|
This idea depends upon one of two factors being present in pretty much every tournament.
1) People who are willing to pay to play games with big name players. If there are enough of these, every pro should be screaming for a way to make your idea a reality. If there are 50 players in a tourney and 25 are the best in the world and 25 are rich suckers who want to say they successfully cannon-rushed Idra once, it'd obviously be a HUGE money maker for the pros. However, I doubt there are quite enough rich fans who can't get a better experience for the dollar (see: gosucoaching) to make this a major factor. Although group play could be a good incentive: essentially you're offering the suckers several pros to play against for their money. Single elim tourneys would be much less successful.
2) People who think they're a lot better than they are. If 25 top players are in a tourney along with 25 people who foolishly think they're as good as the pros, the pros make money. Because of the ladder and the negative feedback between people who play often enough to think they're good and people who have money to lose in starcraft tourneys, I also think this is a small player pool that wouldn't be sustainable for the pros.
That leaves the third scenario. After a short money-making period you have tourneys with 50 of the top players playing against virtually no suckers. Now the cost of the tourney itself is a net loss for everyone. This last scenario is considered the default, because of Brood War history, and is one of the reasons why no one looks at ways around this legally.
|
This is the issue. You bring up a topic like this, and you have a bunch of people say its a good/bad idea. A bunch of people throw out ideas to improve the idea. But, you get literally 0 people that are interested in making it happen. They pretty much want Blizzard to do it.
Allowing the big guns to step in is only going to make it turn into a bad idea. Online poker sit n gos are great, but the truth of the matter is online poker is horribly bad. Rake in brick and mortar casinos and online is making almost billions of dollars. Rake is a BAD idea overall. In the long run, it makes everybody a loser. It creates a pyramid where only the top 10% of people actually earn a profit if everybody continues to play.
Anyways, it doesn't take a genius to figure out a way to market this whole thing, or come up with ways to seperate leagues. All you really need is to set an 50 game minimum, and have the mmr rating. Have the sit n go listed, and allow people to register. So, a $10 sng will start when 10 ppl, of the same rating sign up. You don't need 5 different league $10 sngs, just one, and allow them to be sorted ot just like the current ladder system sorts you.
Why does a rake need to be taken? Online poker sites need to abandon the rake, they are making way too much money. Every sunday million stars hosts, they automatically earn 2nd place prize money. That's PATHETIC. Charge a monthly fee, a small monthly fee.
I'm actually working on creating a better system for sc2 tournaments and interested in bringing larger prize pools to the table. If you actually want to become a working part of this, PM me.
|
On December 16 2010 07:20 dittie wrote:
Why does a rake need to be taken? Online poker sites need to abandon the rake, they are making way too much money. Every sunday million stars hosts, they automatically earn 2nd place prize money. That's PATHETIC. Charge a monthly fee, a small monthly fee.
It actually astounds me that people think this way. Are you trolling? It's a free market. Go ahead and build one for less and force them to bring their fees down. Or hell, just go build a free one and you can support it with all the donations you get.
|
On December 16 2010 04:49 Ghad wrote:
Umm. Stating that the outcome of a poker tournament is 95% luck is crazyness. You would never see a small exlusive club of top players consistently coming to the final table if you were anywhere close to correct.
You're right, if it's 95% luck you wouldn't see this. And in fact, you don't see this. In the WSOP ME it's different players every year. I think Dan Harrington once made the final table two years in a row and it was considered a miracle. Of course that was back when less than a thousand people participated.
|
On December 16 2010 05:16 South wrote:Show nested quote +On December 16 2010 04:45 ziggurat wrote:
I'm not sure how "intimate" your understanding of poker actually is, but it's not unusual to go on a downswing that lasts 100k hands. There is a lot of luck in long-term poker earnings. As for the outcome of any given poker tournament, that is at least 95% luck. No pro would disagree with these statements. It's extremely uncommon to go on a 100K hand downswing if you're a winning player in the game you're playing. Does it happen? Yes. Often? No. Very rarely, maybe once in a career. 10,000 hands is borderline common for a winning player...but 100K you're experiencing an extremely rare period of negative variance or you're not a winning player. Most people that have played 100K hands are on a 100K hand losing streak, by definition. A significant majority of players are losing players. To state that 95% of a tournament is luck is baseless and emotional. You're likely confusing luck with variance. To win the WSOP Main Event, yes you MUST get lucky. But professional players have a much much higher chance of getting "lucky" because they put themselves in better spots when they get their money in the middle. You could theoretically win if you went all in every hand and played like a robot. It is almost unfathomable, however. There's an entire city built on the fact that winning 55/45 coinflips has no luck involved in the long run. Phil Ivey will get the money in good much more than 55% of the time against a novice.
I am probably making too many posts on this, so this will be my last one. With all due respect to the OP and to South and others who agree with them, you guys just haven't played enough hand (and maybe watched a bit too much Poker After Dark). Variance in hold em and omaha is enormous. Many many pros have gone broke due to pure variance, and these are expert players who should be smart enough to know better.
If your point is just that in the long run luck evens out, then no one would dispute that. What I'm saying is that in poker, the long run is very very long.
Anyone wanting to get a better understanding of variance and "luck" in poker should have a look at the bbv forum on 2+2. Check the archives for lots of good discussions.
|
Ok, citing BBV as a frame of reference just confirms you've got to be kidding (it's 2p2 btw). That forum is arguably the largest cesspool on the entire internet and is a joke even to members of that site...let alone to a logical outsider.
No one is denying that pros go broke. It happens all the time when people play above their bankrolls. Mathematically to play in a $300/600 PLO game with an incredibly low RoR, you need $100 million+. Very few pros have anywhere even near that. They still enjoy gambling...but if they played $25/50 at the best of their ability, they would arguably never bust. Regardless, I think people just take extreme exception with you saying "95%". That's absurd and obviously baseless.
And as much as I love Steven's vision, I don't think it has any real chance of getting off the ground because the ball just can't get rolling. The biggest hurdle in my mind is that it almost needs to be integrated. If Blizzard decided to do this, I could see it being huge...but I just don't see an outside company being able to offer a solution that people would really place enough trust in to "gamble" more than $5-$10 at a time.
Another issue is that poker has rich people that inject money in for the entertainment value. I'm sure there are some in SCII land that would pay $100+ to play in tournaments with the likes of IdrA but nowhere near the kind of injection someone like Guy Laliberte gives the poker community.
All of this is tangential and not what Steven was looking for (just a gauge of interest). I'll say that if it were integrated into the Blizzard software and I felt like there was an incredibly low chance something fishy was going on and I could play against people of my caliber, I'd definitely do it...I think it would be fun and interesting. I just think it's an incredibly large task and with gaming laws the way they are in the US, it would be a nightmare to implement. There is no way they would differentiate between this and poker in terms of deeming it "gambling".
|
You can't lose what you don't put in the middle.
|
I don´t believe the success of poker´s buy in tournament system suggests anything about how it would do with SC2. You say you compared the two because they both have competition with a wide range of skill, but I don´t see poker´s wide range of skill as a remotely sufficient reason for why buy in´s are successful in it. The reasons why poker´s buy-in systems work are reasons that come from the characteristics of the game/community and these characteristics are not found in SC2.
I don't think SC2 and poker are similar in a way that would be relevant (or at least relevant enough) to suggest SC2 would share similar success with buy-in tournaments.
While the poll is mildly promising, I question whether those who voted yes really would follow through with it..
Perhaps we could get someone to set up a buy-in tournament and see how it goes (assuming they don't get shut down..).
|
tldr: i don't understand economics.
User was warned for this post
User was temp banned for this post.
|
I think this is what is needed for the game to become much bigger. Good write up, hope it happens I would enter every $5 tourney that came up even if I lose it would be fun playing for the potential of a win.
|
I can't see how this would inject cash into the game. It would move it around but I can't see how it would develop it as an industry since the players would have to be getting cash from somewhere else to put into it.
To develop the industry you have to get money from outside sources.
|
I think that while this can work, (I'm not saying it will work extremely well or anything nor will it likely fail hard) it really takes someone with initiative to start doing these sorts of tournaments and going from there. You can theorize about the results all day but much like the game we play, you need to test it. It takes a lot of small tournaments here and there locally to really get this going.
Another point, while I recognize that you're not suggesting that sponsored tournaments completely go away, in a game that is essentially pure skill, much like other sports, needs to have huge open tournaments, open qualifiers that are free and reward considerable amounts of money. This is healthy due to the fact that it gets more people involved, it gets companies involved, it gets the noobs involved. Yes noobs are important. They're the largest player base and you want them to get hyped up for a large tourney and spread the word. If they have to worry about money then fewer people will join.
The most obvious choice is to just try it. Try doing a straight buy in. Try doing a small buy in ($5 in the US, that's generally an amount of money people are willing to possibly "throw away" on something fun) and then have sponsors to cover the rest of the prize money.
Thinking about this.. I might just start a local SC2 tournament within my own community. Letting newbs get together, go head to head, and then show them some great play (via GSL and such, you don't want to cream them in the tournament). The better of the newbs will win some money, and the others will feel like their $5 was well worth their while to hang out with friends for an afternoon. Everyone "wins" a little.
|
I would adore buy-in tournaments. It's something I always wanted SC to have.
|
I read this as it was posted while I was at work today, but I didn't get a chance to reply with my awesome idea of awesomeness.
HERES THE PLAN
64 person tournament with a $100 buy in.
Sounds like alot right?
To compensate for this you payout starting at the round of 32.
If you make the round of 32 you get your entry fee back.
If all you have to do is win ONE MATCH to get your entry fee back, people would be more likely to enter... right?
People may ask, "Why not just halve the entry fee?"
BECAUSE!
This leaves $3,200 in the prize pool!
It would look something like this:
ro64- $0
ro32- $100
ro16- $100
ro8- $100
ro4- $300
ro2- $1000
Winner- $$1,600
The numbers could obviously be changed.
This would work well for as low an amount as $10.
Thoughts?
|
It's a great idea, but here's the problem:
A 64 player tournament requires a minimum of 63 games to be played, to determine the champion. These games have to be hosted on Battle.net, with a trusted observer to record the results. This observer will have to sit through all 63 games, and considering the average starcraft 2 game is around 8-15 minutes long, that's 10+ hours. This isn't even counting waiting for the players and inviting them to the games, and the odd 30 minute games.
If the organizer kept 10%, that would be $64. That's at most $6/hour for the observer, and no money for site hosting/maintenance.
Sure, some people would observe for free, for the quarter-finals and upwards, but who's going to sit through the round of 64, which will be mostly comprised of average players? Who will do it every week?
Again, I love the idea, and I would be willing to develop the platform, but it seems like the return on investment isn't good, unless we can solve this problem.
|
No need for observers. Sites like craft cup have a replay submission and reporting system that require input for both people, with adequate support for disputes.
|
For those who are still in doubt about if we'll be willing to pay an entry fee or not, aren't we paying it already when we're participating in lans ? (sorry haven't read the whole thread, sadly i wasn't here when this thread started, would be glad to be pointed out if someone already said it)
|
On December 16 2010 12:54 cloudhead wrote:
It's a great idea, but here's the problem:
A 64 player tournament requires a minimum of 63 games to be played, to determine the champion. These games have to be hosted on Battle.net, with a trusted observer to record the results. This observer will have to sit through all 63 games, and considering the average starcraft 2 game is around 8-15 minutes long, that's 10+ hours. This isn't even counting waiting for the players and inviting them to the games, and the odd 30 minute games.
If the organizer kept 10%, that would be $64. That's at most $6/hour for the observer, and no money for site hosting/maintenance.
Sure, some people would observe for free, for the quarter-finals and upwards, but who's going to sit through the round of 64, which will be mostly comprised of average players? Who will do it every week?
Again, I love the idea, and I would be willing to develop the platform, but it seems like the return on investment isn't good, unless we can solve this problem.
10% of $6,400 is 640 dollars... which seems good for 10 hours work.
BUT You don't even have to observe all the games. They CAN be played simultaneously. All you'd have to do is require the players to save replays, screen shot score screens, and report on a website. Also, you'd have very few disputes, and if you did, they could easily be settled by having a few mods.
Your idea that people have to receive payment to do things like this is a bit off as well. There's already a TON of casters who host/cast tournaments with no expectation of any monetary reward. On that same vein, I've seen casters put their own money up as prize money, just so they'd have pro games to cast.
Eventually, once a system was up and running, you could start taking a rake for site maintenance/full time staff. But to start it out, one would have no shortage of volunteers.
Someone also mentioned something about having "leagues" so that everyone in the tournament would be of similar skill.
A way to do this would be:
You have to complete and WIN a certain number of matches before being able to participate in anything higher than the $1 tournaments. Once you are deemed "too good" to compete in the $1 tournaments anymore you are moved into the $3 league and promoted or demoted from there.
This would work effectively because it would quickly allow the gosu's to advance to the $50 - $100 leagues where they wouldn't be allowed to compete in the $1 league's anymore. ANNND it would (after a while) only be plat-low diamond players in the $1 leagues. This would give everyone a pretty decent chance actually making money playing in the tournaments, and it would make the larger tournaments worth while for the pros to play in.
|
On December 16 2010 13:03 Playguuu wrote:
No need for observers. Sites like craft cup have a replay submission and reporting system that require input for both people, with adequate support for disputes.
That's a good solution, I hadn't considered it. But then you let the players organize themselves, and find each other on bnet, as well as submit the results on time?
|
On December 16 2010 13:13 Moody wrote:
10% of $6,400 is 640 dollars... which seems good for 10 hours work.
BUT You don't even have to observe all the games. They CAN be played simultaneously. All you'd have to do is require the players to save replays, screen shot score screens, and report on a website. Also, you'd have very few disputes, and if you did, they could easily be settled by having a few mods.
Your idea that people have to receive payment to do things like this is a bit off as well. There's already a TON of casters who host/cast tournaments with no expectation of any monetary reward. On that same vein, I've seen casters put their own money up as prize money, just so they'd have pro games to cast.
Eventually, once a system was up and running, you could start taking a rake for site maintenance/full time staff. But to start it out, one would have no shortage of volunteers.
I had a $10 entry fee in mind, which would make the max prize pool $640. Sure, if people were willing to pay $100, to enter the tournament, for a total of $6400, that would be a good return, I'm just not sure that's the case.
I'm aware that a lot of people would do this for free, I was mostly concerned with a) finding reliable people who would be available every week, and b) finding people to observe the round of 64, which would probably not comprise of many pro level players.
With a replay submission system though, this might be irrelevant.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
