Grand Battle Planning and General Discussion Thread

keeping people from starting a flood of new battles sounds like a good idea,

I think a "flood" is unlikely.

I doubt we have more than 30 or so people with a strong interest in battling who aren't already involved. And that's a high-end estimate.

With five or six battles (if we go with six players each), we could accommodate all of those people, and maybe even have one or two more for people who want to try another.

And there wouldn't be a need to start them all at once, either. One or two battles a month would probably be plenty to keep up with the demand - and again, this is assuming there are a lot of new people who want to join battles.

In short, my personal feeling is that, as long as the primary reason for starting a battle is "there's enough interested new people who want to join a battle", we won't get overwhelmed with them.

There's another factor, and that's the selection process. The official seasons moved towards "a bunch of people submit profiles and the host picks according to their preferences out of all those profiles", and S! ultimately followed the same pattern for the most part. I think we could do with more first-come-first-served, or at least more "New players get priority". At the same time, personally I'd like the Season battles to be more selective, because I think that's generally worked out for them.

(I realize this opinion carries a bit of the "Official Battles Are Better" implication. On further thought, I suppose I want the implication to be more of "Official Battles Ask More From You", which is admittedly hard to separate from "Better".)

Anyways, right now, I would say our priority is more towards drawing in new players, and so I'd rather not see an Official Season if that's the main purpose. If there's organization to these new battles, I'd like to see it as more of Season Not-Entirely-A-Season or Six-Player Minigrands.

Of course, those are just my thoughts. I think what matters more here is how prospective new players would answer this question:

"If there were new battles you could join, how much would you care about those battles being Season 4 as opposed to something else?"

If being in a hypothetical Season 4 is a big deal to a lot of new players, then I'd say "fine, let's call it Season 4"; if it isn't, I'd stay with "let's call it something else". Personally, I don't see much reason why it would be a big deal to be in Season 4, but that's really a case for the people who think it would be a big deal to make.

Note also that I mean a big deal to you, personally; not that you think it would be a big deal to other hypothetical players.

Edit: In response to Akumu, I am opposed to All-Stars All-Stars, at least as a single climax to the other All-Stars battles. Each All-Stars battle should already be important enough as it is, and I feel All-Stars All-Stars would devalue the individual battles of each season too much. When you have eight battles feeding into a single one, it's not hard to ensure that those eight battles are still relevant even when the winner of one of them dies; when you have 72 feeding into a single one, that's another matter.

I think variants of it could be fun, though; one idea I'd enjoy seeing is a battle where the All-Stars champions were reverted to the way they were when they entered their first battles. No setup, none of the development from their respective battles; just the characters as blank slates. It would be interesting to see how different they turn out.