Welcome to #AskDuelCircle!
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This is a space where we focus on your questions and give you answers. We’ll be doing these periodically from time to time so keep an eye out for future editions of #AskDuelCircle.
Today for DuelCircle’s 4th Birthday, it’s all about tournaments, social media, and of course Manders.
Will DuelCircle ever host a low level tournament in the future?
The short answer is no. The long and detailed answer is that right now our priority is to fine-tune our max level semi-annual tournaments to the best ability.
Conducting a low-level tournament will require new research and potentially new gamemodes, if at all. Basically, we’d almost be recreating our tournaments from scratch and we’re not necessarily ready to do that right now. Of course, the long-term goal is to get more people involved in our tournaments but we wouldn’t want to give you any false hope by saying “maybe” in the near future. Sorry.
Mike @MikeFirehammer – Lead Organizer / Sloth @SlothPlaysNecro – Community Relations Organizer
Are you ever going to make a public DuelCircle Discord server or stream from a DuelCircle specific Twitch?
Having a public Discord server is a lot of work, requiring constant moderation to ensure order. The time commitment and staffing that we have to sacrifice is too big for DC’s current manpower at the moment. Alternatively, you may use Twitter as a platform to contact us or join an existing community Discord server (Quantum) ran by Ryan with most of DuelCircle already in.
The reason we don’t use a DuelCircle specific Twitch is for the flexibility of spotlighting fellow content creators in the community to help us with our events and not locking us down to a single channel. This is important as we like to give as many different stream POV’s of an ongoing event as possible, most of the time it’s 2-3 streams going on simultaneously. We definitely plan on utilizing Twitch’s new Squad Streaming feature later this year when it rolls out.
Mike @MikeFirehammer – Lead Organizer / Ryan @Thetechboy – Lead Technician
What was the inspiration behind MSPaint Manders and will it happen again?
I’ve always wanted to run an art contest. However, a lot of art-related contests have a really high-quality standard that (in my opinion) discourage people from entering. Therefore, I set the bar extremely low by asking participants to send in intentionally terrible artwork. We got a lot of very creative work from all ranges of artistic ability, so this goal was definitely met.
As for whether it will happen again, I would love to run a similar contest next year around this time. It all depends on whether or not we can budget prizes for it.
Sloth @SlothPlaysNecro – Community Relations Organizer
Can we get an update on ManderBot’s progress?
ManderBot is DuelCircle’s custom bot centered around making the lives easier for our staff members and with some features to enhance the live viewing experience!
ManderBot’s main feature right now is to make custom Discord embeds which we use all around the server to keep track of various information such as links to ongoing Google Documents to scheduling for our articles on this site.
We recently used ManderBot in public for our Christmas Clash 2018 Tournament, to display what type of spell the participants are able to use within Twitch chat. This was done as the gamemode “Mander Roulette” was hard for our viewers to keep track of the spell type, which wasn’t apparent in an easy to read avenue. This increased engagement in this gamemode as people were able to know and predict what the participants may do!
ManderBot is currently under development with a major feature to help with logistics within our PvP tournaments. When completed this will make our challonge.com bracket online much more accurate among adding the ability for the Twitch Bot to be more aware of the match. As we get closer to completion towards the summer, I’ll share more of what ManderBot can do!
Ryan @TheTechboy – Lead Technician
Thanks for reading this rendition of #AskDuelCircle. Have a question? Tweet at us or email us using #AskDuelCircle. Please feel free to hit us up in the comments. The organizational team and content team will do their best to engage in a conversation with you. We want this to feel like it’s offering a deeper insight into our work.