... except not IRC; the Tournaments room on the PS! server. I have a feeling a Room Owner or the sort is going to already move ahead with writing an article over the Tournaments room, but if not then I'll jump on that ship before it sets. As for what to include, I've got the idea to make it essentially a conglomerate of all the general conventions of Tournaments as well as user-created tournament formats, how each of them works and the logistics behind hosting one in particular, and official tournaments, how they work, when they're hosted, so on and so forth.
For the typical Smogon lobby user that's looking for a tournament, they're often directed to the Tournaments room, which is natural, but have no idea what any of it's about until they're in the room and then have to navigate a bunch of links to learn protocol. I wouldn't expect a lengthy article to be a blanket solution to what isn't necessarily a problem, but at least it's the answer is a CTRL + F away in this instance. In any case a place where Tournaments is thoroughly fleshed out without having to finagle through a bunch of links to find what one is looking seems to be the most beneficial in my mind's eye.
That said, I've got this in mind as something of a breakdown:
For the typical Smogon lobby user that's looking for a tournament, they're often directed to the Tournaments room, which is natural, but have no idea what any of it's about until they're in the room and then have to navigate a bunch of links to learn protocol. I wouldn't expect a lengthy article to be a blanket solution to what isn't necessarily a problem, but at least it's the answer is a CTRL + F away in this instance. In any case a place where Tournaments is thoroughly fleshed out without having to finagle through a bunch of links to find what one is looking seems to be the most beneficial in my mind's eye.
That said, I've got this in mind as something of a breakdown:
- Tournaments Etiquette: It's important to remember that there's plenty of rules in Tournaments, a lot of which are similar to other rooms. However, there's a few in particular that one should familiarize themselves with and I want to briefly mention them here and their importance. For instance, the fact spoilers are banned and how the use of bold is limited to tournament adverts. A grand majority don't understand that spoilers greatly disrupt the flow of chat and that bold is reserved for adverts for a very similar reason. Other things to cover would be when it's okay to join your own tournament [specifically, which self-hosted tournaments you aren't permitted to join], hosting during Official Tournaments, etc. Mentally a lot of the proposed topics are blending together so I'm trying to mitigate that potential disaster by separating them as much as possible in the draft.
- User-Created Formats: Recently some of the old user-created content was removed from the master page, but there's still a lot of very popular formats such as Catch & Evolve, which is arguably the most requested tournament format that I have seen in my time in Tournaments, as well as Survivor and Hunger Games. I've personally never participated in nor hosted the latter two since long tournaments are not my cup of tea, but it's easy enough to know what goes on during one based on the rules of play, plus an explanation is an ask away if necessary.
- Tournament Hosting: Currently all hosting tips and procedures are spread out on various pages and there's a lot of steps to everything so I want to collate this into more of a casual description of what goes into it all. Procedures are rather specific (1, 2) which is very likely so the numbest of minds can navigate through them and host their own tournaments, but instead of detailing what specifically to do I'm more interested in the more brief breaking down of the types of tournaments that can be hosted and the general "how" - use Challonge, here's a quick link to how to set everything up, but now here's how and when to post your advert in the chat, what to avoid when doing so (frequent posting, keeping it to one page, announcing when sign-ups end, "PM me for starters!" in C&E, announcing final match, announcing winner) and so on and so forth.
