Andrew shared his extensive knowledge about designing events that foster competition within a game. He also covered the nuances of balancing player feedback with design decisions during development.

1. Designing for Competition
Andrew Munden

2. Who Am I?

3. My Street Cred
● I play competitively
○ Broodwar
○ FFXI
○ WoW
○ SC2
○ Dota 2 Beta+
● Watched E-sports since 2008

4. Outline
Designing for Competition
- Every Game is Unique
- Scarcity as a Driver
- A Place to Play
- Community
Application
- Example!
- Things you Should Learn

5. Designing Competition

6. 1st Place
Competition isn't Singular
How competitive something is isn't
determined by a single aspect of a
game.
Mastery
OpponentsPrizes
Mastery
OpponentsPrizes
2nd Place
Jerry

7. So, How to get People to Compete?
Generally, people are competitive -- at different levels. The important part is getting people to
compete in a fun and meaningful way.
So how can we do that? Let's look at...
● Understanding
● Scarcity of Resources
● Developer Supported Competition
● Community

8. Every Game is a Unique
Little Snowflake

9. Every Game is Unique
It seems obvious, but it's not to everyone.
If you want to motivate players in a game,
first you need to understand the game.

10. FFXI vs. WoW
● Shared Servers with
Japanese Players
● Very Polite
● Orderly
● Chaotic
● Less Cooperative
● Item Focused

11. SC2 vs. Dota 2
● Embodied by Liquid
● Valued Contribution
● Disparaged Trolling
● Players Tend to Emulate
their Favorite Pro Players

12. Scarcity

13. Everything is Scarcity Driven
Humans evolved in a world of scarcity...
● Real Life: Money, time, food, shelter, significant other, etc...
● WoW: There can only be 1 server first, 1 region first, 1 world first
● SC2: There can only be 1,000 Grand Masters
● Dota 2: MMR to show how skilled you are…
○ … or it might be good teammates
If these resources weren't scarce, there'd be less competition to get them.

14. Using Scarcity as a Tool
Knowing that Scarcity is a strong motivator that every human inherently
understands; we can build it into our games to foster competition.
We can encourage competition in the core loop or events by offering scarce
resources as incentives.

15. Scarcity and Player Feedback
Scarcity done well can foster competition but if you're too strict it won't be
fun for players! The balance between too scarce and not scarce enough is a
common challenge...
Oddly enough, some signs you did a good job might be counter intuitive:
● Players give feedback that they want more of everything!
● Players give contradictory feedback of each other!
● Players say one thing and do another!

16. A Place to Play

17. Events
Developer supported competitions have lower barriers to entry and can offer
incentives to players to compete.
Competition can only thrive when…
● Events are the right level of difficulty...
● Their cadence is realistic…
● And rewards match the effort...

18. Events
At Space Ape we run weekly events. We focus on different objectives for
different events:
● Distributing new content
● Engaging players
● Fulfilling demand for a scarce resource
● Providing a venue to compete and show off

19. Know When to go Big
Dota 2 International, Valve set the
precedent of going big once a year.
If you're working on a generating
competition, you should know when
to go big. How often you do this
depends on your game and platform.
But going big gives players
something to aspire to.
$24,787,916 sounds big to me!

20. Community

21. Community, Why I Really Played MMO's
Community provides a lot of elements to competition…
● Teammates
● Support Structure
● Advice
● Peer Pressure
● Friends
● Mastery Validation
● Opponents / Rivalries

22. Communities are Hard
Who to listen to? When to offer support, when not to?
We often get contradictory feedback from players, especially around
competitive elements.
The biggest challenge taking player feedback into consideration is
identifying which feedback to take with a grain of salt -- and doing it.
Space Ape Feedback - Emails, Social Media, Player Chat, managed by a Lead
and compiled into daily player feedback updates.

23. Competition Flounders
Under Acquiescence
● Slippery slope is a real problem
● Stick to your guns
● "The road to hell is paved with
good intentions"
Read between the lines, play the game, try to
interpret where you can make developer and
player objectives meet.

24. Practical Example!

25. Understanding
● To Battle
● Nostalgia
● Collection
● Bots!
Why are people playing the game?

26. We identified Bots as the object of desire; so how can we use
Bots to create scarcity?
Scarcity

27. A Place to Play
We needed a place where players could compete for this prize.
PERCEPTOR CRYSTAL

28. Community
To allow us to address community feedback we built different
flavors of Tournaments.
● Individual
● Guild
● Prestiging
This allowed our schedule to be flexible and address players
wants and needs in experience, prizes, and engagement.

29. Getting Better at Designing Competition
● Play Games!
● Compete yourself!
● Understand what kind of competitor you are.
● Talk to a diverse group of opinions, don't isolate yourself.
● Get feedback before, during, and after events.
● Use Data when you can.
● Spreadsheets, ELO, etc… Math is necessary for competition.
● Do it. Gain more experience. Make mistakes.

30. Questions?

31. More Info
VARSITY@SPACEAPEGAMES.COM
THANK YOU!