The State of Wild West Guilty Gear- October 2022

An update on WNF GGST, WNF GGXXAC+R, and upcoming format changes.

If you don’t want to read the article, there is a companion video where I go over everything in this document on YouTube.

It’s been a year since Kim/doedipus and I took over the reins of Wild West Guilty Gear from Ruben/imnotasandwichh and Tomik/hursh191, aka the !godTO. Since then, we have been running two tournaments a week through the WWGG Discord on behalf of Leveluplive/Wednesday Night Fights- Guilty Gear Strive, as part of WNF’s collaborative product with Esports Arena’s Series E circuit, and Guilty Gear XXAC+R, a community effort we’ve dubbed Feliz Jueves. At this point, due to some recent sudden changes in the event schedule, as well as some upcoming changes Kim and I are planning, I feel that it’s best to provide some context and information about what’s going on with our tournaments from here on out.

As a preface, I should clarify our relationship with the various events we put on: Kim and I are the admins/TOs of the WWGG Discord, and Timothy/tuxdev is our friend who commentates Feliz Jueves with us. We run/ran Feliz Jueves and WNF GGST purely on a volunteer basis. At this point in time, we are not officially working with, or representatives of, WNF/LU or ESA/Series E. Our involvement with Series E was solely to manage the bracket for pools- both ESA and LU believe that the streams for pools were not a necessary part of the Series E product. Feliz Jueves +R, and its beginner-intermediate-level derivative, Mild West +R, is also run solely for the +R community- unlike Series E, the event did not receive a big pot bonus or sponsorship apart from whatever generous players contributed to the Matcherino. Speaking of the Matcherinos- neither Kim nor I have approval to pay out the Matcherinos for GGST or +R. I am an admin for the events, but I have not yet been verified as the TO via Matcherino’s system. Alex Valle/Calipower is ultimately the one who cashes out the Matcherinos.

WNF GGST and Esports Arena’s Series E

As of next week (October 11th, 2022) Series E will be undergoing the following changes.

• Series E will no longer be run in collaboration with WNF/LU. We do not know if this will change in the future.
• Series E will move its open bracket, for both the 4-week preliminary qualifier rounds and the rest of the 16-week open season, to Tuesday afternoons at 4PM PDT instead of Wednesday nights at 7PM PDT. The Series E weekly invitationals will remain on Thursday nights.
• The prize pool for the open brackets has been halved, from $500 to $250. In exchange, the prize pool for the invitational bracket has been increased to $1000.
• WNF is taking a break from running Wednesday flagship titles- this includes SFVCE, KOFXV, DNFD, and GGST. This also means that we at WWGG will not be running a Wednesday night bracket for the time being.
• As far as I can tell, we at WWGG are not involved with the running of Series E S3- more specifically, Series E will not be run out of the WWGG Discord. There will also not be a stream for the Series E open bracket until Top 8.
• Signups and bracket management will be done on ESA’s proprietary bracket software, and the event will be run out of their Discord.
• You can find more information about how to participate in ESA’s Series E brackets for both GGST and their newly minted MultiVersus season on their website and social media.

I’ve already seen lots of players in the Discord confused about what’s going on with GGST, whether we’re continuing to run it, if it’s been cancelled entirely, or where to play next. I hope this succinctly answers your questions. Series E was very difficult for us to run on a volunteer basis, but over the past year I feel like we ran it well, and it was satisfying to run every event with success. If WNF begins running GGST or other flagship titles on their own, you can find out by keeping in touch with the pings in our Discord or by following WNF social media.

WWGG and Feliz Jueves +R

To be blunt, the Feliz Jueves event has been hemorrhaging players for a long time. GGST’s release last year cut the numbers substantially, and every other new release or rollback retrofit continued to trim the fat until only the most dedicated players remained. Contrary to popular belief, the playerbase for the event has been dwindling long before the Xrd rollback announcement. The personal satisfaction with running the event has also been waning- frankly, it’s not fun when only a handful of regulars show up to the event, and I’ve been told anecdotally, repeatedly, from former entrants, that the participation of certain players has had a hand in cutting the bracket and audience numbers. Even then, however, the best players who enter the bracket also simply can’t make it to the event- they’re older, with full time jobs or families to take care of. You don’t have to look much further than ElvenShadow for an example- providing for kids while also working, competing in +R, and planning the second-biggest Chicagoland FGC major is no small task.

We initially introduced Mild West +R as a solution to this problem, and Kim and I have been incredibly satisfied with the event. Mild West introduces a Swiss format, which the players have found popular as it lets them play more sets, and it bars top players and previous graduates from entering, which allows the intended audience to feel more welcome. Our entrant numbers for most Mild West events are almost double what our regular attendance for Feliz Jueves is- for an event that we only run once a month, we see this as extremely successful.

Due to a variety of factors- the indefinite hiatus of WNF GGST, the upcoming GGST crossplay beta, the upcoming Xrd rollback beta and eventual final update, and the waning popularity of Feliz Jueves +R, we will eventually be rolling out some changes to WWGG’s broadcasting/event schedule:

• We will be switching to running only one bracket a week. Running two online events back-to-back as volunteers, regardless of differing scale, is extremely exhausting and we’ve been feeling the burnout for a while now.
• We plan on introducing a Mild West event for GGST. We don’t have the formalities quite ironed out yet, but we know that players who have placed into Celestial and have a certain Glicko score will be banned, and we will probably be experimenting with Swiss, a best of three ruleset as opposed to the standard best of five, or some combination. Kim and I are not a fan of GGST’s best of five ruleset (but are willing to compromise and run top 8 as best of five all the way,) and we’re slowly seeing this sentiment shared with other TOs. A Mild West event would allow us to experiment with the ruleset while also catering to players who would normally drown in pools during a stacked event such as Series E.
• When the Xrd rollback retrofit is complete, we plan on bringing back Mild West for that game as well. Mild West began as something Ruben and the old WWGG crew ran for Xrd, and since Patrick/pattheflip and the NorCal Play Guilty Gear crew (and more!) are holding down the Xrd weekly open brackets, we would like to add Xrd to our event schedule in a way that helps it stand out from other events. I personally began playing Guilty Gear with Rev2, learning it from Pat’s stream and entering impromptu offline events that Ruben ran at WNF for free, so I feel like adding the game back to our rotations is the most fitting way to pay it forward.
• Just for fun, and because I’m a really big fan of the game, I would like to add Melty Blood Type Lumina to our event schedule. There’s really no reason for this beyond it being one of my favorite games, and I think I would like to support it and commentate it. Initially my motivation was to get Kim to do all the work for this one so that I could have an MBTL online event that I could enter on my own time, but since our schedule is opening and other MBTL online brackets are gaining traction this is less of a factor now. For MBTL, this would probably be our only open bracket, unless the idea for a Mild West MBTL is popular.
• We plan on keeping Mild West +R in our rotation. As mentioned before, the event is incredibly popular and there are few remaining events for the game that cater to players trying to learn the game. Carving that space out as part of WWGG will allow us to keep the Discord and tournament welcome to lower-level players and hopefully cultivate a community for them.

The final schedule would look something like:

• Mild West +R
• Mild West Rev2
• Mild West Strive
• Wild West Melty Blood

As you can probably surmise, this means that eventually, the Feliz Jueves open bracket will be cut from our event schedule entirely. I know that overall the playerbase and amount of online events for the game has been dwindling, but at the same time I think we as the TOs are allowed to be selfish about the events we want to run. We’re obviously not going to cut Feliz Jueves from the event right away, and we plan on giving it a proper sendoff and heads-up when it comes time. We may also potentially do some other one-off events, like invitational exhibitions and the like, to cater to top players. I greatly appreciate the +R community’s consistent support throughout the past year, but I think it’s also time to try new stuff.

It would also not be honest of me to withhold that another major part of the event schedule change is due to a lot of personal frustration. During the GGST events, we would have several top players get angry with us over little things, and if we tried to resolve those disputes privately, they would just take it to Twitter and brigade us or misconstrue the reality of the situation. This prior experience led to us taking the JasonRiot cheating allegations public to head-off private gossip, which turned into an extremely exhausting situation where, despite overwhelming support from most sides, I was still subject to harassment from an audience that didn’t care what happened either way. This was a major source of the burnout we experienced with our running of both WNF GGST and Feliz Jueves, and made it hard to justify running the event on a volunteer basis. Kim and I have both been contemplating whether it was worth running these events without pay for some time now. That being said, once again, we greatly appreciate everyone who’s been supportive of us and of our event for so long- we wouldn’t be running WWGG without you.

Closing

There’s still a lot of nebulous stuff going on with the event schedule and what we want to do at WWGG, but I figured a prompt update now would cut off a lot of the confusion some players are already experiencing with regards to WNF. In the long term, Kim and I would like to turn our experiences at WWGG into opportunities with the rest of the FGC, in esports, or beyond, but we don’t know what our first steps are. Kim has floated the idea of beginning a Patreon for WWGG at some point where players can support our event, and perhaps a separate page where you can commission artwork from her. In the meantime, you can also subscribe to her Twitch channel and mine. You can also catch up on past VODs on our respective YouTube channels. We’ve also been, on occasion, running matchmaking ladders on our own at WWGG, so if that’s something players express interest in we can do it again. There will be a poll (later) asking our users what dates and times work best for them when we end up running our events for GGST, Xrd, and MBTL, as well as questions about the format and upper-level restrictions. In the meantime, you can always just ask us about what’s going on in the Discord if you need clarification.

As always- stay safe, stay healthy, and Kill Your Friends Guilt-Free.