Competitive GSF Tournament

[havokhead]

With the rising interest in eSports, live streamed games and Bioware's recent interest in competitive gameplay ala Operation Victory. Then why not GSF tournaments? The most competitive players on a competition server. This could rocket GSF from an apparent SWTOR "liability" (which I don't agree with but that's a common consensus) to a position of prominence and draw attention to our much beloved "just a mini-game".

 

To me all the elements are there already just add a competitive server, leader boards and prizes. Some would argue that GSF would need further balancing but I personally feel it's in a good place. As I've continuously stated before, everything in GSF has a hard-counter. Players just need to learn them and develop them on their own.

[SWCNT]

With the rising interest in eSports, live streamed games and Bioware's recent interest in competitive gameplay ala Operation Victory. Then why not GSF tournaments? The most competitive players on a competition server. This could rocket GSF from an apparent SWTOR "liability" (which I don't agree with but that's a common consensus) to a position of prominence and draw attention to our much beloved "just a mini-game".

 

To me all the elements are there already just add a competitive server, leader boards and prizes. Some would argue that GSF would need further balancing but I personally feel it's in a good place. As I've continuously stated before, everything in GSF has a hard-counter. Players just need to learn them and develop them on their own.

 

That's kind of the purpose of Super Serious events. Why is something not sanction by BW/EA? Idk, but asking why is like going through the rabbit hole. There's very little community/dev exchanges with this game and the devs don't seem self-motivated or pushed to implement even small changes that could make a big difference in the game. For example, a better tutorial, which as been discussed many times on these forums. So in terms of big changes, I wouldn't expect much. Maybe it's too much work for such a small element of the game, granted if they spent time on gsf it could become a much larger element.

[Verain]

The problem is that a competitive game will give people reasonably equal footing, and that's not so obviously easy in GSF. For Super Serious Night, we grab a bunch of great players and we all play, but we don't try to declare a winner. Pretend, for the moment, that we DID, and that there was a meaningful prize for doing so (a cash prize, or a special upgrade that gave all of your ships some permanent or months-long temporary mechanical boost). I argue we'd have a hard time finding even the sixteen people relevant to make a game, much less everyone. You'd also have a lot of people trying to find ways to cheat, and trying to stab others in the back to get good players on their team.

 

And that's the state of e-sports or the miniature versions that most of these games have. The ones that aren't huge and offer cash prizes instead offer permanent or temporary character upgrades (getting your current season of ranked gear is a temporary power boost, because it becomes obsolete, and this is copied from WoW's arena system which is the exact same thing but executed on a larger scale).

 

I think GSF would need to be changed to be able to be made into a competitive game. The fact that they don't offer temporary boosts is, in my opinion, a giant selling point to the game, and one folks often forget. That tier 5 heavy laser upgrade you bought on your Starguard in January 2014 is still just as useful and good today as then.

 

 

Super Serious Night has everyone playing their top game. The games are still largely decided by the matchmaker, even then, but that's not the end of the world.

 

 

I dunno. If GSF had cross server and was more popular, I think a tournament could meaningfully happen. I don't think we'd want it to become a frequent event though. The idea of there being an ELO ranked system is just bleh.