Redemption League Feedback

[Bazaro]

Everyone's least favorite barnacle Bazaro here, here to ask for opinions, even though they all smell. By now, everyone and their grandmother's cat should know what Redemption League is/was (if not, how did you get to this thread...) We know the first season only ran for a few months and, while generally enjoyed by the public, was far from perfect.

Season 2 of Redemption League is in the workings, and will be released on...

made you look

...and we want your input!

If you have anything you liked or didn't like about Redemption, something you'd like to see changed, or just have some wacky idea you want to throw to the 4 winds, then this is the place for it. We'll gladly hear all of your suggestions and strive for a better Season next time. After all, out goal is to satisfy the public with a challenging, AND fun experience.

*moonwalks back into closet*

Edited May 2, 2016 by Bazaro

[Fumble]

- Petition to unban Speed Boost Blaziken + low tier Legendaries (maybe RU or below since once you get into UU there's all the fat stuff), but maybe add more restrictions on those idk :x

Of course, Gym Leaders could also use these (couldn't Axel and Leo use Speed Boost Blaziken anyway, seeing that they could use Mega Blaziken), as well as maybe higher tier Legendaries?

- I also noticed that in Reborn League, there was this item that allowed you to challenge Leaders a bracket higher than what you could challenge. Maybe make that + the Re-Challenge Token (although maybe only for usage if you lose to a Leader so you can't get 4 badges a weekend) prizes for bi-weekly tournaments?

- More Leader showdowns - ik that this kinda depends on the leaders but they're fun to watch : P

- Redemption 1v1 tours :3 - idk I just want to see Leaders going down 1v1 tbh

and yea that's all for now

give game + season 2 teasers already :]

edit: o yea this could be cool if able to be implemented

4) Will there be a soundtrack for each leader? Or another way to pump up challengers? c: - Ark from hype thread

[Dragon116]

I would like it if there was a once a month allowance (regardless of badge count) to change either 1 pokemon or 2 moves on your team without being forced to restart. I feel like that would help people get further in the league since it's usually 1 leader that just walls you hard.

Could someone please take over leader standing updates/leader showdown uploads? If you don't have anyone, I'd volunteer. I found that to be a nice way of seeing how the league was doing overall.

[Fumble]

I would like it if there was a once a month allowance (regardless of badge count) to change either 1 pokemon or 2 moves on your team without being forced to restart. I feel like that would help people get further in the league since it's usually 1 leader that just walls you hard.

idk it might be a bit too good if it was a free Pokemon switch every month (which essentially also gives you 4 moves to switch), but a move switch or two could be fine. Maybe every x badges instead of every month, though? Oh well, it's up to Redemption staff to decide.

oh also another thing I'd like to see are Leader Interviews. Not the ones that just introduce the Leaders, like Gallade's, but more of Q-and-A sessions where we can suggest questions for Leaders and a reporter could compile their answers onto the forums. Like the ones done for Sigmund and Arc when Reborn League was still a thing~

I guess my only complaint of the League is that some Leaders were very late a few times, but I guess that can't be fixed since it depends on Leaders' schedules. There's also the matter of only getting to challenge b5 and b6 Leaders once per week, but I guess that could also be because of schedules and because there's usually fewer challengers at the top (iirc the elite / champ leaders in Reborn only appeared twice when the others appeared three times a week?)

[Commander]

Oh boy there are so, so many things I could say about this, but I'll try to pick off a couple of things. Just know I was only able to watch about six battles in total so I don't know too much, but I do know a couple things. The first thing I should suggest is pretty simple:

-I don't anything wrong with allowing a legendary or mega pokemon (1 each or maybe only allowing one) in the UU and below. I don't think Regice is going to break the league so allowing for these could help lower the repeated mons thing quite a bit. Mega Aggron could help reduce the number of Rotoms used.

There's a bigger type of issue I have a pretty good solution for. I saw quite a number of times some users had to completely start from scratch due to not being able to beat one single leader. I figure a plea system could really help out in this area:

So basically, let's say Jimmy has defeated 7 gym leaders, but has lost to this one gym leader five times now. Instead of going back, they can send a PM to the person in charge of team changes (or the plea system). There message is "I can't beat this gym leader so please change Blissey into a Metagross." Their request gets denied though in which the person says they don't see the problem. Sally has the same problem, but in her PM she writes a 200 word note describing why her team isn't able to beat the leader and why this new Pokemon replacing her old one would really help out. She also includes a couple Replays to better explain it. The person in charge grants her the new Pokemon and changes it on her trainer card.

This is a pretty rough system so someone trying to use this system may be granted only 1 team change, 2 if they're lucky, so that a system like this won't be exploited. I can't give too much of an example as I don't know how hard or strict Dash and his team wants to be (for me personally, I'd say 1 Pokemon only can be swapped except in extreme circumstances such as a Sand Team). The point of this is so that people who hit a wall can move forward a little bit more instead of redoing the whole entire thing only to be stopped at the same exact wall.

Ugh, that's poorly worded, but maybe I'll edit it in the morning or something.

[dead account]

Maybe reduce the number of badges you need to get a 7th pokemon back to 15? It seems kind of ridiculous that you only ever get the chance to use this 7th pokemon against a single person who you can only battle once a week, and only after demonstrating that you probably don't really need it to beat them. Or letting people occasionally switch moves(outside B1) would be cool too.

Honestly, I'd be happy with anything to give more of a reason to make you want to just skip a leader who's walling you and come back to them later, rather than completely restart your challenge. Because if you couldn't beat this one leader who's walling you, then that's it. You can't beat the league. If you decided to just come back to that leader later, then you're going to be walled just as hard as you were before.

[Red_Chaos]

add an extra day to league time for leaders who can't meet Friday-Sunday. Like add a thursday or Monday even if it means reduced hours

[pyrromanis]

I had the chance to challenge the league only for 4 days cause the hours were around midnight for me and I didn't want to spend my friday/saturday nights waiting to challenge the leaders. I do agree that adding some other days/hours would be apreciated.

Maybe an extra day only for rematches from the previous weekend?

[Shing]

Ban Shed shell so my Gothitelle can trap pokemon freely ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[Simon]

Only thing that I disliked was just the amount of days available to challenge/schedule for the Leaders, but that's obviously something that cannot be changed due to IRL stuff with school, work, family, etc for the Leaders and Staff.

But yea, I agree allowing some UU and below Legendaries and Megas to be used to hopefully give some more variety. Also, like Chubb stated, make G. Gallade do more stuff.

[DashingStorm]

Thanks for all the input so far, everyone! I'll address these as we've discussed them so far with the other staff members;

- Petition to unban Speed Boost Blaziken + low tier Legendaries (maybe RU or below since once you get into UU there's all the fat stuff), but maybe add more restrictions on those idk :x

Of course, Gym Leaders could also use these (couldn't Axel and Leo use Speed Boost Blaziken anyway, seeing that they could use Mega Blaziken), as well as maybe higher tier Legendaries?

- I also noticed that in Reborn League, there was this item that allowed you to challenge Leaders a bracket higher than what you could challenge. Maybe make that + the Re-Challenge Token (although maybe only for usage if you lose to a Leader so you can't get 4 badges a weekend) prizes for bi-weekly tournaments?

- More Leader showdowns - ik that this kinda depends on the leaders but they're fun to watch : P

- Redemption 1v1 tours :3 - idk I just want to see Leaders going down 1v1 tbh

and yea that's all for now

give game + season 2 teasers already :]

edit: o yea this could be cool if able to be implemented

4) Will there be a soundtrack for each leader? Or another way to pump up challengers? c: - Ark from hype thread

- We're discussing the point of where we could/would unban certain legendaries, we've yet to find a reasonable balance though.

- We'll steer clear from that item for now, unless we can figure out a system for (other) tokens as well.

- That all depends on the leaders, I really don't have any influence on that so I can't really comment on the amount of times we can/will/should have them.

- More tournaments are optional and can just happen on the spot if things go quiet a bit later* on.

- Soundtrack? In-game or during League? In-game, not sure yet. During League, how? - Other way to pump up challengers, elaborate and give ideas, maybe?

*Later meaning during the last hour or half hour of League, if most challenges have been done.

I would like it if there was a once a month allowance (regardless of badge count) to change either 1 pokemon or 2 moves on your team without being forced to restart. I feel like that would help people get further in the league since it's usually 1 leader that just walls you hard.

Could someone please take over leader standing updates/leader showdown uploads? If you don't have anyone, I'd volunteer. I found that to be a nice way of seeing how the league was doing overall.

- The moveswaps are most definitely a no. We can think of alternative ways (ie. move swap tokens for purchase, with increasing prices after every purchase per person) to compensate for that. Otherwise, team building can be accomplished and/or rated in the Rate my Team thread for the League!

- The standings and stuff was previously done by only me (yes, tedious as fuck, I know), which resulted in a lot of delays due to my stupidly crowded work schedule. A day only has 24 hours, and when you work for 6-12 hours a day, sleep for 6-8, and have to somehow live in the remaining hours, there's only so much a single person can do. We're resolving this in the near future, to be prepared with a team of at least 2 people to maintain the S2 standings thread in the future.

idk it might be a bit too good if it was a free Pokemon switch every month (which essentially also gives you 4 moves to switch), but a move switch or two could be fine. Maybe every x badges instead of every month, though? Oh well, it's up to Redemption staff to decide.

oh also another thing I'd like to see are Leader Interviews. Not the ones that just introduce the Leaders, like Gallade's, but more of Q-and-A sessions where we can suggest questions for Leaders and a reporter could compile their answers onto the forums. Like the ones done for Sigmund and Arc when Reborn League was still a thing~

I guess my only complaint of the League is that some Leaders were very late a few times, but I guess that can't be fixed since it depends on Leaders' schedules. There's also the matter of only getting to challenge b5 and b6 Leaders once per week, but I guess that could also be because of schedules and because there's usually fewer challengers at the top (iirc the elite / champ leaders in Reborn only appeared twice when the others appeared three times a week?)

- Leader interviews, huh? Sounds interesting, but I'd have to reach out to Gallade and ask if he's willing to do these interviews.

- With League running as short as it did in S1, we've been contemplating on an extra day in case of need (like, only if extremely necessary when League hasn't been able to run for a full day), but we're not entirely certain how we'll be able to fix this as of yet.

- B5 and B6 were meant to only be available once a week, because when challengers got to B5, they would have free choice every day on who they would challenge. Same goes for B6. When we revisit and change the brackets, we'll figure out what we can do to remedy this, if needed.

Oh boy there are so, so many things I could say about this, but I'll try to pick off a couple of things. Just know I was only able to watch about six battles in total so I don't know too much, but I do know a couple things. The first thing I should suggest is pretty simple:

-I don't anything wrong with allowing a legendary or mega pokemon (1 each or maybe only allowing one) in the UU and below. I don't think Regice is going to break the league so allowing for these could help lower the repeated mons thing quite a bit. Mega Aggron could help reduce the number of Rotoms used.

There's a bigger type of issue I have a pretty good solution for. I saw quite a number of times some users had to completely start from scratch due to not being able to beat one single leader. I figure a plea system could really help out in this area:

So basically, let's say Jimmy has defeated 7 gym leaders, but has lost to this one gym leader five times now. Instead of going back, they can send a PM to the person in charge of team changes (or the plea system). There message is "I can't beat this gym leader so please change Blissey into a Metagross." Their request gets denied though in which the person says they don't see the problem. Sally has the same problem, but in her PM she writes a 200 word note describing why her team isn't able to beat the leader and why this new Pokemon replacing her old one would really help out. She also includes a couple Replays to better explain it. The person in charge grants her the new Pokemon and changes it on her trainer card.

This is a pretty rough system so someone trying to use this system may be granted only 1 team change, 2 if they're lucky, so that a system like this won't be exploited. I can't give too much of an example as I don't know how hard or strict Dash and his team wants to be (for me personally, I'd say 1 Pokemon only can be swapped except in extreme circumstances such as a Sand Team). The point of this is so that people who hit a wall can move forward a little bit more instead of redoing the whole entire thing only to be stopped at the same exact wall.

Ugh, that's poorly worded, but maybe I'll edit it in the morning or something.

- Legendary Pokemon in UU or lower (and Mega Evolutions), would give people the opportunity to use Megas like Mega Aerodactyl (the fastest UU ever), Mega Beedrill (not too far behind Aerodactyl), Sacred Fire Entei, Cresselia, Mega Sceptile, Mega Sharpedo, Suicune, Zapdos, Diancie, and even Hoopa. I know this doesn't sound too broken, but do keep in mind that leaders are bound to a monotype. Just having one of these Pokemon could put a player at a huge advantage, as most Mega Evolutions have access to an extremely wide movepool to cover (almost) all types. We may allow this regardless, but we might put a restriction/limitation on this if we end up implementing this.

- The plea system sounds a bit too complicated to implement, though I agree on the fact that getting "stuck" on one leader is a really annoying thing. We're working on a different method to remedy this, by means of a (maybe) moveswap/re-challenge token when x amounts of losses in a row have been reached.

Maybe reduce the number of badges you need to get a 7th pokemon back to 15? It seems kind of ridiculous that you only ever get the chance to use this 7th pokemon against a single person who you can only battle once a week, and only after demonstrating that you probably don't really need it to beat them. Or letting people occasionally switch moves(outside B1) would be cool too.

Honestly, I'd be happy with anything to give more of a reason to make you want to just skip a leader who's walling you and come back to them later, rather than completely restart your challenge. Because if you couldn't beat this one leader who's walling you, then that's it. You can't beat the league. If you decided to just come back to that leader later, then you're going to be walled just as hard as you were before.

- This is still open for discussion right now, but with what we currently have on paper, a 7th mon might not be that far away at all. We're not entirely sure just yet, though.

add an extra day to league time for leaders who can't meet Friday-Sunday. Like add a thursday or Monday even if it means reduced hours

- See Chubb's second comment for explanation.

I had the chance to challenge the league only for 4 days cause the hours were around midnight for me and I didn't want to spend my friday/saturday nights waiting to challenge the leaders. I do agree that adding some other days/hours would be apreciated.
Maybe an extra day only for rematches from the previous weekend?

- See above. The main reason we couldn't add a fourth day, or even start earlier at the time, was because of the leaders' timezones all being different ones. It was annoying enough for me to be able to figure out a suitable timezone for all of them to be able to be (somewhat) available during weekends, I was happy that some sacrificed their Fridays to show up on League, then live their lives afterwards. >< I'm pretty convinced that even for S2, we won't have a 4-day (or longer) League weekend. Starting earlier is (somewhat) up for debate, but we're almost certain the times will stay the same. We could maybe start half an hour earlier at the most, I'm not entirely sure yet. (That would mean queues would open up at 12:30 PM PST instead if this happens)

Ban Shed shell so my Gothitelle can trap pokemon freely ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

- How about we ban Shadow Tag instead?

Only thing that I disliked was just the amount of days available to challenge/schedule for the Leaders, but that's obviously something that cannot be changed due to IRL stuff with school, work, family, etc for the Leaders and Staff.

But yea, I agree allowing some UU and below Legendaries and Megas to be used to hopefully give some more variety. Also, like Chubb stated, make G. Gallade do more stuff.

- You more or less answered the first one yourself mister Champion.

- See my comment on Commander's comment regarding UU and lower Legendaries/Megas.

- Would have to find and approach Gallade because I believe he's on vacation right now, and I don't wanna disturb him with something that's still a few months away.

Thanks for all the comments so far! We're taking everything into account for S2, and we're discussing the points we haven't really made decisions for, but when we know what we can/want to do for S2, we'll announce it all in a while from now! If there's anything else you'd like to see, or if you have more feedback for us, just comment and we'll be sure to read/see it!

[Odybld]

Feedback 101: Obviously, needs more Venus

For now I don't have feedback in form of a request or proposal. I have two questions that you as a league need to address for your own existential reasons.

The first question is, after the league was announced, an awful lot of people trained, prepared, made teams, practiced with them. Many of them didn't even play a game or played a couple. Why did this happen?

And the second question is... why did a great lot of people lose interest after challenging the league, regardless of badge count?

oh, and one more thing

Never resize sprites ever again

I may be back

[Joker]

I guess I'll take a crack at it.

-First things first I think it would be a good idea to either increase league hours by a small margin(perhaps an hour would be the best), or start earlier.

-I noticed during the later stages of the season a lack of staff. In particular I noticed one day that league wasn't even expected to run because of the lack of it. I believe that day only Washman and one other was around(may have been one more on but you get the point). Granted, it's understandable. People have lives to attend to. School, work, etc. Which brings me to my suggestion. More staff. I think branching out and getting more people involved will help availability. Reborn league had a back up host for every line in case the main host couldn't do their job for the day for whatever reason be it an emergency or what have you. It's something worth talking about at the very least.

-This happened very few times, and I only witnessed it firsthand once. But dc's were being treated as losses by some of the leaders. For the sake of anonymity I won't give names. However, I think that doing such a thing cheats the challenger out of a battle. And I mean, really? It's out of their control. At the same time I realize you can't just hold up the line because someone keeps disconnecting. So perhaps implement a 3 strikes sort of rule for that situation. Again this is only from what I noticed, and I'm not perfect and probably just missed something. Even still, being prepared for such cases is nice and I think 3 strikes is a good number for such events.

-Personally, I have no gripes with the way move changes and such go. I'm fine with the way things are in that regard.

-As for legendaries. If you chose to allow some, perhaps instead of tiering do it by BST.

-I can tell you firsthand that you will regret allowing Retry Tokens if you choose to do so. Being an abuser of them myself, as well as being part of the Reborn league staff. Trust me, it's not an item you want to just hand out. Maybe as a RARE prize in a tour. Extreme emphasis on rare.

I don't have much else to say other than Redemption ran well for its first season. It has some adjustments to be made, of course. It was a very successful introduction to something that could very well last a long while.

Feedback 101: Obviously, needs more Venus

For now I don't have feedback in form of a request or proposal. I have two questions that you as a league need to address for your own existential reasons.

The first question is, after the league was announced, an awful lot of people trained, prepared, made teams, practiced with them. Many of them didn't even play a game or played a couple. Why did this happen?

And the second question is... why did a great lot of people lose interest after challenging the league, regardless of badge count?

oh, and one more thing

Never resize sprites ever again

I may be back

One final thing, of course. My reason for losing interest was mainly due to having to battle on my phone 2 of 3 days(sometimes even the full 3) and because I quickly lost interest in Pokemon. Nothing to do with Redemption at all. In fact it was because it was as fun as it was that I even took part as long as I did. I just got tired of playing Pokemon.

[Commander]

The first question is, after the league was announced, an awful lot of people trained, prepared, made teams, practiced with them. Many of them didn't even play a game or played a couple. Why did this happen?

And the second question is... why did a great lot of people lose interest after challenging the league, regardless of badge count?

TBH, this happens with just about everything. You have three groups of people who noticed this project when it was first announced: people who were interested, people who weren't interested, and the people who are kind of in the middle. The biggest group is going to be the middle group and they're the hardest to keep into the game. Just think about how many people played and downloaded Reborn Episode 13 vs Episode 15. I know one big factor was Shofu playing Reborn which created a spike to people playing the game. People are going to stop playing it for many reasons such as burning out/losing interest, forgetting about it, or something else more interesting comes down the line. It's often why I tell people to wait until you've got quite a bit accomplished before announcing a fan game because people really want to play it then which the sooner they can the better since people interested will drop quickly the longer it takes.

Instead of looking at the total numbers of people leaving or kept going until the end, percentages would be more accurate and comparable, but both of these take work. The second season will more or less really tell how successful it really is since people like to try new things and this won't be new any more. Basically, what I'm saying is take the number of drops in this season as a grain of salt since it happens in almost everything. I wanted to get that out of the way before giving you the answer you really wanted:

The Reborn league also kind of had it better since it was on the main channel and there wasn't much competing with it like the fangames and the forums (which have grown...I think). A certain few drama moments didn't really help, but they didn't really affect the numbers that much. The availability is imo very poor due to it being a time where people are busy with work if they're in school or straight up have other things they need to do (I rarely had a free saturday since like 3rd grade). It was 4-7 Fri, Sat, and Sun right? That's 12 of 168 hours in the week or 7% of the week. If everyone shared the same timezone, this would be a minor issue, but we don't. The other thing is if someone got stuck on a leader, they had two options: start all over from scratch or just quit. The latter is probably the more preferable choice nowadays since there's plenty else to do. Of course, this is just me being theoretical so I could be wrong. The time thing was a big reason why I didn't participate in the league.