Better Friend Battle

The Friend Battle mode is stale and basically just a farm for stars. Here are two suggestions for making it more fun! Posted: Dec 14 '21

Friend battle right now is pretty boring. Sure, you can play against real-life friends or club mates or other teams you care about, but I'd wager most of us are just going in for the stars.

Here are two ideas for sprucing up Friend mode for optional entertainment.

Friend Playoffs

In this mode, you would quickplay a Best-of-5 series against a friend. SPs would rotate after each game so you're not just playing their ace every time, and you'd play all 5 SPs in the series (as opposed to the Top 3 as you might see in real life).

This mode would allow you to test your lineup against your friend's entire rotation, and also would introduce some rotation strategy. Do you put your ace in the #1 spot to start strong, or the #3 spot to hopefully clinch an early series win?

Gauntlet

In this mode, you'd play against a friend until one of you has run out of starters. Here's how it would go down:

  • You pick a friend.
  • You quickplay a game against them.
  • The loser's SP is knocked out. The next game starts with the same SP for the winner but a different SP for the loser.
  • This continues until one team has lost 5 times (i.e. all of their SPs have been knocked out).
To avoid draws, games would have to go into extras, like in League. Also, the starting pitcher would be knocked out even if a reliever took the loss.

With no draws, this would be a maximum of 9 games (4 losses, 5 wins). This mode would stress test your entire rotation, helping you find weaknesses in your pitching staff (or weaknesses in other rotations that your batters can exploit).

What should the reward be for playing these modes?

While I like the idea of keeping them worth Stars (like current Friend battle), it would also be awesome to include some different currency.

Maybe the first win of either battle would count as your Friend win against that team for today (i.e. it'd be worth however many stars you'd currently get) but then any additional wins would provide Clutch coins for Playoffs or Ranked coins for Gauntlet. This would add an extra way to farm those currencies and entice users to try the new modes, without costing users or Com2Us more stars.

Final Thoughts

For both of these modes, I'd want to see an in-depth post-match screen. This would show the post-game slide from each game as well as overall stats so you can compare how you did across the entire matchup.

Also, I don't think either of these need to replace the current Friend battle. They require a longer time commitment that some users may not be interested in, and that's ok. The idea is just to add some additional fun to the game. It'd be a great way to get bragging rights over your friends!