Feedback: PC's Competitive Battling Community

[MoxieInfinite]

kevin garrett is on PC? hes like my hero o_o

 

[Dark Azelf]

My only issue with the server is the staff structure.

Do you have to be a mod on the forum to have power on the server? Why do i say this? Well because people who have been fired on the forum are still server staff, higher staff who dont even battle have power on the server, people who arent staff on the forum are admin/mod on the server and people who arent even active and piss off to smogon the majority of the time still have power. None of these should be the case imo.

Its inconsistent and probs needs addressing.

 

[.Aero]

My only issue with the server is the staff structure.

Do you have to be a mod on the forum to have power on the server? Why do i say this? Well because people who have been fired on the forum are still server staff, higher staff who dont even battle have power on the server, people who arent staff on the forum are admin/mod on the server and people who arent even active and piss off to smogon the majority of the time still have power. None of these should be the case imo.

Its inconsistent and probs needs addressing.

Frankly, I disagreed with this post at first. I didn't care much nor did I think it mattered. However, after thinking about it for a bit I realized that I do agree.

I think the fact that I'm on rather consistently throughout various hours of the day (due to a horrible cycling sleep schedule) allows me to get to know various people on the server regardless of their time zones. As a result, I feel like I should know everyone who is on staff on the server, seeing as how those who deserve server staff status should be consistent members as well. However, every few days I see a brand new name pop up and I have literally no idea who they are (even after they explain who they are). My question is: Why are these people on staff? Clearly they are not consistent users on the server, and I highly doubt they battle at all, save a few random battles here and there (which I, personally, don't even count).

Basically what I'm here to say is:
- Members who don't battle / show up on the server consistently should not be server staff
- Precedent should be given to those who prove themselves to be:
--- Helpful to other members
--- Consistent in appearance on server
--- Decent / knowledgeable battlers
- It's a battle server, this shouldn't be too much to ask
- Members who are staff on the forums themselves should not automatically be given staff on server . This is like giving anyone who posts in S&M (idk what it's currently called) mod abilities just because they mod somewhere else.

ggwp

EDIT: I think I won the tutor war forever ago btw seeing as how only my student is still around and is probably one of the strongest, if not the strongest battlers here. Shoutout to my boy Karp. <3

 

[MoxieInfinite]

Strongest battler at this place is not an achievement. What players has this place brought up? If KG actually DOES go here, thats a fantastic example. Sweep is a great Ubers player. Anti and antebellum have made posts with relevance, which is great looking at the theorymonning. But that size is minimal. For every 5 players here, you have random brazilian forums/Smogon bringing up 1,000. How do you get good students? Proffesionalism.

This place needs some good tutor program. And good tutors. If not, why would people choose this place over Smogon. The laid-back experince? Oh please.

 

[.Aero]

Strongest battler at this place is not an achievement. What players has this place brought up? If KG actually DOES go here, thats a fantastic example. Sweep is a great Ubers player. Anti and antebellum have made posts with relevance, which is great looking at the theorymonning. But that size is minimal. For every 5 players here, you have random brazilian forums/Smogon bringing up 1,000. How do you get good students? Proffesionalism.

This place needs some good tutor program. And good tutors. If not, why would people choose this place over Smogon. The laid-back experince? Oh please.

To be fair you just nitpicked my side-edit of my post which has no relevance to this thread whatsoever.

As for the tutor program, I completely agree. A tutor program being implemented again would be a good idea. As for people choosing PC over smogon, I'm pretty sure the reason people choose it IS because of the "laid-back experience". At least that's the case for me. If I wanted a true competitive and strictly competitive environment I'd go to smogon any day. But I don't. I don't see this argument flying very far.

 

[MoxieInfinite]

Then youre begging to fall behind. And if thats what you desire, your choice. But if you want this place to get some "deserved" recognizion, stuff needs to be done. I'd love to tutor someone half-decent (I dont wanna deal with retards using Bellossom because its their fav mon), and though I rarely play XY, I'm good enough to see and understand the metagame.

 

[Jake♫]

Then youre begging to fall behind. And if thats what you desire, your choice. But if you want this place to get some "deserved" recognizion, stuff needs to be done. I'd love to tutor someone half-decent (I dont wanna deal with retards using Bellossom because its their fav mon), and though I rarely play XY, I'm good enough to see and understand the metagame.

I don't think anyone is asking for "deserved" recognition at all. The entire point of this thread was just general feedback of our current community, and where people think it stands. No one is disagreeing that Smogon is where you would want to go if you just want a strictly competitive environment. People are arguing that they would like our own balance on the battle server to be less like a general chat room, and have a better balance of off-topic and battling discussions.

 

[MoxieInfinite]

If you wanna know where this place stands, its far behind. Youre coming to a second-tier community asking for advice, when nothing stops you from getting somthing better. If you want a rate, go smogon, or expect inferior advice. And TRYING to be the second best is just weird as a goal.

 

[Kevin Garrett]

For clarification, I did not start here. I was already a member on Smogon. My reason for joining was to compete in a forum war. I come back from time to time because the people that are here are long-time members that I knew from years ago. The more relaxed atmosphere is a nice alternative to the serious competition on Smogon. That's not to say there isn't serious competition here, but it certainly has a different vibe and you shouldn't look to erase that. You won't ever beat Smogon doing competitive. My recommendation would be to build a competitive infrastructure that members here can learn from to build up the current base, but keep it at a point where there is a noticeable cultural difference between here and Smogon. That way you have a good chance of keeping members that participate on both sites because they understand the value of the community here.

 

[Anti]

Yeah I think on the note of what Aero and Jake are saying, "laid-back experience" is a legitimate draw for some people, and more to the point, no one in our community really wants to get intense, get recognition, etc. It's just not in the cards at the moment with the competitive community in the state it's in, even if we did want it. Basically what Kevin Garrett said. And with that, I'd prefer to just move on since it's a discussion that probably isn't going to go anywhere except downhill, and there are real efforts we need to get working on right now.

(In case that wasn't clear: STOP WITH THIS TOPIC.)

edit: adding spoilers to make it less daunting so y'all will read it ;)

on clans:

Spoiler:

So to keep moving right along, I wanted to talk a little more about how we can build a battling community from the present community. I think clans and leagues are a good place to start. (I'll address tutoring in a moment as well since that's definitely something to look at.) I'll repost what I said in my first content post, with bolded emphasis on what I want to talk about now:

While I am not against clans or leagues, I think we need to explicitly lay out what it is we would want them to accomplish for the community. I wouldn't want leagues to be noob pits that are disconnected from the server community entirely, for example. (Nothing against noobs, but I think that we should be directing them toward integrating into the battling community here instead of being isolated and never really improving.) So if we brought back clans, what would we want them to accomplish, and how would they define their niche on PC? I'm not a Battle Stadium guy, so my knowledge and vision with these things is more limited.

I do think that overall though, battling groups are a good idea that add variety to the scene here. And with events, I think we can do more tours but also more than just tours. I don't think it's terrible right now, but there is a lot of room for improvement at the moment.

I talked to wolf about clans a little bit earlier, and he brought up a good point in that a big part of clan activity was simply scheduling battles, since WiFi isn't as convenient as laddering or just asking for a battle in our server's main chat. I think that if we're serious about refocusing the community with clans as a part of the solution, we need to ask what the purpose of our clans will be, what their specific functions will be, how they will be organized to fulfill their purpose optimally, and how they fit within the more general competitive infrastructure, as KG just termed it, here at PC. Here is my general outline for that.

Since clans won't be doing much good if they're just a crappy way to organize battles that can easily be organized on the server anyway, I think that clans should be refocused to help newer players get into the game and compete while doing so. In other words, clans would be where there are experienced and new battlers, and those with experience would help along others. With tutoring, people have brought up the concern that we may not have enough willing and qualified tutors. Well, hopefully a clan environment would achieve similar goals.

Besides that, I like the idea that intra-clan competition for clan war roster spots would further motivate people to do well. Besides clan wars (which I think would have to be infrequent enough as to not become stale), I think clans would have to really think outside the box for being interesting. One idea I've had is each of the clans making a sort of CCAT (community create a team) where each clan makes a team to see who can make the best one. I think the main thing is that clans shouldn't be based around things like tournaments or discussions that are better created with the entire community in mind, or else they'll just be too contrived. Other clan activities might include creating unique/creative movesets or clan war-ladder races (where the clan war becomes the sum of each clan's ladder scores instead of direct wars with battles between each other). To be honest though, I'd want to see a few more ideas before being sold that clans are where we should focus, just because I wouldn't want them to flame out in a few months.

on tutoring and leagues:

Spoiler:

Alternatively, it may make more sense to just do tutoring "the old-fashioned way" and not restrict ourselves with clan groupings and to make leagues the focus of how we do battling groups here. I think the league thread that keeps bumping this thread down is evidence of the activity they bring (and the spam-ish shortcomings as well, but these can be ironed out with time). Regardless of what happens or doesn't happen with clans, I think leagues are clearly a good idea. Smogon has the Smogon Frontier, and I think that having something similar would be cool and would encourage people to get good enough to actually participate in or challenge that league.

If we do tutoring, we need to begin to discuss what the details of that would be as well.

Just some other thoughts...

on forum name:

Spoiler:

We need to stop changing this forum's name. I'd prefer if it went back to Strategies and Movesets (for symbolic reasons that I won't get into because I know it's not going to happen anyway), but since that isn't going to happen (!), we need to pick a name and stick with it. Why is this a big deal? I think S&M has rebranded itself enough--let's get down to business now.

on a potential team building workshop thread:

Spoiler:

I think a team-building workshop, maybe as a sticky, would be awesome for noobs and experienced players alike. Maybe something like this could go there: "Hey, I've been wanting to using RP Landorus-T and Mega Heracross as an offensive core that can challenge all playstyles, but I'm having trouble supporting it. Right now I'm considering Pokemon X, Pokemon Y, and Pokemon Z, and I really need a good lure for Gliscor and opposing Landorus and Landorus-T, any ideas?" Look at how many RMTs don't have six Pokemon. I worry this could get too crowded, but I think that team-building as a process is really neglected in this forum beyond the unbearably vanilla "what's your team building approach?" thread that comes up every so often. Why not actually have a place where we can put our ideas to work and have multiple minds work at something? I was talking with Aero about this idea earlier and he suggested having a sort of mini archive of good teams or cores or whatever in the OP as well, which I think would be awesome and useful for players of varying skill levels.

on potential truncated ou threat list thread:

Spoiler:

I think an OU threat list would be nice. Just a simple "huge threats / notable threats / niche threats" organization with basic typing/abilities/common movesets listings would be great, perhaps in the following format as an example:

[mini sprite, like the ones in the viability ranking threads on smogon]
LANDORUS [link to smogon analysis]
Ground / Flying
89 / 125 / 90 / 115 / 80 / 101
Sheer Force / Sand Force
Notable Attack Moves: Earth Power, Focus Blast, Psychic, Knock Off, Sludge Wave, Hidden Power [Ice] Rock Slide
Notable Set-Up Moves: Calm Mind, Rock Polish
Notable Support Moves: Stealth Rock
Checks: Specially Defensive Gliscor, Assault Vest Tornadus-T, Azumarill (RK), Mega Charizard Y, Chansey, Keldeo (RK), Thundurus (RK), Greninja (RK)

Short, sweet, and to the point, though it's pretty rough and is probably more optimally done some other way, maybe with a moveset focus but the point is that this might be nice. Also listing Pokemon and what Pokemon they check would be cool. (For example, on that list, Keldeo's entry would show that it checks Bisharp, Mega Tyranitar, Heatran, Landorus, Mega Mawile, etc.) We should have some kind of resource though, again for teambuilding help.

meh just look:

Spoiler:

Lastly, I think a team-building competition would be fun and I plan on posting one next week once the OU Tour begins to wind down. I think it would be a cool and unorthodox competition like ladder race (needs more participants only six people isn't that fun :( c'mon d00ds) and would further stimulate teambuilding which seems to be a significant barrier of entry here.

 

[champagnepapi]

I think with the clans it might be worth having a sort of clan champiomship, as well as channels on the server for each clan, to promote competition and interaction.

 

[MoxieInfinite]

I know the laid-back experience is why you'd go here. But my question is, why would you want a laid-back experience? If you post RMT's here, you're expecting second-hand rates, when you coulda gone Smogon and gotten a tier one rate at no cost. That's like choosing Ember over Flamethrower.

Also, Smogon isn't all 100% serious. Isn't that why Firebot exists?

 

[champagnepapi]

I know the laid-back experience is why you'd go here. But my question is, why would you want a laid-back experience? If you post RMT's here, you're expecting second-hand rates, when you coulda gone Smogon and gotten a tier one rate at no cost. That's like choosing Ember over Flamethrower.

Also, Smogon isn't all 100% serious. Isn't that why Firebot exists?

Man we are not trying to compete with smogon. This is only a subforum of a general big Pokemon site. We're just here to chill and train really, but that doesn't mean we settle for mediocrity. Me and Anti hit up the ladder a lot, Pokedra and Dark Azelf were competitive back in the day as well. If you want to compete with smogon, or any other battling forum for that matter, you are not in the right place. You also talked about the 'random brazilian forums' popping out players, but those are competitive battling geared too; the whole board is meant for competitive and attracts competitive players [I'd wager they don't take themselves that seriously either though]. Most of the competitive players aren't okay with being subpar, but really it's futile at this point to try and be the next smogon, even when serebii, marriland, etc were active, they probably had the same goal as us: to be a strong community. If we get a bunch of people battling and eventually doing well on ladder and in tournaments, that's great, but the site and this subforum itself, isn't going to be putting up analyses or becoming the center of battling any time soon. Also if you are expecting tier one rates at smogon then you are sorely mistaken lol

 

[MoxieInfinite]

Pretty sure if you put up a well-made RMT on Smogon, players like Chimpact, SS, Aim, whoever the ♥♥♥♥ that rates teams nowadays, will give you a top tier rate if you ask for it.

But yea, point taken. O_o

 

[BeachBoy]

Anyway, we wanted to move on.

About clans, I like the thought of having various teams of players going against each other. If it jumped to a serious scale, a couple of world-cup-like tournaments would be refreshing. However, Anti makes a fair warning about them flaming out. It'll be all excitement at first, but needs some serious investment of players/(maybe artists to keep it fancy? Seriously, grab some talented folks from the artistic forums. If it looks amazing, people are more likely to be attracted to the cool-factor and they'll have a more unique flare than here-is-our-thread-join-us-look-at-our-trophies) to sustain itself. I'm not so sure it could be a let's-figure-it-out-along-the-way kind of project.

I'd comment on other areas (server staff/forum staff disconnect) but I've simply been too absent to fairly recommend changes.

 

[Mana1]

I don't come here much ;-;. I realise that this is a bit delayed, and the topic has moved on a bit, but I just wanted to give my point of view as an outsider to the battling community.

I only go on the server to play some fun matches, I don't play competitively and I don't stick around there for chatting. Some members have mentioned people asking for matches and being ignored, that has happened to me most of the times I sign in - which, admittedly, are getting rarer and rarer. I'd also like to address Chase who said...

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.

I think your overall lenience is offputting to members. I often open up BSS, see a very weird/borderline conversation - yes, I've seen some about masturbation, some with people just randomly swearing - and just quit. It's very intimidating and even if it's not always like that, and I somehow just always come at a bad time, I don't see a reason it should ever be like that.

 

[champagnepapi]

I don't come here much ;-;. I realise that this is a bit delayed, and the topic has moved on a bit, but I just wanted to give my point of view as an outsider to the battling community.

I only go on the server to play some fun matches, I don't play competitively and I don't stick around there for chatting. Some members have mentioned people asking for matches and being ignored, that has happened to me most of the times I sign in - which, admittedly, are getting rarer and rarer. I'd also like to address Chase who said...



I think your overall lenience is offputting to members. I often open up BSS, see a very weird/borderline conversation - yes, I've seen some about masturbation, some with people just randomly swearing - and just quit. It's very intimidating and even if it's not always like that, and I somehow just always come at a bad time, I don't see a reason it should ever be like that.

Hey Magic, thank you for the input! Its very valuable actually to see what users who are hesitant of being involved in this community want, and what is off-putting about it to them. I think chat control is definitely an issue that needs to be adressed, since you arent the only one affected by its content. Anyways we do have some more casual leaning tours and events from time to time that might be worth joining, and I know most of the people posting in this thread would love to give you a battle. We also occasionally have tournaments hosted on the server itself ("script tours"), many in non ou formats, which are pretty fun, although theyve been less common lately.

 

[Sirfetch’d]

I don't come here much ;-;. I realise that this is a bit delayed, and the topic has moved on a bit, but I just wanted to give my point of view as an outsider to the battling community.

I only go on the server to play some fun matches, I don't play competitively and I don't stick around there for chatting. Some members have mentioned people asking for matches and being ignored, that has happened to me most of the times I sign in - which, admittedly, are getting rarer and rarer. I'd also like to address Chase who said...



I think your overall lenience is offputting to members. I often open up BSS, see a very weird/borderline conversation - yes, I've seen some about masturbation, some with people just randomly swearing - and just quit. It's very intimidating and even if it's not always like that, and I somehow just always come at a bad time, I don't see a reason it should ever be like that.

Very good points here! I wanted to say though that these topics you are referring to are totally not OK at all. Before the server was recognized "officially" by PC, we did allow more sexual topics and weren't cracking down on such things but now everything must remain in line with what is allowed on PC itself. If I were to come on a new server and see them talking about masturbation I would immediately leave because as you said it is offputting. Eliminating these types of discussions is a top priority for us staff right now because if we are bettering the server overall we can't have outright explicit chats.

 

[Pokedra]

I'd also propose to ban Twitter-like spam. I think getting rid of this kind of chat like this would go a long way to making newbies feel at ease since it's easier for a newbie to join a discussion on competitive talk or a topic (says some news) rather then 2-3 people talking about their lunch.

 

[Sirfetch’d]

While I do agree that for newbies looking to battle that entering on a chat centered around competitive battling would be better for them, we aren't just going to ban certain topics. That is turning the server into a dictatorship. You can't just go and alter the rules to include things like "no talking about your lunch", "topics about your pet are prohibited", etc. That just sounds silly and is way over the top. There is no way with as small of a community as we have that the server will be 100% competitive chat 100% of the time. There is just nothing wrong with small talk. We can still make the server more centered around competitive without completely changing the way it's run. As a community we just have to find a way to make the chats more balanced. Right now I'd say it's 70/30 with 70% being small talk. I'd say a good goal for our small of a community right now would be to try to bring it to 40/60 with the 60% being focused on competitive. Compromise is the key, not exclusion.