Pokecommunity Battling Tutoring: ideas.

Gen 5 OU is too volatile, suspect ladders can change over time. Besides, I doubt people will register to be a tutor since not to much is known about it. I think Gen IV is a better choice.

I know I said I wanted to be a student, but that was more just me kidding since I know jack about Gen 5. I'm fairly confident I can pick up on stuff if I actually go on the server more than once a week lol.

Now to add something useful[?] to the conversation.

3 months seems like an crazy long time for this, unless you guys plan on doing the sessions once a week. Because if you do them daily, or even once every couple days, I don't see how people could possibly need that long to get a decent handle on competitive battling. Otherwise, I can see it ending up like the last attempt, which failed because of more than just time zone issues. Mainly everybody acted how they normally do and nothing got done because we didn't take it remotely seriously.

Other than this, the layout Anti posted seems like you guys have a good handle on it.

Only other thing I can think of is if you have considered if you guys will be teaching them the same things at the same times. Like say, have one week devoted to a certain aspect of battling, dependent on how often the sessions are of course.

Anti said:

Okay, I think that we need to discuss this:



I've had 2-3 people I'd put under that category who have asked if they could be a student. I figured I'd put that rule up as a discussion and state why I'm conflicted about it.

The tutoring program is meant to bring new users into the community. Yes, we're teaching them how to battle competitively, but the whole point of doing that is so that they consider sticking around. Activity is indeed low. Letting people who have considerable battling experience goes against that. That was the point of the rule in the first place.

On the other hand, the activity from our regulars has been a problem that was identified in the S&M Fix Thread and, realistically, probably won't be countered just by saying "hey guys, you need to be more active!!!"

The only solution I've been able to think of is something of a compromise between the two points of view where six of the eight slots are allotted to new users and the remaining two to regulars. (This is arbitrary but how many of our regulars actually need this tutoring?) Oppo did raise a good point about that idea though which was that new users are likely going to be intimidated should they have to enter a tournament where two people already have a distinct advantage.

Soooooo I don't know, and from what I can tell no one really has a good idea on what to do here. So then, what do you guys think?

Click to expand...

..i hope you weren't talking about me.
if 'experienced members want to be tutored i suggest giving less experienced people the first chance to be tutored, ...i forgot the word i was gonna use... eughhh .-.

It's supposed to run for a month @ yankee iirc.

@SilentCrest: Yeah, B&W is pretty unstable right now with dream world abilities being release left and right, but that doesn't change the purpose of the program which is to introduce the basics to people who want to learn and then some. B&W is becoming more stable now however, obviously it's a weather dominated metagame and learning to deal with rain and sandstorm is a vital ability to anyone's success.

I think we've said before we won't start until Gen 5 settles, but I don't see the harm in starting now. And plenty of people are volunteering to tutor because some people (like DA and myself) actually know quite a bit about Gen 5, what's threatening, and what's good, and how to handle it. ;3 It honestly didn't take that terribly long to learn either so I think the tutor program shouldn't be too much of a hassle with B&W.

on regulars getting tutored: I'm using yankee has a point of reference here, but anyone who has any sort of knowledge of competitive battling should not be able to be a student. Gen V OU is really easy to pick up if you know the basics, especially since it's not like you need to follow an elite teambuilding scale like how it seemed (at least to me) in Gen IV. In Gen IV it always felt like you either had to use the standard cookie cutter teams or you had to be a god at battling to be really good. But in this gen, I literally just picked five 'mons off of DA's threat list with just one or two actually intended to make some sort of synergy and I'm burning on 1200+ on PO (which is good for me, really).

tl;dr Regulars don't need tutoring. If you're going to be tutored, you need to pretty much have no knowledge of competitive battling, because it really is that easy to pick up and get into this.

on time management: I don't think it's 3 months, yankee, but it's two, and I'm still undecided on how it's going to work out. I mean, it feels like a hell of a long time, but it's also really not that long if you look at the whole scheme of things. And hopefully we can get it so that tutors/ees meet at least twice for any given week (unless something terrible happens!) because if any tutor/ee is not available that often (for an hour or two, twice a week) then they probably should not have signed up. And even though Anti said first come, first serve, I still think that some discretion should be used when picking tutors (and even tutees, to a point).

tl;dr If you're not active, don't sign up. We should be able to cut the timeframe down a little, I think; maybe a couple of weeks for each half? (so like 6 weeks total?)

@ Silent Crest:
I know you haven't been around here for very long but I kind of disagree with everything you've said. Gen V is perfect because everyone has a chance to find their niche, really. Figuring out Smogon's basis for their suspects is like trying to rip the front side of a piece of paper from the back. It's impossible and there's no reason why we should do it. We have our own ban lists (read: darkrai, deoxys-a, inconsistent, etc.) and it suffices for this premise. The whole idea is, as we introduce ourselves to Gen V which is a fun, fast-paced, rapidly evolving metagame, we build up our S&M community which has been of terrible quality as of late. And most people are really now burning out of Gen IV. If we teach everyone in the community Gen IV stuff, most people will die out, and then these new guys probably won't know a whole lot about Gen V. Doing this tutoring thing on Gen V is a win-win situation, I think.

Also, there's no one better suited than Anti to run this whole thing. Like wolf said, I really don't have any more ideas or whatever so as soon as this "allowing regulars" debate is finished I think we should get the ball rolling. There's no reason not to, I think.

@ Aero: MY POST IS LONGER SO IT CLEARLY HAS MORE MEANING STOP POST NINJA-ING

Real quick off-topic post. Why are all you posting and I'm the only one on the PC Server? :3

Problems at work people.

And 2-3 times a week sounds good to be honest. We can't expect someone to meet up every day (although that would be nice because that means a new regular), but we should be able to expect 'often'. Once a week honestly isn't enough and I think the time in between each session will cause a lull in our own activity in this program. I know if I introduce EVs and IVs first week, and then next week I'm just introducing something like Hidden power, something's wrong. We need to keep common ideas grouped together.

Also, how long will these sessions run? I'm thinking an hour at a minimum. You can't teach much in 30 minutes. :x It takes that long for me to make half a team lol.

"This program in its entirety will probably take about three months to complete, which is a lot of time when you think about it, so we can't be lazy."

That was in the post of Anti's I was using.Idk if anythings changed since then or anything so yeah.

but I really do think, unless we REALLY need to end up doing this, that no regulars should be students for the simple reason that we generally have at least a decent idea of battling and stuff. That and what I said about having a timeframe for teaching certain aspects of battling to the students, partly to see how effective the tutors are.

Well, I'll leave it up to the tutors and students to figure out how often they should get together to have sessions. The tournaments provide good incentives for being ready, so I'm not too worried. There should be enough tutoring that the student has a basic understanding of competitive battling by the time the first tournament comes around and just more experience helping to develop those skills by the time the second tournament rolls around so that the second tournament's level of play will be pretty high, though nowhere near perfect of course. Indeed, the basic idea of the program is laying a foundation for the student so that he is good enough to get better by battling on his own, though of course we can still help just like we help each other.

The extra month (the two months being tutoring) is just getting the tournaments done, as they can lag on a little bit. I don't see it being a problem and hopefully it won't take that long but we shouldn't be shocked if the tournaments take at least a week or two each. Communication, even when done well, still takes time.

It seems like most of you guys are for no regulars and since I don't really hear any disagreement there I don't see any reason why it shouldn't just be eight new players. Unless there is a major objection to that, it seems like the matter is settled. Thanks for the responses guys.