Hogg
grubbing in the ashes
Alright, spent a few minutes last night having Feelings about UU not being in SPL despite having been pushing for a dual-SPL structure for the past couple of years, because the reality of seeing the tier you've worked hard on to build for half a decade leaving your favorite tour is hard even when you think it's the right decision overall. But now it's morning and I've had my coffee so it's time to talk about something more serious: casting snakes out of IrelandSmogon and making sure that the new summer team tour is every bit as good as SPL.
Because, like, that's the point, right? I know some people wanted to see the team tours split up because they wanted an excuse to kick out lower tiers, but for me it was about making sure that BOTH tours stayed prestigious and competitive.
So, how do we build the absolute best possible team tournament for our summer team tour? Unlike Eo in his previous post I'm not going to refer to it as Snake for the sake of convenience because if we're doing this right, we should be doing it from scratch. We don't need to be tied down by any association with Snake or any other tour (even SPL! except that personally I love SPL so I'll probably model most of my own preferences off of it).
Starting from scratch, here are the things that would need to be hammered out:
Later gators.
Because, like, that's the point, right? I know some people wanted to see the team tours split up because they wanted an excuse to kick out lower tiers, but for me it was about making sure that BOTH tours stayed prestigious and competitive.
So, how do we build the absolute best possible team tournament for our summer team tour? Unlike Eo in his previous post I'm not going to refer to it as Snake for the sake of convenience because if we're doing this right, we should be doing it from scratch. We don't need to be tied down by any association with Snake or any other tour (even SPL! except that personally I love SPL so I'll probably model most of my own preferences off of it).
Starting from scratch, here are the things that would need to be hammered out:
- Branding
- Tournament name
- Theme, if applicable (but let's not make the mistake of being so locked into a theme that we get forced into something either milquetoast or silly again please!)
- Team names
- Art! SPL looks so goddamned professional since Zracknel's revamp. Having coordinated art just puts everything on a whole new level.
- Team drafting process
- Draft style
- Snake draft
- Round-robin allocation (aka Shittier Snake Draft)
- Expansion draft (essentially a way to create retentions in a draft system by giving teams the ability to "protect" certain players)
- Prolly a bunch of others, I don't know, I don't really follow non-American draft sports but I bet there are a million draft models out there
- Auction
- Standard SPL-style money auction
- Sealed auction (teams submit bids on players but cannot see other bids, highest bid wins)
- Sell-back auction (basically, allow teams to place purchases back into the auction pool, in which case the money from the winning bid goes back to them)
- Two-stage auction (variant of the above except one initial auction, usually sealed bid, then a second live auction where teams put players back on the market - so basically initially teams would be created by running a sealed bid auction, which doesn't need to be live, and then the live auction would be teams offering up their own players for sale)
- Dutch auction (basically a reverse auction, only really works with the above two-stage system - teams wanting to sell players would declare a price for a player, and keep lowering the price until someone agrees to pay it, if no one accepts after a certain period of time then they keep the player)
- Qualification-based metrics (need to meet XYZ requirements to qualify for a team)
- A/B leagues
- Variant of above, where teams are drafted from pools of players in smaller or separate tournaments
- Draft style
- Format and Tiers Played
- Please, for the love of god, no more 4 CG OU slots
- Tiers included
- Multi-tier slots?
- Total team slots
- Number of subs?
- In money auctions, fewer required subs = more competitive auction, more required subs = more forgiving auction
- Weeks? Pools? Bo1? Bo3? Who qualifies for playoffs?
- Number of teams?
- Team Continuity
- Retentions
- SPL system
- Re-auction (essentially you auction off your retains, several ways of doing this, including incorporating it into the second stage of a two-stage auction system)
- Full retention of teams from year to year plus a free agent system! It's teal6's dream!
- Expansion or reserve draft
- Retentions
- Promotion
- If you build it, they will come - a lot of what makes a tour prestigious is promotion, site resources, casting, advertising, etc. We're in kind of a unique opportunity in that we can start building up this tour now, and create the structure with this in mind. A bit harder to talk about but maybe let's make sure to include social media/livecasting folks in the discussion and figure out ways we can hype this tour beyond the standard "random facebook/twitter blurbs a couple of weeks before it starts and maybe a power rankings that enAds up coming out a week into the tour because whoops!"
- Art falls under branding technically but it's definitely important here, too
- Scheduling
- Obviously with most of 2021 presumably scheduled already things are probably a bit restricted here but it's still theoretically possible to shift things around
Later gators.