Wanted to get this post I made a few weeks ago on the Beta site up here as well. I've changed a couple things based on feedback.
I think it'd be really cool to get some sort of online league and pickup-game scene both going.
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A lot of people here 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 some 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 map and game-type.
- There should be a league with a season that lasts a certain number of weeks (UGC's usually run for 9-13 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). You can only be on one rostered team at once and rosters will lock once the playoffs start.
- Each team will have a captain reasonable for organizing their team and scheduling specific match times with the captain of the other team.
- 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 can schedule an alternate day.
- 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 standings.
- 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. (Note, most people seemed to be defaulting to Skype on the Beta site)
- My strong preference would be not to ban anything from the game as that's going to be very hard to enforce with the limited tools Nintendo gives us
- If there's some sort of spectator mode/replay mode, that could potentially be used for the community to cast matches. Not really expecting that though.
- There should be some sort of chat room/forum for pick-up-games (TF2 scene calls them "PUGs"), where a bunch of competitive players hang out and can practice running the maps as part of competitive teams.
- Depending on the number of teams that sign up, there should be multiple divisions based on skill level. The lowest division would be for people just having fun and the highest division would require teams practicing roll-outs and advanced strategies on different maps.
- Also depending on the number of teams that sign up (i.e. we have too many to do a round-robin), we could do reseeding based on number of points scored in the matches to ensure a competitive match.
- We may need different divisions for Europe & North America, depending on how the lag situation is.
- The timeline I have in my head would have a season starting in August, which would give people June to learn the game and unlock things and July to form teams and practice. There could be plenty of time for exhibitions, etc beforehand so teams can get an idea of their skill level.
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 think it'd be really cool to get some sort of online league and pickup-game scene both going.
---
A lot of people here 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 some 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 map and game-type.
- There should be a league with a season that lasts a certain number of weeks (UGC's usually run for 9-13 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). You can only be on one rostered team at once and rosters will lock once the playoffs start.
- Each team will have a captain reasonable for organizing their team and scheduling specific match times with the captain of the other team.
- 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 can schedule an alternate day.
- 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 standings.
- 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. (Note, most people seemed to be defaulting to Skype on the Beta site)
- My strong preference would be not to ban anything from the game as that's going to be very hard to enforce with the limited tools Nintendo gives us
- If there's some sort of spectator mode/replay mode, that could potentially be used for the community to cast matches. Not really expecting that though.
- There should be some sort of chat room/forum for pick-up-games (TF2 scene calls them "PUGs"), where a bunch of competitive players hang out and can practice running the maps as part of competitive teams.
- Depending on the number of teams that sign up, there should be multiple divisions based on skill level. The lowest division would be for people just having fun and the highest division would require teams practicing roll-outs and advanced strategies on different maps.
- Also depending on the number of teams that sign up (i.e. we have too many to do a round-robin), we could do reseeding based on number of points scored in the matches to ensure a competitive match.
- We may need different divisions for Europe & North America, depending on how the lag situation is.
- The timeline I have in my head would have a season starting in August, which would give people June to learn the game and unlock things and July to form teams and practice. There could be plenty of time for exhibitions, etc beforehand so teams can get an idea of their skill level.
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.
