SCL prefers not to consider itself an endless stream of tournaments, but instead a trickle. Of cocaine. High quality cocaine.
But it's true, an endless stream of consistent tournaments, while overall nice, does not make a community grow. It's publicizing and the scene that makes stuff popular. That's what a league is for. By setting up high quality matches, tournaments with top teams, and trumping up publicity as much as it can by working with tournaments (and making their owns) as well as good and well-liked teams, is what gets the people who aren't already into the competitive side to jump in and give it a go. People aren't convinced to join in because of high quality tournaments (even though I wish they were :( ). Nor are they convinced to join in in high numbers because the game by itself is good. What does convince them to join in higher numbers tends to be a few things
1. Their friends are joining in. A scene that's already really big can sort of feed off of itself, though if things don't stay interesting people will start leaving faster than they join, and it will die all the same.
2. An atmosphere that makes people excited. People will search for glory and happily jump into the scene to simply become good and have a good time, if it looks exciting.
No matter how good a tournament is, it's not exciting to other people unless it gets out there. I know this firsthand: People get hyped as **** in SCL, especially towards the end, and it's overall a pretty hotblooded tournament series that gets people high on action and then ends fairly fast (hence cocaine). Booyah Battle and other tournaments are also very exciting. But only to people who are in the tournaments or are already into watching it: IE, the people in the scene already. Those aren't the ones we're trying to win over if we want to grow the scene. We have to win over the players who aren't in the scene, and to win over those players we have to communicate all that hype that's in the tournaments we have and the ones we will have to them so that they get the same effect we do when we're checking out our streams and our commentaries. To do this we can do several things
1. Put high emphasis in advertising the streams during the tournaments. This is literally the baseline for about everything. More people watch tournaments, more people want to make teams to play tournaments. Having solid commentary and trying to push viewer streams as much as we can, with a league or without one, is what leads to more people getting into it
2. Set up high profile matches. We obviously can't rely on tournaments to get people hyped. What we need to do is set up high profile matches between high profile teams. Bo7 games, blown up and put up on many streams with good commentary and pushed to people looking into the scene. We need to use this commentary and these games to show that Splatoon is an exciting, interesting competitive shooter that we all know that it is. That first word is key *exciting*. Exciting is what sells, so if we want to turn the eyes of people we would want to turn the eyes of to make splatoon come out as a legitimate option for competitive shooters, then we need to set up exciting matches and get people to pay attention to them and talk about them, preferably not only on SBoards.
3. Good options for new teams to play in. Let's face it, as fun as it is to watch TSB win another tourney, we need to make sure lower teams have their chance to shine. Make tournaments aimed specifically at them after the community grows some (and we have the numbers), and honor rookie teams that do really well. While the high profile matches between the top teams is what gets people into the scene, honor and glory given to the smaller teams is what keeps newer teams from being discouraged and from ultimately leaving the scene. SCL has dabbled with 'rookie tournaments' before, and it's an idea I have held off on in part because the community needs to grow some. But we will be the first to push such things if this league helps the community take off.
4. Work with already established things to help push the name farther and become better recognized. The more we're talked about, the more high names will give us glances. It's at that point that our high levels of tournaments and general hype in the growing community, as well as outreach and the stir we make to others outside will let people higher up see that we are a worthwhile investment.
Essentially, what we need, as a big part of this league, is
SplatMedia. Something to push the splatoon scene to people like a business pushed a product, and to get the community to grow and people new to the community to stay.
Also:
Literally noone is saying we shouldn't have tournaments, what we are saying is that leagues are not only easier to manage for teams, they are altogether a better system for growing our scene, without flooding tournaments and having low quality matches.
Yes, being competitive takes dedication, however it isn't about (in my case) Cyberbullies sitting a tourney out, it won't really hurt us, but if a lot of good teams start burning out, suddenly noone really cares about a tournament that is missing Paradise, NSTC, TSB, OFF, ND, and then we could have(and have had) tourneys won by good teams when noone else signs up.
The idea is to consolidate quality matches and quality content in order to grow the spectator scene, because that is what we as a community have to focus on, we want people to watch matches, and it will help if those matches are high quality. A league gives us the opportunity to hype up a match or matches a week in advance, it allows teams to come up with strategies and will overall escalate the quality of play, while allowing teams to field their best possible rosters(due to less time commitment) and have more consistent commentary and analysis (due to less time commitment and more opportunity for players like myself to cast games after/when I'm not in a match).
We must consolidate if we hope to grow, all these tournaments are great but when I as a spectator can't come onto the board and figure out which tournaments are casting/have streams, or can't really get any feel for a team or feel invested at all in a match, it means I'm not likely to keep watching or be hooked on high level splatoon. Surely you can understand where I'm coming from here.
I find this to be a high quality post in relation to burnout and the need to consolidate and push things. Tournaments already do a pretty good job of working with each other's timetable. We need to take that a step further and do joint options for tournaments and streams so that we can both tap into each other's audience.
