It's time we stop treating regions the same, pretending that AM=EU=KR. Fact of the matter is, you guys FORCED koreans to go to different leagues when you made the prize and point pool to be the same. Of course players will jump ship to go to the easier leagues. Duh! Let's use the football example again to explain how this could easily be fixed without even touching region lock (although I do support region lock to a certain extent).
Split the prize pool something like
Korea: 50%
Europe: 30%
America: 20%
To simplify with an example, blizzard spent $450,000 on each season premier+finals last year with the timeline for 4, so the new revised timeline with 3 for the whole year, that's about $600,000 per season. Let's split the money around:
Korea: $300,000
Europe: $175,000
America: $125,00
Play around with the numbers here and there using excel, you can get a pretty good prize pool split for those percentages. Here's what less than 10 minutes in excel came up with. Please note that this is obviously not the "ideal" split or whatever, it's just used for a general idea of what a bigger prize pool split across more players differently per region would look like. I split 3rd and 4th, as not only does that create an extra fun match, but also I've always hated the idea of not having a 3rd/4th placement match/different in price pool...
Korea Europe America Total Payout
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1st $ 50,000.00 $ 30,000.00 $ 25,000.00 $105,000.00
2nd $ 35,000.00 $ 20,000.00 $ 18,000.00 $ 73,000.00
3rd $ 25,000.00 $ 15,000.00 $ 12,000.00 $ 52,000.00
4th $ 18,000.00 $ 10,000.00 $ 8,000.00 $ 36,000.00
5th-8th $ 10,000.00 $ 6,000.00 $ 4,500.00 $ 82,000.00
9th-16th $ 7,000.00 $ 4,500.00 $ 2,500.00 $112,000.00
17th-32nd $ 4,500.00 $ 2,500.00 $ 1,500.00 $136,000.00
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
$296,000.00 $175,000.00 $125,000.00 $596,000.00
note: I've been messing with the numbers outside of excel so they may not add up perfectly, but you get the picture lol
You tell me this wouldn't automatically force some koreans to want to stay in korea? Sure, the other leagues are "easier", but the prize pool is smaller, so the benefits aren't ALL there. A top korean would look at this split and say "well I could go to america and win ez money, but damn, that's a 30K difference in first place...". It would automatically fix most of the region lock problems for top koreans. I guarantee at least the likes of Taeja, Jaedong, Mvp, etc would go play in korea, while other great koreans in foreign teams (ForGG, Revival, duckdeok, Heart, etc) that might not break premier in KR would stick around in foreign lands, still increasing the overall skill of AM/EU, but not dominating it.
On the flipside, if the minigun's of america and grubby's of europe complain "why does my 9th spot only get me 2500 when 9th in korea is 6500", then I simply say "well go to korea and earn 9th then". I'm fine with not letting koreans flood the foreign events, but don't expect to keep the best players out AND make just as much money. That's not "fair" or "good for the scene", that's just plain UNFAIR. From my example, the NA prize pool pretty much stays the same (It's actually better tbh), while the extra money from not having seasonal finals gets funneled partially into europe and mostly into korea. All fair imo.
To further this "league difference", why don't we make points seeding to blizzcon be competed with within each league? For example, instead of just awarding the same amount of points to every league and say "whoever has the most comes to blizzcon", why don't we implement a "Champion's League" style of seeding, where each region has a number of allowed seeds. Simplest would of course be
Korea: 8 seeds
Europe: 4 seeds
America: 4 seeds
This idea I'm not as sure with, so it could be tweeked of course, along with playing with the region locking. I feel this might segregate the regions a bit too much, although even in joint events (DH, IEM, etc), there would still be incentive for all players from different regions to fight each other for points, just not as direct. Leave blizzcon as is, we like seeing pimps from all over fight each other. Would love to hear some opinions on this, especially counter points, as to this day I still havn't come to terms with the fact that Korea got shafted so hard on $$$ and points.
Other than that, just more tournaments really. The foreign scene I feel is pretty good with Dreamhack, IEM, MLG, HSC, ASUS, etc etc, but we definitely need more korean tournaments. Going from liek 5-6 GSLs + OSL per year to only 3 tournaments is going to kill the scene, no matter how big the prize pool is.
tl;dr: Funnel the extra money from no more seasonal finals partially into europe and mostly into korea, and have more korean events outside of WCS. Would love to hear a response to this from kimaphan.
EPT
