Hello, Skyweaver community!

Been a while, huh? I know, I know. We are just super busy with the final details and bugfixing before going into the Soft Launch (thanks for those reports, by the way!). We should have more news about that soon ^^

But in this Dimension I wanted to  highlight two of our most exalted members: Zygote and Missaurus Rex. They've been with us for a while, and they bring a lot of energy and content to our game.

First, Zygote. He has been involved in our competitive scene right from the start and the mastermind behind the Skyweaverleagues. As such, I really wanted to ask him a few questions about his experience so far, and what he expects from Skyweaver's competitive scene. Without further ado, here are 6 questions for Zygote:

1 - Why did you decide to get involved with Skyweaver's competitive scene?

First of all, thank you for this interview. There are several reasons why I wanted to get involved. The formation of the idea was very interesting actually. I always have trouble while trying to sleep cause I think a lot, and yet another night I was thinking what if we combine a league and Skyweaver. The next day I started this Project. I really love the game and I see a bright future in front of the Skwyeaver. The game is still at a very early stage and the competitive scene is very open right now for the organizers. I wanted to take this opportunity and be among the first tournament organizers and eventually grow while the game develops.

Secondly the game has a unique feature that you do not see in most of the games. Its community. People in the community are very friendly. They get involved in conversations about the game each day, share ideas and help each other. During the process of the Test League, I have seen a huge amount of help and support from the community. Let it be the format of the leagues, arts, streams. They were all willing to help me. Lastly, seeing the developer team helping people to solve their problems constantly shows me that the devs are caring about this project. To sum up all the factors I mentioned encouraged me to get involved in the Skyweaver’s competitive scene.

2 - What are your biggest takeaways from the events you've already hosted?

You can’t expect everything at once and you have to be patient/flexible. I remember the first days that I announced this project. I was so excited and waiting for a reaction and that reaction came quickly at first. People were joining the leagues, asking questions, and I was expecting to fill the roster soon. But the reaction almost stopped after a few days, people were no longer joining. Naturally I started to get worried, questioning myself is this project not interesting enough? Then after some days people started to join and ask questions, share ideas again. It’s like a graph, it goes down and up constantly, you can’t expect it to always be up.

Also you need to be patient, keep other people’s temper low and be flexible. There are people playing all around the world and sometimes they may not submit their decks before the deadline or play their games at the last minute. This can easily affect other people participating in the events, because they want to play as soon as possible, they are very passionate about the game. They can feel left half-way and express their emotions in an unpleasant way. As an organizer you have to deal with all of these situations and when needed make the appropriate arrangements to satisfy at least most of the people.

3 - What do you think of Skyweaver as a competitive (tournament) game, so far?

Skyweaver is an extremely competitive game. Why am I saying this? Because the meta of the game can change very quickly. The game forces you to test and adopt new strategies or develop the existing ones. In most of the card games we do not see lots of shifts in the meta until a new set releases. But in Skyweaver systematic balance patches remove this problem. People always have to be flexible to adapt to new changes, and we have not received a second set yet. I believe this makes tournaments and events more exciting to watch and participate in. Of course this does not mean the meta can not last months in the Skyweaver. Yes it can, as we saw before in the control summer and the latest Banjo aggro meta. Being a singleton game makes it even harder to balance, because the number of interactions increases dramatically. But the devs are listening the suggestions in the Discord and addressing those issues quickly. As a result, Skyweaver encourages players to be adaptive to a changing environment, thus the game becomes more competitive.

4 - What are the things you'd like the most to see in the game to help people like you organize more tournaments?

I believe from the gameplay aspect everything is fine. I think the things needed mostly lies on the broadcasting, audience interaction and marketing side of the game. This is mentioned before but a spectator mode where we can see both sides will improve the quality of the streams much more. Discord screen share is doing fine, but in terms of performance and interaction it can not beat a spectator mode. Secondly, better access to tools of marketing like visuals and game assets can help organizers to easily create their own content.

Also I believe the most important part is the viewer engagement. Not just the participants but also the viewers of the events should be rewarded. They are spending their time and showing support to the community. Special Twitch drops for events can boost the number of viewers and potentially increase the will among the people to organize more events.  I remember in one of our streams where we were having between 5-10 viewers and that can certainly be a motivation breaker for some people.

5 - What was the best Skyweaver Leagues match so far?

All of the games were definitely amazing. The best one was the game week 3 finals between HanooStreet and JustAddBacon. Especially game 1 of that match up was worthy to watch. Bacon had more than 70 and Hanoo had almost 70 cards in the grave. Amazing top decks, intelligent plays, they were all in that game. For the players that might not be the best game they played, cause it went very long. But as a commentator and viewer it was a great game to watch.

6 - What are your plans for Skyweaver after Soft Launch?

Actually I already announced at the end of the last stream that I want to organize a discovery tournament. People may say that’s not a league. But I guess people already realized that we started this project as Leagues, but then we added meta reports, guides, news and other sections to the skyweaverleagues.com. So it’s a complete hub for Skyweaver now, and we want to add different kinds of tournaments in addition to the leagues.

After the start of the Soft Launch, firstly we will give a short break to the Leagues and we can fill that space with the discovery tournament. A break is necessary because people need to build their collections to participate in the Leagues. We have seen an increasing interest towards the Leagues lately, and we even had reserve players for the last week. So we are planning to form a second division if enough players want to join, and of course there’s gonna be promotions and relegations between the divisions. So we are adding more goals for the players, they are not going to just participate to become the champion. Depending on the interest we may organize more Discovery Tournaments and also there are some surprise events that we are planning. We also want to reward the players, so we will need to expand our network and look for sponsors as well to fund our events. Don’t forget to keep an eye out on the #events channel.

Thanks a lot for your detailed answers, Zygote! And if you are a community member interested in tournaments, check the Skyweaverleagues site, you won't be disappointed.

About Missaurus, she's one of our OG streamers, and one of the nicest persons in this community. She has organized a Voice Acting video for some of our cards along other community members like Jupiter Elicius and Shpungo, and the result is so amazing that it has given us some ideas. Also, I want to enshrine this here, for posterity. So, there you go!

Join our Discord server to chat directly with us, subscribe to our subreddit to share your ideas, and follow the Skyweaver account on Twitter if you just want to say heya! Many thanks, Skyweavers, and see you soon in Sky!

Marcelo Suplicy, Skyweaver Lead Community Manager and the GrandWeaver of Missed Lethals.