Battle Stadium Singles blog — Series 8 closing remarks (Special Edition)
This is going to be a short one, but I feel like I have to say a few words about Series 8 again, now that we have the complete picture of what a full three months of play with the Dragon King Cup rules looks like.
A proper post-mortem is well and truly beyond what I am prepared to provide here because of what a decidedly not life-affirming experience we ended up getting (you might even be forgiven for calling it a right and proper poop feast), and I'm not really one to wallow, nor would I begrudge anyone who enjoyed the past three months of ranked for what it was.
And hey, it's not like there weren't some positive surprises: it was particularly nice seeing Calyrex-S break through the way it did after the first month. Similarly, defensive Arcanine's stint as a Zacian-check, and Heatran as a formidable Eternatus counter were both welcome sights. That's about it as far as I'm concerned, though.
This screenshot is from the stream of a Calyrex-S onetrick (who shall remain anonymous) taken the day before the end of Season 16 (30-Mar-2021).
For the record, I went back and looked at what the highest number of games I'd ever put in during the course of a single month was (294 games total; Season 9). And I remember thinking at the time that I was verging on a degenerate amount gametime. Silly me.
As for my own games, I have to admit that I only really bothered pushing during the first season of Series 8, which I ended above 1800 Elo, but other than that, I didn't really do more than a handful of games with each Uber-based archetype — or "legendary frame" as per Japanese nomenclature — the entirety of the subsequent two months to get some sense of how things play out, and even that was mostly just to receive the end-of-season Master Ball BP rewards.
And apparently I wasn't the only one who had better things to do than undergo BSS during March-April: the number of accounts in Master Ball dipped from 73k for the first month, to 64k for the second, all the way down to 46k for this past April, the last two months representing the lowest numbers, respectively, of any season thus far.
Unsurprisingly, then, the absolute participation numbers for ranked formats on HOME — which are always somehow within a few dozen players between singles and doubles, and, as such, are suspect (to say the least) — also saw, by the final month of play, a dip of around 100k players for singles from a relatively stable 300k+ throughout this generation. When a third of your players straight up stop showing up by the third month of a ruleset, you dun goofed.
From the left: official HOME participation numbers for Seasons 14 (the last season of Series 7) thru 17.
That's all I really have to say about this whole experience for now. Well, apart from a final message to the developers that, once again, if you're going to do massive shake-ups like this — which is fine, because change is good, so long as it's not merely for change's sake alone — just go all the way and give us No Holds Barred rules. Come on. I dare you.
But now, back to our regularly scheduled Max Airstreams. See you around; hopefully sooner rather than later.
- Tox
SW-0021-9848-8999
