Contents:
- RLO Major and Weekly Tournaments
- RLO Discord Changes
- RLO's New Services Rocket League Oceania is almost 1 year old now and it's safe to say it's delivered one of the best years of my life. The scene and the community have come a very long way from where it was when I joined, and I couldn't be any more proud to be a part of it.
With this said, we at RLO understand that celebration is very short lived and that hard work is always needed to keep things on the rise. With some of the huge announcements and upcoming events we'll be making a few changes and rolling out new services to push more growth and professionalism within the scene. With OCE very much on the world stage now, we realise that there's a lot of refinement and professionalism needed to be put in place.
RLO will be undergoing a change of focus to cater towards a number of goals, to make sure OCE is ready for the world stage. Firstly we'll slightly be stripping our content creation and community services back, and in turn go for a quality over quantity approach. We'll also be overlooking a number of our content streams in order to refine them. Additionally we'll be making expansions to some of our content streams so that it drives more emphasis around players and teams.
RLO Major and Weekly Tournaments
An additional note to this, is that following the State of Origin Premiership Series, RLO as a community organisation will no longer be developing new competitive ideas and systems. It's safe to say the scene is edging towards saturation with 3 major leagues, a handful of majors, and an abundance of weekly events, we see no need to develop new competitions. Saying this, we will be continuing the competitions we already run. These include ANZAC Day Allstars, the CPC Cups, the State of Origin Premiership Series, the weekly 2v2, and the weekly 3v3 tournament. The frequency of our major events will also drop. The drop in frequency and lack of new projects will make room for us to refine the competitions we already output. Initially we'll be working to improve the quality of our weekly 3v3 tournaments, in hopes to add more structure to the event, in regards to division placements, and a small system for players to be able to track their progression week by week in the carnival. We also hope to improve the overall coverage of the weekly carnivals, not only through broadcasts, but also through social media representation and updates. We hope to add more expansions to the tournament in the future, but for the minute, structure and coverage is what we will be working for the near future.
The weekly 3v3 tournament will be heavily pushed for improvement in the next few weeks as it's not only the oldest and longest running weekly tournament, but also the tournament that Rocket League Oceania was built on. The tournament itself has produced a number of memorable moments, and thus we'll be returning the favour and giving it a long deserved facelift.
Discord Changes
In addition to the above, we'll also be reviewing our discord again since there's been a major influx of not only new users, but news and announcements. The changes we've made so far is as follows:
- Restructured the text channels displaying information and announcements.
As we've seen a large accumulation of not only news, but also weekly tournament announcements, we've categorised the different types of announcements. Each type of announcement has it's own channel and set of rules, so that users can easily filter through the information to find what they're looking for. - '#Weekly Tournaments' and '#Leagues and Majors' will serve as a replacement of the competition shortlist, so that people can see the big list of weekly tournaments, or could find all the info on all the leagues in the scene. - '#General Announcement' will be used as a place for either major announcements, or content announcements for things such as 'The RLO Weekly Report' 'The Pinch' or 'The OCE Power Rankings'
- '#Tournament Announcements' Will serve as the channel to post updated weekly tournament information.
- Added an abundance of new tags. Major ones include: - Deity (20 Tags) - Members can earn this by collecting 20 discord tags. The only person to have a Deity tag so far is the one and only Soma. He holds more tags than anyone on the discord, including staff members.
- RLO A, B and C Champions - We'll be giving this to future winners of the weekly carnival divisions, though if you've won a previous tournament, please approach one of the RLO staff members to claim the tag.
- Throwdown Related tags - If you're attending Throwdown you'll be able to claim a tag. Finalists and Champions will also receive their own tags based on the tournament.
- RLO's upcoming services in aim to encourage team structure and professionalism
With OCE now on the world stage, it's becoming more and more apparent that the structure in team scheduling and progress, could do a lot to help enhance improvement and form. In response to this, RLO will be providing teams with 2 systems at their disposal, to aid them in easily scheduling weekly training and competition sessions.
- The scrim schedule/tracker - We have already released a minor version of this system, which displays team's preferred scrim times. We hope to expand this in new ways so that it is more accessible to teams, and helps make recommendations for planning scrim sessions. At the end of the day, scrimming and practising is very important for player and team improvement. This system may also replace the '#looking for game chat' as we look to review the text channel along with the '#recruitment' channel.
- Weekly Tournament Circuits - This system is designed to work alongside the scrim schedule in that it encourages team to have a plan in how they approach their competitive experience week to week. This system is yet to be released, though essentially what it does is add a points based ranking system over of each weekly tournament. To some, this may sound very similar to 'The Chase' which we are trying to move away from with this system. Selected weekly tournaments will have their own ranking system apart from the others. They do not all merge into one points system. It's designed so that if teams aren't already playing in a league with set game days, they have the option to choose a weekly tournament for their team to consistently attend every week, and thus have the ability to follow their progression through the ranks of that tournament's team pool. Teams can compete in more than one circuit and hold multiple rankings, and the system will be designed so that it it doesn't punish low attendance rates. We hope the system will encourage teams to play with their teams in a set event every week, and so those events can build up their own team pools, which the teams can then track their performance compared to other teams in said pools.
In addition to all this, we'll also be making some changes to our website once again, so that the it's more structured around the community and competitive scene as a whole, instead of just weekly events.
With all this said, I'd also like to give a formal welcome to our new staff members.
- Tuttorix
Coming on to work as a writer on the RLO Weekly Report
- Justice Robo
Coming on as a bot programmer in order to automate a number of activities on the discord
- Zoe
Coming on as the new Social Media Manager for Reddit
Keep an eye on our social platforms for more exciting announcements in the near future!