Battle Server Support

Wolflare said:

I don't like the idea of splitting up our small community. By making another server, one of them will eventually crumple from inactivity and general lack of usage. Here's the thing: we don't have a massive amount of regulars to keep the old server afloat, and once regulars like Elf and Aero leave for the new server, the older one will eventually die. I know this because we still have issues retaining consistent activity on the current server. We don't have this overflowing bucket full of non-battlers that will keep a second server running. We might as well promote battling to our existing community, and possibly get some more battling going on.

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I've tried promoting battling to the community. If you recall, I started a UU tournament with the sole purpose of making people interested in a new metagame and learning it. For a select few, this actually worked! But if you noticed, only people who were already interested in battling from the get-go were the ones who stuck with it (I don't know Fritz that well in terms of how much battling is done, but Fritz is an odd one out in this case, because he stuck with UU). I encouraged the idea of not stealing teams and creating your own and gave a week in order for people to practice with their team on the smogon ladder / work out kinks. You know what actually happened within that week? People did nothing, ignored the tournament, and when it was over that's when people started making their teams. You can't get a community to truly enjoy battling if that's not the reason they're here in the first place. We should know that from years and years of not total flops, but somewhat failures of experiments to improve activity.

If we have a server specifically for competitive battling and discussion, the people who go on there might, I don't know, actually want to learn / improve on competitive battling.

wofl said:

I think the problem stems from the fact that the battle server is getting more active. More people are coming to the server to chat, and off-topic discussion tends to come up more often (like it was in the past). With more people using the chat, it becomes more difficult to change the topic when others are already discussing something else. The natural decision is to make another channel for talk about competitive Pokemon, or make the lobby more focused around it and put off-topic chat in a different channel. However, I know that you (Anti) want to breakaway from this treacherous community that has become too "PC-like," has too many filthy casuals like Lala, yada yada yada. But guess what, when the old server eventually dies, they're going to come over to the new server. Then, you end up in the same situation we are in now. The community will have people that want stick around with their friends, that's only natural. What are you going to do when a good portion of community consists of those type of people and eventually saturates this new "battling" community with non-battlers? Hope that this focus on battling (and strict moderation to enforce that) will eventually drive them out?

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This doesn't make much sense to me honestly. You're claiming that the current server is going to die if the second one is made. How do you know this? Clearly very few people in the current server are interested in actually competitive battling save a dozen of those who come on regularly, most of which would frequent both servers given the opportunity. I, personally, would still visit the current server if a new competitive one is made. Will I prefer the new server? Of course, that's what I want in a server in the first place and why I came back (XY Competitive Discussion / Help once it comes out / people I know and want to battle with). Does the preference mean I won't come onto the current server? No. I don't see why it should. And this is coming from me, probably one of the people becoming most hated by the server staff because of my complaints about how...awful the chats become. There isn't anything wrong with off-topic discussions, but when I'm, say, having trouble working on a team and I ask for help in the chat and I get very blunt / no reasoning behind it / stupid joke answers because "nobody cares, we're discussing username colors", I just feel like the meaning of the server is pretty much lost.

This is why I support another server and whatever Anti deems necessary. Honestly, Anti is probably the most level-headed and logical thinking person I know on the internet and I support anything he proposes.

Also Derk, you claiming that the "lack of battling hasn't been an issue before" pains my soul. Do you not recall why I left PC in 2011?
Nvm, you said last couple of months. It was an issue. My UU tournament took a month for 12 battles to take place. That's a massive problem if you ask me and I made it clear that I felt that it was ridiculous. Not to mention the sheer lack of interest in the tournament as a whole from people I would have expected to sign up who didn't and those who were also in the tournament.

EDIT: Side-note. I feel like the only legitimate argument against getting a new server is that it could result in lowered activity in both servers. And like I said, if the competitive battlers are in such a minority as Derk claims they are, if all of them were to leave, would it really affect anything? I'm going to list some of the members who are on decent amounts and battle and if I forget anyone, let me know.
- Me
- Jake
- Fritz
- Nica
- Dark Azelf
- Anti
- Pokedra

....yeah....

Pretty sure at least Me, Nica and Fritz would still visit the regular server if the second one were made. I can't speak for the other 4.

Uhhhh I'll try to keep this short.

Wolflare said:

I wasn't particularly interested in arguing about this more, but alas, here are my problems with the idea.

I don't like the idea of splitting up our small community. By making another server, one of them will eventually crumple from inactivity and general lack of usage. Here's the thing: we don't have a massive amount of regulars to keep the old server afloat, and once regulars like Elf and Aero leave for the new server, the older one will eventually die. I know this because we still have issues retaining consistent activity on the current server. We don't have this overflowing bucket full of non-battlers that will keep a second server running. We might as well promote battling to our existing community, and possibly get some more battling going on.

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Not gonna disagree with the main point you're making here of impracticality--fair enough, you know the server better than I do--but I do want to point out that the course of action you mention in that last sentence is probably hopeless. Even the wording is telling: "we might as well" and "possibly" don't exactly inspire confidence...

Wolflare said:

I think the problem stems from the fact that the battle server is getting more active. More people are coming to the server to chat, and off-topic discussion tends to come up more often (like it was in the past). With more people using the chat, it becomes more difficult to change the topic when others are already discussing something else. The natural decision is to make another channel for talk about competitive Pokemon, or make the lobby more focused around it and put off-topic chat in a different channel. However, I know that you (Anti) want to breakaway from this treacherous community that has become too "PC-like," has too many filthy casuals like Lala, yada yada yada. But guess what, when the old server eventually dies, they're going to come over to the new server. Then, you end up in the same situation we are in now. The community will have people that want stick around with their friends, that's only natural. What are you going to do when a good portion of community consists of those type of people and eventually saturates this new "battling" community with non-battlers? Hope that this focus on battling (and strict moderation to enforce that) will eventually drive them out?

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I think y'all are sort of misunderstanding the hypothetical nature of the new server. Strictly moderated? I don't think so. I feel like the chat sort of took care of itself when the server was in fact a battle server in terms of the substance. Since I don't really think the server would eventually die without its minority element, I'm very skeptical of what you're saying being some inevitability but point taken anyway.

You can mock my admittedly way over-the-top rhetoric but it's pretty hard to deny that S&M/CBC/BC sort of got the shaft once the server became increasingly dominated by non-battlers. It's like the forum might as well not exist. I feel like it's not unreasonable to be alarmed by this.

(If all else fails then yes a channel is better than nothing, I feel like having the offtopic being the channel is in denial of reality which breaks my heart but facts are facts--most don't battle.)

teamDerk said:

Also, it's a carbon copy because it's essentially our server except people battle. That's the only difference, lol, really.

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...That's sort of an enormous difference. I cherry-picked this because I don't think either of us want to go back and forth forever but this encapsulated my response to your post well enough. For Battle Center's server (getting tired of bolding battle) I would think that's sort of a big deal...

Forever said:

Just wanna say that I support the second server being unaffliated with PC purely because if the first one is the official chat room it makes me think of Ever Grabde City, and their official chat room only being PO. Smogon can get away with this but irc is hugely integrated and I don't think PC should base the entire foundations of an offsite chat being two battle servers. As for the second server I can easily populate it as I know smogon people who would likely use it to it's advantage without heading into that awkward zone of two official servers. Hard to explain but yeah.

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This makes PC affiliation much less necessary...assuming it's reliable. I like it regardless though if only because while I don't necessarily agree I think that the concerns about two official servers are legitimate and two of the people who I know like the idea of a second server have been moe on the unofficial side so fair enough, I think that's what we should do then.

edit: just to speak to aero's edit i probably wouldn't come on except dip though i suspect my loss is probably mutually positive

I am so over talking about this. The debating isn't really going anywhere as everyone is pretty much set in stone, so this is pretty much all I have left to say:

• I wouldn't leave the current server if this ever comes to fruition.
• Instead of jumping to the more work-intensive and more radical approach of creating a new server (not that it's radical, but whatever), why not just TRY making a new channel on the current server and see how it works out? If what we're aiming for can't be accomplished there, hey, no harm no foul. Then we know at least. If it works we saved ourselves a lot of work.

None of you are giving me a solution to the problem I brought up. If the old server dies and the non-battlers from there start frequenting the new server, how are you going to retain this battling community without it being thrown out of balance? All that you folks are doing is trying to get away from the non-battlers and create a community for battlers. That is pushing them aside, and hoping they don't come over to your group. You are under the assumption that the old server will remain intact, but I don't think it will. I understand this is all conjecture, but it's very likely to happen and you want to plan out what to do if it occurs. If this happens, the new server will end up in the same position as we are now, and everything that comes from this will be largely unproductive (aside from making some members more interested in battling). By making a new server, you are just trying to avoid the problem without fixing it. Naturally, as a community grows, it will also gain more non-battlers in the process. The chat will begin to degrade over time (many online communities have this problem) and off-topic discussion will become more prevalent. This gives you two options: 1) strictly moderate it to ensure competitive Pokemon remains as a major interest in the community and attempt to keep off-topic discussion at a minimum, or 2) make another place specifically for competitive Pokemon. The latter option is certainly better for our community, but making another "battle" server that allows off-topic discussion will end up competing with the old server. My solution to this issue is to make a separate channel for reasons stated before. It will co-exist alongside the current community without completely splitting it up, and will give us a chance to have a chat that is strictly focused on competitive Pokemon without having to worry about off-topic discussion taking the priority (because it's in the main lobby).

Any solution would be just as hypothetical as the problem you present, but mine would probably be a channel for non-battlers, basically, and if the battlers want to go there then they can. I say this though still sort of rejecting the idea that the current server is going to die--who exactly is going to leave anyway?--but that's my answer.

Brief thing about the channel: it's not really about having a strictly topical chat (I feel like this is a misconception as that's an unrealistic and undesirable thing for everyone I think) but rather a community defining itself and its culture and establishing its own independent space. I feel like a server is waaaay better suited for that than a channel but if that's the best we're going to do at the moment then I think it would be pretty foolish to reject it. I'll work on an (unaffiliated) server in the meantime assuming it's still okay with you? I have no idea if that's a fair assumption anymore though. And if it does in fact work in actually giving a home to the battling community again then wonderful. But right now it seems like Jake is right and at some point we just have to do something sooo yeah.

We have decided to make a channel called "competitive"! It's basically a channel for talk about competitive Pokemon, and that's all you really need to know. Oh, and it's not strictly related to competitive Pokemon, so you won't be banned for talking about something else or anything severe like that.

I haven't read all these posts but it seems pretty bad that we have to make a seperate server for a competitive subforum so that people can actually play competitive mons on it. I honestly feel like the non-battler people are better off making a social irl channel to move their community too, but whatever works I guess.

Personally, I just think a forum is more effective at establishing an active community from the start. Sure, a chatroom helps people in a community develop bonds with each other, and makes the community feel much more like a group of friends than a forum could accomplish. But there's a lot of effort involved into keeping a chatroom active and ensuring that people will actually stick around and use it. If it's dead when a new user comes, they are certainly going to leave and rarely come back later. Heck, it's hard enough getting new users to stick around even when the battle server is active almost 24/7. It's just so difficult launching a community with a small amount of people using a chatroom, with the obvious flaw being the fact that it's real-time. You have to have people on at the same time to use the chatroom, or it's just useless. With so few users involved, times when there are more than two people on willing to chat are so sparse. This is even more compounded by the fact that this new server would be focused around one particular (and somewhat limited) subject, unlike the current battle server. I would rather use the forum somehow, and gather a solid group of people dedicated to actually using it, y'know? Then attempt to make an active "battle" server or channel once the time is right.

Is the server down? I can't seem to access it. Smogon's PS server is up though so it's not a Showdown! problem; I figured I should ask here.

I'd like to say that the Server's Ladder has been RESET. So that means that each and everyone in the server at any time can re-start laddering up. Note that you must be registered in order to protect and reserve your ranking. And to get out of being (Provisional) you just have to keep having rated battles on the selected ladder (tier), then you will be out of being (Provisional). That is all I'd like to say to everyone, enjoy laddering again and have fun!




Side note: The ladder reset may have something to do with the server being down.

I wonder is it just me, but when I'm going to PC Battle Server, I've got this message:

DNS Resolution Error

You've requested a page on a website (pokecommunity.psim.us) that is on the CloudFlare network. Unfortunately, CloudFlare is currently unable to resolve your requested domain (pokecommunity.psim.us).

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The server is: DOWN

Seems like smogon is still getting DDoSed and the login server for Pokemon Showdown is offline, so you may not be able to connect even thought the client is in fact loading fine.

Server is back up and should be working properly for everyone soon.

Uhm, yeah the server is currently down. I hope it isn't something on my end though.

since wolf is offline,

The Pokemon of the Day is now elekid!
This Pokemon will be guaranteed to show up in random battles.

^

EDIT: today it's kricketot!

GUYS IMPORTANT QUESTION

I asked Wolf about bringing back some of the old seasonals and he said yes, but we need to decide on which ones. Personally I'm voting for last December (fatties and Presents <3), but if there's one you want particularly then please mention it :)

Yes I agree I want the december battles back. I believe they were called Winter Wonderland seasonals!

WINTER SEASONALS OMG OMG OMG

In other words I really want the Winter Seasonals back. <3

Also bring back the April Fool's ones with the cool sprites :D. They were full of hax, but were so fun.

READ THIS IMPORTANT BULLETIN:

http://pokemonshowdown.com/news/june2013attack