Smash in the UK - facebook/reddit repost.

[jjlinyard]

(Link to the original SmashUK Post)

Be warned, This is a long post with a lot of reading. But it's very much relevent to smash, and it's VERY exciting news. A lot of work has been put into this and I can't wait to see it unfold.

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Hi all, we hope you all had a good New Year’s Eve. Now while you're all busy groaning and trying to recover for your respective hangovers, we have a huge announcement for you concerning the landscape of the UK Smash Bros. Community! Over the past few months, various members of the community (notably G~P, JJLinyard, Kone, Smo, Alpha Dash, Jolteon, Fuzzyness, X1-12, and VA) have been working behind the scenes to improve the community in as many ways as possible.

So without further ado we present to you what we have been working on:

Introducing the UK Smash Championship Season 1:

We have collectively identified that the current scene is lacking in tournament quantity and quality. As a result, the UK scene’s competitiveness is low. To remedy this, we have carefully collaborated over an exciting national tournament structure. This Championship is designed to link tournaments, promote the hosting of competitions from local to national, encourage players to travel, and ultimately create greater competition between players to restore the vigour of the community.

Every event throughout the next 8 months leads up to the finale of the season hosted by Kone at the SNY venue in Birmingham: Heir To The Throne (HT3 for short). This August event will feature two tournaments, the open bracket tournament and the 16 man invitational. The winner of the invitational is named UK Smash Champion and wins the UK crown and takes their well deserved place on the UK throne.

But how do you get into the invitational?

By accruing COINS!

How it all works:

• ANY tournaments which feature 16 or more players in attendance provide the ability to gain coins. This includes locals, regionals, ranbats and so on.
  
  
• Coins throughout the season are tallied up until the finale event in August, and the 12 players with the most coins who show up on the day advance straight into the invitational, with the remaining places going to the top 4 of the open bracket.
  
  
• An intensively tested formula which awards players at events coins based on attendance, and the quality of the attendees present and the relative performance in relation to the amount of quality players present at your event e.g. going to an event with 30 players with only one top level player and the rest being newbs will not get you many coins if you place well, whereas going to a stacked event with the top 16 players all there and placing 13th would get you many more coins.
  
  
• The ranking is continuously updating and the formula uses the rankings in order to determine the amount of coins which will be handed out at an event.
  
  
• The ranking season begins with SweetSpot 1 in which there will be a pre-determined top 16 UK players which have been drafted by a panel of selected players. This list is just a rough guide for the formula to award the first handful of coins. After Sweetspot 1, it is completely void, and from then on, coins awarded will be based on the ranking itself. Please do not complain about this list, it will not count for anything after SweetSpot.
  
  
• This is being run for BRAWL, MELEE and PROJECT M!
  

Following up with this we hope to improve the frequency of tournaments inside and outside of London throughout the year. Currently we have a planned list of national events each month leading up to the FINALE event. These events are all around the country. In order to maximise coins, and therefore the likelihood of gaining an automatic position in the invitational bracket, players would benefit from travelling to a variety of tournaments in a variety of localities.

To get you started, here are the first few nationals happening this year:

• January - 25th - SweetSpot 1 (hosted by G~P in Cambridge)
  
  
• February - 28th/March 1st - Edentines Day (hosted by Kone in Birmingham)
  
  
• March - 15th - Smash Ain't Dead III (hosted by Alpha Dash in London)
  

There are also nationals currently being planned for April-July.

That’s just to start us off though — anyone can host a tournament and have it contribute to the UK Smash Championship! Locals, regionals, and nationals all count!

Introducing SmashbrosUK.com:

To bring all of this together, the UK Smash Bros scene will be getting its own website. At the moment, the UK scene is hidden either in this private Facebook group, or several layers deep into smashboards.com. With the excitement generated from recent happenings in the U.S, Smash 4 around the corner, and our exciting new model for the UK community, we wanted to put ourselves out there and make our community easy for anyone to find just by googling ‘Super Smash Bros UK’

The site will contain:

• A blog to keep you up-to-date with the latest Smash UK news
  
  
• League tables for all 3 major Smash games, updated after every event
  
  
• check here to see how you’re doing!
  
  
• Events pages listing all tournaments and socials (don’t worry, they’ll still be here too!)
  
  
• Links to Smashboards, our YouTube channel, twitch channel, Facebook group and other media
  
  
• FAQ for anyone who has just stumbled on our community and wants to get involved
  
  
• Information on crews currently playing together in the UK
  

The site should be really cool — we’re just waiting on a quote from a professional graphics and web design company to provide it for us. This means it will cost something, but we’ll look at ways to fund that without costing anyone much at all, most likely a community donation drive.

Changes to the YouTube and Twitch channels:

As a community we have realised that we run more smoothly and better when all the regions and games work together. Each community for each game interact well together and it is that unity which makes the UK scene special. With that in mind, we are also going to effect these changes that will hopefully bring the community together:

• The solo channels on YouTube and Twitch between brawl and melee have been combined into one channel which will host all content for the games. This has been done to keep the channels more active, improve the subscription and view rate into one channel which overall makes it easier for us to be found by the general public.
  
  
• All YouTube upload will be found on the SuperSmashBrosUK channel
  
  
• The move to the melee channel was made due to it having more views and a higher amount of subscribers. As of this move the old brawl channel shall be listed as an archive for people to go back and enjoy if they wish.
  
  
• The new twitch channel for all UK content is found on the SuperSmashBrosUk channel for the same reasons.
  
  
• Streaming at events will be shared as best as possible with TOs generally having the ability to choose how the stream is run for their events. Each game will try to get an evenly shared amount of time on the stream.
  
  
• We’re looking to create a culture of high-quality match commentary to make the streamed games more exciting to watch. This could take a while to figure out who is good and what works, but we want to take this seriously and do a good job of it. If you’re interested in commentating, get in touch with one of us, or your local tournament organiser!
  
  
• Furthermore we are attempting to step up our recording ability with a focus on getting more footage in higher quality off stream recorded. More on this will be announced later.
  
  
• Finally, we’ll have a more active twitter presence, so stay tuned for timely updates with the latest Smash news and as-it-happens tournament hype.
  

That should be enough to keep you going for now! We hope you look forward to what we have planned. If you have any questions, do comment. If you want to host a tournament in your area for the UK Smash Championship Season 1, do it! If 2013 was the year of US Smash, let’s make 2014 the year of UK Smash revival!