Ideas to Help Revamp the Team Scene

Agree with this all tbh. I would like to see more teams created. I think bumping the limit down to 20 may be okay but after corona could be somewhat of a challenge,

 

Agreed as well, I just think the BIGGEST problems to address with team scene activity is mainly:
1) Frequency of Official/Unofficial Matches (most of which unoffs are not as frequent so mainly official matches) which would be fixed with suggestions 1, 2 and 3.
2) New Player Retention/Recruitment (I think its good that its constantly being advertised in chat along with stuff like the Brawl Discord and CMS but I still feel like majority of the problems lies within new players finding and being willing to commit themselves to a game with a high skill ceiling, etc. Most new players just don't have enough skill -> therefore do not get recruited OR get recruited into newer teams that just get rolled in matches) I think we should bring back CTF Academy to help new players with this issue.

Another minor issue would be catering to players of different timezones. I know this is done pretty well through the part of having teams with mostly EU players, US/Canadian players and so on but so far matches are structured in a way that it's somewhat hard for those who live in Asia/Oceania to make those matches (unless you're dedicated to waking up at like 4am to play in a match). Again, I know that this is definitely not the majority of the player base but there should be more events/teams that are willing to accommodate such players (not saying that they do not accommodate such players, just that matches at good times occur less frequently than they would do for other players). Maybe this could open up the team scene to more players? I'm sure there's a whole bunch of players, even casual players that are within this timezone and would like to participate in a team if given the chance to do so. It's personally kind of a bummer to have really little opportunities to participate in cool events/ref matches at comfortable times.

Otherwise, I agree with your suggestions entirely and I think they should be implemented. For suggestion 6, I think the guides should be updated so as to better cater and outline the specifics and demands of leading a team.

 

I agree with the majority of things stated here. The only point I take a hard disagree is banning scrims. Scrims usually happen only during the week, and is a good way to practice various strats in a competitive match setting, and not have pressure of it being an official. Scrims also happen frequently in any esport, and are valuable for the same reasons.

 

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I'm not arguing, but just to set the record straight, I don’t really know why some people actually think this, because we literally had two matches the two weekends in a row before the tourney was announced,

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we had a match (with TJR) in February that was cancelled/changed to a scrim before a thread was made (they didn't have enough even though they kind of did), and we also had a match at the end of November as a test match with the new members.

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Winter was constantly trying to schedule matches for us in January/December, but we ended up only having multiple practices/vs PPM matches. (I'll admit in hindsight we were being too picky with what teams we were willing to play with which resulted in no matches)

But I do agree that the old rule of needing to have one match per month (or two?) might have to come back, since more players are playing again. For the record, I'm pretty sure that the rule was only neglected because the community as a whole was not super active and matches were hard to schedule with enough people - not just to "save" teams from disbanding. (see: the number of matches between September and November 2019)

This is related to my biggest question and issue about the tourney. I get that some people were upset that past tourneys lasted so long, but if each team has been super active every day of the week and there have been minimal scheduling problems (I have not heard of any but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt), why is one of the goals of the tourney to be short, especially with some teams potentially disbanding after and knowing that many of the players coming back for the tourney will potentially leave again? It's probably already too late to change the tourney format, so there needs to be some sort of tourney-type or community-oriented event that happens after the tourney ends in order to maintain and motivate the current player base. We need to expand upon the current efforts in order to not only keep players, but bring CTF to more people. I really hope things are being planned. And if ideas are being thrown around, don't forget something is better than nothing.

 

I mean sure I guess

Partially why I haven't been merc for any teams recently. Nobody really has unofficials anymore, and I loved playing with other people every now and then. That and I was inactive for about a year or so, but y'know.

Yes.

I'm honestly not sure about this. If you only have 20 players on your team and you want to have a 12v12, you'd have to rely on over half your team to show up. There's also the problem of how in the world are you going to decide who stays and who goes? Probably most people won't want to just up and leave their current teams to make another team with other unknown players, and it wouldn't be exactly fair to have the team leaders make those decisions. That's a pretty tough decision to make.

I do agree that advertisement is needed. But I don't exactly think ANYONE can join the comp scene. Obviously people can make their own teams, but a lot of new teams don't last and a lot of new players won't be accepted to established teams simply because they're not good enough/known enough to warrant a spot. Obviously your next point will help a little with that issue, but I'm not sure how effective it will be.

Personally I think Brawl needs more advertisement in general. More people coming in means more teams and more revenue, more teams and more revenue means more resources and events available to put into the competitive scene and things like anti-cheat and development.

I also think tournaments should be scheduled a lot more often. Perhaps once every couple of months, maybe some varying in theme/limits (i.e. a tournament allowing dwarf, or allowing 2 pyros, allowing ghosting, old ctf classes, experimental classes, etc) and the others being a little more serious.

 

Agree w/ a lot of this and while I'm not necessarily against lowering the team cap size, wouldn't us kicking our most inactive players more likely just have them end up leaving the gamemode? if theyre inactive enough to kick, i couldnt see them making a new team

 

For alternative tournament/matches, a "preview" of stuff could be cool, so a match organised to show off some of the new maps right before they're added, or even to show off a new class/rework? Would be interesting to see a match try them out just prior/while they're added to the game. A few games might do this while under maintenance, to get people watching while they can't play the game.

 

Without going into the other points here are just some thoughts regarding a max of 20 players.
If you just want to read my conclusio, I actually included a TL;DR for once (omg it's a first for me I know), just without most of the thought process behind it oops.
keep in mind that my team experience may be somewhat 'long' but not vast at all so maybe I'm jumping to some assumptions too quickly.

idk if it's just me but matches usually vary between 8v8 and 11v11. Rarely anything above or below. Now, people of course already pointed out that getting half of the players to play to get a 10v10 going. And that's probably true. But if we actually look at the players of a 25 player team who actively take part in matches (as an example, 8v8's), there's always the same heads popping up again and again. Even when ADV was at 25 players, there were a handful of players (can't make an exact guess but conveniently I'd just guess about 5) who maybe played one match per year. And there's some players who played each match. So, yes, getting a 10v10 going might be a bit more difficult if someone who usually plays 'every match' can't make it, but usually none of the lesser active players was able to jump in (we've all seen 9v9 or 10v10 getting bumped down to 8v8s right).
conclusion so far: would it hurt the competitive scene? no not really.
but, would it help?
I'm not really into the team scene anymore but it seems to me, that looking at the rosters of the official teams that... there's a higher percentage of actively playing players on teams (might just be for now because of corona etc. but hey at least it's something) than there used to be a year/two years ago, so theoretically, if you were to kick less active players, they wouldn't be as inactive as the players which would have been kicked a year ago or so. Obviously Ash and Brandon are still right though: the least active players wouldn't really start a team, and often not think about joining a new one with other more or less random less active players. And, obviously, kicking is never nice.
Would kicking players to potentially get a new team going be beneficial? debatable but I'd say rather not (what'd really help is kicking the two most active players [besides council members etc.] of each team but also that's harmful as **** and no frikin team would be up for that), maybe they'd join a new team but probably not start one.
Now a hypothetical question: would the competitive scene be better off now if there'd always been a max. of 20 players? I honestly don't know and could as well throw a coin, still I somehow want to believe that a 20 player max is better. Why? Because, as said, every team is as good as full right now. That'd be the case and would've been the case too with a 20 player max. So why could it be helpful to do that? I think it'd be only helpful to implement a 20 player max IF there were players who really keep pushing for new teams. As long as there aren't, you could as well just leave it at 25. If there are players who keep pushing for new teams but old teams just keep 'hoarding' or recruiting established players (which is easier to do with a 25 player limit) then it makes absolute sense to bump it down to 20.
conclusio/suggestion written below in tldr

TL;DR:
If points 5 & 6 are implemented and actually lead to more players wanting to create a team, player limit should be set to 20.
To avoid kicking people, member apps are just closed until teams reach 19 players again.

 

The 7th Team gen is one of the best Team Scene i know.

Sad that they can't play with the old pyro, because the game would be more challenging.



~LoL200e