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Lake Valor Showdown Server

Discussion in 'Festival Plaza' started by DuoM2, Sep 7, 2020.

  1. DuoM2

    Groudon Egg
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    Hello, everyone! Today, I have a special project I've been planning for quite some time now.

    I've officially created a private Showdown server for Lake Valor! So now, we have our own little space to battle. But what else does this mean? Well, we can add new Pokémon, items, abilities...but most importantly, we can add new playable tiers with our own custom rules. In this thread, as of right now, we'll be creating a Pokémon Showdown format as a community. We can make several changes if we want, including but not limited to the following (let me know if your idea isn't on here) -

    - Creating, removing, or modifying Pokémon, moves, abilities etc
    - Making custom changes to the type chart
    - Adding new rules or mechanics (similar to how AAA/Almost Any Ability allows you to use whatever ability on whatever Pokémon)

    What we could end up doing is just adding one new rule and centering everything around that, something along the lines of AAA. As for what the rule would be, we aren't required to follow this, but I have an idea that we can follow if everyone in this thread likes it...

    I think it would be best if we were to center this around the previously made Fakemon over Lake Valor's contests as a bonus prize for winning and to promote more submissions. There is a downside, though...

    upload_2020-9-7_13-56-15.png

    ...for the few Pokémon we have, there's way too many repeating typings. Jeydis's proposed solution was to make it like CAP where all OU Pokémon plus the new ones are legal, but the issue with this is that some of the Pokémon here likely won't fit very well into OU, so you'd have to put some bonus restriction on the Pokémon to let them see some use, and this might potentially restrict future competitive contests' rulesets. I think we could have the community submit a certain number of Fakemon as well, maybe 2 or 3 per person, and balance the meta around all of those while manually keeping the type diversity in check. Problem with that is that it might be difficult to make restrictions with so few Fakemon, and not everyone may end up willing to create so many.

    also if you want a link to that spreadsheet click here

    I'd like to mention again that we don't have to do any of the above. We don't have to use LV's contest winners at all. This is just me shooting out my personal favorite idea I've had. If we want to pick 30 Pokémon and balance them, sure. If we want to mix two existing metagames and balance that, sure. There's a lot we can do here, and don't let the fact that I'm shooting out an idea dissuade you from posting your own in the thread. I'd love to hear what you all come up with!

    This thread won't just be used for one format, though. We might end up expanding our horizons and allowing people to submit individual projects where only one person can make changes, and we might end up making more formats after we're done with the first one.

    As for the server, click or copy/paste this link if you want to go there (http://lake-valor.herokuapp.com-80.psim.us/). Just note that this server most likely will not be up when I'm away from my computer due to the fact that I'm using free software for this, and if I'm working on programming something for it, the server will constantly refresh and will end up being practically unusable. Please DM me on Discord if you want to use it and it's constantly refreshing or not loading.

    That's about it. @KnightBlader, @Mango and I will be watching over this thread to give opinions on ideas and to gauge whether or not they'd be good for a competitive scene. If you have any other questions, feel free to DM me on Discord.
     
    #1 Sep 7, 2020
    Last edited: Oct 1, 2020
    RadEmpoleon, Mango and Jeydis like this.
  2. KnightBlader

    Mina Ashido
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    Just gonna contribute something too I suppose:

    This is a bit of a wild one, for fun mostly but basically, we put all mons on a randomizer and then essentially allow like iunno a hundred of them in the format, this is gonna get rerandomized like each month or something. This is a really basic idea, and would need a bit of tuning (Ban Ubers? Disallow all unviable NFEs? Etc.) Would be a pretty cute custom for fun format though.
     
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  3. Jeydis

    Jeydis Midnight Gourmand

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    I like that idea, like a random mon rotation but with a bit more control over movesets etc.
     
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    #3 Sep 7, 2020
    Last edited: Sep 7, 2020
  4. DuoM2

    Groudon Egg
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    This isn't a bad idea, but there are a two things I'd want to add. I think it'd be best if we allowed other people to decide how to balance out Pokémon that are overpowered or underpowered, since undoubtedly the format's going to lack balancing in some way. Like if the defensive Pokémon that get chosen are mostly unviable, then the format becomes centered around hyper offense and would quickly get stale and centralized.

    Less to say on this part, and this one is a bit more subjective, but I personally think it'd be a bit more interesting if we'd have less Pokémon. There'd be less of a chance that things end up getting fully outclassed by others, although because it's random, we'd probably completely have to rework some Pokémon in the first place. A better number for this in my opinion would be 50, but I've seen formats work with half that before, possibly even less than that if we're crazy and want to try something new.
     
  5. KnightBlader

    Mina Ashido
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    To just get into some of those points, yes it can be unbalanced at times, that's why I suggested a fairly quick rotation cycle, to prevent staleness and keep format fresh. Adjustments, yeah, I suppose we could do that, that'd bite with quickrota though since if we give iunno Sudowoodo 60 more base Speed, by the time people are truly used to that, it may just be rotated out.
    Also less Pokémon doesn't always mean more balance, esp if randomized that typically isn't the case. A good example of this are the Gen 2 dominance of Blissey, the Gen 8 dominance of Clefable in post-home OU and the general stagnance of the Gen 8 BSS format.
    I think it's worth looking into but would need more discussing and understanding on what we want out of it.
     
  6. East

    East Look to the Stars

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    Hello! I decided to come back from the depths to respond to this thread!

    LV actually had its own PokemonShowdown! server back in the day, which is how I (among many others) came to join this community. That said, I use to help a lot with specific coding to help edit formats for things like LV Super Staff Bros (LVSSB) and LV's own OU tier. We also, for a short time, had a competitive format based on points (which I have been looking into reviving in some form).

    For this to be LV-sponsored, though, it'd be best to seek guidance and approval from our lovely admin team, either to work out costs of hosting or to make sure that it meets LV standards.

    If you're looking for help at any time @Duo, please let me know!
     
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  7. DuoM2

    Groudon Egg
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    I think it'd be much better to try and avoid something that we know would be unbalanced, and without modifying some of the Pokémon, this idea for a meta invites things like this to happen. The unbalanced Pokémon could end up like Zygarde-50 last gen where things are constantly adapting to it and there are always good checks, which I personally am fine with since it pushes the meta to change and allows for creativity. However, what I think is more likely is that something could end up like Naganadel where you have to use either Sp.Def Heatran or AV Tyranitar if you want any chance of it (on a balance team at least), which I'm honestly not a fan of, since it forces the meta into a chokehold and holds back your teamslots. Maybe it didn't have enough time to develop, but while the Naganadel meta did evolve a tiny bit more after that, the meta still didn't really see much change over the period of time Naganadel was allowed, leading for it to be super stale.

    I honestly think it's possible we get either, but more likely that we get something broken on the level of Naganadel in any given slate. Maybe one of us can roll a bunch of Pokémon just to theorycraft some of it, but I don't think it's too unlikely to see a format where RNG just so happens to give one playstyle or Pokémon significantly less counterplay than the rest. This is why I think it'd be the best to have community involvement. If you think it's an issue with quick rotation, then maybe we can make it 2 months, and maybe during the periods we can balance the upcoming slate so there won't be much to change when it ends up coming out.

    I wasn't saying that it means greater balance, but I think that it means there would be less Pokémon that would end up having zero niche, especially if we balanced it. Like, it'd be more interesting to see a format where Dustox was reworked to be useful than to see half of the legal Pokémon not being good at all and having stuff like Toxapex or Kartana on top again.

    Although, admittedly, this part is fully subjective, and I should have mentioned that this was IF we wanted community involvement. I think if we don't want community involvement then we'd kind of need more Pokémon to try and get more counterplay for the inevitable higher tier Pokémon.

    I actually did see someone mention in the Discord that they had a Showdown server at one point and I was completely unaware that it had ever existed up until today. I would likely be able and willing to program its older formats that you mentioned (except for maybe the points format, i'm not entirely sure what all that would entail), and I'm all for people using this for bigger projects.

    As for sponsoring, that's something I actually hadn't even thought about. I was perfectly fine with this being a smaller server that was only ever used for major events like Oktoberfest and Scramble aside from the community format idea. I might be able to talk to someone who has a subscription on the website I'm using for this, and if it would be at all possible for him to lump me in with his subscription, it would be totally free for us. So costs would be covered. As for meeting their standards, I'm going to be making them all staff on the server anyways but it's still worth discussing.

    I'll be sure to let you know if I need help though, thanks!
     
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  8. DuoM2

    Groudon Egg
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    Making a quick post to mention that the old link will not work anymore. I had several problems with the older server, some of which made the server itself completely unusable without completely recreating it from scratch. This was because the website that I was hosting it on was riddled with bugs that were often difficult to work around. No amount of work I could do would be able to fix it, so multiple times I've had to abandon the project and copy/paste all the code onto a new one. Because of all of the problems I've had, I needed to migrate to a new website, so the URL had to be updated to http://lake-valor.herokuapp.com-80.psim.us/. Everything I'm using to do this is still free so the website goes down if I'm not actively using it, and you'll still have to message me if you want it to go up.
     
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  9. Katanaeyegaming

    Katanaeyegaming #FEARTHEWYVERN

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    I happen to be one of the people who found the server back in the day. Those certainly were the days weren't they?
     

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