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276 Posts
On May 24 2014 11:29 Two_DoWn wrote:
The whole point of a tournament with a prize pool is that you are rewarded JUST for how you play in the tournament. Take the NFL. Denver had the best record, but Seattle won the Super Bowl. Does that mean we need to give part of the super bowl prize pool to the players who didnt participate in the final games?
The Super Bowl Prize Pool consists of $92,000 per winning team and and $46,000 per losing team. At a roster size of 53, that comes out to $4.876 million for the winning team and $2.438 million for the losing team. Pretty hefty sum right?
Except the NFL Salary Cap is currently set to $133 million and teams are required to spend 90% of that on player salaries. I'm not delve further into the world of crazy accounting, but it should be clear that the actual Super Bowl payout is a drop in the bucket compared to base salaries, and the difference in total payout between league worst Houston Texans and the Super Bowl Champions Seattle Seahawks is, relatively speaking, quite small.
Meanwhile in Dota we have a team like Arrow gaming who won the SEA Qualifier and will be coming to Seattle. According to datDota, their winnings since 1-1-2014 is $964, a figure that is echoed on Liquipedia. Maybe they don't make top 8, but if 9-16 paid just $10,000, out of the projected +$7m prize pool, that alone would be 10 times larger than their winnings this year and make it all the more likely we might see a stronger Arrow return to the International in 2015.
And no, "but donations!" is not a valid replacement. If 'E-sports' is now a business then the top 16 teams in the world are professionals and as such are entitled to a salary.
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But it's not NFL that pays that salary. You can't pay a salary if you don't own the players, and if you want Valve to contract all professional Dota teams in the world you are opening a whole new can of worms with it's own issue that have little to do with TI's prize structure.
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276 Posts
The NFL, as a whole, is a product in the same way that competitive Dota is a product. The specific financial and legal structures they use are not important to us right now compared to the more general principle that guaranteeing a base income to all participants leads to a higher quality product.
In this case, TI having a flatter prize structure that guarantees payments to all participants simulates the benefits of providing a base salary without having to get into the messy details of outright contracting. There are certainly issues that would arise from this such as team invites being somewhat arbitrary (though I'm not seeing any valid complaints about this years invites), teams relocating in order to draw more favorable qualifier groups, and the still steep drop-off between the top 16 and everyone else, but it is better to go forward and address these issues aggressively than it is to use them as an excuse to maintain the current inefficient prize structure.
Regardless, it's ridiculous to bring up the Super Bowl's prize structure when that money is a negligible part of the overall structure of the average player's compensation. If and when team sponsorships become plentiful and the average sponsor is paying over 10 times the International's prize pool, at that point we can treat the prize structure as ceremonial. Until then, we should admit to ourselves that prize winning is a major component of player compensation and divide them accordingly.
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So far virtually all TI teams receive a base salary, so the scene already has that covered. I don't know much about Arrow but SEA has a ton of issues that they need to fix and simply paying those 5 guys would hardly do anything to fix the deeper problems it has.
The teams that really suffer from the lack of a base income are the ones that aren't able to play in TI. And paying only the top dogs will create issues similar to what you can see in teams trying to get into LCS.
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I still think that only the top 8 teams should get the prize money. This isn't a charity event... It's about survival of the fittest, with the best team taking at least half the money. If your team isn't good enough to make it to the top 8, then too bad. Better luck next year.
NO MERCY!
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Given that teams do not need to pay a single cent during the tournament since it's all expenses paid by Valve, if we want to reward the 9th-16th placed teams, a token sum should be given to them, say, USD$500 per player. Not much to think that they should be satisfied with being placed that low in the tournament, and also motivation to play into top 8 because it's almost exponential increase in prize money just being inside the upper bracket ranking.
A combined sum of USD$2,500 for a team placed inside 9-16th is about the same in prize money for being 1st in a small regional tournament, which I feel is pretty acceptable.
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I feel like drawing comparisons to other sports is a pointless argument. Of course, every sport does things differently---but every sport has a different competitive infrastructure, with different needs, pressures, and histories. We might as well be arguing about whether the NBA has a better system than professional tennis. If you look at The International as just a tournament that 16 teams got arbitrarily invited to, then it's reasonable to question paying everyone a share of the prize pool. But that isn't what The International is. The invitations to this tournament are not even close to arbitrary; they are recognitions of prolonged excellence in professional DotA 2, recognitions that involve heavy scrutiny and follow a set of strict guidelines. If the invites to this tournament didn't mean anything, then Valve would not be so insistent that teams make no changes to their rosters. But they are clearly very meaningful, and it is odd that the achievement of getting an invite to TI is not rewarded.
Aside from that, it seems to me that these teams are at TI to put on a show, like a musician at a concert/festival or actors in a play. I'm fine with paying musicians and actors, and so I'm fine with paying the teams at TI, as well.
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I think when the first International happened, the bottom 8 made nothing so Valve could have that gigantic one million first place prize. That was enough for Dota 2 and TI to immediately get noticed, which is what Valve wanted to promote the game. Now that it's grown big enough to be able to support more professional organizations, there's no reason they shouldn't. Even if you only gave each of the bottom 8 teams 1% of the prizepool, the players would still each get 10k to be able to continue playing professionally, and then you'd still have over 5 million to pay out the top finishers. Like the OP said, why would you not try when one miraculous upset could net you another 100k?
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Russian Federation3329 Posts
I think at first it was necessary to make the 1 MIL for first place viable... Because if you had 1 MIL for first place and then had a "normal" distribution, it wasn't going to economically viable for them at the time (who knows; maybe it was and valve just decided not to). But now that the prize pool is a lot higher and the scene a lot bigger, I don't think we need to stick to the same ratios of the past.
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There is no such thing as invited teams in NFL or any other leagues or tournaments. All teams advance through qualifiers and regular season. This is a concern for the international. A few teams probably dont deserve the invite. And there is no right or wrong, just the system needs to improve. As for prize pool, you probably leave it to Valve. They know what they are doing. Their format is million times better than Riot.
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On May 26 2014 08:14 Bisu-Fan wrote:
I think at first it was necessary to make the 1 MIL for first place viable... Because if you had 1 MIL for first place and then had a "normal" distribution, it wasn't going to economically viable for them at the time (who knows; maybe it was and valve just decided not to). But now that the prize pool is a lot higher and the scene a lot bigger, I don't think we need to stick to the same ratios of the past.
Definitely agree. Valve needed to get people excited to play this game with the million dollar prize. But if people can look beyond the confines of a 1 week tournament at the actual ecosystem, we're never going to have another crop of great players enter the system if only the absolute best players get rewarded. If even established teams like arrow have only won <1k, how are amateur players ever going to transition to being pros? I think this short-sighted view really hurt SC2 (and really all esports up until now). We should want pro players to be able to survive even if they are tier 2, and maybe even tier 3 teams should be "allowed" to have a bit of prize money here and there.
With the size of this current TI prizepool, if every single round robin game in the qualifiers was worth something like $500, it would reduce the prizepool by $100k. That is a huge chunk of change, but only a 1% change in the overall prize. This wouldn't really affect the winners in any material way, but could be the difference between every non-TI team disbanding and half of them giving it another shot the next year. This could also have the benefit of less controversy surrounding games at the end of the round robin that matter for one team and not for the other.
I'm not sure how this issue can be discussed in a forum that reaches Valve's ears, but I think it is the most important one for the health of the scene. Whether DK, Alliance, Na'Vi or any other tier 1 team wins TI this year and gets $2 mil or $3 mil won't change their dedication to playing or their ability to survive. Distributing just a few hundred to lower level teams will.
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Not playing dota for quite some time anymore, but as a lets say analyst i was finding a proper thread to speak a LITTLE bit about prizepool distribution and other stuff, hope it will make sense (and yes, probably repeating something which was said here before, was not even bother reading, sry).
1) Biggest event ever, even if they cut out some of the prize pool for organization, it would not matter, its obscene anyway. The event could last even longer without a problem.
2) Wanna know the name of the guy who decided there will be just these few teams. Lot of players actually play these games because of the "pro" enviroment (not me ever), they somehow believe they could be at TI5...6...7 whatever. This event should be obviously top32. Players should know, that there is one tournament a year where if they even qualify they will recieve decent money (eventho they finish last).
5) Now you can argue. But there are not enough good teams, they will be destroyed by strong teams anyway, so its not even funny to watch and event will be just a bit longer and results will stay pretty much same with a little bit less money for best ones. Yes, BUT if you believe, that theres enough to qualify just once a year and u earn decent money (lets say 50k for team, which is 0,5% of prizepool, literally nothing) than you would try to go for pro/semipro DOTA2 player maybe (again, doesnt apply to me at ALL). So basically what is happening, they have few good teams which everyone has seen BILLION times and even quite a good players lack motivation to work that hard to be best. Because if they are just sligtly behind TI4 teams, they earn shit by playing a game which is M-A-S-S-I-V-E fail.
4) Prizepool.
- Over a 10M usd is MORE than enough to pay everyone participating at least with decent money still leaving off the charts top3 spots.
- Current prizepool is total bullshit, sorry but it just does not make any sense. 15-16th team nothing (srsly? u wanna pay 7/8 of the field, but there has to be someone unpaid?). If you wanna pay just the "best ones" than pay top8 or something, just wrong!
- Bottom 6 paid teams get pretty much nothing honeslty, there should be at least 0,5-1 for any top 16 team in the world imo.
- Obviously the biggest joke is moneyjump on "top8". I mean ye, money jumps are fine, but 10x more? Would fire that employee who made this INSTANTLY. Imagine even the top teams, they are playing for 450k money difference best of three in 9-10 to top8 game. Who the FUCK came with that, jesus. This is more than a really best team can win in other lans in a YEAR. And difference between 6-8 and 5-6? 140k. 6-8 and 4th? 300k. God thatis STILL less than 9-10 to top 8 money jump. Payjumps should be constantly graduating towards top1, which means that biggest payjump is between 1st and 2nd place (at least someting not failed). 46% for the winner in 16 places tournament is discutable, probably too much, but i can understand that 1m/person hype.
Although i dont play dota anymore i wish it (and you guys) the best, mainly because i dont like lol for some reasons, but as long as pro scene will be this much top heavy despite the prizepool it wont happen.
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EPT
