What needs to happen to speedball to keep it relevant?

[Lurker27]

I think the objections about tech are real, though having a clock seems like a reasonable requirement in the smartphone era.

I do object to the notion that tuning the position of end lines is all you need - lines being inherently easier to cross than reaching a point/limited zone is a major consideration. Having multiple factors (Short game length with decremented points, position of scoring zone, size of scoring zone).

I'm coming around to the idea that in practical terms the ref load is fine.

Certainly, such a format even with limited tuning would represent a structurally superior game.

[Lurker27]

Also, just to be clear, it's my position that we as a group should be serious about this shit. I'm not treating this discussion in purely hypothetical terms. It seems obvious that current tournament series need drastic change, if they survive at all.

Step 1 is designing and testing a workable alternative, ensuring fun, watchable play that's affordable for players and fields. This is aimed at expanding and energizing the player base.

Step 2 is coupling this with a proposed ranking and matchmaking system, both individual players and teams can sort themselves without expensive tournament days. I'd propose automated scheduled matchmaking for teams in lieu of tournaments. Again, all of this can easily be handled by software that makes life easier for players and fields.

Step 3 is creating a national halo event to further incentivize local fields to use the format. Preferably in late Fall in Vegas, because costs. Qualification can be based on ELO rank OR victory at local qualifiers.

Someone more familiar with distribution models than I can probably figure out the consequences better than I can, but the idea is that disseminating one massive, compact event is more effective than the "Tournament Series" that are currently run and webcast. Webcasting regionals, within reason, should be fairly easy. The main downside I see is that following a single team across a long period of time and getting high level play consistently may be difficult. I have no sense for what the level of play is for a pro team in their home region - ostensibly in the current format all the best players in a given region are incentivized to band together.

[skibbo]

The last few minutes of regular play (around 50:00 in the video), then overtime and 1v1s is what I think paintball needs to be like all the time.



No matter what I think the bunkers should be color coded to aid in description/viewing pleasure. Easier to explain what's going on when you can recognize which bunkers are which.

[vijil]

lines being inherently easier to cross than reaching a point/limited zone is a major consideration

Yeah, that's the idea though. It's clear that the current get flag + take to opposition base is far too hard, as evidenced by the fact it never happens. Well... maybe once in 50 points. I'd aim to tune the format so that scoring while enemy players are still alive happens roughly three out of four points. The reason I like an endzone is that it gives options on how to score - you can push tape, or centre, or rush, or play defense, or whatever. The tactics will be far easier to appreciate when watching - besides of course the focal point advantages.

If it turns out to be *too* easy (which you seem to be implying) then the line can be pushed all the way back. The field can be made less dense or bigger. The teams can be made bigger (= easier to lock the field down) and so on. If it's still too easy then add the flag, because only the player with the flag can score. If it's STILL too easy then change it to small areas as you say (but by then you're back to regular Race). The point remains though: the fundamental concept can work and work well. It just needs tuning and lots of playtesting. It requires minimal technology and mitigates many of the problems with xball from a spectator and variety/fun perspective.

I'm hammering on about mixed markers because I think that's a good (though not perfect) solution to the cost problem. In this kind of format it also naturally lends itself to front players needing to be mobile and therefore use pistols. In fact, drop the magfed and just use pistols and full noise. 2 and 3 of each. Simpler.

[edit] GO USA. I'm a kiwi but gotta support the underdog on this one #USAvAllBlacks rugby on the other screen as I type. One of my favourite things about rugby is the variety and mini games within the game. The scrum, the lineout, the rolling maul, and of course the open running play and sheer number of tactical options available. The differences in approach between teams are easy to grasp. I'd like to see some of that in paintball.

[Lurker27]

My point is that the timer incentive is synergistic with the end zone incentive in terms of driving play the way we'd like. It gives an additional handle for tuning:

End zone position
End zone form factor (line, zone, buzzer button, etc)
Timer

The more things you have to vary, the easier and more nuanced tuning the game will be. I'm on board with an end zone style format, but I think limiting game time is a way better solution to limiting cost than loadout. AND comes with over benefits. Can you address your views on that directly? I do appreciate that you've got passion around alternate formats.

Mixed markers make no sense to me. I'm looking for a format that could reasonably have high rates of adoption. Mixed markers kills that.

[vijil]

Ah, good to see your actual objection to mixed markers - that most people don't have pistols? Fair enough.

I'm thinking less in terms of existing players and more in terms of new. Smaller tournaments would start with rental pistols. Manufacturers could get behind it. It keeps the initial cost far lower than a timed point would. It's not necessarily something that would work right now with existing players. If you're serious about starting something then I certainly wont complain.

In terms of time limits on points it would work I'm sure - but feels artificial to me. If you can tune the game in other ways so that points will be an appropriate length because tactically that makes more sense, then to me that seems better. It's about keeping tactical options as open as possible. One of the big problems with paintball as it stands is that it effectively forces near identical tactics for everyone. There is one way to play, and while there is some tactical variety it's mostly just a factor of teams getting used to how to play a particular field. That's boring.

Or - have extra points awarded for scoring in less than a certain time, but no hard limit on the time? Limited paint? Full noise Hopper +1 works well for cost and automatically forces a time limit to boot. There are plenty of options.

Then again it depends on the style of time limit you're talking. 4 minutes? Less?

***********

On another note, how would you get this started? Given that the PSP aren't about to up sticks and change everything, would this be something that field owners could get behind and start things at the grass roots that way?

And Skibbo: yes. Coded bunkers. I'd prefer bunkers to be primarily a 50% grey so that players stand out rather than bunkers, but that doesn't stop them having coloured tips or lines or whatever. It's lame that Supair don't do grey as a color, but I'm sure someone like Airups could.

[Lurker27]

Regarding Adoption and Transitions

For adoption to be high, transition costs must be low. For players, and for fields. I don't trust PSP to do anything positive for the paintball ecosystem. They can adapt to new economic realities or die, and my money's on the latter.

I would propose that these changes be sold to field owners first. Ideally, you have an infrastructure that allows speedball games to bring in more players, and keep them playing regularly. I think that woodsball has less of a week after week appeal. It's naturally more casual, which is fine. But, I'd treat it as somewhat a separate entity.

The major thing I'd be selling to fields is a player check-in and ranking system that ensures more balanced pick-up games. This completely works within the current game structure, if you just assume that someone good at PSP will be good at this new game format. We can just port the rankings over to the superior, playtested game format later. So, you offer a software package for free to all fields, and start getting more players playing competitive speedball, as currently constituted. The trick is, one central body owns the database. Players can opt in to text alerts etc for when their field has lots of players at is or is holding an event.

The nice thing about having a longitudinal skill tracking system is that it naturally encourages "league" style play, rather than tournaments. Tournament style play doesn't make a lot of sense for anyone, it's just the best method of sorting skill for players that we have right now. It requires a HUGE one shot time and money commitment. Making the main competitive outlet a "league" format with a "playoff" at the end would allow fields to make their money from field entry fees and paint sales, rather than tournament entry fees. You're just aiming for more and more player churn.


With player performance tracking based on an ELO algorithm and information about things like home field, you can make it REALLY REALLY EASY for a player completely new to speedball to:

1. Go to the local field where the most players of his skill level are checked in (or "willing to play") that day.
2. Be placed on teams for rec play that are automatically balanced for skill to ensure competitive games
3. Place himself in a "Free agent" pool of players of similar skill and location if he's interested in joining a team.

With just some REALLY BASIC information about players that fields should be acquiring anyway (home zip code, marker setup), the same platform could be used for targeted adverts and promotions. This is a practical matter for recouping investment in such a software platform, but this is basically a really simple database software. Fields would just need "admin" access to be able to denote wins and losses quickly, but I envision everyone goes to the field and signs in. Then, for rec play or play against teams, a sorting algorithm gives balanced teams (one button to shuffle 'em if desired). A ref watches the game, then just marks down which team won. Database gets updated. No further information is required. You just make it REALLY REALLY easy for new players to play the competitive version of paintball at a level appropriate for them. If we make sure the game is fun as hell, player retention will take care of itself. Around here, it's really hard to play a good game of speedball if you're not on a team. And it's hard to get a team if you're not playing speedball regularly, etc. A system like I propose smooths the transition from a casual player to a competitive player DRASTICALLY. This increases overall engagement with the industry.

By eventually using your player skill information as qualification to regional and national events, a halo effect can be obtained. That's how you replace what is clearly a broken pro circuit with something functional and beneficial to the industry. This completely eliminates the problem of "sandbagging" in addition to the other benefits. By using a regional feeder effect, you reduce travel costs to teams tremendously. The "national circuit" would functionally be replaced by something more akin to the NCAA basketball tournament. Teams would be seeded into regions by their team rating culled from the software. Then, there would be regional tournaments to do the first few rounds of the bracket, culminating in the "Sweet 16" playing a double elimination tournament that functions as the "Grand Championship" or whathave you. Or, Round Robin style; whatever. I like brackets but I understand people not wanting to go on a national trip to play 2 matches.

The important thing for the pro game is having something watchable and salable as entertainment. The PSP also suffers somewhat from the dilution of each game - if I tune into a webcast, I'm very unlikely to see something happening that really matters for the outcome of a tournament. I think stepping back and refocusing top level play would fix the stakes, so to speak.



REGARDING THE ACTUAL GAME MECHANICS:


Bunkers: Reduced costs to fields are a major, major consideration - I'd argue that for televised play, color coding is a great idea. Vijil, I think the grey is a very good point as well. (Along with bright paint and approved-color uniforms). Steve and I have discussed very low cost standard bunkers that are not airball, but rather a pipeframe-and-canvas type construction. Open source the designs, even. The footprint of most PSP bunkers could be replicated for less than $10 in materials - entire fields would be an order of magnitude cheaper. Not sure if air bunkers are a safety feature in theory, but are they as cheap as they could be? I honestly don't know why we use air bunkers. I'd argue for a few different field configurations to emerge during playtesting, each with slightly different tactics.

Without looking at too many games, I'd say 3-4 minutes is a good time period. Let's say it's 3 minutes. 30 seconds is a logical decrement time, for me. So, getting a player safely across:

Before 2:30 is 6
Before 2:00 is 5
Before 1:30 is 4
Before 1:00 is 3
Before 0:30 is 2
Before 0:00 is 1

This incentivizes scoring quickly, which disincentivizes deathmatch plays. I think it does exactly what you want it to. Maximum ammo use is 1890 rounds for continuous firing at 10.5, 2250 for 12.5. That's still a lot per game, but remember you've heavily incentivized movement. I'd be very surprised if overall paint usage didn't decrease. Granted, that's owing to the endzones more than anything else. Tactics are without a doubt going to vary widely based on game situation (score) and body count. incentivizing fast games makes scoring MUCH more volatile, by changing the risk/reward equation of pushing. I'm not married to the concept, but I'd like to see playtesting with and without.

Run 5 3 minute games with a mercy rule for being up more than is possible to come back from. This should keep time periods predictable. In addition, this would make running something SIMILAR to the "MAXXED" format PSP tried a lot easier. More game throughput = more money. More, shorter games also makes the ranking algorithms much more accurate. Basketball, for example, is far less volatile a game in terms of outcomes than football or soccer, because the scoring resolution is extremely fine (80 possession per team per game)

REGARDING MARKER TECHNOLOGY

Reduced ROF or Reduced FPS, or both, for new players is just peachy with me. New players need to be not intimidated by the speed or pain of the game, and not feel like they're at a large disadvantage. Somewhere around 8bps and 250fps seems about right to me for "entry level" speedball play. Tippmann 98 ACT and GoG rental markers, as well as azodin guns, do just fine here. However, quality paint makes by far the biggest difference in felt impact in my book. That's a discussion for another thread.

Having players NEED to buy anything new seems like a real problem to me in terms of adoption.

[PBSteve]

Don't you have other things to be doing?

[HipboyScott]

I watch speedball videos from time to time.

Speedball is hard to watch because it's an open field game with lots of little bunkers and players and tiny movements with lanes of paint being thrown down but the viewer can't really see much that is definite. The bunkers don't even sit still. At best you can guess at what is going on. It's trying to be a field sport like football or like hockey, where all the action is in one open field and you can 'scan the terrain' to see what's what, I guess to be considered on the same level of 'sport' as those events; but in those sports there are no obstructions on the field. and everyone has fairly defined roles, and as a TV viewer, you're seeing either the focal point (puck/ball/whatever) where the interest is, or you're seeing the whole field and the formations and locations of the elements as a whole in one shot. But in speedball, you have open space but blocked up with bunkers, and people shooting lanes though the gaps; but the lanes are hard to see (even with high-vis paint) and with everyone engaging eachother at the same time, for most of the game at least, there's rarely a good focal point. At any moment people can be eliminated and often you HEAR about eliminations in a video but don't see it happen.

As a TV viewer, there is almost zero way to tell if players are exposed, or in cover when being shot at. Maybe they're protected by the bunker, or maybe they just barely aren't. So maybe they're just chilling while in cover or they're sweatin as the rounds don't happen to hit their exposed flank... can't tall. Can't even read their face because of the masks. So at the end all you see is players sitting there shooting from cover with the only indication of firing being finger movement (no muzzle blast, no recoil, no spent shells, no real sound unless you have a very close mic) and maybe the occasional balls fly by while they sit there. Or maybe they run to another bit of cover, which is the exciting part. When someone does get up on someone and take them out, that's awesome to watch, but it more often happens that you see them just get tagged in a bunker or while transitioning from someone across field. Moves that feel epic to perform (getting a 60 foot tag on someone's exposed pack or foot) are at best noted by an observer. But there's no feeling of "aim, fire, watch it.... contact! Hands up, player OUT!" when you aren't there yourself, holding the marker. And because of how speedball is filmed you see often either the shooter or the target but rarely both.

It's somewhat entertaining to watch as a player insofar as you can see what happened in a match and maybe pick up on some cool methods or techniques (how they run off the break, how a guy snap shoots, etc) but is it entertaining from a drama, nailbiting aspect?

Truth be told as someone who doesn't often delve into speedball; I'd have more fun watching kids play Minecraft or Call of Duty or, Glob forbid; League of Legends... than speedball. And I think that's because of how much information and entertainment value there is in following something that can show you exactly what's going on, has minimaps, HUD icons, plus people have nametags on the screen so you know who's who. Watching speedball is probably less entertaining than watching 99% of videogames and any kid with a computer can become a Twitch or Youtube personality in the videogame of their choice these days: why the hell spend thousands, to get beat up, and probably win nothing... in speedball? At least racing, golf, football... those activities have prestige, lineage, and deep wells of financial reward for those who truly excel.

Speedball I think, just as a general format (single arena with airbunkers and people shooting electros playing elimination or CTF) is a dead-end as far as I can tell in terms of expanding the 'spectator experience'.



So I'll transition to what's on my brain, as not the only answer but maybe AN answer worth considering: some of this will be already stated in this thread and maybe some is already 'debunked' by the thread or by experience of the past, or whatever. But it's my thoughts on what I'd actually want to play. What kind of changes would take someone who doesn't really want to play speedball as it is, other than 'well no other games are going on right now...' to saying 'I'm gonna go to the field and get on a team and play this all weekend!' but also appeals to the core speedball player. I think it is a rebranding of the concept, a middle-point between what makes speedball compelling, what makes woodsball and scenario compelling, and without all the fluff.

The type of game that uses paintball, that would have better spectatorship and at the same time address the core issue of 'I want to play that' are probably going to be more urban-type fields with rooms, walls, doors, hallways; games that last maybe 15 minutes, have constant reinsertions, and have at least one but likely many objectives that will exchange ownership over the course of a match. Instead of a single round lasting 3-5 minutes I'd rather see a game of Domination or Conquest, with control points and video feeds from inside and around those points, showing players desperate to hold the objective for another few seconds, players rallying to storm the objective: each team can have a sharpshooter with first-strikes even, that'd be cool and satisfy some of that 'multiple player roles' that I think is a valid addition.

As a comparison: speedball I think aims for a match to be like a match of tennis: short, intense. Win or Loose, get back in it. Like a game of Counterstrike for a more direct comparison. But you need a lot of high-intensity 3-minute matches to make up a game that's long enough for me to want to sit down and watch. I'd rather see a single longer match that has more going on, something more 'strategic' with teams communicating, falling back and regrouping, deciding to 'go around'

It sounds a lot like woodsball, minus the headache of the woods, the brush, the... whole woods thing.

It doesn't have to be 'milsim' and in-fact should probably be less milsim in presentation. I don't want to suggest that people should play it magfed with plate carriers. Nor should the field have to look like a town or anything. I'd be cool with something abstract like a speedball field. Just with more bunkers, hallways, rooms, etc. That creates focus points for the viewers via the terrain (they went down path A, or they are in room C... what happens when the other player enters that same path? What if Joe can see someone from the window?) There's just less ambiguity than whether from that portion of the snake the player can see the dude behind the stand-up without moving his head too far to the left.

I'm thinking it's a format that could easily be shot, processed, and presented into a video stream that can be parsed by anyone with a passing interest. It won't be about watching the paint as much as watching the players: by limiting them to paths, hallways, rooms, etc; you can see players moving up on eachother. You can see them hunt, and move, corner to corner. It's less about shooting and more about searching. When there is an engagement, it lasts a few shots and often someone was caught on the flank.

Watch videos of people playing CQB fields, then playing speedball. What's more interesting to watch? Someone getting double-tapped in the nuts and falling down stairs is more engaging than someone getting popped off the break. There's story there, drama... pain.

I dunno. I imagine one could make a standard set of bunkers and structures that can be assembled from some walls and platforms and other simple structures that would cost maybe one-two grand at Home Depot and built in a weekend or two, something simple but engaging, and it uses the footprint of your standard speedball field. Something that most fields already have a space allocation for. Offer plans and kits for building smart objectives that link to a simple scoring app, and you'd have a fairly turnkey option for any field op to bring this format to their business, and if it's the new hotness on youtube, it'll damn-sure bring kids wanting to play it.

And then if it doesn't work or an old-school speedball game needs to happen, it can be easily changed up back to a traditional airball format or whatever.

But I'm tellin ya, mazes; hallways, rooms, towers, windows... that's awesome. I always watch those videos.

[skibbo]

I think some sort of FREE Android/iPhone based app with small ads and a linked website would work really well for ranking. You would be able to sign in to your own page, and update whatever info is needed for matchmaking. There's a local laser tag place that does something similar, every time you go to the field you log in and check in to the games. It then logs your kills, shots fired, etc (similar metrics could be useful for our purposes). You can then compare yourself to players that went to the same location or even regionally/nationally. I really like what the PSP is doing with stats for their fantasy paintball leagues (although fantasy anything is a strange concept to me). I imagine being able to see where you're ranked in your area and see who you may be possibly matched up for local games.

I do think there needs to be a provision for teams to stay together so that you're not with random people every time. Some sort of "party mode" similar to COD/BF/etc. From there you could be matched with another complete party or a bunch of randoms that have similar rankings plus a possible bonus for not playing with eachother before (maybe some people are D3 vs D4 or D5). All of the details can be worked out quite easily.

Also, we really haven't addressed this issue but I do think there is a lack of "story" in the PSP broadcasts. There's some expanding of "so and so played for these guys last year and now they're playing against them..." but for the most part you don't feel the rivalries. PBA has done a better job this year doing short videos at the beginning of each match about each team and what's been happening to them; but there's still not any real cheerleading for specific teams (at least for me).
I don't necessarily know anyone who is a die hard Dynasty fan who hates say...Infamous because Infamous stole one of Dynasty's key players last year (making this up) or whatever. I think expounding on existing rivalries makes for better TV.

This idea is readily evident during the NCPA Class AA college national champs since people already know a little about colleges (especially if they're good in other sports too). There's not necessarily a ND vs Michigan rivalry (like in football) but at least the teams can be related to.