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I know many posts have been written on this topic, but I wanted to gauge people's thoughts on a very specific aspect of prize pools, namely the difference in winnings between 1st and 2nd place. My concern is that maybe the prize discrepancy between 1st and 2nd place need not be so large, because people will always be motivated to win a title, for the prestige and because winning feels good. On the contrary, we have often seen lackluster 3/4th place matches (or none at all) when the difference in prize money is negligible. I am suggesting that you only need a large difference in prestige OR money in order to motivate progamers to play their best, rather than both (which is how almost every tournament operates).
I think this makes financial sense as well because of how esports money works. Sponsorships seem to provide the most stable money source for progamers in the way of actual salary, while winnings can be large but also unpredictable. Whether fair or not, I would assert that sponsorships tend to follow the popularity of players rather than strictly their winnings, but there are still only two ways to get a large fan base - win or be particularly interesting/unique, and the only reliable of these two is to win. Therefore, we can expect that progamers who win tournaments will be rewarded with larger contracts from their sponsors for getting their name out there more effectively, so tournaments should be able to spread their prize money out more evenly across all teams. If we could do this, it would help to stabilize the scene immensely, as well as increase interest from amateurs who want to break into the pro scene.
As an example of times where this sort of thinking could improve the scene, last year during TI qualifiers/round robin there were predictably some games which had no impact on final standing, so they were relatively uninteresting (and I don't even want to get into the conflicts of interest that could have come with a teamkill situation like EG playing [A] with elimination on the line). If we took 10% out of the 1st place share (so they "only" make 3.7 mil instead of 4.7) and distributed it across the qualifiers, you could make the prize for each qualifier round robin win worth $1000, and each TI round robin win worth $3000, with money left over. Surely that would be enough to motivate teams to continue playing out their round robin. In addition, if the difference between 1st and 2nd place was "only" 3.7 mil to 1.7 mil instead of 4.7 to 1.7, would anyone not watch because it's not an important enough match suddenly? I would argue that even if the difference in prize money was 10% (1.7 mil to 1.9 mil), people would watch to find out who is the world champion of the year. To make another analogy to sports, the super bowl losers got 46k and the winners got 92k compared to their yearly salary minimum of 420k, but you can bet a lot of money that every player on that field is going all out and wants to win.
tl;dr I wanted to float the idea of having a much flatter prize pool distribution (like 30-25-20-15 instead of 45-20-15-10 with the explicit explanation that the winners will play hard in late rounds for prestige, but also because it will help them gain fans and sponsorship money anyways. The hope is that this might cause more teams to be sustainable.
Edit: I was also curious what people would think about an option when you crowdfund prizepools through ticket purchase to choose how your own contribution is distributed across the teams. Since I think it should be more like 30-25-20-15 I can choose that, and if someone else believes it should be 100-0-0-0, then they are also free to do that as well. Then the prize pool can reflect what people think the teams deserve.
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For better or for worse it's obviously the tournament organizers that choose how prize money is distributed and it's very much in their best interests to have very large 1st place prizes both to attract the best teams (who have a good shot at that sweet sweet first place pot) and to have the best publicity (Newbee winning over $1M each sounds really fucking good). While valve aren't particularly subject to the first point, they very much are to the 2nd.
Also, especially for LANs and such, when tournaments are providing substantial travel and accomodation support, it feels to them like they are paying a lot of money to the last place teams as well. 5 or 6 people per team's accomodation and flights isn't cheap. Tournaments are already paying good money for those teams to participate even if the teams don't really get any cash out of the deal.
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I think winning teams should receive more of the pool. With the number of tournaments and all the teams playing each other all the time, it's almost like "who cares." Cloud 9 gets 100 2nd places? Not bad! Look how many times they got so close!
I say, to the victor the spoils!
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On December 18 2014 04:53 Sn0_Man wrote:
For better or for worse it's obviously the tournament organizers that choose how prize money is distributed and it's very much in their best interests to have very large 1st place prizes both to attract the best teams (who have a good shot at that sweet sweet first place pot) and to have the best publicity (Newbee winning over $1M each sounds really fucking good). While valve aren't particularly subject to the first point, they very much are to the 2nd.
To your first point, it is true that a lot has to do with publicity and being able to say that people are playing for an 100k+ or 1 mil+ prize. However, as people within the scene, I wonder whether we should accept that. In addition, I am somewhat responding to all the people who say that there's no hype if the players aren't playing for enough of a difference in money - for example the outrage at the idea that teams could agree to split the 1st/2nd place prize money before playing the finals. Those teams still both want to win, even when there is a $0 difference on the line.
Also, especially for LANs and such, when tournaments are providing substantial travel and accomodation support, it feels to them like they are paying a lot of money to the last place teams as well. 5 or 6 people per team's accomodation and flights isn't cheap. Tournaments are already paying good money for those teams to participate even if the teams don't really get any cash out of the deal.
I do agree that it is just as expensive to bring the last place team as it is to bring the first place team, but if no extra money makes it into the hands of those players, where are they going to be in 2 years? Personally I think that's what happened to SC2 much more than the complaints of oversaturation. Once those players realize they can't make a living, they have to leave and you are left with T1 teams and some amateur T2.5 teams who haven't come to their senses yet financially.
On December 18 2014 05:21 aboxcar wrote:
I think winning teams should receive more of the pool. With the number of tournaments and all the teams playing each other all the time, it's almost like "who cares." Cloud 9 gets 100 2nd places? Not bad! Look how many times they got so close!
I say, to the victor the spoils!
I personally think this is short sighted, but I am open to other opinions. Do you think that giving more of the spoils to the victor can give us a healthier, more stable scene? If so, how? If not, why is that not concerning to you? My greatest fear is that teams are playing for 10 mil at the TI4, 8 mil at TI5 and 6 mil at TI6. Maybe that's still ok because the bubble had to burst, as long as it's not 10, 5, 2.
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A "healthy, stable scene" to me is not one where mediocre players and mediocre tournaments (and mediocre casters) can coast along.
"Healthy, stable" to me would be an emphasis on the viewer and on making tournaments real _events_. Stable viewership, great hype, healthy player base.
What good or service do mediocre teams provide? Everyone wants to be them, nobody really wants to watch them. If you're doing this for income, you should go get a real job instead.
If you want stable and healthy, prize pools could come down a bit. Shorten the drawn-out online portion, emphasize the lan experience. Teams will still come, and you will have a sustainable prize pool level to continue operating until Dota 3.
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On December 18 2014 05:54 aboxcar wrote:
A "healthy, stable scene" to me is not one where mediocre players and mediocre tournaments (and mediocre casters) can coast along.
"Healthy, stable" to me would be an emphasis on the viewer and on making tournaments real _events_. Stable viewership, great hype, healthy player base.
What good or service do mediocre teams provide? Everyone wants to be them, nobody really wants to watch them. If you're doing this for income, you should go get a real job instead.
If you want stable and healthy, prize pools could come down a bit. Shorten the drawn-out online portion, emphasize the lan experience. Teams will still come, and you will have a sustainable prize pool level to continue operating until Dota 3.
What is a mediocre team? Perhaps this is something you can explain to me, because I have heard it in many places. I can see from results quite easily that EG and Secret are significantly better than say SNA and 4Asc. But do you only want to see EG play Secret? Are other matchups not high enough skill level or not entertaining enough? If so, you're going to run out of dota to watch really fast when EG and Secret play their 4th BO5 in the past month - or just have nothing to watch at all because they only play each other in 1 BO5 each month.
In addition, in order to define good teams you need mediocre teams. In a vacuum, EG and secret are not great. The level of play at TI1 was "world class", but I'm sure Na'vi of TI1 would lose to most teams now because teams and players get better over time and practice (I know it is a hard comparison to make because there have been major changes to the game since then). I bet they would even admit that each of them is more skilled than they were when they won. So if the top 5 teams of today never existed, the teams you are calling mediocre now would be the most entertaining and the best. There is nothing inherent about their play which defines it as "good" or "bad".
You need a healthy player base but you also need a healthy pro player base as well. You can't have an english premier league without several leagues below that, it just isn't sustainable. If those players cannot make money, I guarantee you the overall level will drop off, just maybe not immediately. It's like olympic sports - for all we know, there are tons of potentially great javelin throwers out there. But because only the best can afford to keep doing it, we end up with a couple of boring, small competitions punctuated by one really big one every once in a while. The only sport I can think of which is healthy without a minor league system is the NFL, but they even have large scout teams (and you could argue college football is a form of minor league).
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teams like SNA and 4asc are dime a dozen. If they were to disappear tomorrow, another team would come up to replace them. Last year NAVI.us (before they had a sponsor) won the TI Americas berth. Today they no longer exist. Next year a new team will win that slot.
The fact is, and this is a natural fact in anything, that the farther down you go the more teams there are. If the game itself is healthy, there will always be players in the middle trying to make it and who feed the top. The teams at the top are necessarily few and it is only natural they should command the lion's share. It is also healthier this way in my opinion, as it provides great incentive to be the best, and is also better for viewership.
Therefore I think the emphasis should be on healthy game/viewership and not on healthy players.
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I always wonder how many times players negotiate a chop on the side. It happens in poker all of the time.
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I think I'll wait until TI to participate in the traditional TI rant about prize distributions.
I'll just add that I think Envy's recent blog brings up another element: tournaments should really be spending more money on player infrastructure and confort, even if it comes out of the prize pool.
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On December 18 2014 07:02 Sbrubbles wrote:
I think I'll wait until TI to participate in the traditional TI rant about prize distributions.
I'll just add that I think Envy's recent blog brings up another element: tournaments should really be spending more money on player infrastructure and confort, even if it comes out of the prize pool.
But the sooner we have the discussion, the more likely we are to start changing things, and if all the other tournaments change, valve may be more likely to. Right now everyone just copies valve's structure, so they think they have it right. First we need to have the discussion so that the community as a whole can decide whether they even agree with the typical prize distribution as it currently stands or not, because it's not clear to me there's a consensus.
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The discussion has already happened. The discussion happens every few months and the idea that the community as a whole will agree to something is just absurd. I'm sorry, but these arguments lead nowhere. It's cool to argue about stuff in the internet but that's where it ends.
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On December 18 2014 11:18 SKC wrote:
The discussion has already happened. The discussion happens every few months and the idea that the community as a whole will agree to something is just absurd. I'm sorry, but these arguments lead nowhere. It's cool to argue about stuff in the internet but that's where it ends.
Well then what do you think about my suggestion to allow crowdsourced funding be allocated as the donator sees fit instead of sticking to the original prize pool percentages? If the community cannot agree, each person can choose for themselves. Alternatively, we can just sit by and watch history repeat itself - although SC2 isn't fully dead yet, so there is hope.
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On December 18 2014 07:02 Sbrubbles wrote:
I think I'll wait until TI to participate in the traditional TI rant about prize distributions.
I'll just add that I think Envy's recent blog brings up another element: tournaments should really be spending more money on player infrastructure and confort, even if it comes out of the prize pool.
So could teams. Teams will always only blame the other side.
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hey, at least the dota tournament payout is better than the wealth distribution in america
let that sink in for a second
you can go home now.
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On December 18 2014 15:32 bludragen88 wrote:Show nested quote +On December 18 2014 11:18 SKC wrote:
The discussion has already happened. The discussion happens every few months and the idea that the community as a whole will agree to something is just absurd. I'm sorry, but these arguments lead nowhere. It's cool to argue about stuff in the internet but that's where it ends. Well then what do you think about my suggestion to allow crowdsourced funding be allocated as the donator sees fit instead of sticking to the original prize pool percentages? If the community cannot agree, each person can choose for themselves. Alternatively, we can just sit by and watch history repeat itself - although SC2 isn't fully dead yet, so there is hope.
If the community wants to pump money into the bottom Tier 2/Tier 3 teams, they can just buy their cosmetics.
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On December 18 2014 11:18 SKC wrote:
The discussion has already happened. The discussion happens every few months and the idea that the community as a whole will agree to something is just absurd. I'm sorry, but these arguments lead nowhere. It's cool to argue about stuff in the internet but that's where it ends.
Yeah, but I think the discussion potentially could lead somewhere, though only if it was spearheaded by community figures (managers, team owners, maybe players). It's very rare to see them make public comments on the issue though, probably because they either don't think it's worth the effort, think the system is overall as it should be, are weary of being labeled "whiners", or (what I believe to be the most likely option) they do voice their opinions and do discuss this, except only among themselves (including tournament organizers) behind closed doors.
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few tournaments a year with big payouts or many tournaments a year with smaller payouts?
people want to see other people do things better then themselves, they pay money or at least watch a stream or buy a ticket to see it live. the people playing in the tournament do it for money, fame or pride as well as any mixture so everyones opinion is different and as such it will never really matter. its up to a team if they want to participate or at least attempt to participate in a league or tournament, if some want to focus on 2 big tournaments over 5-6 then thats there choice. stop concerning yourself over such trivial matters if first place has 50% or 25% more then second as having a variety is good and we dont really have a choice in the matter anyways unless we're coughing up the gaben dollars for the next international
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EPT
