-ZAN

-ZAN

@-ZAN

professional bum

awful opinions about video games

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-ZAN
@-ZAN

League Blues

I'll finish my Advent League writeup, eventually... but for the moment I wanted to talk about a related topic... the difficulty of sustaining a league in the first place. When I say league, I mean a "real" league, unlike Advent League (more of a open tournament series), or the #PlayPuyo monthlies (players voluntarily choose the pool they enter), or Bankai League (no formal progression from pool to pool). Yes, I'm being pedantic here... but the reason has to do with player motivation.

Back in 2018, I attempted to run a monthly series of round robin tournaments modeled similarly to the Hisyachuu League. That is, players would be sorted into pools by predetermined skill level cutoff, then play matches against everybody else in their pool. Unlike the Hisyachuu League, I didn't attempt to gatekeep players from entering certain pools. I think my reasoning was to prevent underfull brackets that had been an issue with the #PlayPuyo tournaments every now and then.

The first month or two went pretty well; players finished their matches on time, and entrant numbers were fairly high despite being run on Chronicles. We even got a jerry rigged spectating system in place thanks to a quirk in the way Chronicles split player fields across screens on the Nintendo 3DS.

Match quality immediately afterwards plummeted. People stopped finishing their required matches for the month, which led to fewer players entering, which increased skill gradients within each pool, etc etc etc. Once you fall into that spiral it's pretty difficult to escape. The main feedback I got from players was that they felt like matches didn't matter -- rewards were doled out by random raffle, and there was no system in place to "promote" to a higher pool.

I think this trend tends to play out across a number of leagues, whether it be the Saikyou League fizzling out, or match quality in the twilight hours of the Oversight league taking a nosedive. As soon as players stop taking matches seriously, the league's done for. These two examples even provided cash rewards for placement. If money isn't a motivating factor, what is..?

What about league success stories? Obviously, professional sports leagues provide a salary for their players, so the motivating factor is, well, the cheddar for doing your job. That's obviously not realistic for the current state of Puyo.

I've always found it fascinating how players took the #PlayPuyo monthlies seriously despite there being zero incentive for performance. I think the secret sauce was my insistence on maintaining four pools with very concretely defined skill brackets. Quite often players saw winning a pool as a rite of passage for promoting to the next tier, despite there being no external force requiring them to do so.

#PlayPuyo has also seen better days, though, which I attribute to a combination of moving to official Puyo games (it's pretty easy for new players to enter a tournament for the price of free with PPVS) as well as the new TO's decision to start pools off pre-combined, devaluing what it means to win a pool. So the player motivation question has more facets than just keeping fixed skill categories.

Anyways, that's a longwinded way for me to say that I don't think I'll be repeating Advent League again in 2023 unless I figure out how to square the circle of player motivation (especially those who likely have no chance of qualifying for finals). I think it's a critical part in retaining new players in the scene, and despite the successes of Advent League I think NPI really suffered due to the way the circuit was structured.

That's about all I have to say.

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in reply to @-ZAN's post:

gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

In Saikyou's case, it's more that both the org and the players took themselves too seriously by putting a ton of pressure on themselves to run these hyper-condensed seasons with regular, lengthy elite-level matches in the hope that it'd kickstart their momentum and let them very quickly grow into something that could attract broader audiences, sponsorships, etc, but what actually happened is a bunch of the players simply burned out—between the actual games and the amount of lab time players had to put in just to be able to hang, they couldn't or no longer wanted to put in all that work for what were still relatively small prize pools.

I wouldn't say they were chasing esports, exactly, but they made the mistake of thinking the large and silent casual player base would somehow immediately and magically magnetise to their events if they just churned out enough vods in a short enough span of time, but it was never going to work that way, especially considering their content was not at all tailored for uninitiated spectators.

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-ZAN
@-ZAN

I think I'd still consider that a motivation issue, albeit with a different cause compared to the western scene. When I brought up the possibility of having something like a Patreon-supported Advent League, most people responded that they would be looking to get something in return for their investment, which seems to be a big question mark. It seemed like Saikyou content was primarily focused on dumping match VODs onto YouTube -- I think there's potential to create highly produced post-analysis as a growth area, but there's a huge tech gap to close there.

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gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

Yeah, that's fair enough—I was thinking generally, not necessarily about the specific motivation to stick with [league x]. A few of those "burned out" players continued regularly playing on-stream and elsewhere so it's more a loss of faith in Saikyou to somehow cram five years of growth into one.

Saikyou was trying to integrate more instructional sections into their streams and treat commentary more seriously and so on, and they did try to push clips and highlight compilations as well, but I never thought anything they were doing production-wise was especially advanced or beyond what the western scene can and does do already (albeit with far less consistency).

Edited/produced content is crucial but even just ensuring VODs make it to Youtube is an important first step—Twitch is terrible about post-facto discovery and while Youtube isn't necessarily much better without someone cultivating a channel behind them, it's still something I feel people ought not neglect.

I have a whole bunch of Opinions about funding, production, etc that'll come out elsewhere sooner or later... maybe even as soon as Feb.4, if I can find the time to finish them up.

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