How to grow the Mordhau community and grow the competitive scene.

This thread was added on April 23, 2020, with posts from Jaaxxxxon.

Original Post

I wrote this paper/proposal in OCT 2019 in preparing for the Dec holiday sales and player increase. But due to the building drama and pure stupidity within comp community and even within my own clan, I decided at the time not to publish it as I was hesitant to take on more hate than I normally get. What this paper proposes, I have been saying for over 5+ years from Comp Chivalry. Even back then when we had a small and dying comp scene I was making these proposals before Mordhau was released and even during release that the competitive community really needed to reach out to pub players, train them and get them interested in a higher level of play. Back when I initially proposed that all the current clans put together an outreach training program to bring in new players, I was told more than once, "why should we do that when KILA is already doing that and we can just poach from you?" KILA was the only clan from Chivalry through Mord that was really reaching out and training new players, in both games and into the comp scene. Now imagine how large and great the comp scene would have been, if, at release of Mordhau with 60,000+ players playing and wanting to get better, if the 20 or so NA clans had done competitive outreach and training for new players. Imagine how quickly the need for a better organized competitive system would be needed. But I digress as the comp drama burned me and so many others out.

Now several things have changed since I wrote this I applaud the attempts at training groups and organizing better comp events like The Mordhau Training Academy, Void clan, Venatas, and even Tempest Academy. This has been a mixed bag of drama, success and more failure than not. I believe that falls squarely on the community and their high tolerance and acceptance for bullshit. I applaud those who have tried and worked hard to get tourneys set up and ran. But when you have a max viewership of around 200 players and a last month average of 9k players and a 3k-6k daily player base, that is some very sad interest into comp. Take into consideration that at the time of the last tourney, Giru hopped in and had 300+ viewers, and pubstars like stripedsweater could pull 50+ viewers while a tourney was happening. Why? Why does no one care about the comp scene minus the 250ish NA comp players? Why doesn't anyone really know about the comp scene in Mordhau?

I believe this melee game competitive community and the community can grow. For the sake of argument, lets say there are 200 active NA comp players and a pub base of 3000 daily players. I see no reason why they comp community cannot grow. It is one thing to circle jerk scrim the same 100+ guys everyday to get better. That is understandable but without fresh blood getting interested and involved in the games, the comp scene will share the same fate as it did in Chivalry and is currently doing so. Thus I invite you to read through my proposal even though it was written in Oct of 2019, I think much of it still applies and could be achieved. I do regret not posting it last year as that was the prime time to get invested before the holiday sales. But now with Covid-19 still being an issue, new maps with Patch #17, a dying comp scene, and other games grabbing players interest, now is a good of a time as any to try and grow, mature, revamp, reorganize, and reform the comp community with a priority for building solid lasting teams and of course pub player outreach and training.

Thank you for your consideration.
Retsnom

Comp Proposal Link: rhinoceg.com/orangebox/kila/Comp_Proposal.docx

Jaaxxxxon 5 years ago

Original

Interesting read, and I agree with a decent amount of the points you've made (although not all of them).

For us at Triternion, our main priority at this point in time is to try to grow the playerbase, and add reasonable features that can help ease interested players into a competitive scene.

Every major competitive game has a healthy player base which potential competitive players are drawn from - with a 9-10k peak player amount monthly, the amount of current comp teams/players that we have is perfectly normal. Take CSGO, and I would assume that out of their 1M+ player base, there are probably somewhere between 1-10k people who would consider themselves at least amateur competitive players (either playing pugs, queuing into high MMR matches at the top ranks, FACEIT/ESEA, and attending smaller online events) and about 100-200 that are at the highest tier with major orgs going to LAN events (Astralis, 100T, NaVI, fnatic, etc.).

What this means for us and for Mordhau is that in order to grow the comp scene, we need to increase the player base to make this possible. If you imagine the playerbase as a pyramid, there is a larger pool of casual and semi-serious players who just enjoy playing Frontline/Invasion or maybe a few ranked duels every now and then, and out of that pool comes a smaller amount of players who are interested in competing at a higher level. With this being said, there is a requirement to have more players to boost the activity at the competitive level - both casual and competitive player bases are intertwined.

Additionally, people are less likely to invest time into a game if there is less interest in the game; sinking 6k hours into Mordhau because you enjoy it is well and good, but without a decent following there won't be big tournaments featuring huge prize pools, the players won't be having insane Twitch viewership and be able to support themselves financially there, and if people aren't interested, others won't feel motivated to master the game.

Once the player base is sufficient, there is a higher likelihood of people getting interested in comp play, but for that to happen there needs to be an easy transition from normal, casual play into a more competitive atmosphere. The more barriers in the way, the less likely it is for people to get involved. For example, if you look at Chivalry, Mercs/Compmod changed the base gameplay mechanics which required readjusting, and playing 5v5/6v6 TO was also something that was different to normal play, and required two teams to organize a scrim/event between each other, on a private server.

In Mordhau, the same issue arises, more or less; if you want to dip your feet into competitive play, you need to first learn on your own (typically) to the point where a team will be willing to coach you, find a team and improve, then hang around and wait for teams to scrim your team, continue to improve there, and then you get into a higher tier comp team. Busting down these barriers is a good way to get those who might be slightly interested more involved, and would help to ease the transition into comp play greatly.

As I said above, these two ideas are the things we're looking to improve - the playerbase, and the accessibility of competitive play. I can't say exactly what we're doing currently, but we're definitely not finished with the game, and we'll be continuing to work on it for quite some time. We hope to increase numbers, as well as adding in more organic ways for players to get involved in the scene without needing excessive amounts of coordination to just get a few matches in.

There are a few things that we can't do, however. Injecting massive prize pools into the current scene might momentarily boost interest/exposure/publicity, but you can't create a comp scene from money alone - larger companies than us have tried that and failed. The key to increasing the healthiness of the scene relies on organic growth - more casual players brings more viewers to events, which brings larger sponsors and prize pools, which brings more interested players into the comp scene, and then the cycle tends to repeat itself a bit, resulting in a nice healthy scene.

As for the competitive community itself, there is only so much that we can do ourselves. I can't tell people how to act or behave, only punish those who are abusive/offensive etc. in official channels. As a competitive community, there absolutely needs to be self regulation and fostering a healthy environment that is friendly for new players and encourages them to improve instead of scaring them off due to toxicity.

I appreciate you making this post, and I'm glad to see it's sparked some good discussion in the comments as well. I hope that we can all work together to make Mordhau a better place going forwards :)

(2020) How to grow the Mordhau community and grow the competitive scene.

Links