Simply Put, Why Isn't This Us?

[CT Chia]

aka, why aren't we this:

https://trentesports.wordpress.com/2016/09/21/the-case-for-a-committee-growing-smash/

I think a discussion on this is big enough to warrant its own thread and not put into the State of the BR thread. I'd love to hear the thoughts from the leaders of the room, advisors too if possible.

@Camalange
@Liberation
@Shaya
@Xiivi
Marc

 

[Diosdi]

Chibo is right...we are escentially this, but we don't put it in practice.

 

[PND]

Multiple organizations across Ontario are looking at building provincial circuits. Going larger than state wide does present a set of issues, though.

We still haven't even hammered out a standardized ruleset for this game. 2 stock versus 3? Stage list? (Lylat starter / Dreamland starter / FLSS?) Mii Legality? Sudden death clause? Heck, even customs? These all vary tournament to tournament. If a large scale circuit was to take place, we would need all the TO's and communities to agree on a standardized ruleset.

Sponsors are definitely necessary for something like this, primarily for travel costs. On a statewide level, travel costs are easily manageable. Going country-wide increases the costs quite a bit, and going international balloons the costs significantly. If players are qualifying globally for this event, we'd need a sponsor with deep enough pockets to either cover their flights / hotel rooms or create a prize pot incentive large enough that the players can't say no.

As a TO here in Canada, I'd definitely be on board for helping out with something like this -- but I think we'd need someone with super-major TO experience to take point on it and leverage their connections.

 

[Diosdi]

This is why I insist that , intead of rushing in and use the 2016 budget, with the end of year so near, let's wait for 2017 and have that add up to what we had, then, having much more ground t maybe sponsor, or do circuits. We have possibilities for tournaments, and doing a circuit may bring a lot of revenue and make us as renouned as we shoul be

 

[PND]

Even if the $1k tripled to $3k, that's still not a huge bu dget for events. I ran nexus 2016 in Ottawa on a $4.5 k budget out of pocket, and that got us around ~100 people and a venue that couldn't support much more than that. As far as event management goes, $1k isn't a lot. It's a nice start, but a circuit is going to take a MUCH larger budget than that. I think using the budget for content creation (Say, a podcast / streamed talk show, something like that) would be much more prudent.

Mind you, my dollar amounts are in Canadian, so that impacts costs somewhat, but for a major circuit I think $10k is a low-ball estimate to get one started. (I'd personally want to shoot for about $25k for a top 16 / top 32 invitational, but I'm just spitballing here. I haven't actually crunched a cost analysis for something like this in the states yet.)

For avenues of monetization, we could charge for premium twitch access / vod access. As long as we'd be fully transparent that the costs are going into content creation and budgets for future events, I think we could get smashers to support the pricing model.

 

[shrooby]

Two logistical reasons come to mind:
1) This requires full-time positions. Who would these people be?
2) We don't have enough money for something of this scale. And I don't think we'd be able to gather enough support to be able to get enough.

What is also an issue imo is that we're associated with and affected by Smashboards' image
You may be able to offer more insight into this kind of thing from a business perspective, being the owner of CT. This is where I'd imagine being associated with SWF would be helpful. Also obtaining certain resources for certain kinds of content might be easier for being associated with the name. (Thinking like, getting certain people for interviews or something.)
But from my perspective as just a community member, SWF has a big stigma. A big portion of the people we'd be targeting think of SWF as a joke. This would make it harder just to get general community support (those who attend tournaments at least).
And there isn't really much we can do about it because we can't control how SWF operates, and we cannot control its brand image.
I might have a skewed perspective since I'm West Coast, and WC seems to have an overall even more negative view of SWF.

This is at best a very very long-term goal. (Which is something he acknowledges in the article; it would take years to get it going.) In the shorter-term, our goal should be building a name of our own, using the money we have now.

But, let's say this was a very long-term goal. (Years)
Are there steps we could be taking right now, taking into account what I've said?

 

[Marc]

I was traveling with limited internet access, hence the late reply.

The article centers around the idea of the "committee" putting in place a world championship. While I agree that it's hard to weigh individual events in our community due to a lack of central organization, this isn't a new idea and the article doesn't really address how this would work in practice. The average major is a massive undertaking worth tens of thousands of dollars, heavily reliant on individuals to put in the required effort and shoulder the financial risks. It's not something you run from an online forum.

What you can do however is get the TOs of succesful event series together to tie their events into one overarching ranking. This is something we did with SmashEurope for Melee and it succeeded in crowning a season champion, bringing more exposure to individual events and getting TOs to communicate more. The production values of the circuit itself ended up disappointing however: there was no finale event and there weren't enough people producing content for it. Basically, the individual TOs were too heavily burdened by their own events to put much time into the circuit and it was the events themselves that brought in the money. The circuit pot consisted entirely of cuts from the qualifier pots as a result.

SmashBoards has the means to have people other than the TOs focused on organizing and covering a circuit of sorts, but it would still be very hard to pool the money required to make it stand out, either through a season pot or an actual finale event. In Europe the circuit more or less worked due to top players generally being interested in most of the events already and it wasn't that hard to pinpoint a qualifier for each country. In the US, it would take a lot to get all top players involved and then I still have a hard time seeing an isolated institution like EVO caring. There are also some serious ruleset differences to consider for Smash 4 if you were to pull this worldwide.

So yeah, I am pessimistic about us putting an authorative world championship on the map any time soon. It might be worth a shot to just make a season out of selected events and take it from there.