The State of Wild West Guilty Gear- 10/11 Followup
This is mainly a brief addendum to both the recent announcement we made in this Medium post, as well as a summary of what we saw in our poll asking players about our beginner event formats.
To clarify: It seems that even after reading the original post, many players assumed we were cutting Feliz Jueves sooner than implied. We don’t plan on removing Feliz Jueves from our schedule until the upcoming networking updates for both Xrd Rev2 and Strive are implemented into the main branch of each game. Feliz Jueves will still be on its three-weeks-a-month basis for a little while longer as we sunset the event. I anticipate that when GGST crossplay is fully implemented, we will slot out one of those weeks for GGST Mild West, and based on the preliminary results of our poll, we may implement our Wild West Melty Blood Type Lumina event soon as well. The Rev2 rollback update is currently not anticipated to be fully implemented until early next year, which will be when we finally put Feliz Jueves to rest.
I also have to remind everyone again, it seems, that Wild West Guilty Gear is not affiliated with WNF in a professional way. All we do is host their Guilty Gear events. Any decisions we make for our bracket roster will not be for the WNF roster- they’ll be for our own events. I believe this confusion stems from players outside of WWGG expressing interest in us running an MBTL event; we’ll discuss this shortly.
Poll results
The poll was divided into three sections:
- Section 1, which mainly asked briefly which games on what days players would be interested in
- Section 2, which asked for specifics about the time and date for each specific game
- Section 3, which dealt with rulesets for specific games and other suggestions.
I cut off the responses once I had 50, because that is close to the average amount of players we would have in a GGST bracket on a given week and substantially more than the amount we would have in literally any other event we run. 50 seems like a good sample size when discussing smaller, experimental events.
Section 1 Results
46 of you signed your gamertags. Out of everyone who took the poll, a whopping 33 responses stated that they don’t play in WNF/WWGG events! Shoutouts to whoever shared our poll with the MBTL community.
When discussing start times and dates for our events- Wednesday was perhaps unsurprisingly the most popular day to host an event, with 16 votes. Friday and Saturday dragged slightly behind with 11 and 10 votes respectively. The preferred start time for an event was 6PM PDT, also with 16 votes, with 7PM (our usual start time) in second place with 11 votes and 5PM in third place with 9 votes. I had been led to believe by a vocal minority that the late start time- motivated by the work and commute times of the West Coast, which we primarily service- was a detriment to our event, but it seems like many players from various areas are a fan of starting later. We may adjust our start times by beginning an hour earlier based on this feedback.
When discussing Swiss brackets- While the majority of votes stated that, yes, they do enjoy Swiss brackets (18 votes, 36%) a combined majority of votes stated that they either don’t care or don’t know what Swiss bracket format is. To be clear- we plan on using Swiss for our beginner-level events, having found great success and popularity in doing so for the past year. If you aren’t familiar with the Swiss format, please ask Kim or me about it! Here’s a summary of it from Wikipedia:
“During all but the first round, competitors are paired based on approximately how they have performed so far. In the first round, competitors are paired either randomly or according to some pattern that has been found to serve a given game or sport well. […] In subsequent rounds, competitors are sorted according to their cumulative scores and are assigned opponents with the same or similar score up to that point.”
Startgg takes care of the more complicated aspects of sorting/seeding for us, but essentially, Swiss brackets allow us to seed players with similar performances against each other for each round and has more rounds/no eliminations when compared to double elimination events. This guarantees that low level players get to play lots of sets against each other instead of just going 0–2 and drowning in pools, making it very popular for our Mild West events thus far. 54% of the votes (27 votes) stated that they had entered a beginner level event before, but I imagine that few players outside of our own event have actually tried Swiss, so I hope new players have something to look forward to.
In the select-all vote for games that players were interested in- 30 votes went to MBTL, making it the most requested bracket for our event. GGST and +R had the second highest interest at 20 votes each, with Rev2 placing last as far as our main events were concerned at 17 votes. The most requested game in the “other” section was Blazblue Central Fiction at 5 votes, with Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code at 3. Since I have more of a personal fondness for BBCF and I unfortunately have not played MBAACC enough to know much about that community’s wants or needs, I would be more interested in running BBCF in the future if we expanded or experimented.
Section 2 results
Here, I redundantly asked for the preferred date and start times for each individual event. This section was not mandatory, so there were only votes given for players interested in a given game.
- The preferred date and start time for +R was Thursday (8 out of 24 votes) at 6PM (9 out of 25 votes.)
- Rev2’s preferred date was tied between Wednesday and Friday (7 votes each, out of 25 votes.) The preferred start time was 6PM (9 out of 25 votes.)
- GGST’s preferred date was also tied between Wednesday and Friday (8 votes each out of 27 votes.) Once again, the preferred start time was 6PM (11 out of 28 votes.)
- MBTL had the most responses on this part of the poll, at 37 votes for the date section and 38 for the time. Wednesday was the most popular at 9 votes, while Thursday and Saturday were both tied at 7 votes each. It was also the only poll where 7PM was just slightly more popular than 5PM or 6PM- 7PM had 8 votes while 5PM and 6PM had 7 votes each.
We can derive from this that Wednesday remains a very popular day for our events, except for +R which is probably accustomed to the Thursday slot at this point. The times also remain consistent with the results from the first page until we get to MBTL. We may end up enforcing a Wednesday at 6PM timeslot for all our games (except +R, due to being grandfathered in) for the sake of consistency, as well as to avoid overlap with other events. While GGST will unavoidably overlap on a given day due to its proliferation, we can at least mitigate scheduling conflicts for +R, Rev2, and MBTL.
Section 3 results
Not all of these questions were mandatory- specifically the ones regarding the hypothetical GGST bracket format.
With regards to intermediate/beginner events- GGST was the least desired low-level event, at only 15 votes. Conversely, Rev2 and MBTL were the most desired, at 29 and 28 votes respectively. GGST and MBTL were also the events most players wanted to be open brackets, at 21 and 25 votes each.
With regards to the Swiss bracket- the majority of votes (29 votes) request that whatever bracket remains an open format also remain in the standard double-elimination format. This is understandable and whichever bracket we end up running as an open event (either GGST or MBTL) will probably be run as double-elim.
With regards to the GGST beginner event format: These votes were not mandatory. A slight majority of votes (18 out of 34) expressed interest in trying out best-of-three sets for our event, instead of the popular best-of-five format. That same slight majority (18 out of 34 votes) also stated they would enjoy a GGST event that combined Swiss bracket with best-of-three sets. Kim and I believed that we were the vocal, curmudgeonly minority that hated best-of-five, so we didn’t expect this part of the poll to not only be so divisive, but to end with best-of-three having a slight edge! Rest assured that if we run a GGST best-of-three event, whether it’s Swiss or double-elim, the top cut will be run with best-of-five all the way.
With regards to the GGST beginner event ban cutoffs: This may be the one result we disagree with the community on, but I’m willing to try it out for at least one event. Out of 34 responses, the majority (12 votes) stated that they believe the rank cutoff to enter a Mild West GG should be based solely on results, and not on in-game rank. We personally believe that top-ranked netplay users are as skilled if not more so than players who routinely grind events, especially given how many players are competing in GGST and making names for themselves as online warriors. Implementing a cutoff based on Celestial ranking and ratingupdate.info Glicko scores is our way of ensuring lower-level players don’t get absolutely smoked. The next most popular votes were for allowing Celestial players to enter as long as they were below a 1500 Glicko (8 votes) and not allowing ANY Celestial players or any players above 1500 Glicko (7 votes) to enter. We’ll see how it goes when we run our first event, and if it’s not a popular format we’ll change it.
Likewise, for the mandatory MBTL question regarding event ban cutoffs, 34 votes were in favor of keeping the cutoff based solely on event results rather than on in-game rank. I’m willing to let this one slide since MBTL has a smaller playerbase, but there are still absolutely people who stick solely to ranked and do well, and many strong/notable players are obviously high ranked anyway. This is, again, something we’ll test out on a trial basis and see how popular it is.
With regards to other experimental formats or exhibition events: In the check-all version of the question, Waseda-style 2v2 was the most popular choice at 36 votes, but nearly every other choice except for single-elim ft1 was popular. When I forced you to pick only one choice, however, 3v3 teams was slightly more popular by a single vote- 13 votes for 3v3, 12 for 2v2. First-to-10 exhibitions were also extremely popular on both versions of the question- 34 votes in the check-all, and 10 votes on the multiple-choice. Regardless of the format, it seems teams is exceptionally popular, so if we ever do it again in the future, be sure to grab a buddy!
This is the part where I lay into you. Out of fifty mandatory responses, there was one contrarian anonymous motherfucker who stated that, no, actually, we shouldn’t mandate connection tests and proof of LAN for our brackets. Whoever you are, I hope you stub your toe on a coffee table in your mom’s house. To the 49 of you who are sane and sensible, I’m ordering a pizza. Let me know what your favorite toppings are.
With regards to us running weekly matchmaking ladders- again, only one person actually said no. Everyone else said either yes (26 votes) or maybe (23 votes.) We’ll think about bringing them back again if people are interested.
In the general feedback sections, I don’t think there was anything specifically suggested besides adding pronouns to the stream overlays, which we should have probably implemented since the start. Our overlays… are generally pretty ugly, since they’re the old legacy WNF overlays and don’t even have space for things like the bracket rounds. In the meantime, I may just smush pronouns into the overlay anyway, but if someone is interested in refreshing our stream visuals, please reach out to us!
Conclusion:
- Feliz Jueves is still on, guys! It’s not going away just yet.
- There’s lots of interest in us running MBTL, as well as running it as an open event.
- For GGST, there’s lots of interest in both Swiss and best-of-three. Even if the results were divisive, the fact that they were divisive is reason enough for us to try it out for a beginner event.
- The preferred date and time for our events, except for +R, is Wednesday at 6PM. +R wants to remain on Thursday but also move the time to 6PM. We’re basically okay with this.
- We as the TOs generally disagree with player opinion on ranked ban cutoffs, but we’re willing to give it a shot at least once.
- We’ll likely begin mandating connection tests for all games, but unlike what we did before, once you submit a single one you’ll be verified for life.
- -Regardless of the format, team-based exhibition events are the most popular format by far. We may also leave BBCF in the back pocket for a future event. There is also some interest in running ladders.
Thanks for sticking with us and for taking the poll! We’ll let you know more about when we implement these changes in the future. There may also be an additional poll for runoff/tiebreakers. See you next time!
