YGG Play Summit: How Competitive Play Builds Stronger Communities
At the YGG Play Summit, Unbox’s Carlo Ople, Parallel’s bEw, and esports legends Fatal1ty and Wesley Seek discussed the role of well-designed ranked systems in player retention and community growth.
As games like Counter-Strike 2, DOTA 2, and PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS dominate the charts on Steam, competitive ladders remain one of the best player retention tools in gaming. Well-designed ranking systems help onboard new players, while giving intermediate players a dream to chase: the pro scene. In Web3, Parallel is embracing this model, supported by community initiatives such as YGG Esports’ player guides that show newcomers how anyone can master the game with enough time and effort.
At the YGG Play Summit, Unbox PH founder and TCG veteran Carlo Ople moderated a discussion between esports legends Fatal1ty and Wesley Seek, and Echelon Prime Foundation Emissary Prime bEw. Together, the group explored how gamers form communities and push each other to excellence in PvP titles. Fatal1ty shared his experiences being part of the first wave of professional gamers, Wesley discussed what it was like competing at the highest levels of Hearthstone, and bEw offered a macro perspective as one of the brains behind Parallel’s surging tournament circuit.
The following is an excerpt from the panel, where bEw and Fatal1ty break down the long-term impact of an effective tiered structure on any game’s player base, Web3 or otherwise.
YGG Play Summit: Drive Community Growth Through Competition
bEw (1:48:38): I think if you look abstractly, not just video games or card games, but competition in general, every great league is built on a pyramid. You see this in everything, from basketball to soccer, to even card games. You have the dream that you're selling, which is the Premier League, the NBA, the Magic World Championship, the Pro Tour, but underneath that, you have other leagues.
You have youth systems, you have grassroots efforts. That's your local game store, that's FACEIT on Counter-Strike. You provide a way for people to be competitive with the stakes that they're comfortable being competitive on, and also provide them a ladder to climb as they get better and want to be more competitive.
What the format ends up being is going to be dependent upon the game and your community. But I think every successful competition really shares this key feature, which is that there's a wide base to support competition for low stakes, and a ladder that allows you to climb up as your skill increases and as your desire increases.
Fatal1ty (1:50:04): When I came up in esports in the early days, it was about finding events online. I started doing a tournament called the Fatal1ty Open. I wanted to hold a community event for the Diabolical community and use my brand and my name to bring people together and compete. My goal with this was to bring the community together, not so much the KOLs and the pros. It's more about people who haven't been seen yet on a big scale, kind of the average Joes of the group.
And so, I have this tournament on Saturday, and everyone plays in the event. And then the top four players advance to Sunday to play in the Fatal1ty Invitational. On that Sunday, we would have the top KOLs or the top pros be there to play. So you have this pros versus Joes experience, where this person has a chance to play against a top-tier player and skip to the top of the list. I feel like a lot of gamers might be very talented, but if they're not playing with the right team, or they don't have the right things surrounding them, they can't ever get to the point of being seen.
You can listen to the full recording on YouTube.
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