We'll start with an anecdote, people love those!
There's a classic tale about companies that made pasta sauce. There were two competing companies and one of them wanted to corner the market, so they hired someone to look into what would make the perfect past sauce. The conclusion that person came back with was rather interesting. After looking at various ratios of ingredients, spices and consistencies, the final conclusion was that there was no perfect pasta sauce. There were numerous variations of personal preference that could never be served by a single formula and, were in fact, not being served by the current limited variety. There were entire markets that simply didn't have any offerings and, simply by offering any product for these specific tastes, they could improve their customer base far more than simply reformulating the one sauce they currently offered.
Bartle's Taxonomy and Timmy, Johnny and Spike
Stepping off from that, when Richard Bartle started doing serious research on what players wanted from a game (specifically in the MMO space, but also applies to other games), he arrived at a similar conclusion to pasta sauce. There was no one experience players wanted and many players wanted things that were wildly different from each other. If you want a more complete breakdown of Bartle's Taxonomy, here's the wikipedia page; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_types ,but we will be hitting the high points. Bartle split players into four categories:
Explorers- Want things that are new and/or strange
Achievers- Want to improve and/or demonstrate skill with game mechanics
Socializers- Want the social aspect and the game aspect is secondary
Killers- Want to win and doesn't care how
When Wizards of the Coast set out to contextualize players of Magic the Gathering by what they wanted out of the experience, they had a slightly different take known as Timmy, Johnny and Spike: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-2013-12-03
Timmy- Wants big stompy stuff
Johnny- Wants to win with unique and in depth combos
Spike- Wants to win and doesn't care how
What's universal here is that, much like the pasta sauce, everybody who takes a close look at what core experience players want invariably arrives at the conclusion that there is no one experience players want. This is where we neatly segwey into both community building and organized play because both of those things revolve almost completely around what experience a players wants to get out of the game.
Just to clarify some minor points because I am blazing through an entire thesis worth of gaming psychology, we're talking about the main element players want from a game, but a given player can certainly want more than one of the above. Think of it more like a 1-10 scale for each attribute and we're focusing on the attribute that has the highest score although other scores can still be a factor in deciding how much someone enjoys or stays with a game. Also "casual players" and "competitive players" are *looks up notes* not actually terminology that applies to specific and citable core engagements that a player seeks out of an experience. I believe that is the proper way to term it. The groups that people often try to use these terms to describe are actually incredibly varied in terms of what they want out of a game making those two terms not very helpful and, thus, we won't won't really be using them for this article.
Gaming Ecosystems
This is where this whole affair will get somewhat complex because all of the above groups (Socializers, Killers, Explorers and Achievers) have interactions with one another and none of them are particularly good for a game to have to the exclusion of all other groups. Again, we're going to gloss over this, but part of Bartle's work was looking what a balanced ecosystem entails and what developers can do to invite or discourage certain groups to keep an MMO from getting too top-heavy on any one group.
This blog focuses on miniatures games and those types of games can present a unique problem that is not present in MMOs in terms of creating an effective gaming ecosystem of different player types. Specifically, most players of miniatures games don't have many options about where they play, largely because these games are physically played in person and there's only so far someone can drive to push around toy soldiers/ships/etc. This means that anyone who is trying to coordinate or community build for a game is probably stuck with whatever ecosystem exists locally with only a marginal ability to impact this.
Combine this with the fact that many of those individuals who coordinate events at a local gaming store are volunteers who have lives and full time jobs and you have a recipe for a serious problem. It is simply unreasonable to expect these individuals to have the knowledge and patience to see to it that everyone else is finding their core engagement. It's great if it happens, but neither gaming stores or game developers should expect it to without some serious prompting. I am going to shout out two people who successfully did this and grew communities while balancing the engagements of a wide variety of players: Zafar "Zee" Tejani and Charles Holcomb.
Organized Play
So, how do you help these largely unpaid volunteers manage the different core experiences that the various players who are visiting their local gaming store are looking for? The best solution really is organized play, but it's important to remember that organized play is not necessarily competitive play. It's also important to note that just simply having standardized formats, even if they're not well supported does help. Smaller design teams and companies companies in particular should look at, at a very minimum, putting out OP documentation that outlines formats even if you will struggle to directly support events.
Getting back to pasta sauce, trying to polish a single competitive format to a mirror shine will certainly be appealing to some players, but there are so many more players whose tastes are simply not being catered to. The best approach would be something like this (using X-Wing as an example):
-
Casual Cooperative- Something like Heroes of the Aturi Cluster or even an Aces High format. These are pretty laid back type events, there's a lot of socializing involved and even someone who isn't particularly good at the game in a competitive sense can feel like they're contributing.
-
Semi Competitive- This would be something like a narrative event. Like a Battle of Yavin type tournament:
-Round 1 Space Superiority- 3 objectives and at the end of each turn, each player gains points for each of the objectives they have the most ships at range 1 of
-Round 2 Soften up the Defenses- 3 turbolaser objectives. Defender gets extra points for each turbolaser still up at the end of the game and attacker gets points for each one destroyed.
-Round 3 Trench Run- Attacker has small deployment area, defender has a big U deployment area with one objective in the middle of their table edge. For every critical against the objective, attacker gets points, for every critical from an ordinance, they get additional points.
So, not as tight or super competitive as other formats, but still has a reward for winning and invites unique gameplay that the core competitive experience doesn't have.
-
Competitive- Classic X-Wing OP. Swiss with a cut and bring your A-game because your opponent almost definitely will.
One big aspect that we need to address with this approach is that, not all of this runs all of the time. For example, modes in Call of Duty like Prop Hunt are limited. They only show up every so often to keep them from outstaying their welcome. If they were up all of the time, they wouldn't have enough interest or players but being events that only come up every so often, they get a large player pool of people just looking for a different way to play the game for a little while. In Warmachine, there's a game type called Who's the Boss where your caster is random. It's a fun one off when places run it, but would definitely get grating if it was your only option for competitive play.
And that's kind of the point that this rambling article is getting to. A single game mode, no matter how good or refined, will struggle to maintain an audience for an extended period of time because at least part of your audience will always be looking for a flavor you don't offer...and now I'm hungry