Our staff are some of the people that were with us since the beginning. Instead of keeping their passion to themselves, they decided to spend their own time, effort, and money into creating a system that works smoothly and building a community that anyone can join. The least we can do to give back to them is let them do what they love - play Hoops.
We host tournaments every weekend. Throughout the month there are 4 ranked Sunday tournaments, and if there are 5 Sundays in the month, we host an fun, unranked tournament on the 5th Sunday and let the community decide the rules. In our discord you can use the !schedule command to see the exact dates of upcoming tournaments. Sunday tournaments are always held at 4pm Pacific Time / 7pm Eastern Time.
At our inception we adopted the Elo system for ranking, but we quickly realized that this was not a good system for our community. We soon swapped to the Glicko-2 rating system that we use now, which rewards participation and isn’t a zero-sum game like Elo. Without getting too deep into the math, each player has two values that determine their skill rating: a mean and a deviation. The mean is a number that represents your “average” rating, or the approximate rating the system thinks you should be around. The deviation is a number that represents how certain the system is that you are actually at your mean rating. In the end, your actual “skill rating” is a lower-bound approximation of this interval - exactly 3 deviations below your mean. As you play, your mean will change according to your performance against other teams. The more you play, and the more consistent your performance, the smaller your deviation will be, resulting in a higher skill-rating. After each tournament you do not participate in, your deviation will grow slightly because the system is less sure that your rating is accurate if you don’t consistently participate.
We always appreciate monetary donations to our tournament prize pool. All money we receive or make goes into future tournament prize pools or necessary maintenance costs. Visit the tournament’s page on smash.gg to see exactly how prizes are distributed. If you have any type of skill you think would be useful to our team, don’t hesitate to join our Discord and message any of our moderators.
smash.gg is a website initially designed to improve the Super Smash Bros community by making it easy to host tournaments. They have since branched out and support many games, including Rocket League. In order to play in our tournaments, you must create an account on smash.gg and link your Steam/Console account information.
HoopsBot is a Discord user bot designed by Camber, one of our admins. It has many features to help members of our community get important information and find teammates and people to play with. It also runs the code behind our ranking system. You can find all of the commands you can use with it by typing !help in our Discord. If you don’t see it in the user list or your commands aren’t working, it’s because the bot has crashed and Camber is asleep. Please be patient.
Join our discord and ask around! We have a channel called #lookingforteam that contains a list of everyone that is looking for a teammate for the next tournament. Just type !looking in that channel to be added to the list, or message the people already on the list if you want to team up with them.
As a perk for competing in our tournaments, the 15 highest-rated active players with active Twitch streams in our system get free promotion on our website and in our Discord. To get your Twitch stream added to our system, simply link your Twitch account to your smash.gg account and then play in one of our tournaments.
After 45 days have passed since you last participated in one of our tournaments, your account will be marked as “inactive” in our system. This means that your stats will not appear in the leaderboards and your Twitch stream will not appear in the list as described above. Your stats aren’t gone forever, though; simply play in another one of our tournaments to become active again.
After your Twitch account is registered in our system, HoopsBot will detect whenever you go live on your stream. If HoopsBot has not detected that you've gone live in the past 90 days, your stream is marked as inactive, and you lose your priority on the top streamers list.
No. We do this because we love Hoops and the Hoops community.
In short, no. However, we have a custom flair on the official Rocket League subreddit, so that counts for something.
No, but we highly recommend it because Discord is an amazingly useful tool for voice and text chat within a community like ours. Discord is also the only way that you can currently access your tournament statistics.