May 2020 Patch Notes
We’ve been running SYNTHESIS ONLINE for about a month now. It's been an exciting and challenging set of experiences, and we’re making some changes effective immediately regarding connection lag, prize pools, and our game lineup.
Connection Lag
After running online tournaments for a few weeks, as well as studying other online tournaments around the world, we’ve developed what we believe the most effective way to handle poor connections between players in our events. A brief overview is as follows:
- Players need to provide proof of wired connection. Players without a wired connection will be disqualified.
- Players will participate in a lobby / arena test with one of our admins. Players with an unacceptable connection will be disqualified. If not available:
- Players will submit a speedtest to our admins. Players with less than 5 Mbps upload speed will be disqualified.
We hope that these adjustments will help us address issues quickly and keep things fair for competitors.
For more information, our rulebook is located at: http://gvs.gg/rules. As always, we want to continue to build on and improve this process for everybody, so we’ll keep making adjustments overtime. Online tournaments aren’t perfect, but we’re going to keep working hard to make things as good as possible for everybody.
Prize Pools
Every Monday, GVS has offered a modest $30 prize pool, split 15/10/5. There are 3 competitions (P+, SSBU, SSB64), meaning that GVS funds a $90 prize pool each week.
Spectators and competitors also have the ability to fund the prize pool themselves, either through registration or the shop page attached to the tournament. You can either choose to fund GVS directly (which previously covered our $90 loss each week) or add directly to the existing prize pool.
Truthfully, we would love to charge an entry fee. Being in Connecticut puts us in a legal grey area regarding charging entry fees for online tournaments, so we’d like to avoid that grey area entirely if possible.
But since we can’t do that, the funding for the prize pools comes directly from paperfairy. While he is lucky and grateful to be in a position where he can afford to do that, it is not a sustainable practice long term. Additionally, we want to add more games to the SYNTHESIS ONLINE roster, but don’t think we can afford another $30 per event, per week in order to make things fair for new communities that we onboard.
Effective immediately, GVS will not be funding prize pools for our online tournaments, unless specifically stated otherwise. Players and spectators will still be able to contribute to the prize pools every week, and funds designated as such will always be paid directly to the players.
DRAGON BALL FighterZ
We will be adding DBFZ to our Monday game lineup!
Competition will begin at 7pm ET (in an attempt to mitigate cross registration with Smash Ultimate), and registration will end at 6pm ET.
The platform will be PC, as decided by a Twitter poll we ran last week. Registration is open now! http://smash.gg/synthesis/register
Feedback
As always, we’re always looking for feedback. If you’ve got any questions, comments, concerns, or complaints, feel free to reach out to us via Facebook, Twitter, or Email! If you prefer to remain anonymous, you can use our feedback form, located at http://gvs.gg/feedback.
