I'm serious when I say that I still got a lot of stuff to figure out for Puyo Challengers -- here's a non-exhaustive list of all the stuff I'm still thinking about even after the "soft launch" of the tournament series. Last year, by the time we started Great Tuesday Rumble we already had a rough outline of how Advent League would be structured -- this time around, there's still way too many unknowns to even start thinking about league structure or stream production.
It bears repeating again, the biggest thing stopping the more ambitious plans from coming to fruition is a lack of volunteers, in particular bracket runners and streamers. This goes for more than just me, nearly every Puyo community running events is shorthanded! Feel free to reach out to me or your favorite TO if you feel like helping out.
(1) How are Puyo players feeling? How does their mental wellbeing affect the outcome of events? Today I had a brief conversation about this with @HikuPuyo, and we both agreed that this is something the community at large has to discuss at some point.
— Void (@VoidPH7) May 4, 2023
While I don't think match throwing in comp puyo has reached some kind of epidemic level, I do agree it's worth addressing on some level. It happened on stream often enough that a specific carve-out in the Advent League Code of Conduct was built to address these instances, and the examples of acceptable and unacceptable behavior were modeled around things that had happened prior to its writing. At least one player was warned about their behavior during the course of last year's Advent League.
My perspective is that a player trying to remove themselves from a bracket is likely to already be in a poor mental state. Will applying a punishment to them really correct their behavior, or will it add insult to injury and further isolate them? I don't think any instance of tilt during Advent League progressed to the point of "willful, repeated violations" which would have warranted some kind of penalty or DQ.
From a broader perspective, I don't believe the Puyo community to be particularly worse than other contemporary communities. It's more likely to be a symptom of tournaments being primarily online, where you can just walk away from the computer if you're not feeling it. It's something that people in various circles I've talked to have noticed in the newer generation of folks across different genres and online communities.
What I do think the Puyo community lacks compared to everybody else are the resources to address the issue. In a healthy community, there'd be people in a position of trust - coach, mentor, server owner, etc. - who could step in and go "yeah you're acting headass, take a breather". Nominally, as a tournament organizer, I ought be included in that group of authority figures too, but like, I'm way too detached from the modern western Puyo scene to be able to fill the confidant role effectively.
With that in mind, are there any short-term actions we can do to improve the situation? I think a few things that we can immediately implement are offering more concrete examples of the deliniation in the ALCoC and disseminating them so more people are aware of them. In the absence of "professional" services, better recognition of the border among peers can go a long way towards creating a support network instead of stigmatization.
If you've been following my writing over the past two years or so, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the Apex Legends Global Series has been a huge influence both on how I structure my Puyo events as well as my disposition towards the esports industry as a whole.
The Apex After Hours podcast is hosted by two figures in the scene who've been around the block for a while -- Falloutt, a former Gears of War competitive player, and Snip3down, a former Halo superstar -- and their years of experience give them highly informed opinions on the esports industry as a whole. If you don't follow Apex, the game-specific current events breakdown and jargon will likely fly right over your head, but their industry discussions have been extremely illuminating and relevant to anybody interested in esports as a business.
One of the more recent discussions that I've found topical is the stance that Apex is struggling to make itself relevant as a "ten year esport" despite being one of the most popular and lucrative games on the market. Their proposed path towards sustainability mirrors some of the things I feel like western Puyo needs to be doing as well.
