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I agree with the OP 100%. What it comes down to is making the lives of every pro more comfortable. The more each position pays out, the less each particular pro needs work 9-5 in order to support their gaming.
If more players are able to make a living off of playing Starcraft, then more players are able to justify going pro, and therefore the competition and skill level of each tournament increase as well as viewership. Instead of building from the bottom up like every other major sport (including BW, and other E-Sports such as quake), the GSL is building from the top down. The idea is that seeing a ton of money get awarded is exciting, thus causing more viewers to come watch based on the prizepool, and THEN causing the viewers to eventually decide that they want to compete as well.
Imo, the second way is much more volatile, because what happens when PlayerX gets eliminated in the ro32 and is unable to support himself/family? How is a random viewer going to justify to himself and those around him that he is going to gamble their livelihood on playing a game 14 hours a day in order to get good enough to catch, and pass other players who have been playing 12 hours a day based on prior huge winnings to support themselves? This kind of prizepool makes it really hard to sit down and commit to playing starcraft professional, and creates the risk of the whole thing just dying.
Instead of making a foundation to create a building on, they are gambling on just plopping the building on the ground and hoping that it will sustain itself. It is a huge gamble really, but it might end up working alright with all the ex-BW pros that are starting to switch over from BW to SCII. It is like they don't understand that they need to create a community, and just assumed that everyone would switch over from broodwar. I think it would be most effective if they held 100's of smaller tournaments with say ~10,000 KRW all over korea in order to create a korean interest, and make it easier to become a professional; by nature of it being easier to be pro, there would be more, and then you could create a huge tournament GSL style.
Because ultimately without players the whole scene just crumbles, it is much better to spread out the cashflow, imo.
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On October 07 2010 02:32 FakeSteve[TPR] wrote:Show nested quote +On October 07 2010 02:30 Moosey wrote:
I know that in larger prize pool events, it becomes customary in the finals to offer some form of split. I would be extremely surprised if FruitDealer didn't end up giving at least 10k to Rainbow. Maybe it's different for Korean culture, though. its customary between friends in poker, pretty much unheard of in BW beyond smaller foreigner tournaments
In some interview FruitSeller said, that he lost some of his nervosity in view of the finals, after IntoTheRainbow told him, they should play for having fun. Whatever the meaning was  . It would be cool though: "man let's share the money and enjoy the games". It's something of course you do only with someone you consider being on par with you.
On the OP: I guess it's their tournament [GOMTVs] so they have their thoughts about marketing and justice and act accordingly. The Tea Party Movement would call you a socialist Nevertheless I also thought the same: the price money for Ro64 and Ro32 it's too low compared to the price for the first, considering, that there is a high density of quality players in those rounds, and I dont agree with the "garbage in the Ro64"-talking from some of the posters above and for GSL 2 it would be even less so. Ask JulyZerg aka FantaPrime  So I would regard a "better" distribution of the price money as something good. Maybe 500$ for Ro64, 1000 for Ro32, ... 50.000$ for the winner....
However, their money, their tournament. And FruitSeller, winning with Zerg? Man, he was worth it!
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I agree with the OP about distribution, but generally I think too much is on the line in each tournament period.
Players would show up and play with similar fevor for 1/4 the prize pool. While it sounds cool saying "85k for 1st place," you put a finite shelf-life on your tournament cycle since clearly this isn't sustainable for EVERY month. Even if you only cut it in half, it would be a huge number still while doubling the amount of tournies you could hold.
I'm glad the GSL (plus the other tournies they are setting up like the championship) already has a great schedule through 2011 but I worry what happens after. I expect they will be able to get sponsors and such, assuming SC2 hasn't failed for whatever reason, but basically you've already set the bar SO HIGH that precedent is set and anything lower than these numbers will seem "not enough." This creates a potential problem for future tournaments, post-GSL.
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On October 11 2010 18:10 Damaskinos wrote:Show nested quote +On October 07 2010 02:32 FakeSteve[TPR] wrote:On October 07 2010 02:30 Moosey wrote:
I know that in larger prize pool events, it becomes customary in the finals to offer some form of split. I would be extremely surprised if FruitDealer didn't end up giving at least 10k to Rainbow. Maybe it's different for Korean culture, though. its customary between friends in poker, pretty much unheard of in BW beyond smaller foreigner tournaments In some interview FruitSeller said, that he lost some of his nervosity in view of the finals, after IntoTheRainbow told him, they should play for having fun. Whatever the meaning was . It would be cool though: "man let's share the money and enjoy the games". It's something of course you do only with someone you consider being on par with you. On the OP: I guess it's their tournament [GOMTVs] so they have their thoughts about marketing and justice and act accordingly. The Tea Party Movement would call you a socialist Nevertheless I also thought the same: the price money for Ro64 and Ro32 it's too low compared to the price for the first, considering, that there is a high density of quality players in those rounds, and I dont agree with the "garbage in the Ro64"-talking from some of the posters above and for GSL 2 it would be even less so. Ask JulyZerg aka FantaPrime So I would regard a "better" distribution of the price money as something good. Maybe 500$ for Ro64, 1000 for Ro32, ... 50.000$ for the winner.... However, their money, their tournament. And FruitSeller, winning with Zerg? Man, he was worth it!
I dont think that 500 is reasonable for the first round of qualifiers at all. Honestly the qualification is more of the prize and i think they should win an actual tourny game before taking home a chunk of cash. Honestly some of the brackets right now for qualifiers are pretty filled with holes so being rewarded with 500 dollars for drawing an empty/bad bracket is nonsensical.
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I think the real problem lies in the matter of fact that the korean esport-scene just consits of the GSL. I mean what is there besides Gisado ( no european pro would bother playing 10 1v1 for 5 bucks). What is lacking are small- to medium size tournaments like we have them in the western world (Zotac, Go4sc2 or 500 Euro invitationals). Because if you lose in Ro64 or even fail to qualify you are left with pretty much nothing for a month whereas in Europe you can make a decent living with a salary from your clan and prices, at least if you are one of the usual suspects that makes it far in cups and leagues. The thing is though that the cup system is much more forgiving. Losing in the second round of the Go4sc2 does not force yo to eat rice with beans or cup ramen for the rest of the month.
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The 100,000,000 won is the reason, as already explained. But I agree that the lower brackets need a higher payout. Broodwar had/has the proleagues to offer consistent money to players who will never make it past a Ro36 in the OSL. With no proleague in SC2, this is one of the only avenues for serious money in SC2 (in Korea). If you can consistently make the Ro8 every GSL, then you can live off that. But few or none are gonna be able to do that. Without a proleague, there's no way you can make a living off of consistent Ro32 earnings. So you need rich parents/spouse or a real job which means less practice time. SC2 teams probably do not pay as much as BW proleaugue times.
So to keep that 100,000,000 won, I guess the best we can hope for is that in the future when the GSL is bringing in more sponsor money they can increase the prize pool for the lower brackets and keep #1 the same.
These first few are OPEN tournaments anyway. Maybe once they start seeding they will balance it more. Seeding should eliminate a bit of luck and thus a Ro32 in a seeded tourny is worthy of a far higher payout then a Ro32 in an OPEN where random player x got lucky preliminary matchups and beat another random player y in the Ro64 who had the same luck in the prelims.
But if the seeded tournies keep the same payout then somethings wrong.
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Not for nothing, but assuming you hit the round of 16 in all the 12 monthly tournaments you're still pulling in $20k a year. Is it enough to get by on in Korea? Beats me. It's not bad though, especially considering that you're still able to participate in other tournaments and get sponsorships and the like.
I'm not familiar with the prize pool for other large tourneys, but $1,700 for getting top 16 seems pretty good if you're living in Korea already.
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There are not gonna be 12 monthly tournaments. There will be 5 GSL's a year after these initial 3, with the other tournaments only being open to the best of the best. And getting Ro16 all 5 would be very hard. It's easier to imagine averaging around the Ro16 or slightly less.
So imagine in the 5 tournaments you got Ro32, Ro8, Ro32, Ro64, Ro16. That might be a realistic expectation for a very good, but not S class player considering luck and catching bad/good breaks. That would get you $6230. For most players that's probably too optimistic a hope, and they'll make way less.
You wouldn't make the World Championship with that, as you probably would not be top 4 Korean (foreigner might make it). Ladder tournament could get you some bucks, but who knows when you have 800 (4 regions?) competing to make a 16 man tourney. Blizzard Cup? Well, with your GSL results you likely would not be top 8. So unless you get lucky in a Ladder tournament, you are looking at $6230 plus whatever your team sponsors give you. And the overwhelming majority of players aren't gonna average much better than Ro32 which is only $2150 a year. And without a Proleague how much sponsorship can you get?
But if you took away some money from the #1 spot it would still be attractive but you'd be able to distribute that money in the lower brackets to encourage players to train more (work less) and get better, and give the viewers better games and thus increase viewers and sponsorship and the prize pool even more.
Stacking the #1 for advertisement is good in the short term, but think about: if the lower bracket people can make more money they can work less and practice more and thus get better and thus help the overall scene. Long term it's better to not stack it like this.
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Ah, I must have misunderstood. For some reason I thought the plan was one a month!
I'm honestly not too terribly familiar with how pro gaming works financially, but if players are expected to make the majority of their money from one major league like the GSL, it seems like those lower numbers are going to have to bump up pretty significantly.
As a spectator though, the huge amount of money on the line does make things that much more exciting
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I think WSoP is a terrible comparison, for all the above reasons already stated.
If they want to pay further down the ladder, they either need to charge an entry fee, or do something to significantly increase sponsorship.
Increased sponsorship will come from more visibility outside of these niche markets. While GSL visibility in Korea may be "huge" it's infinitesimally small outside of Korea and there's just not that much reason for most companies to contribute large sums of money to sponsor these events, since the value of that marketing effort is going to be reasonably small.
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And BTW, the above desire to increase visibility is something that would be good for the Pro leagues.
There's lots of flaming and complaining when changes make it into the game that increase how accessible the game is to more average players, and at some levels, appear to remove the requirement of "skill" to win matches. (e.g. some of the recent flames saying the game shouldn't be balanced around plat and below "scrubs") However, those changes increase the SC2 audience and fan base, and will translate into bigger sponsorships and a healthier pro-gamer scene.
Can't have a healthy pro-gamer scene without mass-market appeal of the product, to continue to bring in bronze players who will watch ads, click on live streams, and tell their friends about how cool SC2 is. The salaries and prize-pools people want to see for pros requires tens of millions of dedicated world-wide fans, the overwhelming majority of whom will be bronze leaguers.
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On October 07 2010 01:30 Sadistx wrote:
No, not nearly heavy enough actually. I honestly don't think ro64 or ro32 should even get anything, but they do.
I think it's a bit preposterous that you'd expect to be paid something significant for just placing into ro64.
What it means is that bad people would cheese the shit out of qualifying rounds just to get to ro64 to get paid, which hurts the quality of games in the long run.
Agreed. Although I think they should just give the money from ro64 to ro32, since once you get the seasons going and by having seeded players from previous seasons (which I thought they were gonna do) you eliminate the cheesers.
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Be happy its not winner takes all .
Tbh its only normal that they spread it like this... thats the thing to archieve this first place and the big payout the real pros got salarys from there sponsors and what not anyways.
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man, keep it the way it is. the tourneys not supposed to be life support for the gamers, it's supposed to draw in a large audience. when i heard top prize was in the 800000s, i was like HOLY CHECK! it's all helping e-sports.
and geeze, be happy winning any type of money playing video games. you're basically living every guy's dream. i'm pretty sure none of the people in the gsl are complaining about the money they got. and if they don't like the way things are they can always go to the other...oh wait...gsl's the only tourney that gives away enormous amounts of money.
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The problem isn't the prize pool, if pro-gamers are getting paid decently by their team then they should be fine with a top heavy prize pool.
If they are getting really insufficient pay along with no help for living expenses/food, then this top heavy prize pool would be a problem. This isn't really the case anymore for esport in Korea with the way professional teams are set up now.
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I think it should be this way:
Ro64: $ 500
Ro32: $ 1500
Ro16: $ 3500
Ro8: $ 7500
Ro4: $15000
Runner Up: $25000
Winner: $50000
The total prize pool would still be pretty much the same as it currently is. This would make pro-gaming less of an all-in career choice as if you consistently play well you can make a living without even being a finalist. As it stands now to 'make a living' from it you pretty much have to either always make it to the Ro8... something that given cheeses and stuff that can happen in qualifying and early round, isn't doable even for who we see as the best players.
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no, i don't think it's too top heavy. you shouldn't be entering these types of tournaments expecting to win enough to make a consistent salary, yet making it NOT top heavy is a bad way of trying to enforce just that. it's better to have a league if you want progamers to make a living off of their game, not to simply make prize pools even for anyone who gets in top #.
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Making it so that if you reach Top8 or Top16 constantly opens the possibility to go pro is good for the sport, because more people are going to do it. More pro players higher average skill.
A big splashy first price is a good advertisement stunt but not good for the sport.
You are not the best if you win a big tournament, you are the best if you constantly deliver excellent results and a top heavy prize pool does not support that.
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The hype of a big prize pool is so much better in the long run for progaming. More Hype = More Sponsors. More Sponsors eventually means bigger prize pools.
100 mil KRW attracts everyone when even Tester might just have a bad day and get eliminated in prelims. The skill cap hasn't been close to reached meaning just about everyone who makes it to Ro16 has a shot at the money. Just look how far LiveForever went in GSL1.
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EPT
