Seeking feedback for a cool idea

[Smash]

Hi VG forums fam!

So I’ve been secretly working on something for the community!!! I wanted to mention it first here, because this site is awesome and in some ways inspired me to try and do this secret project.

I still have a TON of work to do on this, and realistically it will take at least a couple of months (or more) to pull this off. However, as I’ve been working through if/how to do this, it’s become apparent that I need more perspectives than just mine to do this right!

That’s where you all come in!

Welcome to The VainGlory Playbook!

The idea is simple: Give the community a way to share and tag (for searchability) videos that demonstrate “plays” (aka Wombo Combos) that could happen in the game.

To pull this off, we would need the following:

• A site/page that allows people to browse/filter the plays themselves
• A page for users to add their plays (with all the necessary info for the design)
• Some sort of template that players can download to construct/communicate their plays (right now I’m using Keynote (or PowerPoint) and then recording the slideshow as a video)
• Some sort of voting system (IE yay or meh)

There’s more that’s needed, but those four points are all mandatory regardless of the design direction. Here’s a link to check out the work so far:
The VainGlory Playbook (Pre-Alpha Version)

Additionally, there’s some specific things I should NOT decide alone for the current design. For example, there’s a list of “Situational Needs.” I tried to think of all of the situational scenarios where specific things like flares or scout cams are needed. There’s also some plays (like ganks) that need cover of some sort to work. But I feel like there’s a very good chance that I’m missing things.

We’d want the list of “Situational Needs” to be complete, so when new users add their play, we should already have those situational needs ready for them to simply check or uncheck.

And finally, if you visit the above link (and please don’t judge me for my crappy videos… for a team that never happened… and guilds that are ghost towns ) you’ll notice there’s also a page made for submitting a new play: Submit a Play

On this page, another thing I’m unsure of, is if users would want to specify any hero perks when they describe and submit their plays. For now I’ve left out the perks, but maybe that was a bad idea!

In the end, I’d really like to get something like this going for our community. I think it will help both noobs and pro teams alike from a strategic POV. But more importantly, it creates a really good reason to generate content for the game. I dream of being able to pull up DOZENS of plays for a specific hero or a specific location on one of the maps.

I dream of shoutcasters calling out plays in pro matches by the play name. I dream of coaches and analysts being able to refer and even voice over plays and the intricies of them. And last but not least, I dream of a playbook becoming the bridge for non-gamers to walk in order to understand why a game like this is so fun and challenging.

But there’s no way I can do this alone. I really need some help and insight from you all, because I can only create enough spare time to do this once.

Thanks for your time, fam! Any and all feedback is welcome!

(Just try to be nice because this passion project is a crap ton of unpaid work!)

[HipsterSkaarf]

I think this sounds amazing! I really need to get off my ass and stop making a living so I can help with these projects more.

[Smash]

Awww thank you dude! And for what it’s worth, I feel you. I’m shopping myself out for a full time day job currently. Can’t handle the swings of lone wolf working much longer.

Well either a day job… or… us VGers start something that brings dat paper!!!

[HipsterSkaarf]

“How to make bank from the economy of symbolic exchange: Getting rich the Bourdieu way”

edit to add: sorry, that’s a horrible joke that almost no one will get.

[Smash]

I like it when you get all intellectual dude! Esp French intellectual

[Ve3nNo0wM]

i wish you success ~!

I do wonder if anyone is going to reveal their top secret plays. the video requirement might make it not so easy to submit a play.

I know plenty of plays, but lack the talent to make a video. lol.

[hazeleyes]

My new plan for getting rich without working is mining cryptocurrency.

So far, I’ve earned about $5!

[LegendaryE]

i get annoyed when people compare players from game to game , like people comparing leage players to vg , and they say even low tiers in league knows the rotations and controlling lane !

iam playing with unskilled players , and i wonder why they dont understand things like this , lack of esports , lack of guides , like of resources , is the vg community or the game devs not doing enough work to make the players better !

like your idea is somehow pushing us to the right direction , we need more attention to the good plays , people should see good plays and learn .

[HipsterSkaarf]

After a little bit of thinking, just a few impressions so far:

• Being able to sort by hero is great. Handy for shoutcasters, great for players looking for inspiration or education. You might consider additional filters for amount of heroes needed and rating. This is good for a casual visitor wondering what multi-hero combos are out there, and gives you a good bit of easily sorted semi-pro gamesmanship… imagine the streetcred of being in the crew that manages a 5-man Churn-chain Saw-shank wombo-combo!

• You might limit ratings to just positive ones to reduce rating noise and bad optics. Not sure though.

• You could also create a combo rating system (ez pz) based on the cumulative difficulties of all the hero abilities involved. This would require scoring the abilities by difficulty. Each combo could then work something like Figure Skating, where you pick up points by the team-wide abilities/items used. Might require some crowd-sourced google polling - “On a scale of 1-5, how difficult is it to properly use [ability or item]?” We could probably open that sheet up to PBE groups and forums/reddit visitors.

General Q: are you planning to remake all submitted clips in a schematic motion-graphic style with annotation (I can help, if yes)? Or were you planning to leave clips as submitted (after review), with an option for accompanying text? The first is great for professionalism, and you can share the clips with their educational info as a tidy package. The second is perhaps better for long-term usability, as players can add more and more combos (sorted to be useful) as they discover them and new heroes are added. You’d just need some admin moderation to make sure all is smooth. There’d still be an option to selectively re-do certain clips in a formal style, maybe according to highest rated or whatever else.

Ok, that’s it for now - will keep subconsciously thinking on it.

[Xhaos]

I immediately fall in love in anything with clean-looking UI.

[Smash]

Good call, I’m curious how this will all play out, too!

As far as making videos, I’m working on some ways to make that easier for you all. We will have to do it via trail and error, but I’m hopeful we can figure out a fairly easy way to get folks making videos!

As far as the big secret plays, my gut says that major pros and coaches won’t add content but will look at content at first. So initially, the plays will be from non pros.

BUT if we end up with a lot of plays, we immediately become a major tool for every pro team. The reason for this (which is super cool) is that if pros don’t keep track of these plays, then eventually those same plays will be used against them in competition.

So my hopes are to get it that far, which means pro teams will have to stay aware of what’s going on in the playbook. Over time, I think pros will add plays, too. Especially to bait other teams with that play, because the pro teams have a secret counter to the play they publically posted!

I ️ Competition lol

[Smash]

Thank you for taking the time to post this!

I will do my best to try and get this going, so hopefully it will help people (and especially new players) to advance their understanding of the flow of our game!

[Smash]

Omg dude!! Love this!

Ok so the first 2 bullets - we are on exactly the same page! I’ve been pondering those two points myself (and am leaning towards only positive ratings, too!)

The third bullet is brilliant dude! I hadn’t thought of that at all, and although it would take a lil work each patch (for new heroes) it would be so freaking cool to have the system calculate difficulty. I LOVE that idea!!!

And finally for the general q - very very good thoughts and question. This is the hardest (IE most time consuming) part of the whole idea. Production quality will eventually be relevant even if we start out super simple. I’m anticipating spending a large amount of time making videos and templates to help people make better vids themselves.

It might be quite wise (because you have a lot of experience video media) for us to brainstorm the how’s of this part together, so maybe our combined production knowledge can figure out a way to make it easy for the whole fam to get to creating!

[Smash]

You are a hero and a scholar! I hope to make it even cleaner and more scannable!