Proposal for making Tournament Listings/Results more organized/accessible

[PCwizCube]

I've heard people talking about how they want to make the Smash community more popular so that we can gain more respect and become a bigger community overall. For example, prog talked about creating more hi-quality videos to encourage people to enter the competitive Smash scene. I have another suggestion. How about making tournament listing/results more organized and accessible?

Currently, I think the way we list information about tournaments for smashers (and potential smashers) is unorganized and frankly, downright frustrating. Okay, so I go to the Tournament Listings subforum, I click the region I'm interested in, but then...scrolling down through the threads, I can't immediately see the dates or the location of the tournaments. Plus, past tournaments are mixed up with upcoming ones. So, to get a good idea of what upcoming tournaments I can go to, I have to put quite a bit of unnecessary effort. I think that discourages new smashers to join the competitive scene (and Facebook groups and IRC aren't really the best way to attract new people either).

I think tournaments results could be much more organized/accessible. I come from the speedcubing community (we solve Rubik's Cubes quickly), and they present information about their tournaments a lot better. Just from their general competition page, I know exactly the tournament date, the tournament name, the country, the city, and the venue name for the upcoming/past 100 competitions. Especially important is that the competition are organized in date order - it makes things so much easier. And with the filters, it's a breeze to sort competitions by event, region, and year. For example, if I want to go to 2013 competition in the USA that has the 3x3x3 cube one handed event, it literally takes me seconds to get a complete list of all the upcoming competitions. I can even search up a competition name / city / venue.

Of course, we still want specific information about competitions/tournaments, and I can find that out easily too. From the general competition page, if I want to know more information about say, the Princeton Spring 2013 competition (2013 March 30), I just click on that link, and then click on the website page and I have all the information about events, fees, the venue, ect. Overall, finding information about competitions is very simple, and it does a great job encouraging new "speedcubers" to compete.

The general competition page also makes finding results of competitions effortless. I just click the link on the main page of any competition that has occurred (past competitions are in blue) and I get a complete list of every competitor and their results in their respective events. I don't know of if this is as important for drawing new competitors to the smash scene, but it makes finding competition results a lot more convenient.

My proposal for the Smash community is to set up tournament listings (and maybe results) like the the way the speedcubing community does, or at least in a way that's more efficient. For finding specific information about the tournaments, we could still link people to the forum threads. Overall, I think having this main page, with tournaments listed in date order, and with really convenient filters, will make finding information about tournaments so much easier. And that, in turn, will help our community gain respect and grow.

What do you guys think?

 

[pokemongeof]

yes! I think this is a tremendous idea! You should post this though on the "Production Values and Smash Community" Thread

 

[KrazyKnux]

Yeah I made a post a while back giving ideas to make tournaments, results, videos, etc... more streamlined.

I'll probably post more on the subject soon, but for now I'll say I definitely agree with you. This kind of thing would go a long way towards helping the community.

 

[bearsfan092]

Agreed on all points. Smashboards organization has always been pretty bad, and it really hurts the tournaments section.

 

[MountainGoat]

Yeah coming from the sc2 community where results are posted almost instantly on liquidpedia and you can easily go back and check on years of results, the smash organization of results is pretty disappointing.

 

[AlphaZealot]

I like this idea. Will see what we can do.

 

[Acryte]

Would be amazing if you could WEIGHT results by tourney size too... or if you could incorporate ELO into it so people could search tourneys that had high ranked players would also be amazing.

 

[ycz12]

The Tournament Listings pages already have an "Upcoming events for the next 3 day(s)..." section at the top, though it's easy to miss if you're not thinking about it. Extending that to the next 7 days would probably be a good start; right now checking on Monday is basically useless.

 

[PCwizCube]

Thanks for all the feedback!

I like this idea. Will see what we can do.

Great! Also, we could possibly integrate more organized tournament listings/results with the http://ssbpd.com/ database, since (if I'm not mistaken) it'll be integrated into Smashboards. From there, you could easily see a list of upcoming competitions, past competitions, placings of players in tournaments, and overall player rank. That would be really nice.

Would be amazing if you could WEIGHT results by tourney size too... or if you could incorporate ELO into it so people could search tourneys that had high ranked players would also be amazing.

Yeah, I was thinking about that. If we integrated the ssbpd.com database with tournament listings/results, a weighting system could be really useful.

The Tournament Listings pages already have an "Upcoming events for the next 3 day(s)..." section at the top, though it's easy to miss if you're not thinking about it. Extending that to the next 7 days would probably be a good start; right now checking on Monday is basically useless.

Yeah, I've seen that. And yes, I agree it's not really that helpful since it only shows competitions in the short term. For example, I wouldn't be able to easily search for all the tournaments in a certain region within the next 3 months. You can do that in less than 10 seconds with the speedcubing general competition page.

I saw that on SmashBoards, there's an Upcoming Events page that shows upcoming tournaments for several weeks/months. It's nice, but I still find it difficult to find tournaments by region, city, country, events available, etc. A lot of it is there, but it isn't as organized/simple to use as it could be.

 

[Sugahighsnipa]

This would be terrific. I'm new to smash and the competitive scene and I want to get out to more smashfests/tournaments, but it's hard to find them

 

[CEObrainz]

SSWT plan to organize results in such a way that they are easy enough to find.

 

[PCwizCube]

SSWT plan to organize results in such a way that they are easy enough to find.

Oh yeah I was thinking about that when I saw the SSWT thread. Are you planning on making SSWT sort of like a centralized governing body for smash tournaments? I know that for the speedcubing community, every official competition is organized through the World Cube Association (WCA) and they make things highly organized, with WCA delegates at each competition that make sure all the rules are followed, announcements of every upcoming WCA tournament in the world, and data on the results of every single competition and profiles of all speedcubers. It helps the community tremendously with a more professional and organized feel, which I think the Smash community is lacking.

 

[CEObrainz]

Oh yeah I was thinking about that when I saw the SSWT thread. Are you planning on making SSWT sort of like a centralized governing body for smash tournaments? I know that for the speedcubing community, every official competition is organized through the World Cube Association (WCA) and they make things highly organized, with WCA delegates at each competition that make sure all the rules are followed, announcements of every upcoming WCA tournament in the world, and data on the results of every single competition and profiles of all speedcubers. It helps the community tremendously with a more professional and organized feel, which I think the Smash community is lacking.

Yes, we are planing to do something along those lines, however having an official at every event may not be possible.

 

[PCwizCube]

Yes, we are planing to do something along those lines, however having an official at every event may not be possible.

Well for the speedcubing community, WCA delegates are chosen from people who are well known and trusted in the community. So for Smash, any person that the community trusts or even the tournament organizer can be an official/delegate. These delegates could start out from well known people in local communities that have done a lot of good things for smash, for example prog, scar, cactuar, etc. (these people can still compete in the tournament), so I think really at any tournament if there's a person that people really like a lot, that person could be a delegate. They don't have to do a ton of work - the point is that that person would be officially recognized to make sure everything in the tournament is going well and it would be more organized and look a lot more professional.

 

[CEObrainz]

Well for the speedcubing community, WCA delegates are chosen from people who are well known and trusted in the community. So for Smash, any person that the community trusts or even the tournament organizer can be an official/delegate. These delegates could start out from well known people in local communities that have done a lot of good things for smash, for example prog, scar, cactuar, etc. (these people can still compete in the tournament), so I think really at any tournament if there's a person that people really like a lot, that person could be a delegate. They don't have to do a ton of work - the point is that that person would be officially recognized to make sure everything in the tournament is going well and it would be more organized and look a lot more professional.

I think that would be mainly a job for the TO as it does seem to come under their responsibilities.

 

[PCwizCube]

I think that would be mainly a job for the TO as it does seem to come under their responsibilities.

Yeah that's fine. For the speedcubing community, usually having separate TOs and delegates is more efficient since the TO focuses mostly organizational tasks like registration and making sure everything is going to schedule, while the delegate's sole task is to make sure rules are being met and being the final arbiter for disputes. It makes the tournaments flow very well, and there are usually less issues with rules not being followed (like the the ROM5 scandal that occurred partially because the TO was too busy doing everything else). Also, with this system, anyone can be a TO but only certain people who are trusted by the WCA board can become delegates. It just makes the World Cube Association as a whole much more consistent and everything is held to the same standard. Competitions in Brazil are run almost the same way they are held in Malaysia and the US and I can go to a competition anywhere in the world and enjoy the same speedcubing experience. This system makes the speedcubing community look really organized and professional and the size of the community has been multiplying ever since the first competition in 2003.

But yeah I don't think the smash community needs separate delegates right now; TOs should be fine (although I feel kind of bad for them because of how busy they are!).