Hey everyone! I'm back after taking a much needed break from writing. I know I haven't been super direct with what my ultimate goal is with these posts, so this one will be a much clearer statement of my purpose and what I hope to achieve. This one will be much much longer as I have a lot to get to, and they flow rather seamlessly (at least in my head). Please bear with me, and thank you!
To state it plainly, NB forums are a shell of their former self. Many players can attest that they'd check everyday what was going on the forums. They were exciting back when we first started. Now a lot of players seldom check the forums. There isn't many threads, or not many interesting ones, or ones worth commentating on. NPA seems to be the only time people get on the forums. To me, this is a problem. New players don't have a place to go to learn from the better players. They don't have an example to follow, or a role model. Sure, there's the handful of YouTube players who are doing a lot of good, but they're it. But for the most part communication is one way. There are many questions the players still have, but no place for them to be answered.
For example, when Unreality made the thread about Aegislash, people weren't sure why running speed on Aegislash was a good thing. And in theory, you can easily understand why they think this. In a vacuum, fast Aegi can lose the 1v1 if they both Shadow Ball. It took a good player to have to explain to them that faster Aegi has more options in that situation, and why it was better. This is what our communication is missing, and I think a lot of newer players learned something that day.
But instead, you see bad RMT threads or bad posts in Competitive with hundreds of views from other novice players and no one gets the knowledge they need to in order to improve. It's a negative feedback loop and it takes a good player to break the cycle. I understand the RMT section is a massive issue to tackle, and I'll get to that eventually, but objectively there isn't a whole lot of quality content going into that section, and no one is being empowered to do something there. But I digress.
Players need to learn somewhere. NB is a perfect place for it. The articles we get are a good jumping off point, but they only go so far. They don't teach players how to learn from the game, or fully explain things. To a lot of good players things seem intuitive. It makes sense to run Aegi with Speed EVs, it makes sense to run Flamethrower on Charizard-Y, it makes sense to love Gastrodon. New players don't get these things. And its our job to help them.
But why? Is it just that the new players aren't just getting better? Our game is growing at a healthy rate, what's the big deal? Pokemon is growing. I think we can say that rather safely. Our numbers increased a lot in the past few years, but our numbers can grow faster. For example, when looking at the CP spreadsheet Gavin managed for 2014 and 2015, objectively it looks like we had a huge growth between those years (544 players in 2014 and 1259 in 2015). These numbers are met with a dark side. Of the players in 2014 who's only achievement was a T64 at a regional (the lowest placement to get CP), 77% of those players did not return the next season, and only 9% went to more than one event in 2015 (which literally means going to 2 PCs for some).
I'm going to repeat that since if that doesn't set off a red flag what the hell is wrong with you. 77% of players in the bottom of the CP standings will not return next year. Oh, that guy who killed your resistance because he's new? Don't worry! Chances are he won't be back next year! Forget about it!
Oh, but Kenan, I bet that's only the bad players who aren't good. I'm sure the players who do well don't quit in such droves! I hope you're sitting down because you cannot be more wrong. Of the 544 players who were on the CP standings in 2014, 57.7% of all players did not return in 2015. ALMOST 60% did not return. And of the 544, only 30% attended more events then they did the year before (and with only 2 PC limit finish in 2014, it's not hard to do that, but people aren't).
Now, the sample size on this data is small, I have only one years worth of data to compare, and there are very valid reasons why some people do not return or maybe they don't get CP, however this should not throw out the evidence. This is a serious problem for our community. Unreality said on the forums when talking about the RMT section, "I don't know why I should be involved in teaching a specific single player if there is no guarantee that player will even be around in a week." You know what, he's right! He's right 77% of the time for novice players and 60% of the time for all players. This is a problem! People won't feel the need to help others if the chances they will return are so low.
We need to fix this, and I have some ideas as to why the average player quits, and how we could fix this. I've discussed this with several people, and I think this is something that NEEDS to happen desperately.
Now, be honest: how many of you reading this would still be playing if you didn't perform well early on in your time playing VGC? I know I wouldn't be here if I didn't win a Regional and meet an amazing group of friends. Manoj told me today he wouldn't be playing if he didn't T4 Nats in 2012. I know many many people who haven't been relevant for a while, but still play the game. Why? It's simple: the community. Simon said: "I wouldn't be here if it weren't for the amazing people I've met all these years of playing." This is how many of the players feel who haven't done well in a while. We still go to Nationals and get on Skype simply to hang out with our friends.
But would we get to meet our friends if we we didn't do well? Think of a big name in the community and try and find one that doesn't have a big placement that brought them into the community. There aren't many. It's rare that people don't perform exceptionally well at events and still manage to get into the community. It's an unspoken right of passage, you have to perform well to hang with the big kids. Denying this is naive.
So what does that mean for the people who don't do well? Well, for the most part they get ignored. Their forum posts have less merit, their articles have next to no merit, and people pass up on them. They don't make the friends that we all cherish, and there isn't anything keeping them in the game. They tried their hand, they didn't succeed, and now they move on. To fix this, I suggest we simply give them a place to play with people of their skill level and host tournaments. But Kenan, we have Lives and Showdown Tourneys! Shut up. Lives are worth something (invite to Invitational) and Showdown Tourneys are dominated by the same handful of players over and over and over again. Gavin one night literally dumpstered kids and won like 4 in a row before going to bed. They are not a good place for newer players to go to play against other players of their skill, and showdown ladder and battle spot ladder is often filled with players who reset cart / new alts who just dumpster them at 1000 / 1500 rating (Showdown and BS respectively).
Hosting new tournaments with no incentive, that good players do not participate in is good for the scene. This gives new / undervalued players a place to show their skills and make sort of a name for themselves. Online tournament hold some merit. Lunar got drafted by Angel in NPA for 3k because Angel knew he performed well on lives, and ended up having one of the best records in all of NPA! We need a place to cultivate new players. Regionals is demoralizing, Nationals is demoralizing, PCs can be demoralizing, Lives are demoralizing, Showdown Tourneys are demoralizing. We need help.
Here's the thing. All those tournaments are bad for one reason, and one reason only: no one knows who anyone is. To a brand new player attending their first event, or just entering the community, no one knows anyone's real names. We all have moved to Twitter and not all of use have our real names with our handle. If you're new, there's only a handful of players who's name you know: Aaron Zheng, Wolfe Glick, Ray Rizzo, Alex Oglaza, and probably Jeudy Azzarelli and other top World's players. But lets say you get paired up Round 1 against someone named Michael Lanzano. Who the fuck is this guy? I've never heard of him in my life. Yet this random BTFO's you. That's terrible for morale! You, as a new player, have no idea that Michael is a former world's competitor, and has won regionals before. You don't know! There's no way for new players to know who is good and who is not. You cannot tell.
All events in our current circuit and even online force new players to play with experienced players, and they don't know why they're getting stomped repeatedly. They just know they got their ass handed to them by a random. And when good players have a bad start to their day (Angel at Nats started 1-2) and you get paired up with him at 1-2, you're expecting him to not be crazy good. But when he 4-0s you two games in a row you feel like absolute shit. You wonder why you're getting beat so badly by players with negative records. They shouldn't be that good, but you have no idea you played one of the best players in the US and just mad unlucky.
Other esports do this all the time. I don't follow more than DotA, but there are tournaments where one or two tier 1 teams play with a bunch of tier 3 and 2 teams. There are teams who get paired up with EG, Fnatic, Empire, or whatever top team is invited, very early on. However, they don't feel like shit if they get stomped. Ah damn, they think, we just got unlucky and played the best team early on and got eliminated. They KNOW who is good. If you're a new player to Pokemon and you draw Gavin Michaels, you aren't gonna know he's about to unleash the biggest can of whoop ass you've ever seen. But if you get paired up against EG, you sure know it's coming.
Now, that one is a little harder to fix. We cannot all brag about all our past accomplishments to demoralize our opponents before the match, we cannot all get sponsored and wear the gear (and people wear their favorite organization to be a fan anyway so that doesn't work). There isn't a major fix to that one. But what we can do is create tournaments that are more friendlier to new players. A tournament without the top players. A tournament where the newer players can feel good about themselves instead of repeatedly getting stomped by players who have been around the block.
To do this, we need something from the players. We need the good ones to self-select who should and should not be qualified to play. It has to be a silent one. We cannot make the requirement to play "has gone negative at an event," or something, as that only makes people feel bad about themselves. It has to be open for everyone, but big players will not play in them. In addition, we need people to host tournaments, and we need a place for these players to get respect for their achievement. Winning these tournaments is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. It does not give cash like the major and does not give CP like a PC or Regional, but they need to feel empowered and good about winning. Whether we get a hall of fame or something where that goes, or make an announcement post on the NB twitter is something we could do. It's small, it's easy, and it gives name recognition to newer players.
We need to do SOMETHING for new players, because as it stands we can say goodbye to 726 players in circuit. If you don't think that is a serious problem you are sorely mistaken.
As always, thank you for reading all this shit. Post comments on the NB thread. I am aware my method of calculating players going AWOL is flawed in some sense, but that is literally the only way I am able to get a rough estimate without asking TPCI to see what Player IDs were and were not used from 2014 to 2015. Unless that data is released, my numbers are the best we have.
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