Feedback: PC's Competitive Battling Community

"I asked wolf if I could post this."


Anyway, this thread is just a place for people to weigh in on PC's competitive battling community. I think it's safe to say that it's gone through a lot of transition in the past few years. Looking to the future, I think it would be very useful if community members themselves outlined how they view the forum and where they would like to see it go, both generally ("we should use the forum more") and more specifically ("let's bring back clans"). Some important considerations might include:


*Competitiveness: determining the ideal spot for PC on the casual-competitive spectrum and defining what that might mean in practical terms (for example, if we're more casual, what does this mean for our tournament and battling groups scenes?)

*Forum-Server Relationship: determining what respective roles the forum and server will have, how to better integrate the two to form a more cohesive community, etc., and "defining what that might mean in practical terms" (which I won't keep including but will probably apply to these other considerations)

*Staff Presence: determining the community's expectations of its staff members, on both the forum and the server, and how to make the staff work better for the community

*Server Atmosphere: determining what the ideal server atmosphere is, especially in terms of the focus of the main chat, how strict or lax rules and rule enforcement should be, etc.

*Forum Content: determining what content is the most useful, fun, and entertaining for us as a community, with such wide-ranging options as RMTs, battle logs, discussions threads, community projects (like a CCAT or team-building workshops), and tutoring

*Community Events and Groups: determining what types of events we want to have, whether it be tournaments, clans, leagues, ladder races, team-building competitions, or something else that you think would add to the competitive community here

*Community Growth: determining how to grow our community and expand our player-base, especially as it pertains to how our community interacts with newer players


So yeah, don't feel obligated to cover everything, as those topics are just there to frame the discussion a little.

And to be clear, I want to encourage people to discuss both the competitive community we have now and what we want it to be (and maybe how to get from the former to the latter), but really the tread is about as broad as its title suggests.

Post away.

I agree all this definitely needs to be adressed. Number one issue to me is competitiveness/server atmosphere and number two is fostering growth. I think the best way to promote growth is clans and leagues since newer players are more likely to get involved that way.

In general, I think the community has improved a lot since last year, where (as far as I could tell) no one battled and the server was just painful. I'm really happy about that. I have a lot to say so I'll separate it into the categories from the OP, in ascending order of importance to me. If you simply must skim my post, at least read the very last section, as I prioritize it the most.

Heil anti etc.

I agree with everything that has been said, aside from one thing. I don't think battle server staff should be required to competitively battle. By all means they should be encouraged to battle and promote it as much as possible, but you also have to keep in mind that we need a capable moderation team as well. Our PS server isn't like PO or Shoddy. We get plenty of visitors from pokemonshowdown.com, and just as many spammers. I don't know about you, but I'd appreciate being able to chat about battling without the lobby getting flooded, haha. :P Anyway, I'm more or less nitpicking, since all of our current staff are interested in competitive battling to some degree.

I'll respond to the other stuff later. I have some clan/group/event ideas in particular that I would like us to explore.

wolf said:

By all means they should be encouraged to battle and promote it as much as possible, but you also have to keep in mind that we need a capable moderation team as well.

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Those things aren't mutually exclusive, are they?

(I don't want to be difficult and as you hinted at it's a more minor point, but I think the question should at least be posed.)

Shouldnt the moderators be the most knowledgeable ones?

I mean, if you wanna push this community forward, you cant have colorblind sheeps steering the wheels. Take advice from the best players. Because they are the best. And being the best deserves recognizion. Because thats what everyone here is trying to be.

Anti said:

Those things aren't mutually exclusive, are they?

(I don't want to be difficult and as you hinted at it's a more minor point, but I think the question should at least be posed.)

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Right, being an active battler is part of being a good BSS member. However, I wouldn't consider it a bare minimum requirement. As much as I'd like to promote only people well-versed in battling, we don't always have that luxury. e.g. If the BSS is running low on staff and no viable competitive battler candidates are around, then I'm not going to wait around for an extended period until that happens. First and foremost, I would rather make sure the battle server is usable without spammers, trolls, and other rule-breakers.

Anyway, it goes without saying that being an active battler is preferable, but it doesn't always translate to being a good staff member.

wolf said:

Right, being an active battler is part of being a good BSS member. However, I wouldn't consider it a bare minimum requirement. As much as I'd like to promote only people well-versed in battling, we don't always have that luxury. e.g. If the BSS is running low on staff and no viable competitive battler candidates are around, then I'm not going to wait around for an extended period until that happens. First and foremost, I would rather make sure the battle server is usable without spammers, trolls, and other rule-breakers.

Anyway, it goes without saying that being an active battler is preferable, but it doesn't always translate to being a good staff member.

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I agree that battling capability isn't necessarily correlated to aptitude at moderating, but that's not what I was trying to say. Rather, I mean to say that if you can become server staff without battling, then there is a bad incentive structure that further reinforces the glorified social IRC atmosphere that currently exists. If you have to actually battle to become a server staff member, anyone who aspires to this will actually have to play the game. This is the incentive structure that we want.

Anyway, to avoid getting bogged down on a relatively minor issue, I propose that rather than excluding non-battlers from staff, first priority is always given to any active server member who battles, so long as they are considered to be a capable staff member. This may well be the system in place, but I don't think it would hurt to explicitly make this a policy. That way, you can't run out of staff members, but there is still a light incentive placed on battling.

I don't see any reason, however, why voice shouldn't only be given out to people who at least periodically battle or discuss battling. The scenario I presented earlier of "competitive chat is happening only to be interrupted by something off-topic" is frustratingly common (about as frustratingly (un)common as actually competitive discussion). The only thing I can think of in opposition to this would be "you can still be a good presence without battling" or something like that, and while this is true in a vacuum, you shouldn't be on the battle server in the first place if you have no inclination to battle, and voicing non-battlers just reinforces the current environment of exclusively being a social IRC at the expense of the integrity of the battling community.

(Admittedly, I'm somewhat unfamiliar with the actual function of voice on PS. My assumption is that it is somewhat symbolic in rewarding good chat presences while also giving them a few new chat commands or something? Either way, unlike staff, I don't see the downside unless I'm reeeeally mistaken about the function of voice, and I don't feel like I'm THAT far off.)

Also it would be cool if we got more replies ~_~

I'm lazy and just going in the order that Anti originally posted.

Competitiveness:


Forum-Server Relationship:


Staff Presence


Server Atmosphere


Forum Content and Community Events and Groups


Community Growth

This is honestly just my opinion but I think you should relegate the regular chit chat to another channel (I believe this is possible on PS) while having the main chat focused on competitive battling. I know we tried to do this by having the competitive chat relegated to another channel. Because honestly whenever I pop on there's just random talk about the weather, TV or something. It gives zero reason for anyone to pop onto the PC server to battle, Smogon is better in that regard.

Like in the past I when we used Shoddy Battle I could pop onto the server and ask for some help/battle and someone (Elf, Jake, Aero, etc.) would be willing but nowadays it just gets lost under all the "Omg my neighbours dog just barked" comments. I realize the Showdown server is now the official chat room for PC but if you want the server to actually flourish as a Battling Community Service the chit-chat has to go. Not saying chit chat is bad but it can't dominate the chat to the extent it is currently, to the point where people feel it's pointless to bring up anything battling related.

And honestly I don't mind chit chat but some of the stuff that is posted is literally pointless. Like it's just a random statement. Like crap like this.

A: Omg neighbour just left home.
B: Wow.
A: He left his dog out the back.
<Wants to Battle Guy>: Hey, want to test a new team. Anyone?
B: Cute dog?
A: Yeah.
C: Is <Insert Name> on?
A: No
C: Okay

Quite honestly if I was to use the server it'd be for some discussion/chatting with regulars. I don't need a blog of a person's life, keep that on your PC blog or Twitter.

tl;dr Balance is needed if you want more competitiveness on this forum and the server is where it starts. We had a nice balance of battling/chat before I feel but the current trend is far too casual for my liking. There's zero reason to choose to go on PC, battling-wise.

Troye said:

think what was kind of sad was that everyone that goes in the server didn't even acknowledge the existence of this thread. If the main point of the server is to be an extension of this subforum, shouldn't the users at least attempt to post in it?

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Very powerful, I highly cosign this. It was in a spoiler and needs more exposure. Rather than my reposting this as a slight to server members, I'm posting it to encourage these people to share their ideas here, if they are part of the community like they claim, so there can be a fair solution worked out rather than a clash of ideals.

Good post pokedra as well, I know me and jake would just idle during chit chat but I agree that it doesnt encourage battling. I feel bad that you and kevin garrett have to log on and see the chat filled with nonsense and inevitably leave lol

Ok, so I have posted mine in here, I hope you guys don't mind.

warning: its 3 am and this post is very long/all over the place so I apologize in advance if it's a little messy.


Been meaning to weigh in on this thread for quite some time now because as a staff member of the server, I feel like I should.

I wanna start of by saying that I agree with what Anti is bringing up here about how it is a battle server and that there should be a good degree of emphasis put on competitive battling as a whole. For the most part, I think the server has adapted to this belief and that the overall competitiveness of the community has grown significantly over the past few months. Likely due to more people enjoying the Gen 6 meta.

Gonna address the points here individually as well:

Competitiveness:

I feel as if overall this is not a problem at all. There are tournaments frequently held(almost daily) with the newly added /tour command, we have the ladder weekends now every week, and the forum tournaments seem to be getting a lot more participation(see the current OU tourney and the GT tournament). That said, there is still room for improvement here. How can we become more competitive? That's a little tricky. We are a small server and can only really have so many tournaments before people just naturally grow tired of it. I think maybe some clans or leagues might be beneficial assuming enough people are interested; organize it.

Forum-Server Relationship:

A good point was brought up about how a lot of active people from the battle center forum were not active on the server and vice versa. Not sure how we could fix this, but I do agree that members of the server should at least try to contribute to the forum in some way or another even if it is something as simple as giving feedback in this or the server thread itself. I will try to advertise this thread around because I think there is some good discussion/debate to happen here.

Staff Presence:

I think Jake summed this up well. It is hard to comment on this from a staff point of view, but overall in terms of managing the server I feel we are all doing a good job of maintaining a healthy atmosphere for everyone. As for us being more competitive in battling, I have mixed feelings on this. I do think that to be a staff member on a battling server you should have at least some knowledge on competitive battling to help out newcomers by answering questions/helping them and I can say for 100% certainty that all of us do. Sure, we don't all actively battle anymore but we all have at one time or another to where we are definitely qualified to be server staff. I also want to point out that not everyone sees what we do behind closed doors. We are very often discussing ways to improve the overall competitiveness of the server in the battle server staff forum to better the server for everyone!


Server Atmosphere:

I don't think anyone has a big problem with this and they shouldn't. We are a very lenient server that allows a lot more than other servers do. We have a good balance of both casual chit chat and competitive battling chat which I think is ideal and what should happen. I do agree that maybe a bit more focus should be put on Pokemon as a topic, but that is really up to the members of the chat. If there is nothing competitive to talk about, I don't see an issue with casual chit chat.

Community Growth:

Skipping to this one as I don't have opinions on the others. I feel like the community is growing and has been for a while now. We have had many members venture over from other communities such as Smogon(such as our staff member, Sweep!) because they like the atmosphere that our server provides. There will always be room for growth though and any ideas on how we could grow even more would be great guys!

Pokedra said:

This is honestly just my opinion but I think you should relegate the regular chit chat to another channel (I believe this is possible on PS) while having the main chat focused on competitive battling. I know we tried to do this by having the competitive chat relegated to another channel. Because honestly whenever I pop on there's just random talk about the weather, TV or something. It gives zero reason for anyone to pop onto the PC server to battle, Smogon is better in that regard.

Like in the past I when we used Shoddy Battle I could pop onto the server and ask for some help/battle and someone (Elf, Jake, Aero, etc.) would be willing but nowadays it just gets lost under all the "Omg my neighbours dog just barked" comments. I realize the Showdown server is now the official chat room for PC but if you want the server to actually flourish as a Battling Community Service the chit-chat has to go. Not saying chit chat is bad but it can't dominate the chat to the extent it is currently, to the point where people feel it's pointless to bring up anything battling related.

And honestly I don't mind chit chat but some of the stuff that is posted is literally pointless. Like it's just a random statement. Like crap like this.

A: Omg neighbour just left home.
B: Wow.
A: He left his dog out the back.
<Wants to Battle Guy>: Hey, want to test a new team. Anyone?
B: Cute dog?
A: Yeah.
C: Is <Insert Name> on?
A: No
C: Okay

Quite honestly if I was to use the server it'd be for some discussion/chatting with regulars. I don't need a blog of a person's life, keep that on your PC blog or Twitter.

tl;dr Balance is needed if you want more competitiveness on this forum and the server is where it starts. We had a nice balance of battling/chat before I feel but the current trend is far too casual for my liking. There's zero reason to choose to go on PC, battling-wise.

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I also wanted to comment on this because you bring up some very good points here.

I think your idea would be good and possibly fix what seems to be the dividing issue here, but I just don't see it working. It didn't work when we tried it the other way around and I don't think sending the chit chat to another room would work either. This would require more staff members to moderate 2 chat rooms, many of the server regulars would be turned off by this, and simply put we just don't have a large enough community for this to work. I understand that it is frustrating to visit the battle server to discuss battling and have it drowned out in another topic that has nothing to do with Pokemon. :( But everyone has to remember that while we are a battle server, we are also a community that has grown close and enjoy chatting about various things. I think we can integrate a more competitive chat without taking that away or splitting up the two sides of the community.


One last thing I wanted to bring up is, If we are going to strive for a more competitive community we need to find a way to include everyone that is a part of the server. Running members out because they don't battle isn't the way to go about this(and I feel like a lot of members would feel like they are unwanted there if we try to put too much emphasis on the "you must battle to be here" part). It makes the server seem like a dictatorship and is more of a turnoff if anything. One idea I was thinking about is; how would you guys who are veterans of the battling community maybe feel about mentoring newcomers/regulars who don't have a knowledge of battling? Honestly, I think a lot of our members don't battle because a lot of us haven't learned competitive and get stomped every time we try. This would be a good way to integrate the current members into the community that we are trying to achieve here without anyone feeling like they shouldn't be there just because they don't battle competitively.

Castform said:

I also wanted to comment on this because you bring up some very good points here.

I think your idea would be good and possibly fix what seems to be the dividing issue here, but I just don't see it working. It didn't work when we tried it the other way around and I don't think sending the chit chat to another room would work either. This would require more staff members to moderate 2 chat rooms, many of the server regulars would be turned off by this, and simply put we just don't have a large enough community for this to work. I understand that it is frustrating to visit the battle server to discuss battling and have it drowned out in another topic that has nothing to do with Pokemon. :( But everyone has to remember that while we are a battle server, we are also a community that has grown close and enjoy chatting about various things. I think we can integrate a more competitive chat without taking that away or splitting up the two sides of the community.

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There are less then 10 serious battlers on here while their are over 30 people who just use it to chat. Forcing them to take an extra step will not deter them from using the server. It didn't work as well before because PS was still in early beta and entering a different room was harder. You had to type in a few commands. The main should only need one staff member at a time to watch over it to ban trolls considering the non battler; battler ratio.

One last thing I wanted to bring up is, If we are going to strive for a more competitive community we need to find a way to include everyone that is a part of the server. Running members out because they don't battle isn't the way to go about this(and I feel like a lot of members would feel like they are unwanted there if we try to put too much emphasis on the "you must battle to be here" part). It makes the server seem like a dictatorship and is more of a turnoff if anything. One idea I was thinking about is; how would you guys who are veterans of the battling community maybe feel about mentoring newcomers/regulars who don't have a knowledge of battling? Honestly, I think a lot of our members don't battle because a lot of us haven't learned competitive and get stomped every time we try. This would be a good way to integrate the current members into the community that we are trying to achieve here without anyone feeling like they shouldn't be there just because they don't battle competitively.

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Running them out is an exaggeration, we've giving them their own space to chat about their lunch, kittens, pimples and whatnot. It's not like they wouldn't be welcome in the main chat either, as far as toxicity against "newbies" go, PC has come a long way I can tell you that much. This might also be a good way to improve the quality of the server chat too, we can have normal chat in the main room just not to the extent it is now. I may sound overly antagonistic but some of the chat at the moment is appalling.

It'd be nice to be able to find a compromise that works for both sides but it's not feasible. This isn't the first time people have wanted to do something about the server being used as a chatroom rather then a PC Battle Community server and each time we come up with some half-hearted method to try change things that doesn't work.

It's not even the fact that people are scared of getting beaten, most of the server just don't care. You post anything competitive-related and it gets swept away in the chat, there's a reason why the battlers are always quiet. If anything the battlers have been run out of the PC server, I could list several people who migrated over to Smogon because they didn't need Twitter; PC edition.

If you want to keep the regulars happy then by all means keep the server in it's current state. I have nothing against using the server as a chatroom. But if you actually want to kickstart the battling community here you'll have to make some people unhappy. wolf keeps telling me the community is getting more and more active but quite frankly the battling community here has never looked more dead to me.

Castform said:

It didn't work when we tried it the other way around and I don't think sending the chit chat to another room would work either.

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If this actually happened I think there is more of a problem than you are describing......

Anti said:

I propose that rather than excluding non-battlers from staff, first priority is always given to any active server member who battles, so long as they are considered to be a capable staff member.

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We already do that, so no need to worry.

Re: Restricting voice to only active battlers: I don't have a problem with that. I'll bring it up with the staff.

Re: Making a separate chat room for battling: Very interesting idea, but extremely tricky to pull off for a community of our size. Last time it didn't work because a) it's too inconvenient compared to auto-joining the Lobby, and b) the conversation felt very forced and didn't occur naturally. However, it is worth noting that it's more realistically viable now. We could restrict the Lobby to mostly battling related topics and make a chat room for anything off-topic. Then, for any battle server links on PC, we could link to the off-topic chat which would effectively allow any PC user to auto-join both chat rooms. Anyone visiting from pokemonshowdown.com would only join the Lobby and not the off-topic chat, but most of them would be battlers anyway. And we could provide links to either of the chat rooms in their intro messages.

Still, the bigger question is if our community is capable of keeping both chat rooms active. And is off-topic chat prevalent enough to warrant this? Could we get away with having only one chat room if we simply put more emphasis on battling?

I'm strongly against two separate chats. The two possibilities...

Competitive battling room: We might as well stop pretending this is a battling community if we're explicitly making competitive a secondary part of the server. Totally unworkable if we're serious about fixing the glorified social IRC element of the server.

Off-topic room: Situating the main chat as always on-topic is just putting the server at the other end of the extreme Pokedra mentioned. While I am annoyed at the server's current state, no one wants to be obligated to always be on-topic. That's too contrived.


More broadly, grouping people into separate chats doesn't solve anything. All that does is further solidify divisions that shouldn't exist in the first place. Even if there weren't practical problems (as Wolf talked about), all we're doing is segregating--and suffocating--the existing battling community and enabling the sort of banal and, frankly, useless/pointless chat that Pokedra mentioned above. Instead of trying to make everyone happy with a compromise option that addresses none of the community's actual problems, we should explicitly set the goal of refocusing the community on battling. This needs to be one community, not two.


In order to make the chat casual but also not as inane as Pokedra describes, I propose the following alternative solutions:

1.) Making competitive the priority of the chat. In practical terms, this means that if a competitive discussion is taking place, it is an expectation that it doesn't get drowned out by a different off-topic chat. Besides being rude, that kind of interruption hampers the ability of our battlers to casually chat about the game. I think that this should be enforced in the sense that if competitive gets drowned out, I don't think it's too much for a mod to say "hey, an on-topic discussion was going on, your discussion of videogames can be taken to PM" or something. Baby steps.

2.) The voice incentive I mentioned earlier.

3.) Further incentivizing battling and battling discussion by getting a couple of Showdown-connected clans going. I think this would give us an opportunity, institutionally, to mentor new players or current non-battlers who'd like to battle, as senior clan people could serve as mentors of sorts. This would help with forum-server integration as well. I do think we need to explicitly lay out how a clan culture would work here in terms of our expectations as well as its practical execution, and I'm curious what y'all think about this (especially the former, for now at least). The main point though is that something like clans (probably just two) would allow us to give an avenue to non-battlers to become real members of our competitive community, allowing us to grow our userbase. Because ultimately, if we want a more topical chat, we simply need more battlers who will actually want to engage in one, so seems like a win-win to me.

I'll expand on this later, but I have to go.

Castform said:

One idea I was thinking about is; how would you guys who are veterans of the battling community maybe feel about mentoring newcomers/regulars who don't have a knowledge of battling? Honestly, I think a lot of our members don't battle because a lot of us haven't learned competitive and get stomped every time we try. This would be a good way to integrate the current members into the community that we are trying to achieve here without anyone feeling like they shouldn't be there just because they don't battle competitively.

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Specifically quoting this part because I don't really have much to argue against in Chase's post, other than that the balance of off-topic and competitive isn't balanced really, it's more 75-25 if anything. But that's been addressed to death so moving on.

For the quoted part, speaking for myself, yes, I think that would be a good idea. There was a point a few years ago where we actually did try this to some success, and it can't hurt to try again. I think the last thing anyone wants to do is drive anyone away. Bringing the focus of battling back to the center, by integrating everyone in, would definitely be ideal.

Still, I'd like to point out that other than two people, we've only had old regulars posting in here, even with Anti asking people on the server directly to give their feedback. Lgi people.

Competitiveness

As others have noted, PC is not inherently as competitive as Smogon. I see PC as a social community as much as a battling community and by no means would I support bloodythirsty competitiveness. Then again, I doubt that would be an issue :p. With that said, there's nothing wrong with some good 'ol competitive spirit, and Matt's tournaments and the (successful) gt 11 tournament are steps in the right direction for getting the community into a competitive mindset. I would like to see tournaments and other competitive battling avenues, so long they keep up with the spirit of PC.

Forum-Server Relationship

I don't have a strong opinion on this. In regards to tournament play, it'd be nice if major matches could be advertised on the forums before they are played on the server. For example, if DA plays Kevin Garrett in an OU final, one of them can post "We're fighting at 11:00 A.M. EST Sunday" on the thread.

Staff Presence

Believe me when I say that server authority do our best to keep everything under control. If you have an issue with the way a moderator or admin is doing their job, you are welcome to (politely) ask why they performed such and such an action. We don't bite! I also feel people look too far into warnings. They are not actual punishments, but are simply meant to keep the chat healthy.

Server Atmosphere

Minus some overly lewd talk (mind you I don't mind such discussion so long it stays PG-13 lol), I have no problems with the server atmosphere at the moment.

Community Growth

If we are successful in other areas, this will take care of itself IMO.


Not sure which criteria this falls under, but I'd love an OU Gym Leader league. This league would involve some of the best battlers on PC being elected to Leader positions. If a player can defeat a leader in a best of 3 series (or perhaps best of 1, though I'd hate to see people win or lose due to hax and a series would provide opportunities for hax to even out), they earn a badge. Each leader may be challenged once a week. This is just an idea I saw on the server that I wanted to follow up on n_n.