Finished PPL 2 Rules and Administration

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PPL 2 is nearly here. Manager Sign-Ups will go up February 20th, Player Sign-Ups will go up March 6th. Player Sign-Ups will be closed about a day before the auction.

Spoiler: How Does PPL Work?

PPL is a team auction Tournament. Managers are decided upon in advance, and are given virtual money with which to 'purchase' players. Players are bought in an auction, using an auction-bot on Pokemon Showdown. This will be conducted on Pokemon Perfect's server.

Managers will be given 100k initially with which to draft. They can use 10k (or, from PPL 3 onwards, their retention price, if that is higher) to purchase themselves as players beforehand if they choose to (if they do not do this, they are only managing the team and not playing alongside). They will have to draft a minimum of 10 players. Each week these will be played:
2x RBY 1U (bo3)
2x GSC 1U (bo3)
2x ADV 1U (bo3)
2x HGSS 1U (bo3)
The additional 2 required players are for substitutes.

Note that 3k will be the minimum price for players, with increments of 0.5k per bid.

Teams will be represented by 1 of the 18 Pokemon types. In addition, there will be a retention system, which cannot be used this PPL to retain players from PPL 1, but in future iterations this will be in effect. In addition, some funds may be retained too.

Spoiler: How the retention system works

Player Retention:

• No limit on number of player retentions
• Retention price is the maximum of the retention price last year + 2k, and 8k. So for players costing 6k or less then they cost 8k.
• One surcharge-free retention: Teams are allowed to retain ONE player who costed 20k or more, for the same price as they were purchased for last year. This allows for some retention of 'star' players, but only at a high initial cost.
• Retention rights can be traded.

Funds Retention:

• 50% of remaining funds retained.
• Capped at retaining 5% of initial funding: for example, if managers are all given 100k for the year, then they can retain a maximum of 5k of it (i.e. 50% of 10k remaining is the most which can be retained)
• Rounded down to the nearest .5k.

New Team Bonus:

• Due to the advantages given to teams that carry on for multiple years, teams that join fresh get a bonus amount of initial funds.
• This amount of funds is an additional 10% on top of the initial funds. So for example, if teams are all given 100k then new teams get given 110k.
• This will also only be applied from PPL 3 onwards.

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Assistant Managers:
If you want an assistant manager in PPL 2, either you can select one before the auction (in which case they cannot play) or you can select one after the auction (in which they can play if they were purchased at the auction).

From PPL 3 onwards, an assistant manager can be selected before the auction and permitted to play, at a price of either 10k or for however much they were bought at the previous auction plus 3k, whichever is higher.

 

[Disaster Area]

Here are the weekly matchups:

Week 1:

vs

vs

vs

Week 2:

vs

vs

vs

Week 3:

vs

vs

vs

Week 4:

vs

vs

vs

Week 5:

vs

vs

vs

 

[Disaster Area]

Assistant Managers:
If you want an assistant manager in PPL 2, either you can select one before the auction (in which case they cannot play) or you can select one after the auction (in which they can play if they were purchased at the auction).

From PPL 3 onwards, an assistant manager can be selected before the auction and permitted to play, at a price of either 10k or for however much they were bought at the previous auction plus 3k, whichever is higher.

 

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Auction Time: 8pm GMT Saturday 18th March
Location: TBD
Week 1 Start Date: Monday 20th March

 

[Disaster Area]

News on auction location:

My first intention was to have it held on the Pokemon Perfect PS Server. However, to make this a more feasible option, I would need to get unbanned on Smogon so as to be able to register the server, making it more likely that Orda-Y would be willing to let us use Scrappie (their bot) on our server. Unfortunately, I tried and failed to get unbanned on Smogon so this is looking like a less likely option.

This left these options: IRC, Manual, and Discord, or some other option involving PS.

For IRC, there is at least Smogon's Auctionbot, which could be repurposed very easily for our tournament. The only complexity is it seems to have been coded for a very particular and not very good IRC client to use; Lutra used this last year so maybe I'm missing something and this might be an option.

Manual is a last-resort option (where I essentially act as the auction bot). Hopefully it doesn't come to this but if this is the case then at least all is not lost.

Discord is something I only thought of tonight, but I managed to find a bot developer who is interested in making an auction bot. This is now my primary choice, although it's not certain that this will be working in time, so I'll be doing my best to try other options too.

PS is still an option in some ways. Some options include trying to get temporarily unlocked on PS main to do the auction there (given I didn't get unbanned and Discord looks promising right now I don't wish to pursue this path), use a bot currently documented in Smogon's technical projects forum designed for auctions on PS (there's a couple), or get the code from Orda-Y to have our own auction bot on the PP server, or beg him to be able to use Scrappie.

So tl;dr, the auction is most likely to happen on Discord. I'll be posting further updates as we approach closer to the auction date.

 

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If managers wish to make a decision to change whether or not they wish to play, they have up until 24 hours before the auction in which they can change their decision. After that time it is set in stone.

 

[Disaster Area]

Alright, I've decided, the auction location is going to be on Discord.

Here is a link to the Discord server we will do this on: link

For those of you unfamiliar with Discord, it's sort of like IRC and teamspeak rolled into one with some nice extra features.

 

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Mister Tim has selected ALLALA as his assistant manager.

 

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The bid order will be this:
Dragon -> Flying -> Ice -> Poison -> Fire -> Ghost -> Ghost -> Fire -> Poison -> Ice -> Flying -> Dragon

 

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Enigami has informed me (unfortunately very late but it's before the auction so whatever, I'll permit it cos I'm so nice) that he no longer wants to play. He will continue as a manager.

 

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The teams:

Manager: CALLOUS
Remaining Funds: 5000
Players:
Marcoasd - 19500
Bedschibaer - 16500
sulcata - 13000
DeepBlueC - 10000
Kingler12345 - 8500
deluks917 - 8000
Ibidem - 6500
thelinearcurve - 5500
Fener - 4000
thelinekioubeur - 3500

Manager: Troller
Assistant Manager: Finchinator
Remaining Funds: 0
Players:
Conflict - 21000
p2 - 10000
Troller - 10000
Finchinator - 9000
hellpowna - 9000
PhilosopherKing - 9000
amberlamps - 7500
Deadboots - 6500
The Killing Moon - 6500
During Summer - 6000
Omfuga - 4000
Arifeen - 3000

Manager: ThrashNinjax
Assistant Manager: SunnyR
Remaining Funds: 0
Players:
SunnyR - 17000
teal6 - 13000
Ron - 11500
ThrashNinjax - 10000
Analytic - 9500
Kerts - 7500
Diegolh - 6500
gorgie - 6000
TSR - 6000
Roostur - 5500
hclat - 4000
Atli - 3500

Manager: Contact
Remaining Funds: 0
Players:
Ugly Duckling - 16000
MetalGro$$ - 14000
slick nasty - 12000
Marcop9923 - 11500
Contact - 10000
CZ - 10000
partys over - 7500
bluri - 6500
Leru - 5000
Klefkwi - 4500
ReshiRampage - 3000

Manager: Mister Tim
Assistant Manager: ALLALA
Remaining Funds: 1500
Players:
Cowboy Dan - 20000
Bomber - 18000
Texas Cloverleaf - 15000
Golden Gyarados - 14000
Mister Tim - 10000
Melle2402 - 7000
SamuelBest - 5500
drud - 3000
j2dahop - 3000
k3nan - 3000

Manager: Enigami
Remaining Funds: 9500
Players:
NightFox - 18500
Peasounay - 17500
george182 - 13500
GGFan - 11500
slurmz - 11000
Real FV13 - 5000
Oibaf - 4500
Ariel Rebel - 3000
Bill Shatner - 3000
pinktidal - 3000

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Trades are permissible, so these teams may change.

 

[Disaster Area]

Troller wishes to sell back Omfuga.

Tomorrow I will make a decision with Lutra on what to do with him. It is hard to make a decision which is fair on Troller, Omfuga, and the other teams. Currently most of the managers favour a clean sellback for nothing for Omfuga, and Troller too seems to prefer this option. Contact wants to have Omfuga on his team but doesn't have any funds to trade or a player he is willing to trade for him. However if Omfuga does just get sold back then he is denied the opportunity to play after being purchased which is arguably unfair. Currently I lean strongly towards the position of a clean sellback for no credits, but I wish to talk it out with Lutra before finalising my decision. Ultimately this position is equivalent to Omfuga being permanently on the bench and never put into the lineup or substituted in to play which Troller is perfectly allowed to do should he choose to do so; a value-less sellback is just a more formal way of doing that and sends a stronger message.

 

[Disaster Area]

With regards to the Omfuga decision:

Troller is within his rights to never put Omfuga in his line-up or substitute him in. So in essence, this is what's going to happen.

I have declined the possibility that Contact may have him for free on Team Ghost. It would be an unfair advantage for Team Ghost to have a player for free, and some of the other managers would not be happy if he were allowed to have him.

It's unfortunate but there is no solution which will make everyone happy, so I've gone with what is by default always permissible, that you buy a player and then choose not to play them.

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With regards to Week 1:

I will be putting Week 1 up after the PPL podcast has concluded. The PPL podcast will begin at around midnight today [GMT] and will be streamed on twitch here, and will then be uploaded to Youtube and Soundcloud afterwards (links will be posted in the Discussion thread).

I have provisional line-ups sent in by each of the managers which were to be used for the Power Rankings. In some cases managers have indicated that the line-up they sent in for the Power Rankings is also to be their week 1 line-up. If a manager wishes to use a different line-up than the one they sent to me for the Power Rankings they should send it to me before Week 1 is up. Managers are permitted to specify who goes into the first and second slot in each tier. If they do not choose to specify this, I will use the players' auction prices to determine who goes into which slot.

 

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I said this in the PP Discord, but just to be clear I'm repeating it here.

If a last-mon KO happens in any generation, we follow what the cartridge says happens [so for example in GSC, it's a tie]. Since PPL is 'best of 3' rather than 'first to 2 wins', we do not ignore ties, so a player is awarded 0.5 each in the battle total. It does mean that if in a series, one player each wins a game and they tie, the overall series is a tie (or in the incredibly unlikely scenario all 3 games are a tie then the same thing occurs).

So in the series of Texas vs Kingler in PPL, the net result is 2.5 - 0.5. Although it doesn't affect this series or anything else in much of a meaningful way, I am posting this for clarity.

 

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The Killing Moon vs deluks917

One of the replays was not saved for this game. However, CALLOUS witnessed his players games and can confirm the result is valid. Troller was not aware that the rule was changed very early into week 1 that replays are required. I am being lenient this one time since the rules were changed after the very first week post was made (although not by much time) and since the other team's manager confirmed the result is accurate.

 

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Here is my ruling on Enigami wanting to substitute a player back in who was already substituted out:

My view is that substitutions are fine so long as they're not done in a way to try and gain an information advantage, and that are done in a sportsmanlike manner, and no further restrictions need to be done. I've argued with CALLOUS that you could abuse substitutions in an unsportsmanlike manner even if there was a maximum of 1 substitution allowed per team, so having a hard and fast rule wouldn't prevent unsportsmanlike behaviour. So the rule is simple: act in a sportsmanlike manner and we don't need any stronger rules. If managers have any questions about whether something is sportsmanlike, speak with me and with the other managers and players in the PPL discord. Obviously if you all act like children and can't do substitutions in a sportsmanlike way, I can apply hard and fast rules, and since as I stated I think substitutions can be abused even with a single substitution permitted, this may mean I ban substitutions completely.

Now that means that in more controversial cases (e.g. substituting in a player who was already substituted out) I may have to make a ruling. Things can and should be done on a case-by-case basis: some things can be up to human judgment. I personally feel Enigami's substitution makes sense and isn't unsportsmanlike. Real FV13 was substituted out earlier for whatever reason. Bill Shatner is now apparently inactive, and Enigami only has 2 possible substitutes in Real FV13 and Ariel Rebel. FV has already won a couple of ADV games for team Poison before whilst Ariel played only in GSC previously. It makes sense that Enigami wants to substitute FV back in for the inactive Bill Shatner, in the later part of Friday (late into the week). So my view is that this wasn't done with any ill intent or desire to take advantage of knowing the opponent's posted line-up, and hence does not appear to be unsportsmanlike.

 

[Disaster Area]

To be clear, the final will be 2 x RBY 1U, etc. as usual. In the event of a tie, this is what I will do:

1) Ask both team's managers to tell me the tier they would least like to see in the final. If they choose the same tier, then it will be 3 best of 3s in the other 3 tiers.
2) If they do not choose the same tier, then I ask them each what tier they would most like to have played in the tiebreak.

- In the event of both teams choosing the same tier, then I ask both of them to choose a second tier.
- If they choose different tiers in the second time, then the 3 selected tiers are played
- If they choose same tiers the second time, both the tiers which were chosen are played
- In the event of both teams choosing different tiers, both the tiers chosen are played.​

3) If the set is tied again, repeat Step 2. If Step 2 is repeated 3 times total, then on the third time, a 3rd tier is randomly selected.