Brawl Strategy

I'm Rhoske, I don't know why I changed my name

While I am technically gone I do still pop in from time to time to have a look at what’s going on. So this post is not me coming back, it’s just a little exercise to show what I would do if I were in charge of Brawl.

GLOBAL CHANGES​

Planet Minecraft

Planet Minecraft is free advertising and we're stupid not to be using it to its full potential. If you can post something interesting once a day, put [Brawl.com] somewhere in the title and mention the relevant servers in the post, you’ll have created something beautiful.

There’s 3 main categories you can post in: Projects, Skins and Textures. Textures can be ignored for the most part. We could create a forum subsection for skins to feature on PMC. But the meat and potatoes lies in the projects, and we have no shortage of projects. CTF maps, War maps, Party maps, parts of the BR map, Build Showcases, Build competitions, the Build server itself… you’re not going to run out for awhile.

I strongly believe that if done right, with shader screenshots and individually curated posts, PMC could be an amazing way to advertise for Brawl. We would, of course, ask the creator’s permission each time or have a way to opt out.

Cosmetics

I don’t know if any of you have seen this, but the general gist of it is that you can change item textures based on their durability value. This is a very easy way of selling cosmetics, and has an enormous amount of potential for gun servers especially.

I can't stress this point enough: if you have some sort of mini-CS:GO skin market going on, you're going to make a lot of money. Not to mention you've actually got something new to put in the ranks, which kind of suck right now.

Build Team

The Build Team needs to stop working on huge maps like WW and BR, for their own sanity. I know better than anyone else that they work extremely hard and do an amazing job, but if you want to foster creativity and avoid burnouts, giant maps are absolutely not the way to go. Instead, go for CTF maps. War maps. Kit maps. Party maps. Raid spawns. All of these go a long way to make the team feel valued, and the variety will stop them from getting bored. And not only that, they make the network feel alive, fresh, and ever-changing.

Forums

Please update the forums! I know it’s in the works but the front page looks great and it would be nice to see the forums get updated too, even if only to stop the site from seeming fragmented.

Lobby

Lobby sucks, we all know it, so I won’t go into the reasons. A couple of times I mentioned using an island format that allows gamemodes to be easily added and removed. @Lord_Roke seemed pretty receptive to the idea. On top of that, though, I’d like to see the lobby become a gamemode in and of itself. Hear me out: if you get people to spend enough time in it, you’ll be able to sell them new gadgets, cosmetics and so on. MCPVP had a go at this, but the lobby itself wasn’t great and then we... kinda... died.

Anyway: I use the term “gamemode” loosely. What I’d like to see is some sort of free-roam, interactive, roleplay-like area with different areas accessible with different gadgets. For example, a restricted area on high cliff that you can only reach with the trampoline gadget, or a floor-less maze that requires a jetpack to navigate. Have some parkour challenges dotted around the place, maybe a PVP arena or archery range or something, whatever. As long as there’s some interactive minigames, and you’re encouraging the purchase of meaningful cosmetics.

(I mentioned roleplay – it’s a fairly big thing on Build so it’s definitely worth looking into, especially as there’s no gameplay to affect. I haven’t given it much further thought though. Could have some sort of old-school Club Penguin thing going on.)

Voting

Turn voting into currency. Every vote gives you a vote token, and you can exchange a large amount of vote tokens for credits on CTF, maps on Build, and points on Party. Suddenly there’s a very real incentive to voting that doesn’t rely on player recognition, ranks or actual money. @chickenputty also made a pretty cool doc on voting rewards a few years ago that’s worth another look.

Chat Aesthetics

Chat is a complete mess. It’s inconsistent in colour and format, both within and across servers. It looks like something some kid set up for his friends on Hamachi. It’s worth changing just for the sake of professionalism, and beyond the fact that you need to go into every single server file to change it, it’s easy enough to make it look good if you group similar colours together and assign them to particular roles. &4 █ &6 █ &c █ and &e █ can be used for one thing, &3 █ and &b █ for another, &2 █ and &a █ for another.

Beyond that, the ugly combinations of tags, clans, ranks etc. need to be fixed, because it’s pretty dire at the moment. Hell, send me the files, I'll do it myself.

SERVER-SPECIFIC​

Build

Still needs a /save command to combat lag and crashing. One possible solution might be to force the map to be reloaded after saving with a dummy player, though I’m not a coder. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Aside from this I’d love to see map rankings implemented; it’d be great for the community. Not a priority though.

HG

Remove from the lobby, but keep it around for events. While it doesn’t cost anything, its presence makes the network look like it’s failing. It’s depressing.

BR

Battle Royale had an awful release. The map’s unfinished, there’s gameplay issues and it wasn’t advertised anywhere other than Brawl. Its current state should be considered an Alpha version, and it should be re-released later on. Between now and that date, the map should be completed and gameplay issues (see this thread) ironed out. I’d personally remove it until that time, for the same reason as HG.

As for marketing, we need to go all in on the PUBG hype train, and it amazes me that we haven’t taken advantage of that. The easiest way to go about doing this is to post regular updates on Planet Minecraft until the day of release, then invest heavily in targeted ads on release day, on Reddit, MinecraftForum and so forth.

FUTURE SERVERS​

Many of Brawl’s servers suffer from a similar problem: if there’s not enough players, the game sucks. It’s partly what killed HG, BR’s suffering with the same problem, and it’s a very real threat to War, WarZ and Wild West if the numbers dwindle that much. There’s three ways to go about this problem: make servers like Build and Raid and that don’t necessarily need a lot of players online at any one time, or make something like CTF that’s so rich and deep and fun that people will stay for literally years, or go down the Party route and make something YouTube-friendly.

The thing these servers have in common is that they’re all low-commitment. You could stay for a minute, or you could stay for an hour. You’re not required to stay for the sake of your team. A person starting the game could reasonably stand a chance against someone who’s been playing for years. You don’t have to queue for a match.

I don’t have any ideas for gamemodes right now, though I may come up with some in the future. But food for thought. A medium-sized server network shouldn’t be investing in gamemodes meant for something bigger. If it were up to me, I’d sell WarZ and Wild West to a network that could take full advantage of them, and focus on marketing the network and building the servers with potential for growth.

Spoiler: Tags

@Canoodle. We miss you! :'(

 

Alright, glad to hear you’ve already thought about everything.

PMC:
Would be a perfect job for the Media/Wiki teams. Let the Media Team take screenshots, renders and videos, and let the Wiki Team (and maybe Mods and willing community members) write the articles. I reckon you’d get a good 100 articles in a short space of time that you could release 3 times a week. You’ve got enough content there to give yourself a safety net if production slows down, and you don’t need to rely on one person.

Cosms:
Disappointing, but all fair points. Definitely agree on the server-side cosmetics front – it would be awesome to see custom pets, hats etc. Worth looking for a 3d modeller.

Lobby:
Not really a question of features so much as designing it around current gadgets. And if you code a few more mobility gadgets – phase through transparent blocks, temporary sponge launchpads, placeable blocks, that sort of thing – you’d get a really interesting experience imo. Making a modular lobby would also mean that you could add new areas as and when new gadgets are added. That would stop you from having to commit to it fully, allowing you to focus on bigger projects and adding new gadgets and expansions whenever there’s some free time.

Chat Aesthetics:
Honestly it’s such a large job that it’d be impossible to point out every individual thing. But using the palettes in the OP instead of green, yellow and purple in one chat message would go a long way to making chat look nicer. The Twitter message looks great, the booster and cosmetic tags messages look horrible. Just as an example. (Also – I don’t think tags look good in bold, might just be me.) I can make a draft myself if you’re willing to give me a copy of all the global messages.

Future Servers:
CTF’s rich and deep because of the amount of ways to play the game – recovery, capturing, defence, offence, support, random killing. There might even be more. You’ve got 13 classes who can each take part in each of those roles, and dozens of maps that might affect your strategy or class choice. While stats and levels and so on might be nice, they’re not necessary because CTF’s gameplay is varied enough to hold people’s attention.