Anti
return of the king
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- Kobe's Reality
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The battling community here on PC is dead, both on the forum (BTB) and on the Battle Server. This thread is a series of suggestions to fix and revive it.
I would normally post this in BTB's feedback thread, but a few of these suggestions would require the approval of the higher staff and would, if only peripherally, change the look of PC as a whole, so it's going here.
Before proceeding, a disclaimer. I get that the "departed staff comes back to complain about the present state of things" does not suggest a very productive frame of mind, but everything I am about to bring up in this thread I did when I was on the staff. Current developments have only confirmed my belief that I should have pursued those objectives more vigorously.
Let's get started.
1. Undo the battling community's backward incentive structure and emphasize battling.
The best microcosm of the poor incentive structure within the battling community has to be the voice rank on the Battle Server. Being voiced on the Server basically serves as recognition that you are a valued and respected user.
The requirements for voice do not include battling, anywhere.
To attain the voice rank, you are not expected to battle, help others with battling questions/teams/etc., or even have a rudimentary understanding of or interest in Pokemon battling. The criteria mostly boiled down to "we like this person." People who have been nominated (and not in the distant past) include people who have consistently caused immense discomfort to the server chat and meme users who have a few friends on the BSS but otherwise contribute nothing, not even to the broader chatting community on the Server--to say nothing of the battling community. It's utterly indefensible. If ROM Hacking had a server and its veterans and staff didn't have a care in the world for hacking, it would seem weird. This is the battling community right now.
There has been a devaluation of battling within the battling community for several, several years now, and dead times like the one taking place now are inevitable when your entire community's core focus is "we're all friends." This is nice, and I do understand that people come to PC for the Pokemon but stay for the friends, but it is very difficult to attract new users when nothing actually seems to be happening. Why log onto the Battle Server if your friend group begins to dissipate? Why stay online if your friends went to bed? Right now, the Battle Server is great for maintaining relationships that already exist and sometimes bringing new people into existing friend groups. In terms of actually providing a dynamic social environment where a more diverse pool of users interact, it is not meeting its potential. Participation in a common hobby (Pokemon battling) facilitates this process.
If you are not interested in the battling community, you're not getting voice. Feel free to come on and socialize, but you're not getting voice for it. But the voice issue is minor, more the symptom than the disease. You know what's actually insane? There was no battling requirement for BSS of any kind until I put one in last year, and it is weak and toothless. Staff is a much greater incentive than voice is, so this is a huge problem. This is the disease.
(One way this matters is that too much work inevitably falls on the real power in the BSS, which usually means wolf. I won't totally excuse some egregious inaction from the BSS admins, but it's hard to blame them for burning out or getting overwhelmed when the lower BSS does almost nothing. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. More on this in the next bullet point.)
Anyone on the server with a staff distinction should be expected to be hosting events and participating in them on a consistent basis or they should not have the position. Frankly, I think showing that leadership before promotion is just as important, as it incentivizes a more proactive and involved userbase. The point to emphasize here is that this is not a failure of the BSS's members but a failure of its incentives. The majority of the BSS either does not battle or battles infrequently, but this makes sense when they only had to be pleasant and inoffensive in the chat to be promoted. And even before that, when getting voice was just a popularity award, the community is not promoting its own survival.
So here's what needs to happen:
- Any rank on the Battle Server needs a strong battling requirement as the primary criterion for ascending to that rank, even if it's voice. This is not to say that it should override important social factors, because no one wants to resemble Smogon's tournaments community, but the primary consideration for any rank should be: "does this user contribute to the battling community?" This should include presence in the open casket known as BTB.
- Staff members should have a higher bar for everyday contribution. Contribution does not just means creating and hosting events but something as simple as participating in the fundamental activity of the Battle Server. Not only will this spread out the workload a little bit, but if contribution becomes a path to achieving a staff rank (the only real incentive we actually have), regular users will begin to make their own community better as well.
PS: I realize this is an argument that is basically historic at this point--how much should battling be grounded in the Server's systemic function?--but with all due respect to anyone who has opposed the vision I am articulating here, the alternative has not worked, not even close. And besides the slowly decaying Battle Server, it has completely destroyed a battling community that used to be vibrant. There is nothing radical or draconian about I am proposing--just a return to better policy.
2. Eliminate the BSS and concentrate all authority in the hands of the BTB moderators.
I really, really hope this is the least controversial item I am proposing here. I was an admin on the BSS for over a year. I've seen the inaction and dysfunction first-hand. I tried to lead efforts to reverse the trends I am about to describe, and they did not work. There is no salvaging the BSS, and I am happy to tell you why.
Before proceeding, one very important disclaimer: this is not an indictment of the BSS's members. As I alluded to earlier, I think a lot of the failures of the current team are systemic and inherent to the body itself. Now then...
The central responsibility of staffing our battle server (or any other one) is to moderate the chat. The BSS handles this.
Outside of that, you're not going to find that the BSS does, well, anything. I'm not exactly being hyperbolic...I mean, can you tell me what the BSS does?
The BSS is an official PC rank, having its own usertitle/color and access to stafforums. To justify this rank, the BSS needs to do more than ban the rare spammer who comes on the server--anyone with a pulse can do that. As I stated in the previous bullet, the BSS has been a failure in community involvement since its inception. Though these people have since been fired, we have had members on the BSS who not only did not battle but did not even chat, and they weren't exactly rare. You will notice that the BSS has dramatically declined in size, in large part because even the most minimal requirement of--I mean, basically, giving a shit--disqualified several members immediately. This matters because that culture of low expectations persists, and not just in the battling-specific ways I outlined above. To give just one more battling-related example, one of my final acts to improve the BSS was to institute the BSS Event Series, a direct attempt to tackle this problem...only it appears to have run out of steam. The idea of the BSS Event Series was that every month, a BSS member would host an event. This is not a very high bar to say the least (you can whip up a passable event in like, an hour tops), but it was still too much for the BSS. So the BSS rarely hosts events and sometimes does not even participate in them, so...what exactly are they doing to justify that shiny official rank that denotes community leadership?
If you fancy the notion that the Battle Server moderation responsibilities alone warrant an official PC rank, I am afraid that you would be severely overestimating the capability of the BSS to effectively moderate the Server.
First of all, it is an easy job that requires almost no time commitment in practice. Before the Battle Server became officially integrated into PC, the BTB mods were server admins and chose mature users as moderators to help keep the chat clean. There was no need, just as there is no need now, for an official PC rank. The server is small enough that it can be run informally. The need for moderation is pretty rare.
Then you get to the issues the BSS has had with chat moderation. Consistently troublesome users like yankee and Dark Azelf would undercut the rules whenever they were online and it took months or even years (for emphasis: this is not hyperbole) to ever do anything about them. What is the point of a moderation team that does not moderate? I got the impression that people were afraid to do their jobs--more on this in a second--which only made things worse.
The admin team doesn't exactly have a great track record either, and I am happy to indict myself in this if it means finally ridding the battling community of this feckless body. One BSS member was fired for inappropriate chat remarks--I mean, to anyone who has spent more than ten minutes on the Server, the irony here is comical--only for them to be awkwardly rehired after that reason was deemed insufficient. Another ex-BSS who had left on their own accord asked to return to the team, but because they lacked investment in their previous time on the team, we rejected their request. Only one problem: no one ever replied to their PM. We assigned an admin to do this, and it took over a month to send the PM. This is rude and indefensible. These are not isolated incidents, as the complete lack of professionalism or purpose is definitely reflected in the team as a whole.
I could write a book on the BSS's failure to take any responsibility for the PokeCommunity League, the most ambitious project in the battling community in years which flamed out because, for all the BSS members we had, only two of them could actually be counted on to do anything for it, and I was one of them.
Even though the BSS basically does nothing and is ineffective at what it does do, its presence had profound negative effects on the leadership of the battling community. That is why this matters. The BSS hamstrings the more active people within the body who are the real leaders because the BSS's decision-making apparatus is actually quite cumbersome. You post a thread waiting for peoples' thoughts, some of them respond, you have to build consensus based on a few ambiguous posts and more than a few absent BSS members altogether. (Getting BSS members to consistently post in the mostly inactive BSS forum is harder than getting children to eat vegetables. Unless it's a voice thread, because we all know how important voice is. Yikes.) This happens in the theoretically more straightforward senior staff (admin) forum too. It's very frustrating when you want to do routine upkeep--say, upgrading some staff guidelines--and you need several stamps of approval to actually do it. If only one stamp lags, as it inevitably does, it can take far longer than it should. This is why concentrating that authority in the hands of two people makes much more sense: it is simply much more efficient, and any extra input rarely yields better outcomes in practice. (They can also then replace BSS moderators with new ones as they see fit. Moderating the Server is not hard.) It also matters because hiring almost always skews toward people who are pleasant and well-liked--this is the part where I emphasize the lack of a battling requirement until recently. When being inoffensive and pleasant is prioritized, there is no incentive to actually move the needle in the community. The BSS's failure ties directly into the first bullet point, and the two issues mutually reinforce.
So I have come around to the position that the BSS is simply an inherently flawed entity, a do-nothing sowing circle whose removal would hardly be noticed in the day-to-day operation of the Battle Server and its parent forum. I would like to think I know from experience that attempting to drag it into greater responsibility is a waste of time--you're teaching an old dog new tricks. This is not a case of "our moderators are bad" but one of "the conception of this staff position is fundamentally flawed." Remove the BSS.
(Also, if oversight is an issue since the Server is now officially run by PC, just put it into the job description of the BTB moderators. It's not like higher staff input prevented some horrible moderators from being on the team in the past anyway.)
3. Reboot PCL and run it professionally.
While I am more than a little bit tempted to write a hatchet job here on how incomprehensibly inept the leadership of PCL has been, I think the fact that PCL has been "in the works" since before the Republican Convention should say a lot in few words.
The battling community needs a fulcrum that can act as a draw for people who want to battle or are curious to try it out. In other words, the community needs something it can identify as a core reason to exist. No such identity even exists unless you point to ambiguous social moorings like "we have more of a community feel than Smogon does!" (There is a reason we have had brain drain to Smogon for over half a decade now--when battlers are a minority in their own community, Smogon is going to be a superior option.) That is the potential of PCL.
No one appreciates the logistical challenges of running PCL more than I do, but those obstacles do not excuse the staff team totally dropping the ball on it. When I say run it professionally, I mean that ALL community leaders need to participate. Whoever is in charge of running the League should have a strong sense of organization and should always meet deadlines for carrying out the League's functions. Like, this is basic stuff. And I realize this entire bullet point is very passive-aggressive, but I frankly don't care when the lack of professionalism in leadership is the lone reason PCL has died. The community needs PCL. Running it and running it well should be a basic expectation of the BTB moderator/server admin position (which hopefully won't be a BSS one, because heaven forbid anyone on the BSS take initiative on PCL).
In terms of the details of what PCL should look like, I am too detached from the community at this point to really say what is best, but I do want to emphasize one point. The structure of PCL matters only in that it needs to be coherent. Agonizing over it without confronting the actual issue with PCL--leadership and organization--is just rearranging the deck chairs on your favorite doomed voyage. PCL with good structure but poor leadership is a decked out Christmas tree with no needles. By the way, this principle also applies to BTB, which has gone under more revamps than a plastic surgery addict but has never confronted the fundamental issue that the Server's poor incentives rob it of a huge volume of its potential activity. There is supposedly another revamp in the works, which will almost positively do nothing to address the core issues I am articulating here. (Which isn't to say that it's a bad idea, but I am highly suspicious that it will move the needle at all.)
One idea that might be worth considering given the barren state of the community right now would be 2- or 3-person clans which would effectively provide a mentoring structure of sorts. If PCL were to expand, expanding the League to more clans rather than more voluminous ones would be a potential direction that could increase competition and add to the intimacy of the clans--bypassing the old issue of the nonexistent clan group chat.
Other than that, I just want to emphasize that it is important that something like PCL to exist and to never go on three-quarter-year-long "breaks." Even if it is in a different form than PCL1 and PCL2. It just doesn't matter that much. Run PCL and run it well. Make sure mistakes are not the result of lackadaisical implementation.
4. Create better incentives than emblems.
I realize this isn't happening (it's been like, 18 months (?) since my thread on this and the "something is in the works :3" reply I got) so I won't go into much detail, but emblems are a laughable incentive. The only thing anyone can really work for--across all of PC really--is a staff position. There is plenty about Smogon I do not particularly admire, but their incentive structure (badges and trophies) is so much better. Staff as a lone incentive can make PC a little cultish at times (socially), but that is another discussion.
Anyway, this isn't a cure-all since we'd still have to actually execute this right inside the battling community (I suspect that right now a lot of non-battlers would get the hypothetical "Battling Community Contributor" badge incentive), but this would help a lot.
(Also, this is about the eighth most important issue at this point. Please think twice if you want to post just to oppose this. Like, please.)
5. Imagine new ways to contribute to the battling community.
If this sounds broad or unrealistic, I will go ahead and cite a precedent from quite some time ago: the Battle Log forum. It was a bit of a shooting star, but for a few months, we got some exceptional contribution from users logging their battles (known on Smogon as warstories). I realize that replays have made these largely obsolete (RIP), but the point here is that contributing content is fun. Battling is fun and writing about battling is fun. We have the shiny new PokeCommunity Daily to showcase content. If a few community leaders took the lead on encouraging this, it could give a new life to the skeletal BTB.
By "encouraging" content, I mean posting it. Regular users follow the lead of the staff. If the entire BSS suddenly started posting replay analysis or RMTs or PCL recaps or whatever else it may, you had better believe that other users will want to do this.
Having content makes the forum more fun. It gives users a reason to log on and read something new. It gives people a reason to stay on the Battle Server when their friends aren't online so they can read something interesting from one of their community members.
This is not a cure-all by any stretch, but it is a sign of a healthy battling community. I think a lot of the other broader changes need to happen first, but as the community begins to self-select again for people who actually want to battle, these types of things become more natural. It creates a "scene" of sorts that actually begins to address the argument "why shouldn't I just go over to Smogon?" We shouldn't be losing Vrais and Karpmans because our community doesn't give a shit.
That's all I've got. You can take or leave the suggestions--I always meant it when I said "it's not my community to run anymore"--but I thought I'd at least give a belated parting gift in the hopes that maybe a third of it becomes reality. Then, when I come back on to say hello to old friends, I might actually run into more than three people on the Server.
I would normally post this in BTB's feedback thread, but a few of these suggestions would require the approval of the higher staff and would, if only peripherally, change the look of PC as a whole, so it's going here.
Before proceeding, a disclaimer. I get that the "departed staff comes back to complain about the present state of things" does not suggest a very productive frame of mind, but everything I am about to bring up in this thread I did when I was on the staff. Current developments have only confirmed my belief that I should have pursued those objectives more vigorously.
Let's get started.
1. Undo the battling community's backward incentive structure and emphasize battling.
The best microcosm of the poor incentive structure within the battling community has to be the voice rank on the Battle Server. Being voiced on the Server basically serves as recognition that you are a valued and respected user.
The requirements for voice do not include battling, anywhere.
To attain the voice rank, you are not expected to battle, help others with battling questions/teams/etc., or even have a rudimentary understanding of or interest in Pokemon battling. The criteria mostly boiled down to "we like this person." People who have been nominated (and not in the distant past) include people who have consistently caused immense discomfort to the server chat and meme users who have a few friends on the BSS but otherwise contribute nothing, not even to the broader chatting community on the Server--to say nothing of the battling community. It's utterly indefensible. If ROM Hacking had a server and its veterans and staff didn't have a care in the world for hacking, it would seem weird. This is the battling community right now.
There has been a devaluation of battling within the battling community for several, several years now, and dead times like the one taking place now are inevitable when your entire community's core focus is "we're all friends." This is nice, and I do understand that people come to PC for the Pokemon but stay for the friends, but it is very difficult to attract new users when nothing actually seems to be happening. Why log onto the Battle Server if your friend group begins to dissipate? Why stay online if your friends went to bed? Right now, the Battle Server is great for maintaining relationships that already exist and sometimes bringing new people into existing friend groups. In terms of actually providing a dynamic social environment where a more diverse pool of users interact, it is not meeting its potential. Participation in a common hobby (Pokemon battling) facilitates this process.
If you are not interested in the battling community, you're not getting voice. Feel free to come on and socialize, but you're not getting voice for it. But the voice issue is minor, more the symptom than the disease. You know what's actually insane? There was no battling requirement for BSS of any kind until I put one in last year, and it is weak and toothless. Staff is a much greater incentive than voice is, so this is a huge problem. This is the disease.
(One way this matters is that too much work inevitably falls on the real power in the BSS, which usually means wolf. I won't totally excuse some egregious inaction from the BSS admins, but it's hard to blame them for burning out or getting overwhelmed when the lower BSS does almost nothing. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. More on this in the next bullet point.)
Anyone on the server with a staff distinction should be expected to be hosting events and participating in them on a consistent basis or they should not have the position. Frankly, I think showing that leadership before promotion is just as important, as it incentivizes a more proactive and involved userbase. The point to emphasize here is that this is not a failure of the BSS's members but a failure of its incentives. The majority of the BSS either does not battle or battles infrequently, but this makes sense when they only had to be pleasant and inoffensive in the chat to be promoted. And even before that, when getting voice was just a popularity award, the community is not promoting its own survival.
So here's what needs to happen:
- Any rank on the Battle Server needs a strong battling requirement as the primary criterion for ascending to that rank, even if it's voice. This is not to say that it should override important social factors, because no one wants to resemble Smogon's tournaments community, but the primary consideration for any rank should be: "does this user contribute to the battling community?" This should include presence in the open casket known as BTB.
- Staff members should have a higher bar for everyday contribution. Contribution does not just means creating and hosting events but something as simple as participating in the fundamental activity of the Battle Server. Not only will this spread out the workload a little bit, but if contribution becomes a path to achieving a staff rank (the only real incentive we actually have), regular users will begin to make their own community better as well.
PS: I realize this is an argument that is basically historic at this point--how much should battling be grounded in the Server's systemic function?--but with all due respect to anyone who has opposed the vision I am articulating here, the alternative has not worked, not even close. And besides the slowly decaying Battle Server, it has completely destroyed a battling community that used to be vibrant. There is nothing radical or draconian about I am proposing--just a return to better policy.
2. Eliminate the BSS and concentrate all authority in the hands of the BTB moderators.
I really, really hope this is the least controversial item I am proposing here. I was an admin on the BSS for over a year. I've seen the inaction and dysfunction first-hand. I tried to lead efforts to reverse the trends I am about to describe, and they did not work. There is no salvaging the BSS, and I am happy to tell you why.
Before proceeding, one very important disclaimer: this is not an indictment of the BSS's members. As I alluded to earlier, I think a lot of the failures of the current team are systemic and inherent to the body itself. Now then...
The central responsibility of staffing our battle server (or any other one) is to moderate the chat. The BSS handles this.
Outside of that, you're not going to find that the BSS does, well, anything. I'm not exactly being hyperbolic...I mean, can you tell me what the BSS does?
The BSS is an official PC rank, having its own usertitle/color and access to stafforums. To justify this rank, the BSS needs to do more than ban the rare spammer who comes on the server--anyone with a pulse can do that. As I stated in the previous bullet, the BSS has been a failure in community involvement since its inception. Though these people have since been fired, we have had members on the BSS who not only did not battle but did not even chat, and they weren't exactly rare. You will notice that the BSS has dramatically declined in size, in large part because even the most minimal requirement of--I mean, basically, giving a shit--disqualified several members immediately. This matters because that culture of low expectations persists, and not just in the battling-specific ways I outlined above. To give just one more battling-related example, one of my final acts to improve the BSS was to institute the BSS Event Series, a direct attempt to tackle this problem...only it appears to have run out of steam. The idea of the BSS Event Series was that every month, a BSS member would host an event. This is not a very high bar to say the least (you can whip up a passable event in like, an hour tops), but it was still too much for the BSS. So the BSS rarely hosts events and sometimes does not even participate in them, so...what exactly are they doing to justify that shiny official rank that denotes community leadership?
If you fancy the notion that the Battle Server moderation responsibilities alone warrant an official PC rank, I am afraid that you would be severely overestimating the capability of the BSS to effectively moderate the Server.
First of all, it is an easy job that requires almost no time commitment in practice. Before the Battle Server became officially integrated into PC, the BTB mods were server admins and chose mature users as moderators to help keep the chat clean. There was no need, just as there is no need now, for an official PC rank. The server is small enough that it can be run informally. The need for moderation is pretty rare.
Then you get to the issues the BSS has had with chat moderation. Consistently troublesome users like yankee and Dark Azelf would undercut the rules whenever they were online and it took months or even years (for emphasis: this is not hyperbole) to ever do anything about them. What is the point of a moderation team that does not moderate? I got the impression that people were afraid to do their jobs--more on this in a second--which only made things worse.
The admin team doesn't exactly have a great track record either, and I am happy to indict myself in this if it means finally ridding the battling community of this feckless body. One BSS member was fired for inappropriate chat remarks--I mean, to anyone who has spent more than ten minutes on the Server, the irony here is comical--only for them to be awkwardly rehired after that reason was deemed insufficient. Another ex-BSS who had left on their own accord asked to return to the team, but because they lacked investment in their previous time on the team, we rejected their request. Only one problem: no one ever replied to their PM. We assigned an admin to do this, and it took over a month to send the PM. This is rude and indefensible. These are not isolated incidents, as the complete lack of professionalism or purpose is definitely reflected in the team as a whole.
I could write a book on the BSS's failure to take any responsibility for the PokeCommunity League, the most ambitious project in the battling community in years which flamed out because, for all the BSS members we had, only two of them could actually be counted on to do anything for it, and I was one of them.
Even though the BSS basically does nothing and is ineffective at what it does do, its presence had profound negative effects on the leadership of the battling community. That is why this matters. The BSS hamstrings the more active people within the body who are the real leaders because the BSS's decision-making apparatus is actually quite cumbersome. You post a thread waiting for peoples' thoughts, some of them respond, you have to build consensus based on a few ambiguous posts and more than a few absent BSS members altogether. (Getting BSS members to consistently post in the mostly inactive BSS forum is harder than getting children to eat vegetables. Unless it's a voice thread, because we all know how important voice is. Yikes.) This happens in the theoretically more straightforward senior staff (admin) forum too. It's very frustrating when you want to do routine upkeep--say, upgrading some staff guidelines--and you need several stamps of approval to actually do it. If only one stamp lags, as it inevitably does, it can take far longer than it should. This is why concentrating that authority in the hands of two people makes much more sense: it is simply much more efficient, and any extra input rarely yields better outcomes in practice. (They can also then replace BSS moderators with new ones as they see fit. Moderating the Server is not hard.) It also matters because hiring almost always skews toward people who are pleasant and well-liked--this is the part where I emphasize the lack of a battling requirement until recently. When being inoffensive and pleasant is prioritized, there is no incentive to actually move the needle in the community. The BSS's failure ties directly into the first bullet point, and the two issues mutually reinforce.
So I have come around to the position that the BSS is simply an inherently flawed entity, a do-nothing sowing circle whose removal would hardly be noticed in the day-to-day operation of the Battle Server and its parent forum. I would like to think I know from experience that attempting to drag it into greater responsibility is a waste of time--you're teaching an old dog new tricks. This is not a case of "our moderators are bad" but one of "the conception of this staff position is fundamentally flawed." Remove the BSS.
(Also, if oversight is an issue since the Server is now officially run by PC, just put it into the job description of the BTB moderators. It's not like higher staff input prevented some horrible moderators from being on the team in the past anyway.)
3. Reboot PCL and run it professionally.
While I am more than a little bit tempted to write a hatchet job here on how incomprehensibly inept the leadership of PCL has been, I think the fact that PCL has been "in the works" since before the Republican Convention should say a lot in few words.
The battling community needs a fulcrum that can act as a draw for people who want to battle or are curious to try it out. In other words, the community needs something it can identify as a core reason to exist. No such identity even exists unless you point to ambiguous social moorings like "we have more of a community feel than Smogon does!" (There is a reason we have had brain drain to Smogon for over half a decade now--when battlers are a minority in their own community, Smogon is going to be a superior option.) That is the potential of PCL.
No one appreciates the logistical challenges of running PCL more than I do, but those obstacles do not excuse the staff team totally dropping the ball on it. When I say run it professionally, I mean that ALL community leaders need to participate. Whoever is in charge of running the League should have a strong sense of organization and should always meet deadlines for carrying out the League's functions. Like, this is basic stuff. And I realize this entire bullet point is very passive-aggressive, but I frankly don't care when the lack of professionalism in leadership is the lone reason PCL has died. The community needs PCL. Running it and running it well should be a basic expectation of the BTB moderator/server admin position (which hopefully won't be a BSS one, because heaven forbid anyone on the BSS take initiative on PCL).
In terms of the details of what PCL should look like, I am too detached from the community at this point to really say what is best, but I do want to emphasize one point. The structure of PCL matters only in that it needs to be coherent. Agonizing over it without confronting the actual issue with PCL--leadership and organization--is just rearranging the deck chairs on your favorite doomed voyage. PCL with good structure but poor leadership is a decked out Christmas tree with no needles. By the way, this principle also applies to BTB, which has gone under more revamps than a plastic surgery addict but has never confronted the fundamental issue that the Server's poor incentives rob it of a huge volume of its potential activity. There is supposedly another revamp in the works, which will almost positively do nothing to address the core issues I am articulating here. (Which isn't to say that it's a bad idea, but I am highly suspicious that it will move the needle at all.)
One idea that might be worth considering given the barren state of the community right now would be 2- or 3-person clans which would effectively provide a mentoring structure of sorts. If PCL were to expand, expanding the League to more clans rather than more voluminous ones would be a potential direction that could increase competition and add to the intimacy of the clans--bypassing the old issue of the nonexistent clan group chat.
Other than that, I just want to emphasize that it is important that something like PCL to exist and to never go on three-quarter-year-long "breaks." Even if it is in a different form than PCL1 and PCL2. It just doesn't matter that much. Run PCL and run it well. Make sure mistakes are not the result of lackadaisical implementation.
4. Create better incentives than emblems.
I realize this isn't happening (it's been like, 18 months (?) since my thread on this and the "something is in the works :3" reply I got) so I won't go into much detail, but emblems are a laughable incentive. The only thing anyone can really work for--across all of PC really--is a staff position. There is plenty about Smogon I do not particularly admire, but their incentive structure (badges and trophies) is so much better. Staff as a lone incentive can make PC a little cultish at times (socially), but that is another discussion.
Anyway, this isn't a cure-all since we'd still have to actually execute this right inside the battling community (I suspect that right now a lot of non-battlers would get the hypothetical "Battling Community Contributor" badge incentive), but this would help a lot.
(Also, this is about the eighth most important issue at this point. Please think twice if you want to post just to oppose this. Like, please.)
5. Imagine new ways to contribute to the battling community.
If this sounds broad or unrealistic, I will go ahead and cite a precedent from quite some time ago: the Battle Log forum. It was a bit of a shooting star, but for a few months, we got some exceptional contribution from users logging their battles (known on Smogon as warstories). I realize that replays have made these largely obsolete (RIP), but the point here is that contributing content is fun. Battling is fun and writing about battling is fun. We have the shiny new PokeCommunity Daily to showcase content. If a few community leaders took the lead on encouraging this, it could give a new life to the skeletal BTB.
By "encouraging" content, I mean posting it. Regular users follow the lead of the staff. If the entire BSS suddenly started posting replay analysis or RMTs or PCL recaps or whatever else it may, you had better believe that other users will want to do this.
Having content makes the forum more fun. It gives users a reason to log on and read something new. It gives people a reason to stay on the Battle Server when their friends aren't online so they can read something interesting from one of their community members.
This is not a cure-all by any stretch, but it is a sign of a healthy battling community. I think a lot of the other broader changes need to happen first, but as the community begins to self-select again for people who actually want to battle, these types of things become more natural. It creates a "scene" of sorts that actually begins to address the argument "why shouldn't I just go over to Smogon?" We shouldn't be losing Vrais and Karpmans because our community doesn't give a shit.
That's all I've got. You can take or leave the suggestions--I always meant it when I said "it's not my community to run anymore"--but I thought I'd at least give a belated parting gift in the hopes that maybe a third of it becomes reality. Then, when I come back on to say hello to old friends, I might actually run into more than three people on the Server.
