Speaking on slots for this tournament, my choice would NDM > SV4
What my post here will be going over why I want NDM in MPL and discuss the opposition of NDM's inclusion in this tour, which I have to say hasn't been the most engaging or convincing, especially on Discord. I can use this thread to augment my thoughts and I won't call people out specifically unless I got ss/logs (I cba to go through Discord) of what people said verbatim so in any case like that, I will just paraphrase what I've read on Discord.
Why I would like to NDM in MPL?
MPL is Monotype's biggest and most prestigious tournament, that much is obvious and has been stated by many. We get the highest quality of play our tier has to offer in this tournament. It also allows us to look back at our previous metagames across the years and it is exciting to see if anything new pops up. NDM is pretty popular and anyone that says the contrary is probably disingenuous, it sees more ladder games than Core Metagames like LC and PU (As per the Mar. 24 stats). This implies that the tier has an active playerbase and
will have a decent number of players willing to play and prove their skills at the highest level. One other thing I have to note about NDM is its overall better reception as a metagame vs SV Monotype. SV Monotype has stayed controversial for quite a long time due to a number of factors like controversial mons still being in the tier and tiering choices, which has had an impact on people's enjoyment and how competitive they find the meta. NDM on the other hand, has not really had this problem. The last tiering survey before the one that has just finished (October 18 2023), enjoyment was at
8.27 for
qualified voters and competitiveness at
7.09 and at around the same time for SV Mono (October 2 2023), enjoyment was at
6.86 and competitive
6.16 for qualified, and these numbers went
down the following survey in February 2024 (
5.98 enjoyment
5.12 competitiveness). I can say without a doubt when the results of the next NDM survey come up, our numbers will be a lot higher since when we did the survey, Baxcalibur, Ogerpon-H and Ursaluna-BM were not banned. I am aware that SV also had a really recent survey but we are still at
below a 6 for competitiveness though enjoyment is at
6.60. Not to mention regardless of skill level, I know many players that play both metas and say NDM is better most of the time. My point here is that NDM is a competitive meta that its best players actually enjoy playing tour after tour and a meta that has such an active community and people running it that want the best for it, it should have its chance in the biggest Monotype tour of the year.
Moving onto some points I would like to have a bit more clarification on since these are being used against NDM's inclusion. What I will say firstly is that if you think SV4 fits more to NDM, that's completely fine. I can see the reasoning for that, outlined in posts made by users like
schwipper but there are some other reasonings that don't really hold for me.
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"
NDM should be left to MWP"
We've had this reasoning here from users like Mada and Vodoom in this thread and others discussing on Discord and I have one really simple question.
Why? And someone is going to tell me "NDM is an OM and MWP is for OMs". I am not bothered to argue semantics and it doesn't matter if I believe NDM counts as an OM or not (Monotype at the beginning of its lifespan was an OM and now it counts as the only "Official Metagame") but it's hard to sit here and really compare NDM to like Mono CAP, AAA and so on. It has a much larger scale, has a permanent ladder which sees similar numbers to the lower tiers while the other Mono OMs and even the oldgens are relegated to roomtours most of the time. I also recall someone saying MPL is for CG + oldgens only, which does seem to make sense looking at the past decade of this running, but never has been stated by leadership and NDM getting a mention in the OP anyway would seem to contradict this. Either way, if it's an issue of
what MPL should be as a tour and NDM doesn't fit that mold, then fair enough but that mold has never been established, opening the possibility of us getting in, which would be the best case scenario.
I will go against most people's posts and say that NDM should not be in MPL. It is far more sensical to have it featured in MWP and more importantly, in its own premier league (NDMPL) rather than have it featured in Monotype's most important team tournament, and there are only very few select players who are familiar with it in the monotype community. It favors teams searching for NDM-mainers and I don't think find there has been enough "competitive engagement" for it to be featured in MPL, outside of those forementioned tournaments (which have been for the most part dedicated for the National Dex Mono playerbase and not the Monotype community). It also narrows team engagement as only select few players will know this tier and will know what to bring. Surely a "fun tournament" is a valid criteria to go for, but having bo3 as a format is just as fun and it is far more consistent in terms of what our playerbase is engaged with.
This post didn't really make a lot of sense to me as I kept reading it back. "Very few select players who are familiar with it in the monotype community", we've had Azick, Attribute, Trich, Rinda, Maroon, Mada, Leafium, Schwipper and I can continue listing; these are all people who have all played NDM in tours the past year or two and even if they wouldn't play NDM in MPL, they can still support their teammates who are again, most likely people who play Monotype and have dabbled into NDM at least at some point in this gen. Separating the NDM playerbase and the Monotype community also doesn't make much sense, it's all Monotype at the end of the day and a good number of our roomauth are also auth for NDM and council. And "not enough competitive engagement" also doesn't really hold without much backing that statement up. It's a competitive metagame and if you are referring to engagement by "how many good people are playing it", we still have enough people to fill the amount of teams we have.
"
You will be pressed to find good enough players to fill the slots"
This is also generally paraphrased from what I saw on Discord and people are worried that there isn't enough good players, which I can say is valid but it's one slot. Are you telling me we're worried about the quality of games for
one slot. Again, I could drop a pool of players myself that could or would be the pool that would sign up to play for NDM in MPL and apologies if they aren't all SPL level players at the game, but some are mainers and have good showings for anything NDM so let's not overblow this "the playerpool is bad" issue because it wouldn't be one.
Overall, we'll see what happens but I do hope NDM makes in but if it doesn't, we try again next year I suppose!