With the COVID-19 pandemic in the last few months, online tournaments have seen a rise. Many top players have started to enter these tournaments, and several tournaments and series have been created for this occasion. There have been many tournaments full of both top players and Wi-Fi Warriors such as the tournaments in The Quarantine Series, and a majority of them have been documented on SmashWiki.
Most if not all offline tournaments within the next few months have either been cancelled or postponed, and with the lack of new updates on the game itself, the news section has remained quiet, with the last entry dating back over a month ago. With the rise in online play, it's up to debate whether online tournaments should be considered for the section.
The only problem with this is that -- aside from the obvious tournaments -- there currently isn't a clear boundary between major online tournaments and "regional" online tournaments. There have been tournaments such as WiFi is SS-Tier! that have a large entrant count but not many notable players, and there have been tournaments such as Ultimate Naifu Wars 9 that has less entrants but has more PGR players and Wi-Fi warriors. Before even considering adding online tournaments to the news section there should be an idea on what is considered a major and what is considered regional. I personally believe the Wi-Fi Warrior Rank should be used since it's similar to the Panda Global Rankings. The only problem is that it's pretty slow to update and the points for PGR entrants is the same as the points for those ranked 50th-31st on the WWR. However, it's still better than blindly sorting it out.
In summary, with how big the online tournament scene is now we should consider adding them to the news section, but only after we consider what should be added in the first place. Love suggestions for those first before thinking about the news section. CookiesCreme 22:47, May 3, 2020 (EDT)
- I already discussed this on Discord so I don't know if I'll miss anything, but I strongly support this. I believe we discussed considering some (possibly all) Naifu Wars, any major offline tournaments replaced by online tournaments (Pound, EVO, Final Saga, etc.), and the entirety of the Quarantine Series. I don't know much about the online scene before the pandemic, so the only tournament I can propose from before is the Soaked Series Invitiational, but I mostly agree with the idea of using the WWR as a foundation for what should and shouldn't be considered. P.S. In case anyone is wondering, my original reason for bringing this up was because The Box is currently the largest tournament in Smash history, so it seems silly not to determine a standard for what online tournaments are major and expand our efforts to document these results. KungFuLakitu, Spiny Overlord 23:44, May 3, 2020 (EDT)
- I strongly support including online tournaments in the news section. I feel like this should be pretty obvious considering the circumstances. As for which tournaments to include, I think we can use the WWR as a basis, but we should also take into consideration other factors such as pot size, amount of ranked players, and just total attendance after DQs. This would vary for each game however as online Melee, 64, and PM tournaments are significantly smaller in size than Ultimate tournaments, but they are still notable within their respective online communities nonetheless. Pokebub (talk) 04:49, May 4, 2020 (EDT)