Thoughts on an online competitive community for Splatoon
Apr 3, 2015 15:15:03 GMT
JP4464 and FunkyLobster like this
Post by thefro on Apr 3, 2015 15:15:03 GMT
A lot of people on this board seem to be coming from the Smash Brothers competitive scene. It'd be great if there ends up being a local scene and tournaments people go to, but I haven't heard a lot of talk about how the online competitive community should work.
I won't claim to be anything close to an expert but I have played a couple hundred hours of Team Fortress 2 and dabbled in that community's competitive scene enough to know how part of it works. TF2 is a team-based game like Splatoon with objective-based gameplay, so a lot of what works there should work in Splatoon.
The league I'm using for a model is the UGC League, which I played a season of. Here's their rules and a FAQ.
Keep in mind I'm assuming we can have a match with friends or some sort of password-restricted tournament and pick our maps/modes.
- There should be a league with a season that lasts a certain number of weeks, followed by playoffs of 3-5 weeks.
- You sign up to be on a team. A team needs to have at least 4 players, but their roster can be up to 8-10 players (so that you can have some people sit out weeks if they're busy). Each team will have a captain. You can only be on one rostered team at once and rosters will lock once the playoffs start.
- There are different divisions for teams depending on skill level. The lowest division should be accessible to a casual competitive player to jump in and have fun, while the highest division will have teams practicing complex strategies on maps, playing scrimmages, spending hours practicing roll-outs, etc. If a team wins a lower division they will get automatically bumped up to the next division up for the next season. Admins will encourage teams to be in skill-appropriate divisions (i.e. a bunch of A+-ranked Splatoon players shouldn't start in the lowest division, or a new team formed with some players with experience on the highest-level teams shouldn't be able to curbstomp the lowest division).
- Teams play a weekly match during the season. There will be a default day during the week where these matches will be scheduled, but team captains (who are responsible for scheduling) can schedule an alternate day.
- For scheduling purposes, we may need different divisions for each region (Europe, NA, etc). If lag isn't too bad we could have a "grand champion" match at the end of the playoffs between the best NA & European teams
on a weekend.
- For matches, each week we would play a different map/mode, which would be best 2 out of 3 or 3 out of 5. Screenshots of the results screen should be saved to MiiVerse for reporting results. BP earned/allowed would be the tiebreaker for seedings beyond wins/losses.
- Teams get reseeded in the standings each week and the goal is to match teams similar in skill during the regular season.
- Teams should use something like Mumble/Skype/Ventrillo/Teamspeak, etc. for voice chat. I'm not sure what the best thing would be that is free, easy to use, available on smartphones, and has the least lag. Ideally there would also be a way to link each of the team rooms for pre-match/post-match communications and then unlink them when the match starts. It'd be cool to standardize things here so most of the community is using the same software.
- My strong preference would be not to ban anything from the game as that's going to be very hard to enforce.
- If there's some sort of spectator mode, that can be used for the community to cast matches.
- There should be some sort of chat room/forum for pick-up-games (TF2 calls them "PUGs"), where a bunch of competitive players hang out and can practice running the maps as part of competitive teams.
If anyone has any ideas to add to that, feel free to chime in. I'm sure there's lots of other structures people have used for games on consoles, etc but I'm not as familiar with them.
I won't claim to be anything close to an expert but I have played a couple hundred hours of Team Fortress 2 and dabbled in that community's competitive scene enough to know how part of it works. TF2 is a team-based game like Splatoon with objective-based gameplay, so a lot of what works there should work in Splatoon.
The league I'm using for a model is the UGC League, which I played a season of. Here's their rules and a FAQ.
Keep in mind I'm assuming we can have a match with friends or some sort of password-restricted tournament and pick our maps/modes.
- There should be a league with a season that lasts a certain number of weeks, followed by playoffs of 3-5 weeks.
- You sign up to be on a team. A team needs to have at least 4 players, but their roster can be up to 8-10 players (so that you can have some people sit out weeks if they're busy). Each team will have a captain. You can only be on one rostered team at once and rosters will lock once the playoffs start.
- There are different divisions for teams depending on skill level. The lowest division should be accessible to a casual competitive player to jump in and have fun, while the highest division will have teams practicing complex strategies on maps, playing scrimmages, spending hours practicing roll-outs, etc. If a team wins a lower division they will get automatically bumped up to the next division up for the next season. Admins will encourage teams to be in skill-appropriate divisions (i.e. a bunch of A+-ranked Splatoon players shouldn't start in the lowest division, or a new team formed with some players with experience on the highest-level teams shouldn't be able to curbstomp the lowest division).
- Teams play a weekly match during the season. There will be a default day during the week where these matches will be scheduled, but team captains (who are responsible for scheduling) can schedule an alternate day.
- For scheduling purposes, we may need different divisions for each region (Europe, NA, etc). If lag isn't too bad we could have a "grand champion" match at the end of the playoffs between the best NA & European teams
on a weekend.
- For matches, each week we would play a different map/mode, which would be best 2 out of 3 or 3 out of 5. Screenshots of the results screen should be saved to MiiVerse for reporting results. BP earned/allowed would be the tiebreaker for seedings beyond wins/losses.
- Teams get reseeded in the standings each week and the goal is to match teams similar in skill during the regular season.
- Teams should use something like Mumble/Skype/Ventrillo/Teamspeak, etc. for voice chat. I'm not sure what the best thing would be that is free, easy to use, available on smartphones, and has the least lag. Ideally there would also be a way to link each of the team rooms for pre-match/post-match communications and then unlink them when the match starts. It'd be cool to standardize things here so most of the community is using the same software.
- My strong preference would be not to ban anything from the game as that's going to be very hard to enforce.
- If there's some sort of spectator mode, that can be used for the community to cast matches.
- There should be some sort of chat room/forum for pick-up-games (TF2 calls them "PUGs"), where a bunch of competitive players hang out and can practice running the maps as part of competitive teams.
If anyone has any ideas to add to that, feel free to chime in. I'm sure there's lots of other structures people have used for games on consoles, etc but I'm not as familiar with them.