Snapshot VR Viveport Open Recap

Published in

Giant Scam

4 min readSep 1, 2020

On Saturday, August 15th we sponsored the first ever community-driven Snapshot VR tournament. It was wild.

The Setup

This tournament was made up of 7 teams of 3 playing a double elimination bracket — all matches prelims through finals taking place on the same day. We got it done in just under 4 hours.

For each match, teams played a best 2 out of 3 maps, where the first team to win 5 rounds claimed the map. We saw everything from 5–0 2 map blowouts to 4–4 clutch points on the 3rd map.

The full VOD is up on Twitch, and will be reuploaded to Youtube soon.

The Maps

All maps were custom made by our community member and mod Shiva Soldier. He put special blocking walls at each pit as well to eliminate ghosting from the dead box.

Map #1 — Xball

Map #2 — Super Lanes

Map #3 — Offseason

Prelims

The prelims had a few surprises in store.

Blaze, a group of our newest members (friends from the VRML) had a strong showing in match 1, barely losing to team Tri-hards. Blaze would go on to perform very well in the losers bracket, making it all the way to the losers bracket final, where they lost but secured a 3rd place spot and a share of the prize package.

NashGameDev, a personal favorite, is made up of other game developers in or from the Nashville scene, including SirCrocketz who made the sound effects for Snapshot VR. They dropped 2 quick matches but tell me they had a good time along the way.

Finals

The real story here is with our finals teams — Eastbound & Down and Underage Ballers. Each playing very well in prelims until facing each other — where Underage Ballers was able to scrape by and put E&D in the losers bracket. These teams have good stories. Underage Ballers, as their name might imply, is made up of some of our younger (but most experienced) Snapshot players and has players from the US and Norway. E&D has players in the US, Japan, and Australia. Shout out to our international players for playing at very odd hours and at less than perfect pings, but still making it to the finals.

E&D winning the losers bracket means they needed to beat Underage Ballers twice to secure the championship. And they nearly did just that.

You can watch both finals matches on Twitch here.

The first finals match had Underage Ballers taking map 1, E&D taking map 2, and it coming down to a 4–4 on map 3. Eastbound & Down was able to take the last point and reset the bracket — setting us up for a second finals match.

The second finals match was nearly the same story, all the way to a 4–4 on map 3. Check out the final moment of that 4–4 point:

Final Standings

1st. Underage Ballers
2nd. Eastbound & Down
3rd. Blaze
4th. str8shooters
5th. Pod Chiefs
6th. Tri-hards
7th. NashGameDev

Prizes

3rd Place — Each team member received a variety pack of Snapshot VR and Giant Scam stickers.

2nd Place — Each team member received their choice of a Giant Scam or Snapshot VR t-shirt

1st Place — Where the real money (figuratively speaking) is at. Each team member got to choose between a custom printed Savage Paintball board or a VR gun stock.