as folders isn't fun
Overall I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes of this site and helping where I can, so long as I don't bite off more than I can chew