About the WaterWar.net League

Development of the WaterWar.net League.
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isoaker
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About the WaterWar.net League

Post by isoaker » Thu Nov 03, 2011 12:23 pm

The WaterWar.net League is the evolution of the online water warfare community's water warfare league system.

In its current incarnation, WWn League development is to be headed by DX, marauder_4, and SEAL. Me (iSoaker) will also help with development, but taking on a more supporting role, giving freedom to the three heads to come up with the system to be used for the WWn League.

Of course, membership input on how the League should run is most welcome. What the League organizers are for is to help organize ideas and make final decisions when general consensus appears unattainable. They will also be involved in judging of League activities (but would not be permitted to judge their own entries).

Thanks, DX, marauder_4, and SEAL for their willingness to help oversee the development of the WaterWar.net League!

Let's help get things pushed onwards to the next level for water warfare! Soak on!

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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by marauder » Sun Nov 20, 2011 5:05 pm

I'd like to see member pages on the waterwar.net site. We could have a league page with member pages. Something to list the battles we've fought in - especially community battles.

Also, Perhaps we could issue out patches for community wars. Some kind of memorabilia, and us military types would definitely sew them on our camo uniforms. And it doesn't have to be just Dug Hill, if someone in Germany or California wants to sponsor a war we could issue them for those too. I have access to custom patch making machinery and would foot the cost as my sponsorship of the Community War(s) if there is interest.

I write about that here and not just in the community war page because I want to see some kind of point system or reward system put up for community involvement - NOT for any kind of hierarchy, but to reward people for what they've done and track involvement. The members pages could also feature patches earned. There would be rewards for online involvement as well, because we should recognize people who submit photos (and win contests), share groundbreaking mods, etc etc. I have several guns back home that I want to send out (maybe working with iSoaker) as rewards for involvement. I would sponsor this idea fully, but again my internet access is off and on for the next year. If no one else wants to help push this forward then I will champion it and head it up next Fall in preparation for the 2013 season (if this idea is popular).

The whole goal of this is to get people involved more. The future is bright.
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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by atvan » Sun Nov 20, 2011 5:45 pm

Neat ideas. Even just e-patches would be fun.
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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by DX » Sun Nov 20, 2011 6:51 pm

I think we should focus on growing the community for the next few seasons. The early community was huge - original WWN at its end was already the size that iScF took 7 years to reach. Everything from 2005 onward was recession to the point that now we only have a handful of daily active members. As recently as 2007 we were still experimenting with 3rd forums like SoakerMedia, WaterTalk, and WWC. Now we have one. Rebuilding the community should be a priority - not just getting more people involved with content, but just getting more people, period. It's not impossible to make an impact considering how Nerf has taken off. Granted, Nerf has things going for it that we haven't got, but I remember when the NIC was pretty small. NerfHaven and NHQ are massive today, but they were much smaller than SSC and dwarfed by WWN around 2004. We don't need an explosion in membership like Nerf, but we do need fresh blood. Otherwise, League contributions and Community War turnout will not grow.

Expanding the Community again would be a good start. There are very few sites today about water warfare. We can even get some nerfers to check out water warfare - you'd be surprised how many of them also own and use water guns (like the Urban Taggers crew). I'm thinking we could hook some of them through conversions. The first thing that comes to mind when you're a nerfer with a water gun is how to convert it to shoot darts. If you're a new nerfer, you'll notice there's not much reference material on this in the NIC. Converted water guns tend to be banned at major wars and all. So, a new nerfer may turn to Google and that's where we could snag their attention. Course, it would take someone with deep pockets to buy up new guns just to convert them and write guides for them, but it could work. New guns are shitty to us, but nerfers love them for conversion potential. I'd never advocate converting CPS ever, but all those underpowered air pressure guns are perfect. If they search and land on a water war site, chances are they may explore our community a bit. Just something to think about.
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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by isoaker » Wed Nov 23, 2011 12:33 pm

Expanding the community is always the underlying goal, but of course we want to grow a good community and not end up with some influx of people who may be following friends, but that are not actually into water warfare and end up significantly lowering conversations.

To that end, increase the value and types of content in the forums, wiki, etc. give others more of a reason to join. Allowing profile creation or even perhaps also linking to people's Facebook, Google+, or other pages could be worth considering.

Having rewards and such not for just real life, but also online involvement sounds like a great idea! Just need to be sure that tracking and recording achievements does not end up being a burden to anyone.

From where we currently stand, we have lots of room to grow and I think we have a good solid number of members who can help make things happen.

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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by SEAL » Fri Nov 25, 2011 12:08 pm

I'm just going to stick my foot in the door here, and offer some of my ideas.

First of all, I'd like to know, how exactly will the judging work? Whenever someone submits something, whichever league head finds it first will award points? Because I think that a sort of judging "panel" (Where each judge gives the submission a score, then you add up all the scores, and that's how many points the contributor will recieve.) would be better than having just one person judge every report. Because everybody has different tastes, and having all the league heads score a submission would eliminate bias and differentiated opinions.

Okay, there's a good chance that nobody got that, so I'll give an example:

Let's say Jimmy posts a battle report, and Judge #1 gives it a score of 20. Later that week, Billy posts a battle report that's about the same length, but has quite a few spelling errors and is pretty difficult to read. So Judge #2 sees it, and gives it a score of 22, which is more than Jimmy's report, even though it was written better! Because Judge #2 doesn't care about spelling and grammar, he gives it what he thinks it's worth, while Judge #1 is a perfectionist, and would have given Billy's report a score of 15.

See why I think we need more than one judge at a time? Of course problems would arise whenever one of the league heads posts a submission, because obviously, one cannot judge his own work, so any league head's reports would probably have lower scores than normal members. I have a few solutions for this:

1: We could have iSoaker fill in as the 3rd judge whenever me, DX, or M4 submits something.

2: Instead of using the sum of all the judges scores for the final score, we could use the average (For example, if a report gets scores of 10 and 20, the final score would be 15.), that way we could use 2 judges, and the score won't be affected by the lack of one judge. Of course, we could have the same issues that I mentioned above, but it probably won't be as bad as with one person.

Any other suggestions are welcome, of course.

I love all of M4's ideas too, by the way.
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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by isoaker » Sun Nov 27, 2011 10:18 am

I like the judging panel idea; makes for less biased judging. The main catch is that is requires at more "people time" needed. Of course, if all the League judges are ok with the idea, I'm game, too, and would be willing to be the "pinch-hitter" judge when SEAL, DX, or M4 is the one who submits something. As for how to determine points, I'd lean towards adding scores as opposed to averaging them (avoids fraction/decimal issues). :goofy: For this system, though, since three sets of points are being awarded, would needed to increase reward levels 3x.

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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by atvan » Sun Nov 27, 2011 11:25 am

Averages can be rounded. Also, if there are judges who cannot post for a variety of reasons, then a problem could arise. Perhaps if only two judge for some reason, then perhaps the two scores are averaged, rounded down, and this is added to the score. If a third judge becomes availible, then (you are all mods right?) the post with the rounded score could be deleted and a true third score added.

Finally, It would be nice to have all the scorings immediately following the submission. Not sure how that could be done, but that is why I'm proposing the idea to you. :goofy:

Edit: fixed my spazzy spelling.
Last edited by atvan on Sun Nov 27, 2011 5:51 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by isoaker » Sun Nov 27, 2011 5:11 pm

atvan wrote:Finally, It would be nice to have all the scorings imediatelly following the sbmission. Bnot sure how that could be done, but that is why I'm proposing the idea to you. :goofy:
If submissions need to be judged, there's no way it's going to be immediate. If there's some sort of automated submissions system that does word counts and image counts, might be able to have automated scoring, but that's highly unlikely. Also, since such a system wouldn't be able to actually check for the quality of a submission, even an automated system would need to have the scoring process verified.

@atvan: As an aside, the spelling quality in this past post was horrible and made it difficult to read. Please try to keep your posts of better quality. Thanks!

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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by atvan » Sun Nov 27, 2011 5:55 pm

I wrote a reply, but accidentally deleted it, so here is the abridged version:
atvan wrote:Sorry.

I meant three blank auto-posts following the submision, hence the question about being moderators, so you could just edit in your scoring. Auto-rubrics sound icky.
DX wrote:In the neanderthal days of K-modding, people would lop off the whole PRV
Well, not that much soakage.
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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by DX » Fri Dec 02, 2011 1:26 am

The main issue I see with the judging is a very widespread problem - the subjectivity of evaluating writing. There's a reason the Writing section got scratched from the 2nd version of the SAT, even though essays were passed through multiple evaluators. The issue with multiple judging is availability - if someone or two people isn't/aren't around for a while, the submission might just sit there. I also dislike decimal points in scoring, but don't see how adding the scores would be stable given the amount of judging involved.

Don't exactly have solutions for these concerns yet, just putting them out there for consideration. I'll have to think hard about what additional methods are out there.
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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by marauder » Fri Dec 02, 2011 11:42 am

Set amount of points for:
Length of report
# Pictures
# of Participants
Participating with Other Members
same as @ isn

Grammar & Style:
1 poor, 2 good, 3 captivating writing style

Any judge can award the set amount of points immediately upon reading the submission, and then offer his grammar score. Other judges will give their grammar & style points along with their comments. Final amount of points will be: Set (content) points + (judge 1 grammar style score + judge 2...etc.)

This should give us a good balance between content and style, speed of review and fairness and accuracy.
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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by the oncoming storm » Fri Dec 13, 2013 8:16 pm

I was all for the WWN league as it stood in 2012, is anyone else wondering why we didn't run the contest in 2013?
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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by HBWW » Fri Dec 13, 2013 9:23 pm

Too busy with awesome community wars is my guess.
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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by DX » Sat Dec 14, 2013 3:51 pm

Problem is, those of us who are able to go to community wars have a huge advantage in a points-based league. Also, we only got Hasbro on board, and only with new releases so bad that nobody wanted to claim them, not even to resell. If BBT stepped up with good prizes, we might have something worth going for. But, BBT's concept of outreach is...strange.

We can definitely discuss reviving the league over the offseason.
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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by isoaker » Sat Dec 14, 2013 6:41 pm

Duxburian wrote:Problem is, those of us who are able to go to community wars have a huge advantage in a points-based league. Also, we only got Hasbro on board, and only with new releases so bad that nobody wanted to claim them, not even to resell. If BBT stepped up with good prizes, we might have something worth going for. But, BBT's concept of outreach is...strange.

We can definitely discuss reviving the league over the offseason.
Uh, who said we only had Hasbro on board? In fact, who even thinks Hasbro is directly on board? Have people already forgotten past contest Water Warriors brand prizes? Moreover, regarding BBT-based prizes, members haven't been as keen on the more recent offerings from BBT.

'tis unfortunate that in spite of my efforts to explain, there's seems to be a general feeling that BBT isn't doing everything it "should" do to please the community. Considering what I know they do try to do, particularly given the small size of our membership, I can only re-state that they do try to make the best performing water blaster within the price ranges they must target. However, I fear this group will never quite understand/appreciate how difficult it is to design and mass produce a water blaster. As such, I'm stopping my futile attempt to build more understanding here.

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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by the oncoming storm » Sat Dec 14, 2013 8:11 pm

I thought the performance issues had been explained quite nicely. (for those who have forgotten they make their blasters so that the suggested age on the box can actually use them, and size constraints limit BBT blasters to roughly gorgon size)

Isoaker just give us this, did BBT raise the box recommended age on their top of the line blaster for 2014 to allow for slightly heavier guns and larger pumps?
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Re: About the WaterWar.net League

Post by HBWW » Sat Dec 14, 2013 10:25 pm

Well then where is there left to go? The WWn League achieved one of its most important goals in the last few years: actually getting events organized. Judging by what we keep hearing and what iSoaker keeps saying that we'll never appreciate what BBT has to go through to do what they do, the problem is much simpler and more fundamental than that.

Our needs are simply incompatible with the mass market's needs. There's a little overlap, and people have had some success bring in Python 2's to face CPS's (last weekend), but where does it go from there? Water blasters have become a commodity, throw-away product in today's world of rapid consumerism, and despite what some eBay entries may have suggested in the past, the market for performance blasters isn't there.

Well that's fair, and it's fair that we, the community, should be responsible for online outreach and not BBT, but we've got a long ways to go to do what we want to do. That said, it's becoming clear that those who have the interest do not have the resources, and those who have the resources do not have the interest to expand the outreach of water warfare. We are such a niche group now, so seemingly closed off from the rest of the world just doing what we do with old blasters, some with critical functionality held together only by epoxy and perhaps a little metal plating. Only a fundamental shift in the way things work will bring about any change for us, but this shift requires time and dedication. It requires true real-world, on the field experience, which is precisely what we're gathering. I don't know where else it goes from there. I don't have the resources myself to make that shift. Water warfare is a small piece of the pie compared to everything else I do, and I've accepted that no matter what I try, we're not going to get that shift we need.

Let's talk videos. I only managed to spit out one this year (MOAB), but perhaps I didn't post about it enough here, and I know I'm not satisfied with the way I planned and edited that video. With our backlog of archival footage growing larger and larger, it's time to do something about all that. My idea is that I want to throw together a web series, but I've gotten the idea that this is only something I can do by myself with the community's pile of footage. Perhaps it's a communication thing. Everyone's busy, and we're just focused on more wars and more footage to sit on, but we don't really have many ways to turn all of that into an active YouTube channel that will gather viewers.

What else can we do? Perhaps some of us (especially myself) have demonstrated a bit too much unspoken hubris and arrogance that comes with actively attending community wars. We're a small, well-knit group, and what happens out there is what matters here. There is a certain natural pride that comes with blazing past personal and other barriers that only the community wars have been able to deliver for me. Sports put me to sleep, so community wars is really my primary outlet here, but the lack of a large group with constant events is driving me to explore Nerf and paintball some more. These are the only games that can deliver the adrenaline rush I need to push myself to become better physically and mentally, nothing else works for me. Every single incremental improvement brings almost quantifiable satisfaction. Community wars are one of my only channels that really works to improve myself this way, and that is partially where the pride comes from; from knowing that we're a small, special group that does what very, very few people do around the world and have done throughout history.

Frozen Fury was my kind of boot camp. If you didn't move on your feet, you froze up. If your blaster didn't move, it froze up. CQB is fast, demanding, and relentless, demanding constant mental alertness, fast reaction times, and punishing of the slightest mistake. Despite the focus on CQB, we played on plenty of terrain too, which, being from MI, I'm horribly adapted to and was punished for accordingly last weekend. However, despite any lack of ability, I've always felt so alive at community wars, whether it be breathing in the night air at MOAB or Soakemore, or charging at a large, bunker-like cement structure.

So here's the message I'm getting from iSoaker, and from my past weekend experiences: Focus on what matters, instead on what BBT is doing. Make videos instead of just talking about stuff. Come to community wars if you can. If not, host as many games as you can, or practice by yourself no matter how socially awkward it may be. But for those of you who've never attended community wars, I ask that you make it a pilgrimage of sorts. We don't know how much longer we'll be around here, doing this sort of thing. After you cut through all the same old tired discussions, the time wasted posting about Hasbro's useless dollar store blasters, and the time asking BBT for that ergonomic Gorgon 2 or for more social media outreach, the only thing left is what we do: water warfare. Get your CPS, an XP, a WW, a homemade, whatever. Get it and go soak.

With all that negativity cleared aside, I'd say we've made real and meaningful progress on the 2013 season. Perhaps I'm too biased, because this is my first year of community warfare, but we've learning how to organize events better and how to get better games setup. My own ideas on setting up games are getting sharpened by real world experience, so that all that HBWW gametype setup stuff you see is not just some "only works in theory" garbage, but stuff that's applicable to the real world and to real water wars.

We have more footage this year for promos. We've further explored the use of WBL's in water warfare (the results being disappointing as usual, but at least we had something; congrats SEAL for getting the first known community war WBL kill!), and while we're not exactly expanding our small sphere of influence, we are improving what we do. The Facebook page gradually gets more and more content. What we really need is the photographic and visual stuff; the videos (and even that ambitious video game that still has zero meaningful progress) is what people see. You can sit and read a bunch of text, but seeing it in lively, real-time action means a lot more.

So while thinking of the future of the league, let's keep these things in mind. We can say we don't want to be too dependent on league warfare, but that's all that's really driving things now. The league warfare experience is the real draw of what we do, and I would argue is also one of the few truly meaningful things. I say this because locally, very very few groups have built up a high level of skill, gameplay variety, and other aspects of their water wars, and from that I have more respect for some of our community war leaders M4 and DX who have this battle experience.
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