Deep Dive: Leagues (Team Play)

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Wondering what this is all about? Read the introduction here first.

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Overview & Design Goals

Leagues provide a recreational competitive environment for a full team of your friends, aiming to normalize competition as a social activity rather than simply being ‘esports’. The weekly event League Night brings the community together for several hours, placing teams into small one-night-only leagues against opponents of similar ability. Featured Leagues push that experience further, taking place across many weeks for more committed teams who want to compete for prestige and rewards.

The primary design goal for Leagues is to pull the community together into full parties where they can celebrate the greatest of accomplishments while laughing off any losses. Designing for mass participation means rather than relying on players to bring their existing friend groups, we utilize a powerful Pro-Social MatchMaking system which pairs players based on how likely they are to enjoy playing with one another. The goal of that system is that players will make new friends & look forward to their next night of league play.

How It Works

‘League Night’ is a weekly community-focused event which is open to all players and lasts around two to three hours in total. Players may either attend with a full team, or can use the Team Finder feature to be matchmade into a new team for the night. Each team will be given a series of goals to complete during the one-night-only League in order to earn FAME and progress towards unlocking and upgrading trophies which are displayed on the Player Card.

Phase 1	Phase 2	Phase 3	Phase 4
Registration	Create Teams	Create Leagues	Play!
Begin collecting teams about 30 minutes before event starts.	All players in Team Finder are paired off into new teams, about 5 minutes before Phase 3.	All teams are placed into leagues, based roughly on skill level.	Leagues take place across ~3 hours of gameplay, GLHF!

Thirty minutes prior to the start of the event, players may begin to register and hang out in the interactive waiting area full of community activities & fresh content.

Just before the start of the event, all players who joined the Team Finder are assessed and new teams are created based on a wide range of metrics from the matchmaking profile, their Dojo survey, account history, skill level, ‘Reputation’ and more.

Once teams have been created and registration is closed, teams are divided into small leagues based roughly on their skill level. Most League Night formats are one-night-only, taking place place across several hours with a variety of potential formats and match settings.

Note: Leagues can be a wide variety of sizes and formats. I don't get into details here since this is a fictional game anyways, but imagine that everything from Round Robin to Swiss to Double Elimination to Time Trials and more are supported. And we can scale from an intimate 4-team league all the way to a 64-team league spread across various divisions and conferences.

There are several ways in which players can earn rewards and unlocks during a League Night.

The simplest way to earn rewards is by completing matches. At the conclusion of the League Night, players will be able to spin a wheel full of prizes – every match they have completed will grant one additional spin of the wheel.

Teams are also given a set of tasks in the form of a Campaign. Campaigns allow teams to compete across multiple weeks of League Night in order to unlock a Trophy which is displayed prominently on a trophy case on their Player Card. During a League Night, teams are given tasks corresponding to their skill relative to the rest of the league – for example, a team may learn they are the Underdog of the League and a task may be to simply finish better than last place. Or a task may be to take down a Rival team of similar skill.

Completing Campaign tasks (and doing well in the league) will earn Fame which progresses towards the Trophy unlock and also serves a measure of how accomplished the team is – build up your Fame across multiple Campaigns to earn the ability to retire onto the Hall of Fame leaderboard. Completing all three tasks will award additional spins of the prize wheel and may grant an item to help with your Campaign progress.

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In addition to League Night, teams looking for even more league action can join Featured Leagues with a variety of sizes and formats. Unlike League Night, these leagues can will often take place across multiple weeks, with teams registering for a day and time which works with their schedule. These leagues can represent a major commitment which can last a month or more, so players are limited in how many Featured Leagues they can be in at one time. Players with a high account Reputation score and a lengthy account history will be able to enter more leagues.

Certain leagues may require a small entry fee ($) which is used to be able to provide real-world trophies and apparel to teams. Winners jackets, team jerseys, league posters, and potentially even cash prizes for more esports-focused leagues.

These leagues can also be used for a variety of ecosystem purposes: Esports Path to Pro, ‘Arena’ Champion Series, Dojo-Specific Leagues, Sponsored Leagues, Private Content Creator Leagues, and so on.

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Your Reputation is the culmination of many factors: Attendance, Quit History, Account Age, Player Reports and more.

High reputation players will benefit from high reputation teammates in team finder, access to more Featured Leagues, and receive free cosmetic items from time to time.

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Design Corner

From Strangers to Friends

While it’s an extremely worthy goal to pursue, convincing a group of complete strangers to commit to playing a game together for an evening is not an easy task. Making that experience such a positive, fun experience that they are compelled to play together again in the future is an even tougher challenge.

Simply creating a large, live community event which requires that players join together to participate is a good start to tackling that challenge, but it will still fall short if it’s entirely reliant on players with existing friend groups. It’s critical that the matchmaking systems do their best to pair people who will enjoy playing together.

To give ourselves the best chances possible at compatible matchmaking, the design of League Night provides several distinct advantages.

First, a scheduled start collects all of the players into one giant bucket before doing ‘matchmaking’ and creating teams. This is a huge advantage over ‘traditional’ matchmaking, where matches are created very quickly and there are very few players matchmaking simultaneously. In a game with a large community, this advantage might mean having thousands of solo players looking for a team, and the system will get to sift through and make the absolute best pairings possible from that large buckets of players.

Second, our Pro-Social MatchMaking approach has resulted in a mountain of data to help inform what type of person the player is and what they value the most in a teammate. Between the Dojo survey for new players, the ‘Team Finder’ profile, and existing data around skill level, reputation, chattiness, etc; there’s a mountain of information which goes way beyond simply pairing players based on their MMR. Over time, the weighs for each of these data points will be dialed in even further based on learnings from which teams are most successful at creating friendships.

Lastly, the very nature of the event – a commitment toward spending 2-3 hours playing together – filters out players who have zero interest in socializing. Of course, some players will still abandon that commitment and sour the experience for others. Data science can be utilized alongside the reputation system to predict this behavior and filter ‘low value’ players into teams with one another. Players who find their experience ruined by these players can also be guaranteed high Reputation teammates in the following week to encourage them to give it another shot.

Between all of these elements, we have quite a few tools at our disposal and a system which is built to improve over time as we collect additional data about what is or isn’t working. Team Finder itself can also be adjusted from week to week, removing prompts which don’t correlate with the goals and adding new experiments in their place.

Assuming the tools have done the job well, we now have groups of players who have a lot in common and should be pretty damn compatible with one another. We’re then dropping them into an activity with goals which have been tailored to their skill level, with rewards which provide emotional stakes and the potential for narratives and heroics. It’s a pretty powerful bonding framework for strangers coming together around a shared interest (the game itself, and some degree of socialization).

Team Retention with Campaign Mode

Hopefully the team had a good time playing together, and now the challenge now becomes getting that group of strangers to play together again. Human behavior often makes it a bit difficult to be the one to show initiative and say ‘Hey, let me get your number.’ or to actually make plans for the following weekend rather than the soft ‘We should do this again sometime.’ without follow-up.

We pull a bit of a magic trick here to make that easier. All teams are placed in an active Campaign, and therefore are automatically on an extended journey together which can (optionally) be picked up the following week. They’ll be able to continue progress towards unlocks along that Campaign, with new teams placed into shorter Campaigns that can be completed in just 2-3 weeks to earn the Trophy. Conversely, if they don’t play together the next week, the Campaign will lose 1 Health Point and eventually ‘expire’ after several weeks.

This serves as a gentle nudge towards that all-important 2nd night of play together. If everyone is already going to be online again the next week (another benefit of a fixed, scheduled event time), then why not play together again to be able to progress towards rewards?

This also serves as a powerful retention tool for more established groups of friends, helping to encourage the entire group to show up each week. This might take the form of a team member proactively reaching out to remind their friends of the event coming up (“We’re so close to the trophy!”), or a player who may have decided to not play feeling pressure to attend so that the group can complete their next unlock. This pressure can certainly become a source of stress (especially for introverts), but it’s also the type of soft nudge and social ‘grease’ which helps people to form friendships and break out of cycles of loneliness.

This reinforcement tool can be adjusted to serve the design goals while not frustrating players too heavily. Shorter campaigns allow for players to tag in / tag out if they will be busy in the future, teams can be awarded items which enable a player to be a ‘substitute’ for a week, or Campaigns may be ‘paused’ entirely for a period of time without penalty, and so on. These tools can provide agency for highly engaged friend groups while still preserving the social nudge for strangers who need that carrot to play together and start to form new friends.

Community Spotlight

Having the eyes of the entire community on a live event is a great way to be able to shine a spotlight on new content, community events, content creators, and more. I envision this involving a highly interactive lobby where players hang out in the 30-45 minutes before the start of the League Night, providing a highly visible platform for all of that community content. Particularly engaged smaller developers might even host a livestream & change the gameplay for the night based on incentives or community voting.

Of course, having all of your players online at peak hours with a lot of community interaction can also be a major benefit for monetization & sales. Developers can launch new cosmetic items just before the event, putting them on display while everyone is hanging out. Host giveaways, launch limited run items, etc. In a more community-building approach, this lobby space could also feature artwork or music created by community artists with a tip-jar for players to recognize their work.

Recreational Leagues

While the one-night-only ‘League Night’ leagues are focused around community & building new friendships, Featured Leagues provide that next step in the form of a longer term commitment across many weeks of play.

From a design sense, I find it valuable to think of these more akin to Rec Leagues, Youth Sports, Festivals or Fantasy Sports rather than the more obvious ‘Esports’ imagery which league systems might provoke. We want everyone to be able to play.

This focus on recreational competition for everyone means viewing Featured Leagues as yet another fun way to hang out with your friends during the week. Design crazy league formats, provide awesome rewards, ship physical trophies to the winnings teams, or even offer jerseys with their team name & logo on the front. This is about creating a Premium activity for the most engaged and dedicated players, providing excitement as a result of the narrative arcs and familiarity which come from playing the same rival teams across multiple weeks of play.

Of course, this system can (and should) support a ‘Path to Pro’ esports ecosystem which qualifies a roster into increasingly difficult leagues before earning entry into the highest echelons of Professional play. And while this will remain a distant, distant dream for most players, there is definitely an audience that embraces the aspirational nature of being able to work their way to stardom from the comfort of their living room couch.

But the true mark of a good competitive feature is that it can attract players of all types, a reminder that competition doesn’t require a quest for perfection. The real superpower of league play is that it creates a weekly excuse to hang out with your friends for a few hours around an activity which you all enjoy.

Whether your team is sweating with intensity and focus as your compete with the best, or they are slamming beers after each round as the night descends into chaos, League Nights are for you.

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