Hello gamers, I hope 2024 started well for you all. I am making this thread to try to be more transparent on what plans I have in mind to revive Gen8, and get feedback and opinions from the community about it. This thread also aims to gather any suggestions and ideas you may have to revive the tier, so if you have any feel free to post about them here. Keep in mind this thread is specifically about Gen8 National Dex OU - if there is any interest reviving other ss tiers, such as uu or monotype, I will let the corresponding tier leader(s) take initiative on it.
I also am looking for people interested to help reviving the tier, mostly to host the tournaments but also eventually host projects in the future. If you are interested, feel free to shoot me a message either on smogon or on discord (.r.8.).
Let’s first take a look at the current state of the tier: gen8nationaldex currently is the smallest National Dex ladder on PS!, with about 15k games each months, much less than for example ND Monotype (~80k) or ND Doubles (~50k), and the SS Natdex metagame discussion thread only got one single post since the end of the gen. If you are in the National Dex discord server, you might also have noticed that the channel dedicated to the tier is generally not very active either - however it has been picking in activity recently, most likely because people have been starting to prepare for the upcoming SS Cup. This leads to my first point:
1) More tournaments
Three different ideas here:
- Defining a yearly tournament schedule for SS Natdex, or even a circuit with playoffs. Still not completely sure what it would look like: I am suggesting taking inspiration from our official tournament schedule, with two seasonals, a last chance tournament and if we manage to revive the tier enough a ladder tournament. That being said we might have to accept any schedule might compete with the official Natdex circuit schedule. In my opinion, we still should keep the SS Cup in our official circuit (and thus probably include an SV Cup in our circuits once gen10 becomes a thing), but I am interested to hear what people think about this too.
- In addition to the above, off-circuit tournaments can be fun, like ghosting or 3v3 team tours. Those can be hosted any time, and anyone can volunteer to host them - somehow making sure people are aware they can host tournaments if they want (granted they first get the approval to do so, which is not hard to do - just ask a forum mod) could be a step in the right direction.
- A yearly invitational tournament with cash prize on the line, following a similar idea to Jirachee’s (DPP), Monai’s (BW) and Callous’ (ADV) invitationals. I believe it would be better to hold that off for now and wait for SS Natdex to develop its own community more.
2) Developing the community
In my opinion, you can’t dissociate the activity of a tier with the community built around it, so to speak. While this is not something that would make the tier active on its own, I think it can help that SS Natdex gets its own spaces. National Dex UU is a prime example of that: getting its own discord server instead of being stuck in the now archived #natdex-uu channel in the official National Dex server was a very clear positive for the NDUU community, and significantly contributed to its growth.
Note that the stuff listed here is not planned for the immediate future - those are just things I believe they would be good things to eventually consider
- Much like NDUU, I think creating a gen8 natdex discord could help developing a proper community around the tier, on top of being a place dedicated to people interested in gen8 natdex in particular. With only a single channel available to it in the current national dex discord, which is fundamentally more about SV than SS, I don’t think SS Natdex has the possibility to really have its own community.
- This is something I am less certain about, but I think giving SS Natdex its own subforum probably can be considered, where we could host tournaments, projects and splitting resources into multiple threads without ending up cluttering the Natdex subforum.
What do you think? Do you agree/disagree with any propositions here? Is there anything you’d want to add? Post your thoughts!
I also am looking for people interested to help reviving the tier, mostly to host the tournaments but also eventually host projects in the future. If you are interested, feel free to shoot me a message either on smogon or on discord (.r.8.).
Let’s first take a look at the current state of the tier: gen8nationaldex currently is the smallest National Dex ladder on PS!, with about 15k games each months, much less than for example ND Monotype (~80k) or ND Doubles (~50k), and the SS Natdex metagame discussion thread only got one single post since the end of the gen. If you are in the National Dex discord server, you might also have noticed that the channel dedicated to the tier is generally not very active either - however it has been picking in activity recently, most likely because people have been starting to prepare for the upcoming SS Cup. This leads to my first point:
1) More tournaments
Three different ideas here:
- Defining a yearly tournament schedule for SS Natdex, or even a circuit with playoffs. Still not completely sure what it would look like: I am suggesting taking inspiration from our official tournament schedule, with two seasonals, a last chance tournament and if we manage to revive the tier enough a ladder tournament. That being said we might have to accept any schedule might compete with the official Natdex circuit schedule. In my opinion, we still should keep the SS Cup in our official circuit (and thus probably include an SV Cup in our circuits once gen10 becomes a thing), but I am interested to hear what people think about this too.
- In addition to the above, off-circuit tournaments can be fun, like ghosting or 3v3 team tours. Those can be hosted any time, and anyone can volunteer to host them - somehow making sure people are aware they can host tournaments if they want (granted they first get the approval to do so, which is not hard to do - just ask a forum mod) could be a step in the right direction.
- A yearly invitational tournament with cash prize on the line, following a similar idea to Jirachee’s (DPP), Monai’s (BW) and Callous’ (ADV) invitationals. I believe it would be better to hold that off for now and wait for SS Natdex to develop its own community more.
2) Developing the community
In my opinion, you can’t dissociate the activity of a tier with the community built around it, so to speak. While this is not something that would make the tier active on its own, I think it can help that SS Natdex gets its own spaces. National Dex UU is a prime example of that: getting its own discord server instead of being stuck in the now archived #natdex-uu channel in the official National Dex server was a very clear positive for the NDUU community, and significantly contributed to its growth.
Note that the stuff listed here is not planned for the immediate future - those are just things I believe they would be good things to eventually consider
- Much like NDUU, I think creating a gen8 natdex discord could help developing a proper community around the tier, on top of being a place dedicated to people interested in gen8 natdex in particular. With only a single channel available to it in the current national dex discord, which is fundamentally more about SV than SS, I don’t think SS Natdex has the possibility to really have its own community.
- This is something I am less certain about, but I think giving SS Natdex its own subforum probably can be considered, where we could host tournaments, projects and splitting resources into multiple threads without ending up cluttering the Natdex subforum.
What do you think? Do you agree/disagree with any propositions here? Is there anything you’d want to add? Post your thoughts!
