Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/WargrooveCompetitive/ Competitive Discord: https://discord.gg/BXmaEyB https://smash.gg/wgladder - Ranked Matchmaking Ladder (Async, 5 maps+) https://smash.gg/wargrooveladder - GOW Matchmaking Ladder (Realtime + Async, Map Pool of 7)
Any game needs official support and in game implementation to have a credible competitive scene. Discord and external ladders are cute, but don't quite fill this purpose. A player must be able to open the game, click one button, get an objectively set up game and play it. After that he must be able to click another button to see, how he is doing in comparison to other players. The quickplay is a good foundation for a competitive setup. It just needs some improvements: Better and more balanced map pool. I'm sure this is easy to do now that there's a lot more data on the meta. In game ladder. Some minor polishing, like players being able to ban few commanders based on their preferences and the map.
Obviously an in-game ladder and official support is the best implementation, but you simply can't expect that from so many games these days. Discord and smash.gg are solutions to the problem of unsupportive devs (common). Even some of the largest games out there don't have a proper ranked implementation (Fortnite just got ranked, but they forgot to implement leaderboard lol. smash melee and ultimate? nope, unless you go on Anther's Ladder for ssbm, which is a 3rd party ladder that is widely used for netplay now.) Chucklefish doesn't make really good maps, and our community has looked through all of the default maps already (detailed in /r/wargroovecompetitive). You can't really make a balanced pool from the default maps, there's only 1-4 "playable" maps. Custom maps would be a whole dilemma for them to implement (how would people submit or vet the maps?) While an in-game ladder with bans is ideal, it's just too much to expect right now when they've made it clear that competitive isn't the priority (and may never come). So here we are with this smash.gg solution. Our previous smash.gg ladder had 130 attendees. https://smash.gg/tournament/in-the-groove-february-2019/events/ladder/overview
I appreciate you putting the word out there to garner peoples' interest in the competitive scene. If Chucklefish has no plans to support a competitive scene, then I honestly don't understand what their plans for this game's future are. The 1P replay-ability is basically non-existent due to a horrible AI. No reason to go through the campaign more than once when the maps are such a slog. Once the puzzles are complete, no reason to do those again. Arcade mode is also plagued by the bad AI. It's really a shame they didn't implement a true War Room with great maps to achieve ranks on with all the COs. I wish CF was more transparent about what they really plan for this game, because as of right now, my only interest is competitive play/map making via Discord and Smash.gg, and if you observe the official subreddit and Discord, you can see interest has died down a lot since the initial release. The subreddit used to have tons of new posts every day. Now there's maybe one or two. The Discord was so active that I didn't even participate in it due to how fast it moved. Now it's slowed down to a crawl. I hope CF's plans for this game aren't for us to keep it alive for them.
I think Fadedsun is being way too pessimistic here. They're pretty much ignoring that StarCraft 1 was pretty much put together with duct-tape and staples and its competitive scene sort of emerged without help from Blizzard. In fact, it just sorta blew up in Korea. Good games that are well-made for competitive play, ideally, just naturally create a competitive environment. Period. I think it's way too early to say Wargroove won't naturally do this. And I don't think it's necessarily bad if the game's "lifespan" is short. It doesn't matter how long or short a game's lifespan is, just so long as it's good for every moment it is alive. And for it to live exactly as long as it deserves to. To that end I think Wargroove has nothing to worry about. If the Advance Wars spirit can survive twenty years despite outright being dropped by its creators, I think there's a lot of potential for Wargroove to go the distance with the love and attention it's getting. Regardless of where that love and attention comes from.
Yeah, those are good points. It remains to be seen. Right now there seems to be next to no want for a competitive environment, though. Our competitive circle is a little dead, though we see some new faces every now and again. Hoping things will pick up in the future.
Maybe something will pick up. Or the game could languish for many years only to discover new life later like EarthBound did or something like that. It's too early to say, but I'm totally with you on thinking it deserves better than it's getting.
