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1001 YEARS KESPAJAIL22272 Posts
I like the idea of buy-in tournaments, and I do like your train of thought that it can (not will, but CAN) lead to more money going into Starcraft through sponsors and advertisers, once more events start popping up.
The one concern is, of course, if the general SC2 population is interested in buy-in tournaments, which depends on their belief that they can make back that money they invest. Even if you play the game "because you love it", spending money on a tournament is not easy, and earning money (or in fact, any sort of positive reinforcement) feels good. Most will think "why should I spend if I have no chance of winning??"
I think the solution to that is to expand the spots that get prizes. For example, in a $10, 64 man tournament, I don't think the split should be $300/200/100. Instead, it should probably be more like $220 for first, $120 for second, $50 for 3rd and 4th, $20 for 5th-8th, and $10 for 8th-16th. This will encourage more people to join, because you don't need to finish near the top to break even. You only need to advance a few rounds, and you can make a nice 100% profit. This kind of prize split makes the top prizes smaller, which will help to make it less enticing for top players, but more interesting for casual players. The manageable break-even point will also make tournaments like these more agreeable, financially, for normal players.
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$10 to play in a tournament? it would have to no more than 64 ppl and bo3 and double elim or else no its not worth it.
buy ins to tourneys arent the answer here. as to what exactly is i wont go into because its too broad and unexplored!
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As much as I would like to see this happen, Blizzard is a United States video game company, not an online gambling company.
It is completely illegal for Blizzard to do this under Federal Law, and something tells me Blizz isn't gonna be moving their operations to Costa Rica and run under the table transactions through WU...
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I've posted it in a different thread, but my website http://ehcg.djgamblore.com/ contains reasonably up to date standings for money earned by SC2 players including a lot of beta events.
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Personally I think blizzard should let people deposit money and then have their own buy-in tournaments... even ones like $0.25 to enter like there is in poker. I enjoy playing with not a lot of money.. winning even a little is fun with not much risk lol.. I even took a screenshot of my win of $11.70 in one of the small tourneys I entered on poker lol.. I also agree with splitting the money up more for people so there is less risk allowing some to earn enough to enter another tournament..
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I think that the main problem is that poker is still at its core gambling. There is a large element of luck involved in the game. A person can have a legitimate shot at beating a pro depending on how the cards turn out. In Starcraft it is arguable there is some luck but there is alot of skill.
Let's say I'm a prospective player, I play at 2k diamond and I see a 10 dollar buy in 64 man tournament. Prizes are split between top3. Then I look at the list of entrants. IdrA, Jinro and Huk have all entered. My odds of walking away with any money dropped down to close to zero. It suddenly becomes alot less attractive for me enter.
Also poker has the advantage in that there has always been money associated with it. Starcraft it is still pretty unusual for players to have a buyin for a tournament.
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I believe the problem is that pro players aren't properly supported, so they have to constantly compete in these small touneys to make ends meet. If Blizzard wants to have a stranglehold on the tournament scene, they need to establish some kind of official pro league that guarantees compensation.
Right now, there are only a handful of players capable of actually winning tournaments, and even if they put in money, it's only going to be a few hundred bucks for prizes. Blizzard needs to monetize the game better by working with other companies to sponsor the game, and create more of a spectator sport environment. Once the pros are supported, they'll have no need to compete in these weekly tourneys, opening up the chance for the average diamond player to make some money.
Basically Blizzard needs to create an NBA-type of thing for the pros with official teams, and then independent organizations can register with Blizzard to hold amateur tournaments, where pros would not be allowed to play. So it's all in Blizzard hands, and they aren't handling it so well.
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I didnt vote because of the "US" in the question. i don't have an NA account so it would be NO anyways 
Problem is, with an entry fee you scare away a loooot of players and thats not what you want. rather have some more sponsors and make it 200€ like go4sc2 (and thats only the cups on saturday, there's even more at the monthly final).
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It's a cool idea but I can't see it happening legally. Sure you could probably get away with a couple small scale tournaments running this way (running as a not for profit organisation with "donations" and "gifts"). But if it becomes large scale and gains any amount of decent publicity it will be definitely shut down unless theres appropriate capital to pay licensing fees etc... Let alone running it online across multiple countries, the investment required would be astronomical.
That's not even thinking about player interest, there's absolutely nothing to say a semi-pro player wont buy in anyway and that you will be just as interested in entering as much as you do the current tournaments.
There are lots of other issues, I wont really go in to it because it would take quite a while to write up properly, and I don't really have the time, but hey, if you really like the idea, go for it! Tonnes of entrepreneurs have just started with a cool idea.
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On December 14 2010 15:26 byFar wrote:
i love this idea and i can't believe theirs 3 page of mostly possitive comments on this already
IF by positive you mean naive and uninformed, sure.
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Only way it would work was if there were tens of thousands of players interested in tournament play for cash.
You need a huge number of tournaments to guarantee the top players would be playing the better ones. The large number would diffuse the population a lot more through the different tournaments.
BUT
I think a better idea is a free tournament format. (at least at the start) The tournament brackets and matching would be taken care of by battle-net directly, you just sign up and compete in single elimination Bo3 style. Winning could get trophies, or new avatars, or other crap.
It allows for tournament "experience" without having to pay anything, but still having something to fight for.
None of this will likely ever happen. The closest will be fan-run tournaments where you pay your "buy-in" through paypal, and kinda do it yourself. But I'm not even sure that's allowed, or if it would actually happen.
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I agree with you 100%
E-Sports is hindered by the lack of incoming money. It simply cannot follow the format of professional sports of making money from concessions, merchandising, and advertising. Without a realistically sustainable income for most top players in the world, it will not grow. Taking a page from poker would put much more needed money into the game, and thus the better players will be able to make more money.
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I like this, I would easily do it. No questions asked, if I can be on for the tourney, sure, I'd be more than happy to play, and even lose in the first round even.
I am sure the community rage would increase, but rules to frown on that would be put in place I would assume. But realistically, I feel it could generate some serious excitement towards the game for many who just look at it as a plain old RTS game that is just popular. I honestly would love to do this, because I used to do this in FPS games.
One thing I think that should be done is people stay within their league, for example, bronze players would only play bronze, silver would only do silver, gold would only do gold, but there would be buffer room on the extremes such as top 20 Bronze can do Silver if they wish, but the risk is greater to them (in some instances). Instead of going "10 dollars, and you face a random dude" who ends up being a diamond who has 5+ years of Starcraft experience. It'd be unfair to pit a 7 year old Softball player against a 25 year old Professional Athlete in a home run derby...but put do an age grouping for the tournament and you've got some balance, that whole "oh god I'll be facing Diamond's or semi-pro's" goes down to "Okay, I could be facing better or equal players"
With some of these things ironed out, you could really make a successful thing here, and I for one would gladly partake or offer assistance necessary to get some things done for it.
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It seems that this I hear about this recently...guess what who wrote it :3
Well, i think there is no big money in ANY sport until there are huge sponsorship or really many players play it with money so there can be establish a top tier players like in football.
Everybody dreams of big money, but there are only few who can achieve it. Look at any sport.
You believe in American dream? Your decision.
Also i wish there are not that many small tournaments because many pro players attend many of them at the same time and its unfair when a pro beats someone and get disqualified because he plays at another tournament like drewbie vs Destiny recently what was really stupid imo.
Also there should be kinda organization between these tournaments so the fixtures are more flexible and viewer friendly. I know that sc2 and its tournaments are still growing, but i see a lot of potential, I just wish that not everybody begins to cheese and try to win at all cost because of money like GSL S3 which was really horrible to watch except maybe handful of games.
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i think a huge barrier to this is also the fact that, unlike poker, people are not predisposed to spending a little bit of money to make a lot of money. their mindset is, i will either play the game to have fun, or go all the way trying to be pro. there are not many people who think, i want to compete, but not with the best, though enough to pay to play.
the problem this makes is that if you try to put up a scenario where people can win X or Y or Z amount of money in 3 different tournaments, where X<Y<Z, the situation will take many tournaments to flesh out, and i don't think there is enough confidence in the general community to put up money for the X and Y tournaments long enough, while naturally the best will go to however many Z tournaments they can afford to apply to.
i certainly wish it wasn't illegal to at least try, i'd love to be proven wrong and i think amongst the poker/SC players you could definitely have a community large enough to support consistent X money games where it could eventually grow to become an accepted way of running tournaments, but it's hard to see the 'mid level' actually bridging the gap with the Y tournaments. for a very long time i think the players who should be playing in Z will apply for Y too and just shove the mid-levels out since Y will still make them a lot more money than you can normally make in SC2.
i voted i would pay, but i wouldn't pay $10 continuously. i'd surely pay something smaller though. i'd want to play in a lot of tournaments to make a small amount of money and just have fun competing, $10 all the time adds up when, like many people suggest, 'you probably won't ever win.'
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Braavos36402 Posts
You're missing the point of why people play SC2. Sure, a small minority play with money as a motivator, but the vast majority (99%) play for fun. Most of the big names play these buy in tournaments that probably net them $10/hr (and that's if they win) because they'd be playing anyway, not because they feel it's +EV or something.
Thus, a buy-in scene is just not sustainable when the bulk of the people buying in can just play the dozens of other tournaments without buyins. The difference in experience of playing in a $10 buy in tourney vs a free-to-enter tournament is nothing to the average player. What does a buy in get you? In poker the experience of playing in a big tournament with high stakes is pretty fun. You even have a small chance to go really far if you're lucky. In SC2 for an average player paying $10 to play maybe 1, 2 Bo3s with 0% chance to cash? That just won't be worth it. Entry fees are fine when you're actually paying for an experience that nobody else can provide (MLG, etc) but for a regular online tournament, it's just not worth it.
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You can get lucky in Poker.
In SC it's mostly skill and the skill gaps between players can be HUGE.
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I have to say I only clicked this topic because the TC was STEVE
But it sounds like a really cool concept. I hope something can come of it; at the moment it's difficult for someone ~2000 diamond to even get into a decent paying tournament due to the number of higher ranked players who would inevitably be entering as well.
Though, I do find it kind of unlikely that playing in buy-ins will ever be profitable for even say, top 50-100 US ladder players, just because there would likely not be so much money as to deter bigger names from playing in smaller, 10 dollar buy-in tournaments. Off the top of my head, I can probably name 50 players in NA that I'd be super intimidated to play. Whereas poker is a lot more luck based, so winning a 64 man tournament at least seems feasible, winning a 64 man tournament in SC2 with just one somewhat well-known player like Hashe or Spades feels incredibly difficult.
However, it does feel a lot less intimidating to be participating in say, a 10 dollar buy-in, 8 man tournament. That feels doable, just because there's a slight chance I could win from really good luck.
Anyway, hope your idea comes to some sort of realization, sounds fun. Someone has to buy nice stuff for Rachel, after all!
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Buy in tournaments would be pretty awesome if the top 50% or top 25% got money, imo.
Let's say you have a 10$ payin with 64 people. That gives 640 dollars. You could easily pay the top 50% (the higher you placed, the more you would get, naturally)
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probably been posted but
poker isn't really the best example, anyone can win in poker with luck
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EPT
