High Ink: Creating a One of a Kind Invitational
My name is .jpg, and I’m one of the head tournament organizers for Low Ink. I ended up taking on High Ink and overlooking most of its development. I’ll talk about my perspective on creating and managing an invitational.
Inkling Performance Labs was built off the success of a single tournament series. Low Ink is currently our most popular event, featuring what was a unique concept at the time of creation: only allowing newer and lower-level teams to participate. This ideology led to exciting ideas that other tournaments wouldn’t even consider, namely the iconic tradition of banning Low Ink winners. It’s a big deal, too; it’s the moment your team has graduated. You’re no longer considered low level, and everyone accepts it.
Low Ink has been running since mid-2018, it’s been around for a long time. IPL staff were given a unique opportunity with a tournament featuring so much history. We have numerous teams who have won a Low Ink at this point, never to play a Low Ink again. We asked ourselves: Where are these teams now?
High Ink as a Concept
On February 3rd, 2020, a private ‘High Ink’ channel was created. We asked all the previous winners what they thought of a tournament only featuring Low Ink winners. The response was positive, so we wanted to move forward with the idea. This idea, of course, never ended up happening anytime soon. We discovered that even with all the staff we had within the Low Ink team, we couldn’t do it. We didn’t have the drive, resources, and most importantly, the knowledge to create such an event.
When summer started, High Ink was left in the dust. We had no bad intentions, quite the opposite. That summer was when we started moving forward with our plans to create Inkling Performance Labs. With a push to get more experienced staff in more significant numbers, we could develop numerous tournaments for all to enjoy. For a while, that was our number one goal upon the creation of this then-new organization.
In late August, High Ink was reconsidered. IPL as an organization is now established and stable; we had time to create new tournaments. However, we never ended up moving forward for the simple fact that we didn’t have a reason to. It wouldn’t be too much longer until we would find one though.
A Reason to Move Forward
October 25th, 2020, Splat or Swim just won that month’s Low Ink. Gaining access to the secret High Ink channel, we explain the tourney’s concept and ask for their thoughts on it. I felt uneasy with this, we’re still telling these players about the idea of High Ink, but we’re not even working on it at all. I tell everyone in the High Ink channel that we’ll get it done eventually, I promise!
That wasn’t going to happen any time soon as far as I was concerned. But two crucial factors leading to the creation of High Ink occurred two days later:
In a moment of seemingly sudden demand for High Ink, we finally found a reason to move forward with the idea. Raze, the head tournament organizer for IPL’s Testing Grounds, was interested in helping out with High Ink just for the fact that he wanted to try creating an invitational. It’s important to mention that out of every tournament organizer in IPL, Raze had some of the most experience running events.
The second most important thing was this message. Out of nowhere, Jonny from team Kalopsia suddenly just posted “plan! high! ink!”. This resonated with me, and I was reminded that players do want to see High Ink happen. Both these messages appearing on the same day made us move forward with the High Ink project. The High Ink you saw happen on December 12th was born here.
Creating an Event to Grow IPL
After two failed attempts to get High Ink off the ground, I had to do something to ensure we would follow through with our plans this time. After a meeting with staff, the first thing I did was to let all Low Ink winners know that we are working on High Ink once again. We were going to be transparent with them in terms of progress too. Doing so ensured that we had excellent communication with the players.
We’ve determined a few goals to make High Ink worth running. We had big ambitions for the future of IPL, and we thought a one-off event like High Ink would be a perfect time to try stuff out. First and foremost: High Ink is a production-focused event. We wanted to grow our production team. We had to get more video editors and other content creators involved, alongside improving the ones we already have. We wanted to create trailers for the teams and try new things with the stream.
The most critical thing established within this planning period was neither of these things, though. The most important thing done was setting a deadline to follow. We could always move it around if things don’t work out, but it helped everyone have a general idea of when things needed to be done. The first and last proposed tourney date was December 12th, the day High Ink ended up taking place. Having a deadline is a deceptively simple thing to create, but will significantly help your staff team understand that things need to be done within a timeframe.
Challenges with Invitationals
IPL goals aside, we’re still creating an invitational here. New challenges appeared left and right. Namely, the most considerable challenge was getting a good number of teams on board to play. Luckily for us, it was early November, and inviting teams to play in an event more than a month away is surprisingly easy. Still though, this was a long and stressful process.
Having to follow the idea of a tournament featuring Low Ink winners was the most challenging part. Low Ink has a long history, but most winning teams have no easy ways to contact them or no longer play competitive Splatoon. Initially, High Ink was to have 16 teams. This was a good number to shoot for and was entirely possible. Of course, assuming everyone I contacted could get their entire teams to play on a specific time and date (so it wasn’t possible). We lowered the number to 10 teams after this realization. The event ended up having 12 teams, but there were only 10 at this point in time. In total, I contacted 19 different people to get teams in High Ink.
Other tournament organizing challenges come up when you’re creating a bracket for ten teams, unlike our other events that get 20 teams minimum. We had to think outside the box to have a format worth playing in, suitable for a stream, and respectful of the players time. I let Raze handle this, and he came up with a round-robin group stage to double-elimination bracket. Round robin gives us a chance to create accurate seeding for all the teams. It also gave us a chance to stream teams that would otherwise get eliminated before we could even show them. Double elimination is a given; both viewers and players can easily follow it, so we went with that. All in all, this format ended up making for an excellent stream. It only took just under 6 hours, pretty good for a significant event.
Announcing High Ink
By the time we got all ten teams lined up, High Ink was still a secret to the public. We had to come up with a way to both creatively and significantly announce this event. We needed to advertise this as a Low Ink winners invitational. The name may confuse people at first. This direction would prove to be a much more important step than we anticipated.
I felt strongly about announcing High Ink during the upcoming Low Ink stream. I had about two weeks to come up with something. In a burst of incredible motivation, I taught myself a new video editing software. I began work on a High Ink video trailer. Creating it was a ton of fun but time-consuming. I showed the trailer to Kbot, Nitrogue, Vicvillon, and Inkfarer. All of these people have experience in content creation and tournament production, and they gave me incredible feedback.
When it came to finally announcing the tournament, the hype I saw around this event was rewarding. It was no longer the deadlines we set that made us want to move forward; it was the fact that what seemingly felt like the whole community was looking forward to this event. Creating a strong first impression was something done somewhat unintentionally, but I’m thrilled it happened.
Building Hype
Pivoting off a strong start, we wanted to keep the hype going. It was time to show off the teams we had lined up. But not so fast, a particular team decided to show their faces once again; you may have heard of them. Seishin Chitai, who won one of the first Low Inks, said they’d come back for this one event. I contacted them immediately; they responded immediately.
With that unexpected team return, it was time to start work on the team trailers. I want to give a personal shout out to Inkfarer, who did all the graphical work on the team trailers, alongside the stream for High Ink. To help me put together all these trailers, we had YDKids come on board as they have video editing experience. Both Inkfarer and YDKids made the team trailers possible, so they get the credit here.
I’ll spare you the details on creating the trailers; it just involved getting clips of teams and assembling them. Nothing insanely tricky, it was more time-consuming. For any other tournament, producing trailers for all the teams would be a waste of time. High Ink was different; we had fan favorites and disbanded teams returning for this one. You must make a big deal out of it.
Tournament Day
Before we knew it, it was game day. The greatest thing about running an invitational is that you can have fine control over how the tournament is run. Raze and I determined that all teams must ask a TO before starting a match. We wanted to stream as many games as possible, and this rule was crucial to achieving this. It allows the bracket to move as fast as possible, and you get to choose the matches to stream. Aside from that, rules don’t play a role in invitationals as much as you’d think.
On the stream side, we finally got to see what Inkfarer put together for the stream overlay. We tried adding weapons to each of the players on a roster. We figured it was a very doable and a worthwhile detail to add thanks to the strong communication we had with the teams. Nothing else to add aside from the fact that the stream looked fantastic.
Commentary was a bit trickier with this stream too. We picked established commentators for this one. As much as we like supporting people trying to get into commentary, this was not the place for it. We even wrote up a three-page commentators document full of team history and results, ensuring all the commentators knew a bit about the teams. Something like this isn’t feasible with any other event, so we wanted to continue taking advantage of it.
Returning to format: Our round-robin to double-elimination format saved our butts. Almost all the teams got significantly moved within our seeding list thanks to the match results we saw in the group stage. In general, the tournament saw so many unexpected results and made for some incredible matches. All in all, High Ink exceeded my already high expectations.
My Personal Thoughts
I want to give my personal input on some decisions made during the course of High Ink’s creation. I want to make it clear that these thoughts are my own. I will mainly address common comments I saw regarding High Ink.
Whats next?
Upon the announcement of High Ink, some people were expecting more. We hyping up “something new” before we played the trailer on stream. From the perspective of a head at IPL, I can assure you that we have many new tournament ideas for 2021. Sit tight; now that High Ink is over, we’re moving onto bigger things. I cannot share more than this.
Why an Invitational?
Some wondered why High Ink was an invitational. I don’t blame these people. Why not make it an open event for any players banned from Low Ink to enter? Two reasons, the first being that we don’t have the resources for another Low Ink type event. The other, more significant reason is that there isn’t any reason to make an event like that. If you wanted to play in a tournament with more substantial teams, play in any of the other IPL events (or any non-low-level event in general). High Ink being an invitational lets it stand out and be a lot more unique. I’m happy we pulled off an invitational here.
Why’d you invite *certain team*?
Because they won a Low Ink. Simple as that: you win a Low Ink, you’re invited. Regarding team balance, that wasn’t the goal here. We wanted to see where the winners were today. Deliberately not inviting specific teams skews with this idea. Anyway, most of the matches we saw during High Ink were some of the greatest games I saw in competitive Splatoon. Team balance, aside from grand finals, was not an issue.
That’s all from me. Not every little detail was covered here, but I hope this put the amount of work and the process into perspective. Personally, I’m a bit drained after working seemingly nonstop for a month straight. I won’t even touch IPL’s next events, so it’ll be a bit until I’m involved with our next big thing.
Until then, I’m here for Low Ink- always.
