Proposed Forum Restructuring

[BoDragon]

Is it possible to reorganize the Organized Play forum?

First, organized play exists for both Pokémon Trading Card Game and Pokémon Role Playing Game series.

Second, the forum is meshed with league, local tournament, prerelease tournament, and championships series event listings and various reports.

Organized Play

-> Pokémon League

Information and discussion about Pokémon League.

-> Tournaments

Information about nonpremier tournaments.

-> Prerelease Events

Information and discussion about TCG prerelease events.

-> Championships Series

Information and discussion about Championship Series events, including Battle Road Autumn, City Championships, State/Province/TerritoryChampionships, Region Championships, Battle Road Spring, National Championships, and World Championships. Idea can be separated into separate forums - TCG Championship Series and VG Championships Series.

Reports from any level of events mentioned could be included in those forums, or they could be compiled into "Event Reports".

 

[Futa]

Is it possible to reorganize the Organized Play forum?

First, organized play exists for both Pokémon Trading Card Game and Pokémon Role Playing Game series.

Second, the forum is meshed with league, local tournament, prerelease tournament, and championships series event listings and various reports.

Organized Play

-> Pokémon League

Information and discussion about Pokémon League.

-> Tournaments

Information about nonpremier tournaments.

-> Prerelease Events

Information and discussion about TCG prerelease events.

-> Championships Series

Information and discussion about Championship Series events, including Battle Road Autumn, City Championships, State/Province/TerritoryChampionships, Region Championships, Battle Road Spring, National Championships, and World Championships. Idea can be separated into separate forums - TCG Championship Series and VG Championships Series.

Reports from any level of events mentioned could be included in those forums, or they could be compiled into "Event Reports".

But remember, we are trying to have as little forums/sub-forums as possible. They can get pretty messy and can confuse new members with all of these places.

 

[BoDragon]

But remember, we are trying to have as little forums/sub-forums as possible. They can get pretty messy and can confuse new members with all of these places.

It is understandable to use few forums and subforums possible. It is also necessary to neatly organize topics into broad generalized areas.

The generalized areas are:
Site Information
Pokémon TCG
Pokémon VG
Pokémon OP
Fanfiction/Fanart/Clubs, Clans, and groups/etc.

Several of us here operate forums, and usually know how to balance forums.

 

[xxashxx]

But remember, we are trying to have as little forums/sub-forums as possible. They can get pretty messy and can confuse new members with all of these places.

Well if you want to make it easy set the forums to send a welcome message to every newcomer with an outline so they know what is what and where to go. If you have enough sub forums you won't have room to put everything with the 15,000+ threads on these forums. It has to be made so everything fits and not less sub forum. It has to be made so the sub forum fit each section or combine threads to match things that are similar and in different forums. For Example for everything TCG should all go in one huge forum and same goes for the gaming section. That has to be all in one forum with 1 sub forum for Wi-Fi Plaza for battling and trading. Those are 2 ideas to get started.

 

[Brett]

Okay let me just point out a few flaws in your logic there xxashxx...

1st: Combining all the TCG Forums Together?! Are you insane? That would be a dark hole and nothing would ever get done in there. We need Forums under Categories, Not A forum under A Category. Right now as of WPM's Last Forum destructing update things look great for the TCG Aspect.

2nd: Once again combining the VG Forums? That is not going to work. As of now we have the crud place that is the Wi-Fi Trading place. Then we have the Battle arena which is MOSTLY Shoddy Battle. Wi-Fi is basically ceasing to exist however not entirely. So why push for a forum that already has a FORUM to be made into a SUB-FORUM? It makes no sense. You said it would organize better? If we put all the VG Stuff together it would be a big clump of poop.

Just two little points.

 

[xxashxx]

C88. There are members here and a lot I might add that only have Wi-Fi and if we start phasing it out no one will want to come here at all. We have to make it equal with shoddy because not everyone can use it and I am sure not going to start now or anytime soon. From what I have heard Shoddy is not the greatest program to use and making your Pokemon and using them is not fair to everyone. It is a cheap and very cheap way to battle. I prefer Wi-Fi and you can't voice Chat on shoddy. Not everyone that I know uses skype at all. The friends that I have here except for you and Valk don't use skype for Voice Chatting. They all use their DS because their computers can't handle skype. It is a great way to chat but most computer from 2003 and beforehand can't handle it because of the RAM capacity that they can work on. We have to focus on making Wi-Fi and Shoddy equal or we will loose over half the members here. The fact that our clan is still alive is because we are the fortunate and very luck ones I might add because it is a Wi-Fi only clan. Yours had both and I don't know why it is locked but so far we are the only ones standing in the Battle Stadium. We have to make this forum so it is an either or thing because there are members making Player threads every day almost and the members do keep their threads going when they can get on to update. It is not like last year here but we do have members with big threads now and with those members with the big threads including me now means there is room for more. I will see that this forum is supported by both formats because if push comes to shove I can ask that Wi-Fi is equal with Shoddy.

 

[Limitless]

C88. There are members here and a lot I might add that only have Wi-Fi and if we start phasing it out no one will want to come here at all. We have to make it equal with shoddy because not everyone can use it and I am sure not going to start now or anytime soon. From what I have heard Shoddy is not the greatest program to use and making your Pokemon and using them is not fair to everyone. It is a cheap and very cheap way to battle.

Shoddy is the exact same as Wifi battling, except for the fact that you don't have lag. It is in no way cheating if everyone's Pokemon have the same IV's, but I guess if you actually wanted an unfair advantage... We prefer Shoddy because you can do more battles in an allotted period of time. This will thus make our battlers more competitive due to the larger influx in battles taking place. I would suggest that you try Shoddy out first, before being prejudice to programs that you obviously haven't tried out yourself.

I prefer Wi-Fi and you can't voice Chat on shoddy. Not everyone that I know uses skype at all. The friends that I have here except for you and Valk don't use skype for Voice Chatting. They all use their DS because their computers can't handle skype. It is a great way to chat but most computer from 2003 and beforehand can't handle it because of the RAM capacity that they can work on.

When I still had my DS, the chatting capabilities were pretty crappy.

We have to focus on making Wi-Fi and Shoddy equal or we will loose over half the members here. The fact that our clan is still alive is because we are the fortunate and very luck ones I might add because it is a Wi-Fi only clan. Yours had both and I don't know why it is locked but so far we are the only ones standing in the Battle Stadium.

You're the only ones standing because we're trying to faze all of them out. Our intent is to get everyone to join Team PokeBeach. Also, if we lose the majority of our Wifi battlers, then good. Over 95% of them don't battle competitively, and we really are trying to persuade everyone to that direction. If battlers are not competitive, then we often times get more spam posts. However, our overall goal is not to just drive the Wifi people out, for we actually do want them to move over to Shoddy. In all honesty, it is the exact same as Wifi, just in a faster speed. Once you get used to it, there really is no difference.

 

[Brett]

Just to add onto what Limitless said:

If you take a rough percentage of our Wi-Fi Group altogether it's totaling about 15-20%, while our Shoddy Battle usage has gone from 80-85%. So as you can indeed see that moving to Shoddy battle hasn't LOST members but Gained some.

Your going to say that Wi-Fi's chat capabilities are going to make Wi-Fi better then shoddy? Please. In Shoddy not only do you have a chat in the battle, but you can have chat outside of it in the main chat, or in a private PM. Alongside of that you could also use the Pokebeach main chat, or #PBConnect our Redshark/Trading/Battling room.

Skype is also another wonderful way to do it, however it's not common. I can name 2 more of your friends who use skype besides me and valk but I am not going to going into that because this is not what this is about. Skype just works for voice speaking if you must have it but in cases where someone has a hoarse voice or something similar Voice Chat just doesn't make sense, and the typing is 10x better.

P.S. Well the other two who use Skype are James and Shaun, LuckyLuigi7 and Wariopower.

 

[ArmaldoEX]

Adding on to Limitless and Charizard88's points:

Come on, tell me who doesn't play Shoddy anymore? If you can log onto Pokebeach, if you can event connect and play via Wi-Fi, you can definitely use Shoddy. It's not an excuse saying "hey, I can't get Shoddy", because all you need is a basic computer and you're all set to begin playing on Shoddy.

Playing on Shoddy is one of the best, if not, the absolute best way of honing skills, as you get more games on average when compared to Wi-Fi. No voice chat? Shoddy has text chat, almost as good as voice chatting. Shoddy allows you to constantly tweak your Pokemon in your favor, fixing even the slightest of things that Pokemon in the DS can't.

Let's assume you want to tweak EVs on a perfect IV'ed Electivire - are you going to breed a billion years for another perfect IV'ed one to then start EV training again? No. Look at some of the ebst battlers here - Kevin, Belle, and even Limitless himself, use Shoddy.

I'm not trying to doubt the skills of those whom prefer Wi-Fi, but there is a necessity in spliting Wi-Fi gaming and Shoddy gaming, as they both offer very different experiences. Again, Shoddy isn't a cheap way of 'making' Pokemon, it's just a way of battling without taking hundreds of hours to get a perfect Pokemon. We play on Shoddy to learn how to battle, not how to take long hours in obtaining our desired Pokemon.

 

[Gale]

When it boils down to it, what we want to do is attract members who are eager to learn about the game, and so our articles/community that are both created by experienced, competitive players. This way, the newer players who read the articles/RMTs will learn as much as they can, and will allow us to maybe compete with Smogon, lol. If you dedicate the forum to Wi-Fi, you're not going to get good results. Wi-Fi attracts people who want to trade, which presents to problem of hacked Pokemon, many trolls, spammers, unnecessary threads, it just doesn't work at all.

As for Skype, it has nothing to do with the forum, so therefore, unnecessary subject to talk about. Using Skype is a totally voluntary action and is not needed to battle. With Shoddy you HAVE a chat system available right in front of you. Actually, there are a LOT more people who don't have Wi-Fi than people who don't have Shoddy. If you have a computer that works a least a little, you most likely have one that can run Shoddy.

This is true for the TCG as well. PokeBeach has for too long been too much of a casual site for TCG and Video Games. We have more to offer than Smogon and Pokegym because we cover both TCG and Video Games, however, we don't have the 'best' coverage of the two because when covering TWO WHOLE subjects as big as these, you need dedicated people to do so. While it would be nice to retain a casual feel to the forum as a whole, we need more competitive attitude on the front page and for articles in general, because that will in return bring casual players who want to turn competitive to the website, and they can learn a lot better with better articles.

My two cents.

 

[Brawler]

*Brawler puts in two cents

I agree with Gale. In order to attract people we need to have more of a serious attitude like pokegym. Except pokegym is full of flaming wars, and we probably don't want that. But we need the same competitve level- Front page articles, Articles on decks, etc. It would bring in a lot of people who are interested in the game again or they just want to improve. We have the talent here, we just need to use it to our advantage.

 

[Gale]

Well, we're losing our better members/writers because there's nothing really to keep them here, both for Video Games and for TCG. Many of the strategists for the Video Games, or so I've seen, have been changed around a lot because they don't devote their time to this website over, say, Smogon. If we can attract newer talent for both the TCG and Video Games. Front page + articles = advertising for the forums. If an article on Flygon/Machamp is written, let's say, and a person puts into Google, "Flygon/Machamp", PokeBeach will be one of the results. That's more people visiting the site, therefore more people visiting the forum, therefore more people learning, therefore more potential good players.

 

[CFOURCOLTSFAN]

I'm actually writing an article right now so I agree w/ Gale. It would attract more people to the site.
So I like the idea.

 

[HenryP]

*Brawler puts in two cents

I agree with Gale. In order to attract people we need to have more of a serious attitude like pokegym. Except pokegym is full of flaming wars, and we probably don't want that. But we need the same competitve level- Front page articles, Articles on decks, etc. It would bring in a lot of people who are interested in the game again or they just want to improve. We have the talent here, we just need to use it to our advantage.

I really agree, gym has alot more about actual Metagame and they have front page articles about current TCG topics and alot more top players go there. We need something to bring more members to beach.

 

[Blue Thunder]

I will also agree that we need to put a bit more emphasis on the competitive level, both in the TCG and Video Games. Most serious players for TCG go to Gym, and for the VG Smogon. PokeBeach is in the middle, yet it lacks any sort of any real competitive essence about it.

Staying in the middle of the VG and TCG is a good idea, IMO. However, we need to have a more competitive feel about PokeBeach. We shouldn't dive in as hard as Gym into TCG and Smogon as the VGs, but at least have some content about the competitive game in both areas. We have absolutely no Video Game Content, and we've had one article about the TCG go on the since September/October of 2007. Back then, we had REAL strategists that wrote articles on the site. Now, I don't see much activity going on in that user Group.

It is also interesting to note that most of our Strategists don't last long on PokeBeach. The only ones I can think of are Bellomence, Alakapimp, esprante, and Phazon-764. And only 1 of those is a TCG Strategist. (Of course, this is excluding other moderators.)

This an idea I would at least consider. Have articles from both Article Sections go on the main site, and this can idea can be achieved.

 

[Limitless]

Believe me, we've been talking about articles going up for a very long time. However, WPM has been busy with multiple projects, and putting these articles up on the main site would consume a large majority of his time. WPM has expressed his consent to these articles getting up at a later date, but for now, as expressed in a previous post, a link to the article from the main site would suffice. As long as we can at least get some form of exposure, I'm all for it.

 

[Blue Thunder]

A link is a decent idea if we can't get the whole thing posted. The Gym uses a strategy somewhat like this. The have the first few sentences typed up, and then it is followed by a link to the rest of the article.

As for the Articles themselves, I believe that any member should have permission to post one. However, we could use a team of "Article Editors" to deem which ones are site-worthy, and also polish up any grammar and spelling issues. These Article Editors wouldn't be a whole new user group. Rather, they could get a Badge for "Article Editor." (If and when the badge system does get implemented.)

 

[Gale]

Why not give a Super Moderator the ability to access the front page to edit it and put the articles on it? :S It would cut down on the work WPM would have to do if this person could even post a news story once in a while on the main page to take the stress off of WPM.

Of course, we actually have to get active strategists in the first place to write them ;o I do agree with Blue Thunder's list of active strategists. I think the reason we have so many inactive ones is because they have no motivation to write their articles. This is why they go to Smogon or Pokegym or devote their time to their respective TCG team. Unfortunately, the only way we can change it is to get people who are devoted to this site only and don't really split their time unevenly with other websites so they can take the time to write articles and improve this website.

Like I said, as long as people can search on Google for the website, that's already a lot of advertisement right there. Once they see our news stories and informative articles, they will most likely want to search our forums because they are provided with a link to the article on the main page. Maybe they have a question on the article, or want to post a variant of the deck provided in the article (I'm speaking of the TCG as I have no knowledge of Video Games xP). Whatever gets them on the forums and can help make them a better player.

I always had a cool idea in the back of my head for the strategists back when we first had Card of the Day - at the end of the week on Friday, post a poll on the main page asking members what their favorite Card of the Day that week was. Let's say the cards are Mesprit, Uxie Lv.X, Azelf, and Gliscor Lv.X. Now let's say out of the four, Gliscor Lv.X is voted the highest ranking Card of the Day amongst voters. Maybe you could have the strategists then write an article on that chosen Card of the Day? That ensures at least one article is made a week.

I don't know how things work on Smogon or on this site for Video Games, but you could do something similar with that. Whatever gets articles going xP

 

[Limitless]

As for the Articles themselves, I believe that any member should have permission to post one.

I believe that we already have a way for members to post their ideas in an article, Canalave Library (for VG at least). Anyways, yes, that would be the main form of getting these articles up to speed.

However, we could use a team of "Article Editors" to deem which ones are site-worthy, and also polish up any grammar and spelling issues. These Article Editors wouldn't be a whole new user group. Rather, they could get a Badge for "Article Editor." (If and when the badge system does get implemented.)

That is what the Strategists are for.

Why not give a Super Moderator the ability to access the front page to edit it and put the articles on it? :S It would cut down on the work WPM would have to do if this person could even post a news story once in a while on the main page to take the stress off of WPM.

Once again, we have already gone over this with WPM. It's not the fact that we are unable to get these up on the main site (Kevin has access to it), but that WPM has to format it to his liking. While currently we have a basic format down, all of the little things that it takes to making an article perfect, WPM has to finish off, and frankly, he is too busy to do at the moment.

Of course, we actually have to get active strategists in the first place to write them ;o[/s] I do agree with Blue Thunder's list of active strategists. I think the reason we have so many inactive ones is because they have no motivation to write their articles. This is why they go to Smogon or Pokegym or devote their time to their respective TCG team. Unfortunately, the only way we can change it is to get people who are devoted to this site only and don't really split their time unevenly with other websites so they can take the time to write articles and improve this website.

Well the main problem was that we weren't attracting people to our site, essentially because our work wasn't being shown. However, if we are at least able to get the links going, I think we'll start seeing more activity from our strategists. I mean I go to multiple forums, but that doesn't mean I can't write an article or two every week.

I don't know how things work on Smogon or on this site for Video Games, but you could do something similar with that. Whatever gets articles going xP

Once we get going on the articles, I assure you we will have time schedules that we will abide by. However, the priority of which articles are done first, will be up to us.

 

[Blue Thunder]

Yes, I knew that feature had already existed. My main reason for stating that, however, is that the idea would still be kept. Restricting the authors of articles to Strategists or whoever would massively slow down production of them, and normal members wouldn't feel like they are not contributing to anything at all.

Hmm, I haven't really seen any Strategists polishing up articles. Rather, I see the community making suggestions for the article, which of course could relate to spelling and grammar issues. However, I haven't really been in Canalave Library much, so I can't entirely speak for what happens there.

However, I like that idea of Strategists filling that role, if they haven't already.

So, let's go over an overall look of how this might possibly work:

-Any member can post an article in Canalave Library/Article Submissions
-Strategists decide whether this article should go on the front page or not, and also polish the article up
-A link to the article is featured on the main page, if it is not possible to put the article up as a whole on the website.

Sounds OK to me....it takes the current system in a good direction, IMO.