Proposal: Resources Subforum

Hello all, I was just speaking with Callous and had an idea for how to improve this forum. I believe the ultimate goal for this site should be to be "The Place for Old Gens" and while the tournament section is moving forward quite nicely, one area where we are lacking is in a resources section. The biggest barrier to entry to competitive pokemon as a whole but old gens even more so is the massive amount of information you have to learn before becoming even just a somewhat competent player. As it stands currently this information is spread all over the internet in places like RoA, random Youtube videos and the Smogon Pokemon analyses. Some of these resources are outdated, some are even just flat out wrong about certain things and as a new player piecing this info together and filtering through it is a massive challenge. If we can pull together a comprehensive, well organized and consistently high quality resource for new players I think we can really cement this site as "The Place for Old Gens."

Organization
The most important aspect of making this work is making sure the resources section is organized in a way that is easy for new players to grasp. The way I see it this should be broken up in to 3, maybe 4 distinct subforums:

1. Sample Teams: This section would only have 1 locked thread for each tier. In the thread would just be a list of sample teams organized in the following format:

Sprites of the 6 pokemon

Spoiler: Analysis

Team analysis formatted as overview + analysis of each of the 6 pokemon

Spoiler: Team

Importable

This format allows new players and experienced players alike to quickly glance through and look for teams they would want to try out based on the combination of 6 pokemon but also gives the opportunity for in depth explanation for how the teams work. Making sure the long sections are collapsible is crucial as no one wants to sift through a massive block of importable pastes.

Making these threads locked is also important and will be a theme throughout this whole section. We want each of these pages to appear as finished products not ongoing discussions of potentially questionable quality.

2. Individual Analyses: **Note After Speaking with vapicuno, I've learned this section may not be necessary due to recent revamps of old gen smogon analyses. still leaving this up for discussion** This is where analyses akin to the smogon pokemon analysis section would appear. This subforum would be further broken up into more subforums for each tier. The only things posted in those individual subforums should be the completed individual analysis page for each pokemon. The format of an overview followed by each common set listed and explained followed by an other options section used on smogon should be followed for each contributed analysis. Like with the sample teams each of these threads should be locked for discussion.

3. Articles: This section would be an opportunity for content writers to get creative and write about aspects of the game that don't fit into the previous two sections. I'm thinking subjects like archetype analysis, interesting synergies and strategies etc. Even wildly specific stuff akin BKC's excellent vid on the 4th move of CB metagross. Anything goes in this section as long as it relates to competitive play in one of the tiers on this site. Again each of these articles would be a finished product posted in a locked thread. Like the previous section it would be broken up into subforums by tier with an additional "General" subforum for articles that relate to competitive pokemon as a whole.

4. Discussion Forum (Maybe): This would be a place to post things like viability rankings and discussion threads akin to RoA, as well as discussion about threads in the previous 3 sections. I don't think this section is specifically necessary as it can largely be done on discord but could be as it gives new players an opportunity to lurk and see the kinds of discussion and arguments that come with this game before they feel comfortable joining a discord server.

Implementation
The process we go through to get this rolled out is also extremely important to its success. I believe Discord will play an important role in this as it allows a format to gather ideas and articles from a variety of users and push them through quality control so that what gets posted on the forums is a finished product.

Quality Control: I think it's important that we don't limit the users who are allowed to contribute content as we don't want to limit our bandwidth but with this comes with a need for a quality control team. Having a few users dedicated to this role for each tier. Each tier should have a quality control chatroom where users can post their articles, sample teams and analyses (or edits to existing individual analyses), to be reviewed by a dedicated quality controller. Anything posted in these chats that isn't a proposed post should be deleted. Additionally once a dedicated quality controller starts their review of a post they should also delete it from the chat so these rooms don't get bogged down and content writers can have a clear idea of where there post is in the queue. The reviews themselves should be done via PM between the quality controller and the content writer. Once the QCer completes the review, the content writer will be free to post and then will send the link to the QCer for a final check to make sure the formatting wasn't screwed up. I personally don't think grammar QC should be a huge focus in the early stages as it severely slows down the process content writers will have a tendency to blow this portion off and give up on finishing their post. QC should largely be about making sure any information posted is accurate and relevant. If we do decide to have a discussion section I don't think it should be necessary that threads posted in here go through QC rather we can just monitor the content. One thing that I can see as a potential criticism of this system is it leads to a lack of transparency when it comes to what content ends up getting posted. To remedy this I think we should also allow users to post updates, fixes and changes to existing content. To do this they would follow the same process as they would to post new content. Just submit what they would like to have changed to the appropriate QC chat. This will also go a long way to making sure content is up to date.

Next Steps: The first thing that needs to happen is putting together a dedicated quality control team. Without this the whole idea falls apart. I believe we should at least have 2 QCers for each tier. If we can't get a team for every tier in these early stages that is fine and we can start out just putting together the resources for the tiers we have QCers for. Next we will need to create a publicly posted list of the posts we would like to see from potential writers (credits for this idea vapicuno). This will both spark ideas for potential writers while also keeping a clear organized goal in mind we can use to shape the content on the site. This can include individual pokemon analyses we still need, articles we would like to see and archetypes or specific teams we would like to have included in the sample threads. Once this is put together we will need to create the discord chat rooms for this. We should have 1 QC chatroom for each gen as outlined in the previous section as well as a private chatroom where the QCers can discuss among themselves. Finally we will need to actually implement the resources section on the forums as detailed in the Organization section. One question I'm not sure of is, in these early stagtes, should start posting content as we have approved posts or wait until we have a certain critical mass of content before anything gets posted. Obviously having a largely empty subforum doesn't look great but allowing things to get posted before the whole subforum is ready could act as a proof of concept and inspire other writers.

What I need from you:
Volunteers! If you're interested in being part of a QC team please PM me on discord, on the forums or reply to this thread. Once we have a critical mass of QCers we can get the ball rolling on this. Additionally if you have any criticisms or other ideas for this proposal please post them in this thread.

Thanks in advance!

 

Had this conversation with Dan on discord, but will put it here for the record:

I think this will probably work best if PP decides on a theme/suite of articles that we want to be written, and gets writers for these articles. Left up to their own devices, I think people will submit individual articles to Smogon because of the larger reach over there. However, if people understand that they are contributing to part of a bigger project, that this --forum--, not --thread-- is the place to find an across-the-board analysis of say, teambuilding philosophies, then it will naturally be PP where people go to. Deciding what is in this suite requires a community discussion of course, because writers are hella scarce and all have their niche. Speaking from my experience working on the QC/writing team for Smogon analyses, it's thankless work, and people who are competent tend to spend the bulk of their time doing the main thing which is prepping and playing, or are making their own content on other platforms coughBKCcough.

About individual analyses, the QC team on Smogon (mainly me, Triangles and BKC, with inputs from several others) generally wants the analyses to be super detailed and airtight, so maybe there is space on PP for more readable, succinct analyses. But again, gotta solve the finding writers problem. I personally think this shouldn't be the focus of PP, for what it's worth.

I think PP could either prioritize making this suite of articles happen, or find a way to make the labor non-overlapping (simpler content for newer guys to write, more heavy stuff for more experienced writers).

Cheers!

 

Don't really have strong opinions on this currently, just some succinct thoughts. I appreciate the vision and I hope that there's the will to implement it; with anything on PP, there's a question of what is being done here that isn't being done elsewhere. The old gen analyses are certainly still largely lacking on Smogon, though that may change and PP doesn't have an elegant dex to display them in.

 

Fwiw the rby analyses on smogon seem to be dead in the water, so it would be feasible to catch up to them and overtake them. Still, probably not safe in the long term. As mentioned, their dex is a much more polished product, and there's no reason why someone couldn't take over there and get the rby stuff revamped- at that point, there'd be no point in using our analyses.

I do like the idea of a discussion forum for a couple reasons. First is that having some sort of public exchange of ideas is valuable, and you can often glean small insights that are useful, but might not otherwise make it into a polished product. Also I love forums and hate Discord, so there's that.

Sample teams are a good idea, they're also not my cup of tea. I'll leave that for other people.

EV benchmark compendiums could be cool. When I build for newer gens I honestly use the smogdex just in case there are some EV benchmarks that are worth hitting, because otherwise I often default to max/max, which usually isn't optimal. I really have a tough time identifying offensive/defensive benchmarks that are good targets when setting EVs

Articles seem to be the way to go, however that's an extremely broad category of content. I'm just going to dump some ideas as to what kinds of articles might be considered, I'm not expecting all of them to be covered

• Regular meta reports
• Generalised strategic advice
• Guides on how to handle certain major metagame elements (e.g. leads, sleep in rby, entry hazards in literally every generation that they exist)
• Meta-specific teambuilding processes/archetype guides*
• Pokemon-specific deep dives- cover things like nuances in how you use a certain threat, and also what kind of teambuilding processes you might employ, what kind of cores you might look to use, that kind of thing
• Discussion articles might also be a neat idea- have a written discussion between a curated group of guests
• Also 1 on 1 interviews, can be general interviews or about specific topics
  
• Opinion pieces?

*I don't really like categorising teams into archetypes, especially because I think labels beyond stall, balance and offense are stupid. However, there are definitely some distinct approaches and mindsets that can be employed when teambuilding that align with stall/balance/offense. I think it's helpful to go over the teambuilding process for each mindset and identify what are some common threats that need specific attention as opposed to being something that can be covered by "X resist" or whatever.

Anyway, I think it's important to identify what kinds of articles we'd like to cover, as it helps define the scope of this project, and also helps give some guidance as to what we should be writing, otherwise I feel like if no-one knows what kind of articles we're after, then it's hard to know where to start

 

So, what's come of this? Is there a plan going forward, are there people willing to get involved?

 

when it comes to individual analysis, i think pp can have some advantages over smogon bc analyses on smogon tend to be detailed and lengthy like https://www.smogon.com/dex/rs/pokemon/zapdos/, thus being hard to absorb information. another point is that once smogon analyses are uploaded, they can just be edited by a mod. however, when it comes to pp, everyone can give comments to an analysis.

the questions are what's a discord for a project, what is a skeleton of an analysis, what is a reservation index for each tier, how many quality checks are needed for an analysis to be done, and who are the qc team leader and members of each tier. also, an individual analysis can be searched more easily on smogon than on pp.

i also suggest some references of an analysis, including posts and replays