Swoops v0.8

What's new

In one of our biggest releases yet, we introduce Tournaments, Swooper Points, and Matchmaking to our league.

Tournaments

We previewed what a March Madness style Tournament looks like in our end of season Swooper Bowl a couple weeks ago. But why save the fun for the end of season...when we could have tournaments all the time?

Now we do.

Starting today, you can join our daily tournaments and compete against others in a brand new contest format. Unlike head-to-head contests, tournaments are multiplayer contests where you can compete among 8, 16, 32, or 64 teams.

We introduced tournaments for three reasons:

1. Head-to-head contests are great for running experiments and learning about your players in a low stakes environment. It's where you try different lineups in volume, as our owners currently do to the tune of 2000 games a day. Tournaments are for taking those learnings and deploying your best strategy to win real prizes. If head-to-head contests are about quantity, tournaments are about quality.
   
2. They're multi player, which not only simplifies the prize pool mechanics (especially when real money gaming launches), but they're simply inclusive to a wider range of owners at any given time. This gives us more opportunities to include more owners in big moments throughout the season.
   
3. Swoops is not just a game, but a sport. And like any sport, we are an entertainment destination for dedicated owners, casual observers, and everyone else in between. Tournaments, with their series structure and elimination format, provide a compelling viewing experience. Fans watched with gripped excitement as some teams advanced and others got knocked out in the Twitch cast of our Swooper Bowl. We want to create more of these moments.

Swooper Points

Borrowing a page from traditional video games, we're bringing our own version of XP (Experience Points) to Swoops, appropriately titled...🥁

Swooper Points!

We've designed a new team activity and performance based point system that will be used to decide which teams qualify for the end of season Swooper Bowl, while also determining Swooper Bowl seeding.

It starts with your locker room, where you'll see a brand new section detailing the challenges you can engage in to gain these points.

You'll see your SP tracked in the upper right hand corner of your screen. There's some special effects that happen as you advance from tier to tier. Only one way to find out what they are...

Lastly, our leaderboard remains the place for you to see how you size up against others in the league. It is default sorted by SP, the central metric to rank our teams.

Matchmaking

As we focus our effort on growth, we're prioritizing what the user experience is like for owners just starting out, sometimes with weaker teams. Joining Swoops and losing ten games in a row to the best team in the league isn't exactly a welcoming experience.

With matchmaking mode, we're hoping to change that. We built an algorithm that pairs like skilled teams together. Our algorithm scores teams based on the win percentage of their last 50 games and then matches similar scored teams. We'll continue to tweak this logic over time, based on your feedback and our own observations.

Head over to our 5 Swoopster lobby in the Head-to-Head page to start getting matched!

What's next

Our next release will hit three themes:

• Abstract the crypto away - wallets, metamask, crypto currencies, NFTs - these are confusing (and in some cases, worrying) concepts for a new user who just wants to sign up and try Swoops. We'll be introducing a social login alongside a custodied wallet to reduce this friction and make it possible to sign up in seconds.
• Onboarding - there's a learning curve to Swoops and we want to ease that. We're building an in-app onboarding system that walks you through the core sections of many pages, including the locker room, the lineup creator page, and a player page.
• Free-to-play - we're removing the biggest barrier to Swoops, which is an upfront investment in purchasing Swoopsters to play our game. When you sign up for the first time, we'll give you an off-chain player to play with. You can do everything another owner can, short of selling it. This player will become on-chain after you complete a Swooper Points challenge which lets you sell it, if you choose to do that.

Stay tuned...