The future of the league

When I first posted a thread in Forum Discussion in early 2007, asking whether or not people would be interested in some sort of Diamond and Pearl online league, I got a pretty good response. It seemed like a lot of people thought it would be fun, so Butterfree set up the forum and Mudkip and I tried to get things started. For the first couple of months, everything seemed to be going relatively well--we had some tournaments, got some of the gyms set up, and people were actually participating. Now... not so much. Shortly before the forum crash last summer activity started to die down, and it's been pretty much flatlining ever since.

Now, I know that life and school and unreliable Wi-Fi access happen. I sure have school to deal with, I know that much, and things like that need to be dealt with before silly little online Pokémon battles. But the total apathy this part of TCoD is experiencing puzzles me. No one is even attempting to try the gyms, hardly anyone signs up for even the most general, simplistic tournaments... are you saying that almost all of you honestly have zero time to do anything at all? I admit that there haven't been as many tournaments or events as of late, but that's because I'm worried that I'll devote all this time to setting them up and then, as usual, no one will participate at all, or people will start but then fail to finish without so much as a warning (and it's rarely because they're actually unable to finish--I still see people with unfinished battles or unclaimed prizes or whatever on TCoD and doing other things nearly every single day). I might try for a few more badges of my own, but at this point I doubt that most of the gym leaders even remember they have gyms.

So now I'm asking you: if the league really isn't enough to hold your interest as it is now, then what do you want? I've tried setting up gym leaders, I've tried tournaments, I've tried events, and yet this corner of TCoD continues to go largely ignored, or people start things but then seem to forget about them halfway through. I've put a lot of work into thinking of new things for people to do around here, and I don't want it to have been for nothing.

One idea I had was possibly extending the scope of the league to include Shoddy Battle tournaments and events as well. This would be easier for some people to work with, as it requires less preparation time before battles, more choices and only needs an internet connection, not a functioning wireless connection. Without our own server, of course, that means we'd have to do everything on someone else's server, most likely the official one, which probably won't be an issue but you never know.

And is it not clear enough that the battles, etc. that go on around here aren't all competitive in nature? Several people on TCoD like to complain about how "cruel" or "stupid" or whatever competitive battling is, and sometimes sign up saying that they aren't going to participate in gyms and tournaments for that reason. There is an entire half of the Wi-Fi forum set up for players who are not competitive. So why isn't anyone using it?

What else do you want? Do you want the gym system to be handled differently? More tournaments? More kinds of tournaments? More events, no events, different kinds of events? A ranking system? I can't make this interesting if I don't know what you're interested in, so you guys have to tell me what you want me to do to keep things entertaining around here.

I mean, come on. Several of you gave input as to what you wanted in the Christmas event, but for all the suggestions and apparent attempts at enthusiasm hardly anyone tried anything. I asked what you guys would be interested in doing, so if you weren't interested then why bother suggesting? I feel like I sort of wasted my time trying to put that together. I don't want to have to keep worrying about finding things for you all to do if you aren't going to do them, so tell me what you really want.

Who knows, maybe no one's really all that interested in anything at all and this whole thing has been an exercise in futility. But if it is, then I need to know that so I'm not wracking my brains and feeling bad about not keeping you all amused when you really don't care.

I would've definitely entered the Metronome-only tournament if I had any access to WiFi at the time (my only WiFi access is through my school's wireless internet, so now that I'm back in school, I'll probably be more active in this part of the board overall; maybe even try some of the gym battles eventually, now that I know that one of the two gym boards isn't so saturated with the competitive-battling stuff.)

So I'd like to see more tournaments with wonky rules like that. Maybe a tournament where you can only use untrained level 1 Pokémon (with all egg moves besides Sonicboom or Dragon Rage allowed, but no using TMs or stat-boosting vitamins.) Or something like the old Pika Cup rules from the Stadium games--no Pokémon that can't be obtained at level 20 or lower in the 3rd or 4th-gen games.

I've wanted to kick the Crystal League's ass for a while now. I would've tried a gym battle already if not for the fact that I'm a huge procrastinator and I still haven't come up with a decent team (non-competitive, of course; competitive has far too many numbers for me).

That, and some tournaments like El Garbanzo said. I'm always nervous about entering stuff, so that's why I've not entered anything besides the gym tournament. :/

I'm fine with everything quite honestly. I've no idea why it's flatlined. :/

Well, I'd like to think that I'm fairly active, but obviously my lack of wi-fi recently has been an issue. In light of that, I don't know that I'm really the best person to take a stab at this question, since I don't really have a problem with the way the league is being run.

First of all, wi-fi activity is down everywhere. It was all cool and novel when it first came out and everyone needed XYZ to finish their pokédex, but by this point it's been a couple years and people are kinda looking ahead to Platinum. There are few places where requests for wi-fi battles and trades are still brisk.

Second, this community does indeed have more casual than competitive battlers. As a result, people probably tend to assume that they wouldn't be welcome here, just because it's a "league" and people are used to those being full of IV-grinding people. I think this means that Shoddy isn't the answer. Wi-fi has its problems, to be sure: an annoying tendency to slow up/fail, the requirement that people arrange FC's and usually times in advance rather than just hanging out on a server, waiting for someone to show up... but ultimately, Shoddy just isn't that attractive to the casual battler.

On the other hand, it would solve some of your problems: people signing up for something and then being all, "Nope, sorry, guess not." People say they want fun, novel tournaments and stuff, and then they find out they actually need to train something for those, at which point they lose interest. With Shoddy this obviously isn't a problem, but at the same time, Shoddy is definitely more geared towards the competitive battler. One of the primary reasons I said that the metronome thing on Shoddy would be lame: there are no attack animations. To me, that's pretty much the entire point of metronome. Just having the little line of text, "Togepi used draco meteor" coming up isn't as appealing as seeing those flaming rocks raining down all over your screen. Shoddy is quick and efficient, but that's something that doesn't appeal as much to people who want novelty battles in the first place.

For the most part, I think that the lack of activity is due to the low number of members. Like I said, wi-fi venues almost everywhere are suffering. TCoD doesn't have a reputation as a wi-fi center, and it's a fairly small forum. The league itself is a small forum shoved way down by RPG's and such. People don't see a lot of other people doing stuff here, so they're not motivated to do anything themselves. It's kind of a vicious circle. There's tons of other places people can find wi-fi trades and battles on the internet; if the forum looks dead, it stands to reason that they're going to be able to get what they want faster somewhere else. I guess... the best way to proceed would be to advertise more, maybe? I know that's sort of a strange thing, because you'd be advertising to people that already go here, but just to different areas of the forums. Sort of be like, "Hey, we have a league here, and we're doing some cool stuff like X, why don't you come check it out?"

I'm not very good at advertising myself... in fact, I try to avoid it wherever possible. However, I was going to record some of my battles in the league, you know, put them up on YouTube and put a link to them in my signature. At that point, hey, maybe some people would watch them, maybe think they looked kind of fun or want to battle me or something, and check the place out, right? Of course, then my USB adapter told my computer that it wanted to see other people, but that was the idea.

What you're really fighting against isn't so much that there's any real problem with the league's construction, but just with the nature of people on the internet. People are all excited to sign up for something, then they end up not doing anything with what they signed up for. That's why almost no RPG's ever finish, why there's a bajillion people in the ASBank records but only maybe fifteen that are active in the game on a regular basis, and so on. This isn't Smogon, where there are thousands of people and people fall all over each other trying to get tournament slots. If you can attract more members, and most importantly a small core of members that people can see are reliably active and interested in the league, then you should be fine. Whether they're casual or hardcore battlers, it doesn't matter; people are used to internet projects sinking because everyone jumps ship. If you can see that something is there to stay, then they're more likely to stick around and invest themselves in it.

Edit: Dear god how did that end up so long?

El Garbanzo: More weird stuff, right. I've never really done Little Cup-type things before aside from some staged battles in XD, but this isn't the first time it's been suggested. I can look into that, sure.

Negrek: Well, yes, I can understand the "need" bit wearing off; the trading area, for example, isn't what I'm worried about, and I'm not exactly expecting the place to be as active as it was when it first started. Just... not gathering dust, is all. And I've always been the first to say that it isn't Smogon around here (for different reasons, but still). As you said, it's really just trying to find ways to get people interested in things... which I have tried to do, and others have occasionally tried to do, and which has, as of yet, not worked very well at all. The problem is that people see this place and aren't finding anything interesting to do, and yet when I ask for what they'd find interesting I don't exactly get a favorable response. Either no one says or tries anything or they do but then back out, which makes me question how interested they were in their own ideas in the first place. It's getting that small core of active people together that's my main concern, and wherever it goes from there is wherever it goes from there.

As for Shoddy, yes, well, I understand that it is really intended for competitive play, but the non-competitive players can easily ignore the EV and IV adjustment if they'd like and just slap six Pokémon and twenty-four moves together. It isn't the same at all, I agree, and I really do prefer Wi-Fi myself, but the ease of use is just so attractive that I figured I'd suggest it anyway. I did forget that there weren't any attack animations, though (shows how often I use it). That sucks.

"Advertising" is something I guess I could try... at the very least, I should probably link to this thread in my signature.

You also mentioned Platinum, which I guess is something else. The people who get that might gain some renewed interest in Wi-Fi, and depending on how easy it is to work out (I have no idea, I still haven't done much with it myself) we could do quicker, sillier things like having small groups meet in Wi-Fi Square and play the little games or whatever. At the very least, by the time the original novelty wears off, that small group of people with some semi-regular interest might have formed and might stick around.

Also, I completely fail to understand why no one wants to claim free prizes after they've already won them. That's a slightly different matter, I suppose, but still, it makes zero sense.

Also, I completely fail to understand why no one wants to claim free prizes after they've already won them. That's a slightly different matter, I suppose, but still, it makes zero sense.

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Well, I can understand it just of because what a bitch wi-fi can be to use. Most of my event pokémon I've picked up from free giveaways people have done online. You know, "I made 40 clones of my movie Regigigas, who wants one?" But then you get on there, and then your DS won't connect and you have to restart your computer, and then when you get to the connection screen you can't see the other person, and then you have to reset your connection. And then when you try to connect to the other person, you get that "not responding" error crap like three times before you can actually make the trade. I mean, there was one giveaway I signed up for twice and I didn't get anything either time because my DS wasn't cooperating (turns out the pokémon in question was totally a hack BUT it's the principle of the thing!). Wi-fi is just a nasty hassle any way you slice it, and that's not even throwing time zones into the mix. I honestly can see not picking up prizes if you're not willing to put up with that sort of crap.

If you're that paranoid about Wi-Fi trouble, though, why would you sign up for a free prize in the first place? I'm not talking about tournament prizes or anything, more like the totally free, no strings attached Christmas prizes. If you don't think you'll be able to claim the prize... then... don't put your name in the drawing? Only one person has actually spoken to me about it at all, so it isn't a matter of trying, failing and giving up.

Ah, in that case, I guess it would just be another case of people deciding to do something and then not really caring in the end. It's rather inexplicable, but in the end, that's just the way a lot of people are. I take it you sent them all PM's or something to remind them that they had prizes they needed to take?

I did, though I think it may have been during hangup time and so if they didn't get multiple PMs they may not have gotten them at all, I guess.

Include Shoddy, or make this Shoddy-only. I <3 Shoddy.

A lot of people don't like Shoddy, and while it would bring in other people removing Wi-Fi entirely would just alienate a bunch of others. I'm not trying to do anything that would make the group of interested people even smaller. :/

I really need to get out my copy of Diamond and participate here more. I apologize for having not been active here; my original Diamond became a victim of the washing machine and I had to grab a new one... totally killed my interest in Pokemon. I do have a new copy, though, and I think I'm going to get it out and work on getting a decent team together again.

Okay, so. There's some interest in Shoddy as well as in more varied tournaments. Anything else? Any particular suggestions as to what to do with Shoddy (just a few tournaments, a separate league-type setup, maybe testing a modded server on the side, etc.)?

And according to Serebii, Platinum seems to support Wi-Fi joint Battle Tower runs in addition to DS-to-DS runs. This doesn't really seem like anything that would work for competitions, but at least there'd be a venue for people to set that sort of thing up if they wanted to try the Tower with another TCoDer. So I suppose there's that if nothing else, unless someone can think of something more to do with that.

Any particular suggestions as to what to do with Shoddy (just a few tournaments, a separate league-type setup, maybe testing a modded server on the side, etc.)?

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Well, to do any sort of server modding, we'd need someone willing and able to host the server, yes? If so, then yeah, it would be nice to have our own server to muck around with the rules on. Other than that, a gym leader setup might be nice, but people already don't really use the gyms that are there and we still don't really know how many people would really be interested in Shoddy, so for now I would say that just a tournament or two to try it out would be best.

An RPG server thing would be cool but would both require loads of setup and possibly scripting and be getting sort of really far away from "wi-fi" and "league," but eh.

We do have a private server here that's just collecting dust - I'd love to put it to good use, if you ever need one.

Okay, so before I trouble Retsu with setting up a Shoddy server or anything like that, one last call for opinions on Shoddy. Or anything else. Really, I'm open to anything reasonable at this point.

For the time being it would probably be for the best not to worry about modding the server and just set up a standard one; after we see how well that does we can start discussion about making modifications and what sort of modifications we'd like to make, if any. It would probably require a second server, of course, but as I said we'll worry about that when we come to it.

Erm. I'd play on Shoddy, but I haven't joined Wi-Fi because I have to steal it from my friend's house, and the connection is bull. So yeah. =P

Eh, sure. Might be a good idea to figure out what, exactly, we're going to be doing with it before we go and make it.

Will the league still be mostly Wi-Fi based? I'm not planning to go on Shoddy again any time soon.

This is just an idea, but would it be possible to branch out into other games than DP? For example, people seem to have interest in Brawl; there are quite a few topics about it. Just asking, of course.