Taking GFL To The Next Level

[BeatBoxBattleMe 116 / 4,060]

Alright Hi boys been a minute, but a certain discussion forced me on here to suggest this...

 

Since GFL I was able to join a good semi-pro team for gaming. This team includes streamers, competitive players, and more. Thus, leading them to gain multiple sponsorships', community support, and even their own branding line made by Soardawg. This led me thinking as to why GFL has not tried this before? From my understand we did have social media and tried comp teams out, but have we really done it in a sufficient way? 

 

GFL needs to start recruiting streamers, who will be able to promote GFL all together, while just having fun playing. This can bring in a fan base who not only likes the streamer they are watching, but it will also bring in more people. This is what all big gaming communities do if you just do the research. For example, SOAR, Obey, Faze, and literally every gaming community out there. 

 

Secondly, GFL needs to create competitive teams who will literally compete in tournaments. There should be tryouts with certain requirements within the community for members and everyone else to be able to have the opportunity to join the team. This should not be a team consisted of admins, managers, and more because you need the best players to be able to win and bring in money. Sorry, but that is business. Along with that, we can all agree the competitive scene is bigger than ever. Every single sport is practically cancelled, but you know what sport isnt? Esports. GFL needs to hop on that immediately.

 

Finally, you cannot have any of this without proper social media. Right now Twitter is by far the best place to go for gaming community to gain popularity. It is also the place where you can find sponsorship's and more. From my understanding, GFL did have social medias but lets be honest here. Everyone here most likely plays games on a religous levels and probably does not like to be on social media too much (this is just an assumption). You need people who need to know how to bring in people, advertise, and more. This role should also be run by more one person, who are TRUSTED within the community. 

 

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk. This is just a rant and a thought that will bring GFL the next level. Its time to grow and grow big. This could potentially bring in a lot of revenue, members, and success within the community.  

[Guest Saizy]

this is a w in all honesty

[Joshy 4,364 / 44,927]

GFL has tried this before.

[Nick 1,249 / 17,847]

Thanks for the suggestion!

 

Ambitious projects like this can only be properly executed by people who are truly passionate about it, so it is hard to start a project like this "out of nowhere". No doubt about it being a good and cool idea, but there is a big chance it will just fail again. I'd love to see a project like this, but in my opinion someone who is passionate about this and GFL should step up and say "I want to do it". I don't think anything good will come out of it if it's the other way around (i.e. staff saying we want to do it and then looking for someone).

 

[TheJitFace 699 / 18,162]

Doing this with CSGO and Valorant will work. 

Don't try this with overwatch. 

[mbs 365 / 8,846]

minecraft competitive team 

[Joshy 4,364 / 44,927]

Lessons were learned as there was an effort in the past.  I'll just say it's a lot easier said than done.  Whoever goes through this again I'll say there is a huge risk of tarnishing your reputation even if you do all the right things.

[Mr Wombart 4 / 331]

gfl had a streamer team but practically nobody was on it anyway and it got shut down with the media team

[BeatBoxBattleMe 116 / 4,060]

8 hours ago, Nick said:

Thanks for the suggestion!

 

Ambitious projects like this can only be properly executed by people who are truly passionate about it, so it is hard to start a project like this "out of nowhere". No doubt about it being a good and cool idea, but there is a big chance it will just fail again. I'd love to see a project like this, but in my opinion someone who is passionate about this and GFL should step up and say "I want to do it". I don't think anything good will come out of it if it's the other way around (i.e. staff saying we want to do it and then looking for someone).

 

Never hurts to try. Like I said before, all the big name communities do it. With all the members we have gain, why not have them help out and follow? Plus, I already know a couple people in GFL who use social media and know how to advertise greatly ( @Mejilla ). I mean hell just look at her TikTok account and views.

 

12 hours ago, Joshy said:

GFL has tried this before.

Obviously didn’t do it well enough. If I was able to take a brand new account, join a team, gain a good bit of followers, and all that on twitter in about 3 weeks, then GFL can easily do more with all the members we have. 
 

This is just another chance to gain more people, more revenue, and put GFL on the map. 

[Joshy 4,364 / 44,927]

I usually prefer learning from others that the pan is hot instead of touching it myself to see.  If anyone wants to risk burning their hands by their self, then by all means go for it there's nothing stopping you (I wont).  Speaking for yourself as one competitive person makes sense and I think probability of controlling your own success especially if you are more passionate, then it makes sense that you can manage it and do well.  Good stuff.  Great job.  Speaking about teams and greater community involvement is a different story and is a huge task.  Again: If someone wants to facilitate or take on a team effort, then feel free to touch the pan yourself and let me know if it's hot or not- I have no problem learning from you and I'm no longer in a leadership role to worry about risking myself.

 

I'm not strongly against and wouldn't suggest not doing it, but I am sharing my experience on this and letting you know that there are a lot of details.  A lot of concepts sound great and really exciting, but actual practice those subtle details can snag you.  I have super open arms I totally welcome anyone to show me the right or better way to do it.  This effort was about 4 years ago so this is why people are forgetful.

 

edit:

 

Another bit of advice GFL or not is that even when someone has done it wrong or didn't do it very well it's probably not a bad idea to try and learn what they did; see what went wrong or understand why certain decisions were made.  It's foolish to repeat mistakes.  There's no point in trying to reinvent the wheel or enter a new opportunity with blindfold.  It's not to say that you can't do a good job, but it couldn't hurt your chances to know more.

 

I also posted because I know the risks and paid the price myself.  I wanted to share a small piece of my experience and let others know a little bit about that risk (tarnished reputation and the workload involved).

Edited May 14, 2020 by Joshy
tried to slightly improve grammer

[Joshy 4,364 / 44,927]

Many apologies because I admit and know it's sexist, but social media for females are very different ballpark compared to other types of accounts.  It's an unfortunate truth and I wish we lived in a better world.

[Joshy 4,364 / 44,927]

Okay. I'll stop on that topic- no contest.

 

Anyhoo: The "it never hurts to try" is something I use to say often.  I still believe in it, but just don't be silly going in for it without learning about the history.  Just because it failed in the past doesn't negate its future success, but it's foolish to not learn about the past pitfalls.  Individual efforts are very different from team and community efforts.  It's cute the first time to watch the dog chase its tail, but when topics like these repeat it's painful when experienced persons feel unheard or ignored... as if they are criticize just to criticize or because they have "negative behaviour" for not flowing with the team.  I don't think it's unfair or wrong for me to say try not to make the same mistake.

 

Certainly: Go for things.  Even while I was in such a leadership role it was the story I also told.  Just do it.  Just try it.  Start something unofficial and transform it into something official.  What I think this needs is proof of concept; keep in mind that doing it just as one person or one account you'll want to show scalability to really work it (does it work the same way or relatively close for 1 person compared to something that involves 10 people?).  Show the people who have told you "no" that they are wrong; give them a hint or whiff of success and lead the way.  It's yours to own.

Edited May 14, 2020 by Joshy

[Mamoru 301 / 6,533]

I see how this is a good idea. But just to make sure, what kind of "competitive teams" do you mean? Is it all games or just the main games such as Csgo, Valorant, Ow and league? or is it just any games?

 

Anyhow, i'd love to help with the csgo part. We have a lot of good players in the csgo section of the community and some might just also wanna make a team for GFL. Tho seeing as GFL mostly is NA im afraid i won't be much help in the long run. 

 

 

[FrankAL 104 / 3,191]

At least regarding gmod hide and seek, I don't know if that would be a good idea. Under the presupposition that we did so and our HNS server got massive support and people started playing games on hns, they would flood the server making it difficult again for admins to get on. For this to be even tenable we would have to increase the player slots to probably at least 64, but then the problems becomes lag from the sheer amount of people engaged with the server at once.

There is also the potential for multiple gfl hide and seek servers, where the problem there will be that one server will definitely be more active than another, and then people are really just going to wait to get on the most active server and create different problems.

 

Regarding competition, I don't really understand how it would work regarding hide and seek. Would it be that the winner is the person who gets the most points on a specific map, and if so what is the actual prize? Also, even if that is how it worked, I don't see it really getting any real traction. It's hide and seek, and the competition would really be artificially injected. It's true that we have try hards on the server, where I sometimes have fun putting the effort in.

 

Although, there may be a way that hide and seek could work in a competitive sense that might actually be very interesting. For instance, let's say that there is a separate locked server, and 32 people would be included if they signed up for a specific tournament time(if they don't make it on time they forfeit automatically, though there can be some leniency)(there should also be some requirements to join the tournament, such as a certain amount of time playing with gfl hns, and a relatively clean warn template). 1 person is the designated starting seeker(it'd have to be situated so admins can force choose the starting seeker), and that person(preferably a skilled admin) has the goal of tagging everyone. If everyone is tagged in 5 consecutive rounds(the duration of a map), then the starting seeker wins. However, if everyone isn't tagged in 5 consecutive rounds, and we have a set amount of hiders in some round, then all of the tagged people would be kicked, with all that being left is the starting seeker and the hiders that survived. However, after a certain threshold of people being removed for getting tagged and losing, the map is a changed to a smaller designated map so it becomes more difficult to get away with surviving the round. For example, a large map like Geekroom or littletown from 32 players to 20, and then might turn into something like museum from 19 to 10 players, and then lower to smallotown or plaza from 9 to 2 hiders left. If there is 1 hider left in the end, then there will be 1 more round between the seeker and the hider. If the hider is tagged, the seekers wins. if the hider survives, the hider wins. The reward could be a large amount of pointshop points, and maybe a special pointshop item limited only to tournament winners like that.

This would probably be very fun, and tournaments could be done semi monthly. They could be hosted on something like twitch if someone wants.

[NaratoHeHeXD 75 / 0]

Valorant competitive team 

[Brotherwolf 326 / 7,218]

29 minutes ago, FrankAL said:

At least regarding gmod hide and seek, I don't know if that would be a good idea. Under the presupposition that we did so and our HNS server got massive support and people started playing games on hns, they would flood the server making it difficult again for admins to get on. For this to be even tenable we would have to increase the player slots to probably at least 64, but then the problems becomes lag from the sheer amount of people engaged with the server at once.

Technically, I think how it works is we have 64 open slots to play, but if we even get to 32 players (which we rarely do anyway), I think the last 32 slots are reserved for VIP's and Admins to be able to get on (unless people connect from the HnS IP). The lag will just depend on the server, how well optimized the map is, how good the player's PC is. I know people who can get 200+ frames with 15-25 people on well-optimized maps. However, I have a horrible PC and can't even get half that number  (I'm on I-3 with integrated graphics LOL)

 

34 minutes ago, FrankAL said:

Regarding competition, I don't really understand how it would work regarding hide and seek. Would it be that the winner is the person who gets the most points on a specific map, and if so what is the actual prize? Also, even if that is how it worked, I don't see it really getting any real traction. It's hide and seek, and the competition would really be artificially injected. It's true that we have try hards on the server, where I sometimes have fun putting the effort in.

 

Although, there may be a way that hide and seek could work in a competitive sense that might actually be very interesting. For instance, let's say that there is a separate locked server, and 32 people would be included if they signed up for a specific tournament time(if they don't make it on time they forfeit automatically, though there can be some leniency)(there should also be some requirements to join the tournament, such as a certain amount of time playing with gfl hns, and a relatively clean warn template). 1 person is the designated starting seeker(it'd have to be situated so admins can force choose the starting seeker), and that person(preferably a skilled admin) has the goal of tagging everyone. If everyone is tagged in 5 consecutive rounds(the duration of a map), then the starting seeker wins. However, if everyone isn't tagged in 5 consecutive rounds, and we have a set amount of hiders in some round, then all of the tagged people would be kicked, with all that being left is the starting seeker and the hiders that survived. However, after a certain threshold of people being removed for getting tagged and losing, the map is a changed to a smaller designated map so it becomes more difficult to get away with surviving the round. For example, a large map like Geekroom or littletown from 32 players to 20, and then might turn into something like museum from 19 to 10 players, and then lower to smallotown or plaza from 9 to 2 hiders left. If there is 1 hider left in the end, then there will be 1 more round between the seeker and the hider. If the hider is tagged, the seekers wins. if the hider survives, the hider wins. The reward could be a large amount of pointshop points, and maybe a special pointshop item limited only to tournament winners like that.

This would probably be very fun, and tournaments could be done semi monthly. They could be hosted on something like twitch if someone wants.

As for competition, I'd say that if we were going to do a competitive HnS tournament, we should do it in a separate server. This means we won't get caught in the crossfire with newer players and players hoping to just hop on and chill on HnS. We need to make sure the server isn't hosted in a bad spot (i.e. if most people were from the EST time zone if we did a competitive map, we wouldn't want the map hosted in Asia/Australia). We should have everyone in that specific map be a seeker once and hiding every other time until everyone has a turn as a seeker. Once a hider gets tagged, they need to go to spectate so the designated seeker is the only one to tag people. Obviously, they cannot go into spectator to avoid getting tagged, because that'd rob a seeker of points they need, and they cannot tell the seeker where the hiders are as a spectator, they cannot say where anyone is because that'd be ghosting. The scoring would ideally be the same, with hiders getting 3 points every round they win and a seeker getting a point for every person they tag. Once everyone has a turn at seeker, then we count up the points. Whoever has the most points by the end would get the prize. Now, I also think 2nd and 3rd place should get a prize as well because 2nd and 3rd won't be easy to get. With some people being better at the game than others, it's only fair that we offer the other people some prize, although it won't be anywhere near as good as first place.

 

Now, I think the reward should be 5 million pointshop points or all the playermodels in the pointshop. This will entice a lot of prominent figures into joining the competitive match and it will really raise the stakes. A lot of people would want the money, so giving them lots of points/skins is a good idea. This will also get newer players into the action (only if they want to, of course) because they're also going to be looking for the money. Another solution that we could do is have a skin/accessory only available to people who've won in competitive HnS.

 

Another point that should be obvious but I'll say it anyway, you will be kicked from the server if you're being toxic/harassing people/hacking/breaking the rules normally found on HnS. This is for money and but in the end sportsmanship still applies, and we don't condone unsportsmanlike conduct on HnS, so we shouldn't do it here. Also, teaming with others to get more points will not be allowed. You have to tag people as the seeker. Also, people that are banned from HnS or GFL in general wouldn't be able to participate. They're banned, it's only fair.

 

The last thing I want to talk about here is the maps. We should not do a map like Tulip where people constantly complain about frames. I often get ~10 frames on that map and we shouldn't do a map with bad statistics. Also, I'm leaning towards a bigger map because for a tournament, we are going to want as many people to participate as possible. I'm thinking a map like Littletown will be good because it's not absolutely enormous, but it's a sizeable map that will challenge a seeker and also has a variety of parkour spots and actual hiding spots.

 

I think this should be done once a month if we were to do one of these, as this doesn't make it overdone, but it gets players hyped for a month for one specific day, all hoping to come out with an illustrious reward without everyone overdoing everything.

 

@FrankAL sorry for such a long post but there's all my thoughts

 

[Worgee 812 / 13,264]

I quite agree with @Nick, but I've been on the side of doing it and being passionate about it. I'll list what was worked on when I was in charge of it and why it stopped.

Streaming/streamers:

With an early perspective on how to get more people interested in GFL through gaming, we introduced hosting streamers within GFL from the GFL twitch channel. Along with this the GFL Twitch channel achieved access to the affiliate program however this is where the streaming took a rough turn. With the (still) current setup of paypal etc. GFL is unable to become affiliated. This demotivated a lot of the streamers at the time and focus was put more into social media and partnerships/company deals.

Partnership/Company deals:
As mentioned above we went on to partner up with other gaming communities and discussed company deals. We were in a position where a company wanted to sponsor nice physical products, being energy drinks, food supplements and similar stuff fairly known in the world of competetive gaming and stressful college days. The deal got secured and all that were left to was for Roy to say yes. He said no due to GFL not being ready for actual deals knowing this deal was being prepared for him and something that was requested by Roy and directors at the time.

Social media:
While this was constantly in progress we did not have anyone truly interested and passionate for updating the social media profiles. We however chose to put more focus into youtube.

Youtube:
With youtube we started looking into GFL and found that there are some quite big content creators within. We decided to reach out to one in particular with more than 100k subs. He was willing to work with us and was simply rewarded with "free" VIP. We also started working on videos for each game we have servers on and on videos for each of our servers as well. This all came to quite a halt due to issues amongst the higher ranks of GFL. (if you know, you know.)

While it could "easily" work out well now, then there are quite a few things that would have to be configured and dealt with first. This would most likely include how GFL runs money wise but could be worked around with proper management and passion.

PS: This work tends to burn out people.

[Joshy 4,364 / 44,927]

I would say one of the most difficult things hardly involves any technical details or the game.  It can be a showstopper right up front even after all of this very scientific discussion about how to do it the right way.  I recommend starting off by making a team roster or really going for the talent with tryouts.

[BeatBoxBattleMe 116 / 4,060]

As for competitive teams, just start with the major games since they have FREE tournaments any team can sign up for. 
 

- CS:GO

- Valorant

- CoD

- LoL

 

Edit: I don’t expect all this to happen soon of course, but GFL ca at least start with social media or something simple. 

Edited May 15, 2020 by BeatBoxBattleMe

[Joshy 4,364 / 44,927]

I always encourage people to show me wrong, which is why I'm going to bump this and inquire on its status as it has been a few weeks.  Has anyone tried anything regarding this or has it budged?  I really don't want you guys to fail if you really want it; it's not a power move to prove myself right...  I want to be proven wrong.  It's a total win if this can be done.  My earlier comments weren't against the idea; they were to share that there were indeed genuine and strategic past efforts, and some lessons learned.  Please be aware of them and use them; otherwise: it's another empty suggestion people got riled up over for nothing.  Don't let that happen if you want this to become something.