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Squidboards Update: SQSS January 2018 Wrap-Up


Hello everyone! ^_^

Rapture here – Squidboards GM, one of our head admins, and SQSS Head TO/Organizer – back with another SQSS wrap-up.

We had our first Splatoon 2 event of 2018, so let’s talk about it!

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Our fourth Splat Series event was not only our first event of 2018, but our largest event yet. Incredible turnout would be an understatement – we had a whopping 104 teams register (about 106 or 107 teams actually, but a few teams removed themselves as the tournament drew near) and out of those 104, 96 teams ended up participating in the event. Without a doubt, this was far and away our largest event so far and one of the largest Western Splatoon 2 tournaments of all time!

The turnout increase was a significant jump from November 2017, which had 69 teams (nice) ultimately participating in that event. We got a little bit of help from the holiday break, for sure. It was great to see so many of you come out and participate!

Our winner this month was Ethereal, taking over for Saikai and Rising Moon as reigning SQSS champions. Ethereal is no stranger to the SQSS top cut – they’ve placed 2nd and 5th twice in previous SQSS events. Seems like it was finally their time to shine, and indeed it was, battling it out with Team Olive in a fantastic Grand Final set. Team Olive has come close to taking SQSS several times, but so far they’ve been unsuccessful. Might we see a rematch between these two teams next month?


Not too much has changed structurally for SQSS in a little while. We’ve been mulling over ways to continue to improve our events, from providing feedback to Battlefy to bringing on new staff members to help us deal with user problems and match disputes while the event is in duration.

One issue we’ve been dealing with lately, and has certainly been a thorn in our side, is the Free Agent system. Since we’ve started implementing it, it has caused a large number of problems on the administrative side of things. The inability to check-in free agents individually; frequent no-shows; dealing with substitutions and players unfamiliar with competitive play and/or Battlefy; the inconsistency of team skill since we pair players together randomly; handling the all-Free-Agent teams in conjunction with actual, established teams – these have all leads to numerous headaches for us. More often than not, we have to make multiple changes and adjustments to Free Agent teams, often swapping players around as we find out who is active and who isn’t. It doesn’t help that Battlefy sometimes screws up Free Agent draft by creating duplicate player accounts, or allowing players to sign-up who didn’t properly fill out their contact information.

From this point out, we will no longer be opening registration to Free Agents. Only pre-made, established teams – teams that sign up as a unit and are already formed – will be allowed to register. We apologize if you’re one of those who sign up as a Free Agent, but to maintain the quality and timeliness of our events, we feel that this is will be a net-positive and a valid decision moving forward.

That being said, we’ll still maintain the Free Agent roles on our Discord server, so players can put together their own teams and/or can be contacted to become subs for established teams. We encourage current free agents to take advantage of this and make teams amongst yourselves or join others who are looking for players.

Alongside that, we are considering the possibilities of implementing an entrant cap, so that events don’t get widely large out of our control, and possibly making SQSS a two-day event. Considering how large our events have gotten, these might be necessary solutions to keep things from running too long in one afternoon. However, these are still considerations and by no means confirmed for any future SQSS events, so keep that in mind. With the amount of players we’ve gotten, we’ve still be able to run a very timely and efficient event, so we aren’t particularly pressured to move to two days or put a team entrant cap on just yet. Outside the Free Agent system removal, things are staying put for the time being until we otherwise say so.

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As always, many thanks to the SQSS/Squidboards team and our partners at InkTV. You all do fantastic work and I’m very lucky to have such an amazing team and partners to work with. Congrats to Ethereal for their first SQSS win; we look forward to seeing how you do next time. And of course, to all of you, for making SQSS January another spectacular Splatoon 2 event!

We’ll update you all with the date and details for SQSS February as soon as possible. Be sure to stay tuned here on Squidboards, on Twitter, and on Discord for more SQSS news, and much more.

See you next time!

-Rapture
 
TheRapture

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