The Structure of Factions

As mentioned previously, the regular season of the Factions of Silph Arena has a fascinating structure. Earlier, the competition held one-off preseason Cycles with many teams in them, which made them appear like one big tournament. With the regular season, however, the competition is now grander in scale, and that's saying the least. It also has outgrown its tournament foundations and has become almost something different entirely with its regular season structure.

For the regular season, the teams (that is, the "Factions") are divided into 5 top tiers and 2 bottom tiers. The main tiers are Diamond, Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze going from top to bottom, and these contain the top 40 teams with 8 teams in each. The teams play against each other once in a round-robin format, resulting in 7 main Bouts. After all the Bouts are completed, the top 2 teams in all tiers except Diamond are promoted to the next higher tier, while the lower third-place team battles the higher sixth-place team in a "playoff" Bout to determine who goes where, and the bottom two teams are relegated to the next lower tier. For Bronze, however, the bottom 3 teams get relegated instead to the bottom tiers.

The bottom tiers are Open and Qualifying. The Open tier is made up of the rest of the teams up to the top 50%, and the Qualifying tier makes up all others, all of them battling in the usual Swiss system format for the duration of the 8-week Cycle. The former receives the 3 relegated teams from Bronze and sends the top 3 to be promoted, while it sends its bottom 50% to be relegated to Qualifying; the latter sends its top 50% to be promoted to Open and receives the bottom 50% from Bronze, as well as new teams that register in the middle of a Cycle, who would then appear in the next Cycle.

It becomes clear that the new structure makes it evident that the competition is now essentially a league-style competition like that of soccer, though it maintains its foundational tournament basis with the round-robin and Swiss system in the respective tiers. Another evident quality is that the competition is designed to be accommodatingly huge, if the preseason Cycles don't already make that fact apparent; they have had 50 teams in them, which is already large, and now the regular season can accommodate the good, the better, and the very best in large numbers, particularly for the former two.

Yet there are adaptations. Presently, Asia Pacific has far fewer teams than the other three regional divisions (North America, Latin America, and Europe-Middle East-Africa), and it has only the top tiers of Diamond, Platinum, and Gold, immediately followed by the bottom tier of Qualifier containing 14 teams. With a little math, that means the region only has 38 teams. That may become a prompt for Trainers in Asia Pacific to try to get more teams going, in hopes that they can fill up enough of the lower tiers for a full-on league competition.

Regardless, if the intent of Factions is to create an amazing team competition that rivals its standard individual one, then its workings have that in spades. The best of the best are there in their own tiers, while the rest can vie to become as such from the bottom up. Combined with all the participating Trainers, the competition becomes grand, enough for them to declare that they can reign supreme as the team groups that they are.

One year ago: Spending Afternoons with Eevee(lutions)

Two years ago: Where My Voice Gets Heard

Three years ago: Dexterity, Pokémon Games, and Me

Four years ago: Team Harmony