Hakato here, the unknown Solo League Moderator Pleb, coming at you with ...

Hi everyone, this one may be a sloppy mess as I'm not that organized when it comes to things like this.

A little tidbit about me: Once I took a break from Houseparty a few months ago and stopped hosting inhouses, it died. Seriously. Once I returned, I found Baka had left and everything was pretty much dead. Since then I revived the Solo League and the community is alive again. Most people will clearly say "Well it's not like old Houseparty...". Clearly... I don't want this to be the Old Houseparty, I want this to be OUR new Houseparty. I'm working very hard to steer the ship into the right direction and I feel that it really is working. I could of created my own community with all this effort but I honestly love Houseparty. It brought me a lot of fun for years and I want to continue it's tradition and I hope a lot of you come back to give it another shot now that I have re-vamped everything and now that Solo League is over-seen by me. I'm working very hard to bring you guys the best experience and it all just takes some time. The previous Solo League in the PH (Pre-Hakato) Era was basically a beat down 92' Oldsmobile with no treads left on the tires and 235k miles that got you from point A, to point B. Anyone could drive it but eventually it was going to get sold to a Pick-Em yard for 300 bucks. Now as of recently we have upgraded to a more modern day ride. Since taking over I have Re-vamped the Spreadsheet and added quite a few features you will notice at first glance;

• Addition of the Pre-Ranking System
• Win Streaks & SoloQ Ranking
• Defer System
• Hidden SLP

Addition of the Pre-Ranking System: This was designed to weed out the people that would not show up for more than 4 Solo League games throughout the season. Once a player finished their 5th game they will be ranked into the Solo League Ladder. It saved a lot of clutter from the ladder and has overall a big upgrade from the way things used to be.

Win Streaks & SoloQ Ranking: I really wanted to make this Spreadsheet a lot cleaner than other communities so I really took the time and effort to make icons for these two Columns. Once a player reaches a 10(Depending on how often people even get to 10 this may change) the Win Streak Icon will turn to a Golden 10+. The SoloQ ranking wasn't easy for me to implement and took about 2 hours but once I got it working it was perfectly fine. If we can't find your Ranking through OP.GG you will be placed as Unranked until you notify us of your Ranking or op.gg link.

Defer System: Now this has always been an issue with any community whether this was implemented or not. Some communities allow it, others don't. I wanted to leave the option for players to be able to Defer being captain as a way to bring in the top dogs of the ladder without them having to deal with the nagging work that is, Captain. On the other hand, you don't want people deferring all the time so obviously you want to implement a system to where the amount of Defers a player has is limited. Hence, the 3/3 Defer system. 1 Defer for each month of the season. I'm in the works of a Solo League Currency feature that allows you to purchase certain things depending on your currency you earn from Solo League explained later on in this post.

Hidden SLP: This decision was debated about by the Staff on whether or not we should hide or reveal the Solo League Points on the Spreadsheet. After being a frequent player of Inhouses for many years I eventually got to the point where I cared more about my wins than the actual points that I gathered from the wins. If you win more games, you climb higher. Eventually after talking with Staff and listening to their opinions I decided it was best to just hide the Solo League Points and make it more appealing to have a better win-rate. That's when I came up with the idea to make the Win-rates color formatted from Red-Green (0%-100%). Not only does this decision take a column out of the Spreadsheet that wasn't really needed, it made it look a lot cleaner and overall people are still playing Inhouses even though it is hidden. The decision has worked.

Now that that's out of the way, here are some of my plans and current projects that I'm working on;

• Solo League Currency (SLC)
• Rule Book
• New Team Selection Method
• Solo League Prime
• Solo League Schedule
• More Solo League Officials

Solo League Currency (SLC): This idea came about when I was designing the Defer system and thinking of what happens when a player who is addicted to using Defers, uses all their Defers. I first was originally going to reward each player with a Bonus Defer every Ten wins. Then I thought, well, I could implement some type of Cash system where they can purchase Defers. That's when the idea for purchasing more than just Defers hit me. The things that you would be able to purchase are Defers, Special Spreadsheet Icons, Name Color Changes, Houseparty GG Pens, Mousepads and much more in due time. All of this will be basically ran off of my money and I don't want to implement the ones that actually cost money until we get the Solo League Community more active than what it is now.

The Infamous Solo League Rule Book: One of the things SERIOUSLY lacking in PH Solo League was the addition of a Rule Book. All the decisions were made on the fly and everything was a hot mess most of the time. New Solo League Officials had no idea what the rules were and the Moderators would have to be poked and bothered almost every Inhouse that was hosted. While I am working diligently on this SL Rule Book, it will take some time for it to go more in-depth the longer it exist. I'm no expert and clearly some decisions will have to be made right then and there, then an official rule will be set proceeding a decision (doesn't mean it will be the same as the decision made). I'm finished everything besides the In-Game rules. That's where I've stopped and need to work on come next Tuesday before the Schedules Inhouses Wednesday.

New Team Selection Method: This is something I have always thought about. What this basically means is a few different ways to select a team once all 10 players are in the Lobby for the Solo League game. One, their names will be thrown into a generator and Randomly Generated teams will be selected for the Solo League game. The problem that lies with this, severely unbalanced teams and teams that have 4 of the same role on one side. Clearly you can see the problems that I do with this method. Another one is to throw everyone's name into a Generator and then out of it pick 2 of the names that will be the captains for the game. Although I liked this idea, I always wanted it to be the top 4 people in the lobby to be thrown into the Generator then out of those 4 two are selected. That's the system that I want to work on and implement.

Solo League Prime: This at first seemed like a good idea but then got negative feed back. The idea for this was to give Bonus points on certain games that are announced to be a Prime game. Problem with this is it takes away from my idea of wanting people to care more about their winrate than their Solo League Points. Until a better version of this comes out, I will be taking this idea BACK to the drawing board.

Solo League Schedule: Pretty simple one here. I felt that the best way to start reviving the community was to put Solo League on a Schedule until it got to the point where we'd get 20 people typing INV after a line is posted. I feel that my decision to put Solo League on a schedule has worked and am looking to add another day to the mix which will either be Thursdays or Saturdays.

More Solo League Officials: Here is a doozy that I get asked quite a lot, "Why haven't you recruited any more Solo League Officials?" Well, quite simply put, I wasn't ready to. I've gotten a lot of request of people wanting to become a Solo League Official and I've temporarily denied them all. For a long time since I took over I have been so busy doing the Spreadsheet, fixing the mistakes PH Solo League did with not rewarding the Trophies promised (Still working on that Aprycot, I promise I won't let you down.) and trying to repair the community. I have finally gotten the Spreadsheet to where I've wanted it to be. I'm almost done the Rule Book which will help guide Solo League Officials when I'm not there and it's a lot easier now to build the community and train the Solo League Officials on how to do their voluntary^^^^^^Non-profit job.

-------------------------------------------What can YOU do to help----------------------------------------------

Well, I need help. Now that I got things to where I want them with the Solo League I'm ready to add more Solo League Officials to the Staff and finally grow the community. Before I was waiting until I got everything prepped and ready. Another thing you can also do is be more active in the community, start talking in discord, bring friends into the discord and just play in the game rooms. You'd be surprised how many people stop by the HP discord just to see if anyone is in there. I hope you all understand how much effort I am putting into Solo League while also working full-time and living the adult 'dream'.

Solo League Official: Application
Discord Link: Discord
Twitter Link: Twitter
Twitch Link: Twitch

TL;DR: I made things pretty and am ready to recruit Solo League Officials.