SBB99 - The Good, The Bad, and The Supercrowns
The future of SBB99, improvements we're making to it, and the schedule for the rest of the Summer
After running SBB99 for 2 months, we've learned some good stuff, (super)crowned some champions, and found out exactly what the best late-late game comps are (Radiant Prism features heavily).
Today, I'm going to tell you where SBB99 is headed, and what our plans are for it. Let's get to it!
The Good
SBB99 is a blast. We saw a lot of player engagement and excitement, with tons of folks having a great time playing. It turns out that Storybook Brawl scales well to 100 players, and doesn't even take that much longer to play. Plus, when it does take longer, you're making a deep run, and that's about as exciting as it gets.
Assembling wild comps, taking full advantage of Sharebear, and arguing over who the best Heroes are - all of these were tons of fun that resulted from the SBB99 queues. Overall, we consider it a successful mode, and are going to continue iterating on it, as well as adding features that differentiate it from vanilla SBB.
Here are some of the ideas we are exploring:
- Already Live: Queue now waits until 100 people or someone has been in queue for 5 mins so games fire with more players.
- Improve visuals on the "players left" counter.
- Add "# of players in queue" counter to queue screen.
- Adding an SBB99 indicator on results screen and match history.
- Make the countdown timer show the exact day/time in the player's time zone.
- Adding bounties for eliminating other players
- Give a benefit for earning Supercrowns
As we work on improvements, here's the schedule for the rest of the SBB99 summer (with evening times so players on different schedules can enjoy it as well):
- Friday, June 29th - SBB99 Lobby open from 12-3pm Pacific
- Monday, August 15th - SBB99 Lobby open from 3-7pm Pacific
- Thursday, September 15th - SBB99 Lobby open from 3-7pm Pacific
The Bad
It's not as much bad as inevitable, but SBB99 does need some upgrades to continue being a huge draw. The fact that it competes with the ladder queue did lead to some frustration from players looking to rank up, and running SBB99 every week has started to become too rapid a cadence. We also will plan on avoiding the beginning of the month for SBB99, as we've heard plenty of feedback from players who want to focus on ranking up right after the reset.
We appreciate everyone who played, gave feedback, and enjoyed this mode, as we certainly did. SBB99 will return, and the data we've gathered has given us some great actionable information to work from.
The Supercrowns
That, of course, brings us to Supercrowns. These are what you get when you win an SBB99 lobby, and are few and far between. We have been tracking these ever since the first SBB99 lobby, and have plans for them in the future. Until then, they are still a great way to show off, and in that spirit, here's the Supercrowns Leaderboard:
Congrats to Jebas, who not only took down the Summer Championship, but is also dominating in SBB99. What a legend!
Let us know on Twitter (@storybookbrawl) or on Discord what you liked (or not) about SBB99, and we will keep you posted as we flesh out our plans for it. Cheers!
-LSV