Lake Valor League

Maybe instead of gym leaders, and Elite Four member, a Battle Frontier style? There could be all sorts of different types of battles then. Maybe also have different difficulty tracks. One for new battlers, one for average battlers, and one for the ones that breath competitive battling. Same leaders, but they have some sort of handicap in easier tiers. I'd be interested in it either way. I join almost every battle thing on here.

 

Gladly. The battle types could be decided by popular vote. As for the other part:

The hardest track would have no handicaps, it would be an all out battle. Maybe for the mid track, it could be 4 or 5 vs 6. For the easy track, maybe the challenger can have one Pokémon that does not fit the requirements of the tier (within reason). So if it were monotype, they could have one Pokémon of a different type. That wouldn't work for random, but for Random, it could easily be 5 vs 6 for mid, and 4 vs 6 for easy. I was also thinking that the easy track would have the same handicap as the mid track too.

 

I would love the league to come back. I kind of like the idea of having different difficulties, but I feel like the way that that is done is important. Maybe just have one league, but as you said each member has two teams, one for newer players just getting used to competitive and another team for those familiar with competitive. There are many ways that you could lower the difficulty. I feel it's important to keep the Pokémon themselves should still have standard movesets and should be Pokémon that they are likely to encounter in competitive play (ruling out most PU Pokémon and mostly using Pokémon from RU and above). I also feel like keeping the EVs, IVs and level for these Pokémon are important so that they can get a feel for how much damage certain moves should be doing to certain Pokémon (and therefore know when the damage is irregular and so determine whether the set their opponent is using is particularly offensive/defensive). I think a way that it could be done would be that the lower difficulty team could be comprised of only 4 Pokémon (making sense considering most Gym leaders in the game have fewer than 6 mons) and maybe forcing them to all share a type (I believe in the original league the gym leaders could have two wildcards which didn't share the type of the gym, so this luxury would be taken away for the lower difficulty team). We could also allow people choosing to do this to lower difficult to change the movesets, spreads and abilities of their team between matches to allow them to figure out what is strong against these teams and what isn't. Counter teaming in itself is an important skill to have when it comes to reacting to changes in the meta and having that on a much smaller scale seems like a good place to start.

As for different kinds of metagames, I really feel having both a singles and a doubles format would be a great idea. Doubles can be a totally different format for people who have only really played singles and it can be really refreshing to play something new. I might be a bit biased there considering I love doubles but I really do think it could be a really good addition to the league if enough people were interested in it.

Anyway, as for solving the issues that you highlighted.
1. I honestly hope this gets solved with the release of sun and moon. Hopefully more people will be interested in Pokémon and want to join a community and get interested in competitive battling. We could have the league on a smaller scale or have 1 player have two badges with 2 teams of different types (and lower difficulty versions of each) so that they are challenged more frequently.
2.There could be some challenge modes added. If you beat all of the gym leaders using a monotype team of your own, or all Pokémon below a certain tier, or a monocolour team etc. Different LV Awards could be awarded for these.
3.Hopefully there would be a staff member willing to make sure everything ran smoothly.
4.LV OU seems pretty outdated. I mean the smogon tiers are all going to change with sun and moon, with many of the previously banned Pokémon being brought down to OU making the current LV OU tierlist redundant. I think it would be best to stick with the smogon tiers to be perfectly honest.
5.I really do feel like there should be some penalty to this. If you are gone for a 2 or 3 week period with people wanting to battle you I feel like you should be replaced by someone active, and if you know that you are going to be inactive for a period you should try to have somebody to take your place while your gone.

 

My League is an attempt to make a new and Improved Lake Valor League (Yuki even being Valor in Jap).

I'd love if @[member="Reborn"] and @[member="Endrew Swiftwind"] would check out my league and review it to see if it checks out to their standards, because I honest think it does :O!

 

Right, the old league. I wondered why there hasn't been anything happening with that. Well, I always like the idea of leagues, so I'm all for it, and I'll have a lot of time to take part in it. As for improvements, there's not really much I can say that Reborn hasn't already said I remember trying to qualify for being in the league, but it didn't work out so well. That was almost 2 years ago, though, and I'd like to think I've vastly improved since then, so if/when you guys bring this back, lemme know, and you'll have yourself a Ghost member in no time.

 

I was going to bring up the Yuki League as well until I saw Apawn's post. Why not have the Yuki League as more for anyone who wants to join and have the Lake Valor League a lot more competitive?

AND WHY DO I NEVER GET TO THE LEAGUES IN TIME TO CALL GHOST?!

 

I like the idea of the Yuki League, but I don't think its really worth joining any leagues until sun and moon comes out. It sounds like there's going to be a bunch of new changes (Z Moves might change things up, there are changes to things like statuses, alolan forms, new Pokémon etc.) and I feel like before any leagues are set up we should allow the metagame to form since at release people are going to use anything and everything trying to figure out what is strong. I also think that it should only be on Showdown for a multitude of reasons. Battles are harder to regulate on console, Pokémon need to be bred/genned which is tedious and deters newer players from joining, communication with your opponent is much more convoluted, making sure that you set the rules correctly and your moves have the correct sets and EVs/IVs (especially for hidden power) can be a pain, connection issues, shorter games meaning less of a reliance on the battle timer, the list kind of just goes on and on. And for the same reason I feel we should wait for sun and moon to come out since it would take showdown a while to code in all the new game mechanics and add the nice new 3d sprites for the new pokes

So yeah, sorry but I'm not really interested in joining a league until at least like a month after release of sun and moon.

 

I don't believe I ever played the Battle Frontier (or at least if I did it was waaaaay too long ago). How is this different to the Gym leaders/Elite Four dynamic? Are there different tiers of differing difficulties or something? Is there still the monotype rule for the 'Frontier Brains'? (which to be honest I wouldn't mind getting rid of but that's just me).

But if it's a similar thing just scaled down with different labels then I have no issues with that. What kind of ratios would we be looking for between Frontier Brains and challengers do you think? I personally don't really think random battles is a particularly good tier for a league like this. Firstly it's not a particularly well balanced format, it's not a good representative of what new players are likely to expect in other formats (damage calcs are skewed with the differing levels, movesets are bizarre and there are certain Pokémon that are complete deadweight even with a massive level buff). But other formats seem like they would be a great addition, though again it depends on the size of the league and how interested people would be in them. I personally love the idea of VGC17 being a part of it but that's probably just because I'm hyped for VGC17 in general But I would say stick with the OU tier for a while (especially considering it will take a while for the UU and below tiers to even be established).

And yeah, sorry for saying a lot of what Endrew already mentioned, I hadn't read his post before I made mine :/ (because I was still writing mine when he posted it lol).

 

That seems great then.

I like the idea of the different tiers, but not so much if it means the leaders use things that are uncompetitive. Another way that we could reduce the difficulty could be to provide people with a bit of information (like they do in Battle Factory) about the opponents team, like some of the Pokémon or some of their moves. Even if they aren't allowed to change up their team before the battle, knowing that the opponent has HP Fire on their Latios for example could be a big advantage.

I definitely think that the more formats the better, the issue is that there will be a large delay between the release and Sun and Moon and UU and RU being stable tiers. For the first few months people will be using anything and everything in OU trying to figure out what is good, with bans which are inevitable only making this process even more crazy. I wouldn't be surprised if it takes 2-3 months before the usage of the Pokémon are actually somewhat representative of how good the Pokémon is, and it is only at this point that UU will be introduced, at which point that whole process repeats itself before RU is established. That's a fairly long time to wait to start the league, at which point the new members who I expect/hope join LV with Sun and Moon may no longer be interested in getting in to competitive battling one the hype dies down. I may be totally wrong, as I often am, I just think that having a league that caters to people interested in competitive regardless of skill level close to the release of Sun and Moon would be great for getting people to stick around and be active in the community.

 

I'd say stay to ORAS Tiers till S/M Tiers are finalized

However, I think something elts needs to be talked about, Finally Making this Dream League a thing. I'm going to assume that everyone in here would want to help out yes?

So I think the things we all agree on is multiple tiers, credibility (At least I haven't herd any objections) and making it like the Battle Frontier/Frontier Brains

 

I kind of feel like nobody will want to play in the league if they aren't allowed to use the S/M mons, they'll just play S/M OU instead, and I kind of feel the same might be true for the lower tiers in our league if we put all of the S/M mons in OU. I know that I personally want to be using the new Pokémon as much as possible. I think the best way to go about it if we wanted lower tiers would be using S/M OU until S/M UU and below are released and use ORAS UU and below until then. It might be confusing for people that aren't familiar with smogons tiering system and I think it would make sense to encourage the newer players to get in to S/M OU more than the lower tiers since getting them used to an old metagame with different mechanics (like having different thunder wave and confusion mechanics etc.) doesn't seem like the best way to go about getting them in to competitive.

I don't really get the credibility thing, or at least how it would be relevant to this kind of league.

 

It be kindof a way to see if someone is still qualified to be a "Frontier Brain" kind of thing (You don't want someone who keeps on losing in a position like that, especially if its something you shouldn't be losing to) or at least a fair rotation of people in the positions so people don't become sour to the fact they may very be "important" (A higher position) in the league/inspired to achieve great things in Pokémon Metagaming (This is surprisingly important factor, the sourness thing, its been the end of almost every league I've been in, hence why I added "Gym Takeovers" in my League).

If that makes any sense.

 

Ahh okay yeah that makes sense. Though I think it's important to make sure that it's fair. We shouldn't replace somebody just because they've had their position for too long. I'm sure that's not what you were going to do anyway but I feel like there needs to be a way to decide who should be replaced that also represents the battles that they should and shouldn't be winning. I guess a way you could do it is the way they do it on the battle spot ladder, everybody starts at a certain number of (credibility) points, you gain and lose these from winning and losing matches. The difference between you and your opponents points determines how many points you gain/lose. That a long with the win/loss could be used to tell whether somebody needs to be replaced, or maybe when a challenger reaches the same number of points that the Frontier Brain has then they battle for their position. I haven't thought that all the way through but that seems like the fairest way to accommodate for the fact that there are some battles that the Frontier Brains should just be winning.

But yeah, takeovers are important in a league like this, though I feel like they should be reasonably hard to pull off.

Also, I think there should be an emphasis on teaching your opponent where they could improve in a battle after they lose, particularly for the easier difficulty. Everybody should be trying to improve at the end of the day and there's always a reason why you lost and usually a way that loss could have been prevented, even if its to hax or a poor prediction.

 

I've given all the thoughts that I have for this. I like the ideas being tossed around. However this works out, I'll join in and do my best to help in whatever position I end up in (whether it be challenger or whatever the titles end up being). I really like battling, so I doubt I'll lose passion for it anytime soon