Running Long Term Online Events — Lessons Learned From Groove of War #4

It’s weird to think we’re almost a year away from the previous article about this. In that time we saw a massive update to Wargroove which included some much-needed balance changes, an entirely new event series in the form of “Test Your Mettle” and a ton of work from the event staff to improve things. Before we go into the new lessons learned, I want to take a quick look at how our changes made from the previous article worked out.

This event was not for everyone and that was good

…and that’s fine. Despite a small drop in numbers from 47 to 45, the people who actually showed up and played had far fewer issues. The times’ people would play were far stricter and people had to choose 1 of 4 timezones to play their matches in for the majority of the event. While this could be improved upon to offer a bit more flexibility in future, having set times made the event experience much smoother overall.

We still saw some issues due to Corona and one case where someone lost access to everything except their PS4 version of the game. But the reality is there is only so much we can do and this was a major step forward.

Clearer rules and clearer enforcement

So the other important thing this time around was rules were much more set in stone. Players would use in-game timers, so we had no more instances where referees would need to make calls during matches. Matches had set deadlines that we could easily enforce, with a few small exceptions that gave some people 24-hour extensions.

While it did suck to see people given losses for simple mistakes like showing up late to their match or not realising they needed to be on discord to coordinate with their opponent, the overwhelming majority of matches that happened went smoothly.

We did get a bit more flexible as the event went on, but kept it within reason and with good communication between all parties involved. There are some rules to tidy up further as well, but overall the clearer rules made for a much better event.

Building a strong relationship with the developers helped a lot

Since the end of Groove of War 3, the relationship between the Groove of War staff and Chucklefish has come a long way. Several Groove of War staff helped with an updated map pool for quickplay and are now credited in the game. Timers were added to the game, making it possible to run events smoothly without heavy oversight of each match.

The level of extra promotion and prize support was bigger this time around too. Multiple tweets, stream hosts and enough prize support to give us supplemental prizes for the rest of the year.

Chucklefish have moved their development resources over to Witchbrook now outside of bug fixes to Wargroove. For us though, we’re at a point where social media support is enough right now and we can keep growing.

Better pacing means minimal burnout

One of the most noticeable changes this time around was just how less stressful everything was. Matches took place on Thursday with gaps between each region. Some games took place outside Thursdays, but the tighter schedule and longer downtime meant we had downtime during the week to take breaks from working on the event.

After Groove of War 4 concluded, most of the staff involved were able to continue working on other things pretty quickly.

New lessons learned

With all the improvements we saw this event, we do have new challenges to face. Chess timers made scheduling easier, but the 30-minute timer we chose resulted in timeouts and narrowed the types of available strategies. We’re looking at either longer chess timers (Chucklefish recently added a 45-minute chess option) or turn timers for future events. We will need to test the formats to see how viable this is before we can consider running Groove of War 5.

Another issue we ran into was rushing to have maps done on time for the event. Despite having mostly gone for safer options, there were a number of issues with the maps. In some cases, we updated the maps mid-event (causing more problems) and in others, we left maps alone (also causing problems). I don’t regret pushing to have Groove of War 4 start when it did, but I’m also in favour of taking more time to prepare in future. Making changes in the middle of an event shouldn’t happen again either, so Groove of War 5 will be a while away yet.

Lastly, we had a lot of people asking to play more than once per week. In Groove of War 3, we had the issue of almost too many games so we went the opposite for 4. Best of 1 sets had issues too, with an obvious need more multiple games between opponents each round. Going into Groove of War 5, we’ll be looking to keep a weekly schedule but in a way that allows for more matches.

So that’s it. Thankfully we have less to work on now compared to going from Groove of War 3 into Groove of War 4. We also have a much better idea of how to make improvements as well as where to make them. There’s some more events between now and Groove of War 5, but I’ll be saving writing another post-mortem until after that.