Pokémon Puzzle League Speedrun Tournament 2021

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Welcome to Puzzle General's third Pokémon Puzzle League speedrun tournament! We hold this tournament every year to honor the game that our community was founded on. If you love playing Pokémon Puzzle League as much as we do, please join us!

If you like to volunteer to help organize, broadcast, or commentate matches, apply here.

Before The Tournament

You will need a Challonge account to sign up for the tournament, a racetime.gg account to participate in the races, streaming software to broadcast your gameplay in real time like OBS, a timer to track the race time such as LiveSplit, and to join the Puzzle General Discord server to communicate with the other participants and staff. Be prepared to stream all of your gameplay and keep local recordings. If you need an emulator to play the game, use either Project64 version 1.6/1.7 or Dolphin of at least version 5.0. You can find them in the Links section below.

You will also need to qualify for the tournament by performing during the month of August at least one speedrun of one of the 1P Stadium game level categories and submitting it to the community leaderboard before the deadline. For further details, see the Qualifying section below.

Tournament Structure

Registration: Open from August 1, 2021 at 12:00 AM ET through August 31, 2021 at 11:59 PM ET

Starts: September 11, 2021 at 4:00 PM ET

Game: Pokémon Puzzle League (N64 / Wii VC)

Speedrun Categories: 1P Stadium, All Game Levels Easy through S-Hard

Match Categories/Length:

Round-Robin Group Stage - Easy / Normal / Hard. Players agree on the first level. Loser picks a different level until all levels have been played. Best of 5 (first to 3) races. Games 4 and 5 may be raced on any level.

Double-Elimination Bracket Stage - First two rounds played in V-Hard only. Best of 5 races. Following rounds played in S-Hard only. Best of 3 (first to 2) races. Grand Finals becomes Best of 5 with the winner of the Winners Bracket starting with a 1-0 lead.

Prizes: Discord role "PPL 2021 Champion" in our Discord server to the winner

On September 4 at 4:00pm ET, we will broadcast a preview of the tournament participants on our Twitch channel. Players will be shown divided into four to six groups depending on the total participants, distributed according to their best submitted times on the leaderboard per the qualifying procedure below. This group stage will be played in Round Robin format, i.e. players will be expected to compete against everyone in their group once.

During the preview, a full schedule of the tournament will be revealed. Matches will be shown on Saturdays and Sundays beginning September 11 starting at 4:00pm ET. If you are not able to play your matches at those times, you will need to make arrangements with your opponent and a tournament organizer to record the match ahead of time. Matches will be restreamed live to the Puzzle General Twitch channel whenever possible, but because schedules tend to clash, it is not likely that all of the matches will be shown live.

The top two players of each group after all matches are completed will move on to the final stage. If there is enough interest, the players that did not qualify for the final stage can register for a single-elimination "redemption bracket" for some bragging rights and a Discord role. The redemption bracket would be run entirely on Hard difficulty.

After the group stage concludes, the double-elimination bracket final stage will begin. One loss will put you into a Losers Bracket. A second loss will knock you out of the tournament. The first two rounds of the Winners and Losers Brackets will be played on V-Hard difficulty. The rest of the bracket will be played on S-Hard difficulty. The goal is to restream every bracket match live.

Qualifying

To help us distribute player skill as evenly as we can among each group for the group stage, we ask that you demonstrate to us your current skill level by performing a speedrun of at least one of the 1P Stadium game levels and submitting it to the Speedrun.com leaderboard. Each run you submit must not only be recorded and submitted between August 1 12:00 AM ET - August 31 11:59 PM ET, but also include the text PPL2021 in the run description to be considered. Your run does not have to improve your best time in that category to be considered. Your run must be verified by a leaderboard moderator in order to count. You will be notified if your run has been rejected for failure to follow the rules of the board. If you do not have a qualifying run by the submission deadline, you may be removed from the tournament.

If you have participated in one of our tournaments before, you do not need to submit a run to be entered. However, you will be seeded at the bottom of the standings and likely grouped with the top players. Multiple people who enter this way will be ordered at the bottom based on their personal best leaderboard times in accordance with the below scoring system.

You are encouraged to do at least one run of each game level (Easy, Normal, Hard, V-Hard, and S-Hard) in order to improve your seeding and reduce your chances of being grouped with more top players. Players will be initially seeded based on their best submitted times in each category by way of a point system.

The player with the best time in a category will be given 100 points in that category. Other players will receive a proportionately reduced amount of points in that category based on how much slower their times are. Example: The fastest time submitted in a category is 8 minutes. That player gets 100 points. A player with a 16 minute time will get 50 points for being half as fast.

Each category is also weighted based on the minimum number of races a player needs to win in each category during the tournament. The number of participants will have an impact on how many races a player will need to win. Due to the format of this tournament, each group stage match will count for 1 Easy, 1 Normal, and 1 Hard race each. V-Hard bracket matches will count for 3 races each. S-Hard bracket matches will count for 2 races each. Example: If the champion would have to play in 4 group matches and 4 bracket matches, the game levels would be given weights of 4, 4, 4, 2x3= 6, and 2x2= 4, respectively. V-Hard would count for a little over 27% of your final score and the other levels would count for about 18%.

You can find the qualifying leaderboard and how each player's times affect their score here.

Links

Puzzle General Discord: http://discord.puzzlegeneral.com/

racetimeGG: racetime.gg

Resource for Timers and Streaming Software: https://www.speedrun.com/resources

Staff Application Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1fQIt6mWp-KD-RAZN6QfnIZO5DNIgFk7q94LesETbt6E/edit

Speedrun Leaderboard with Guides and Resources: https://www.speedrun.com/Pokemon_Puzzle_League

Tournament Qualifying Leaderboard: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Tho6KhuOGaQxP7fiebfGv7LlBQBwQ0-bPcdrxmR008w/edit?usp=sharing

N64 Game: https://lmgtfy.com/?q=pokemon+puzzle+league+rom

Project64 1.6 emulator: http://www.emulator-zone.com/download.php/emulators/n64/project64/project64_1.6.exe

Wii VC Game: https://lmgtfy.com/?q=pokemon+puzzle+league+wii+wad

Dolphin emulator: https://dolphin-emu.org/download/