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Sweden33719 Posts
EDIT: oops I clicked post before I was done, working on finishing up the post.
EDIT2: Finished.
Since the WWI questions thread went a little off-topic (hm can't help but feel I contributed to that) and was closed, I decided to start a new thread.
The basic idea
Basically, I want automated tournaments in SC2. Nonstop, around the clock tournaments that start as soon as they fill up (be they 16, 32, 64 or 256 man tournaments).
That is, a sit'n'go, as described here:
sit and go
A poker tournament with no scheduled starting time that starts whenever the necessary players have put up their money. Single-table sit-and-goes, with nine or ten players, are the norm, but multi-table games are common as well. Also called sit n' gos and a variety of other similar spellings.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sit_and_go#sit_and_go
Now, I would ideally have these be both free to play and pay to play, blizzard could run tournaments in different buyin-fee brackets, say 5$ or 10$, take a small % in rake (hey they need some incentive for this kind of stuff don't they?), perhaps 5%, and have the rest go towards the prize pool.
In addition they could host bigger tournaments (say with a 50$ buyin, just as an example) and run qualifiers to it (free ones or really cheap ones) to pad out the roster/prize money (ie everyone qualifying gets their entrance fee paid for by blizz, going to the prize pool). Something like a monthly event (or even weekly, akin to the Sunday Million in poker).
Criticism
Then the money stream goes away from the players. You cannibalize your own player base.
Well, if money was a finite resource then you'd have a point. But it isn't, as long as people enjoy playing the game/new players come in/people don't get so addicted to SC2 that they stop going to work/school, it's going to work fine.
You can find small tournaments ran in basements that have any structure / fee / payout you'd like, but they don't represent the sport. TLTour was a failure and a one time thing, using it to support your argument is ridiculous. You should be using the Korean leagues because they're what represent StarCraft, and they're what's successful.
Korean leagues, if we're talking the big ones - IE OGN, MBC - are corporate sponsored, offline and broadcasted. There is no incentive for sponsors to sponsor non-stop, anonymous tournaments, nor is there any comparision or overlap between this type of tournament and huge live tournaments spanning weeks or even months.
Korean amateur, online leagues DO frequently have an entrance fee.
Oh and TLTour (and WGTour speed ladder, which used a pay to play structure as well) was a success.
If you win other people's money because of pay in fee then what are you going to do?
You are going to try to play tournaments with weak opponents that are stupid enough to enter a pay tournament in which they are outclassed.
People are going to be sandbagging. People are only going to play for money.
The strongest people should play vs each other and they should win the money from a third party.
There is going to be so much abuse. The top players are going to form a cartel. They enter one at a time into one of those tournaments so they have a free win and don't steal money from each other. Stuff like that.
Simple solution: do not show a list of players that have registered for a tournament until it starts.
Besides, there are going to be a LOT of good players, most who won't know or have any contact with eachother whatsoever.
Also we're talking competitive players here, I'm fairly certain people will let ego get in the way of greed the majority of the time.. It's not like first prize is gonna be 20 000$.
If you offer good enough tournament payout structures, and maybe some qualifiers to the bigger tournaments, I'm pretty sure lots of people will play them. The pros to make money, practice and for prestige, people like me (current me, maybe I'll like SC2 enough to give it a serious go at being a pro) will play because hey, it's 10$ and competition is fun.
It's so obvious. Do you want Starcraft 2 to be a sport or not? It's not entertainment which you pay for. It's not supposed to be gambling either.
But it IS entertainment which you pay for, unless you download the game.. WoW has a monthly fee, this isn't even like that - this is an optional fee that you can choose to pay. Even if you don't want to pay, free tournaments can easily run around the clock, simultaneously with the pay-to-play ones.
Do you want it to be like Formula 1 where people have to buy a seat in a car?
Otherwise, it's not just a zero sum game. You mention a rake. People are going to lose money overall from playing Starcraft 2. That's bad. There should be money to be won. Not money to be lost.
People are going to lose money overall from playing SC2 no matter what you do, short of making the game free.
People lose money from WoW overall.
People lose money from having an internet connection overall.
Esports should copy chess, not poker.
Chess tournaments frequently have entrance fees.
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Various thoughts
It's obvious some people find the idea of paying to play in tournaments to be unappealing, but I have to ask; what system do you, then, propose? What other feasible way is there of running automated tournaments around the clock?
Sponsors are not possible/unlikely to be possible simply because the coverage is non-existant, especially in terms of live coverage.
Sponsors work better for big, scheduled tournaments with plenty of coverage - something we could easily have alongside these pay to play tournaments.
The image issue. That is, to some this is going to be percieved as gambling which is bad (I don't think gambling is bad, but I think blizzard wouldn't like being percieved as supporters of gambling).
I don't actually think it is gambling, as it's a skill game. If you offered 1on1's for money I COULD see the point, but in this case it's just paying to play in a tournament, which happens all the time at LANs.
As somebody mentioned, having this work is going to be huge when it comes to advancing the skill of players around the world, as well as the viability of being a professional at this game. Someone mentioned Magic: The Gathering having had these types of tournaments run for a long time online, which is a good example.
Another thing I want is the ability to - within the BNet interfac - host your own tournaments; private and public. I'm unsure if you should be able to host p2p (privately hosted) tournaments directly through BNet (I'm not sure it would be feasible) but that's no big deal since as long as the infrastructure for hosting a tournament is there you can deal with payments privately (ie over neteller, paypal or other e-wallets).
Ok I think that's what I wanted to cover in this, I'll give it a read through to make sure I didn't miss anything.
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I wouldn't do it because I hate paying for things, but it sounds like a fine idea.
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I support this idea. As I said in the other thread, if SC had 10% of the infra-structure that poker has, then it could beat soccer in popularity ^^
But why wait for Blizzard to do it in SC2? Can't we just do it ourselves today using ICCup + Paypal?
I mean if we talk to ICCup programmers they could use their existing tournament system. Write a script to create tournaments one after the other, entry would link to paypal and would confirm it after the script gets the receipt from Paypal. No?
edit: or even better, you buy "iccup credits" from paypal. Then you just use those credits to enter tournaments and later you check out trading your earned credits for money in paypal. That's how most poker sites do right?
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On June 28 2008 17:41 d.arkive wrote:
I wouldn't do it because I hate paying for things, but it sounds like a fine idea. I don't know how things work on your socialist anarchism country. But myself, on the other hand, am a D- noob who would definetly pay 5 bucks once in a while to have some fun getting owned by pro players ^^
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Sweden33719 Posts
Hm wow, I had honestly been trying to think of a way to do this but private servers didn't cross my mind (my main obstacle was finding a way to have the games report automatically). Not a bad idea 
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I wouldn't wouldn't play in them myself until either I was a lot better or I had a lot more money, but I love the idea.
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I feel like this would give players more of an incentive to hack. If they could play random public online tournaments for money, what is stopping people from hacking? Imagine how pissed you would be if you found someone hacking and you just lost money because of it. Hacking does indeed happen in online qualifiers nowadays for money tournaments, but if tournaments were on such a large scale as you are describing, hackers could be under the radar. Even if intense anti hacks are around, people will always figure out a way around them.
I suppose if you suspected people of hacking then you could review the replays. But if so many tournaments were going on constantly would necessairly it be easy to report them and get the money back / refunded?
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On June 28 2008 17:53 FrozenArbiter wrote:Hm wow, I had honestly been trying to think of a way to do this but private servers didn't cross my mind (my main obstacle was finding a way to have the games report automatically). Not a bad idea I'm sure ICCup programmers have access to those. And gaining a small share of the tournament earnings would be big enough of an incentive for them to get working ^^
Think all we need to do is get enough people to support the idea 
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By the way, let the normal around the clock tournaments cost 1 dollar entrance, 5 would alienate too many for it to be feasible.
Then have a few with higher buyins etc, just like poker, and even free tournies.
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Yeah you'd obviously need really good anti-hack to make this work. But if poker sites can remain hack free I'm sure blizzard can too.
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Sweden33719 Posts
Well, they could have several tournaments starting simultaneously, or have them start in order (1$ tournament fills up, the 5$ tournament opens registration and then the 10$ tournament, repeat).
Maybe based on how big the tournament is, ie 1$ tournaments could be, say, 64 man and 5$ 32 man etc.
Details like this can be worked out at a later stage I suppose :O
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On June 28 2008 18:05 Luddite wrote:
Yeah you'd obviously need really good anti-hack to make this work. But if poker sites can remain hack free I'm sure blizzard can too.
Because everything is simple and server-side, unlike in SC, they aren't even comparable. Not to mention even server based online games rely a lot on the client to save a lot of processing time and bandwidth(which could make them unfeasible otherwise).
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On June 28 2008 18:05 Luddite wrote:
Yeah you'd obviously need really good anti-hack to make this work. You know what. Technically it is possible to make games 100% map hack free, but at the expense of lag (intermediate referee instead of p2p connection). But with money on the line I'm sure most players wouldn't mind some extra lag to make sure your opponent isn't cheating.
I'm not sure how viable would that be for sc1 because of syncing. But Blizzard has all the tools to do it for sc2.
But if poker sites can remain hack free I'm sure blizzard can too. Does there exists such thing as poker hacks?
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Sweden33719 Posts
Not hacks but there are illegal tools, such as online databases on players (with detailed statistics etc I suppose). You can gather this kind of data yourself (lots of legal tools for it), and most serious players do, but it has to come from your own play or it's considered cheating.
There have also been a couple of insider scandals sort of recently, Absolute Poker had one and I *think* Ultimatebet did too. The Absolute one was pretty big, it's going to be on 60 minutes/has already been on 60 minutes (not sure which). Basically it was some inside job and the guy could see the other players holecards, pretty sick.
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A part of me feels like the gambling aspect will encourage hackers, reward hackers, and bring a lot of controversy around cheating, balance (Since the game won't be balanced immediately,) and have I mentioned hackers? =)
Also, you already know how angry people can be when they lose, especially to like a 4pool. Imagine how much angrier they'd be if they also lost money along with it?
And finally, the whole concept just feels "messy" and has many potential issues involved. Also, would there be a lot of extra legal work for Blizzard to do? I'm not sure so someone will have to enlighten me.
Now, on the pro-side. I'm one of the people who plan to play extremely hardcore, and wanna be one of the top players, so I feel like I'd have a good chance to actually make money from this. If these tournaments were completely optional and extra, and didn't have it's own ladder or ranking system that would somehow prioritize or rank-above non-betting players, then I can see some interesting potential in this.
I can imagine a players profile, with a ladder ranking, race statistics, and a list of bet-tourny's they've won. Maybe even a grand total of money won in bet tourny's.. It really is an interesting idea.. I just don't know if it's worth the possible complications.
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On June 28 2008 18:16 lololol wrote:Show nested quote +On June 28 2008 18:05 Luddite wrote:
Yeah you'd obviously need really good anti-hack to make this work. But if poker sites can remain hack free I'm sure blizzard can too. Because everything is simple and server-side, unlike in SC, they aren't even comparable. Not to mention even server based online games rely a lot on the client to save a lot of processing time and bandwidth(which could make them unfeasible otherwise).
I have no idea how it could be done, I'm just using poker to illustrate that I think it CAN be done, provided the company is willing to put enough time/money into the matter. Heck, ICCUP has been hack free for what, a year now? And that's just from volunteers! If blizard hired a full time team of experts to stop hacking (which they could easily afford from the rake they'd get), they could do it.
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You realize online gambling in the US has been made illegal. Although it is very loosely enforced given how well known blizzard is I don't think they want to piss anyone off.
I'm all down for free round the clock tournaments but buy-in is never going to happen.
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Sweden33719 Posts
This isn't gambling, starcraft cannot possibly be defined as anything but a game of skill. So legally I don't see why this would be a problem.
The UIGEA is the most retarded piece of legislation ever tho. Bans poker but horse betting is fine. So logical.
Hopefully it will be repealed soon because it's just retarded -.-
Anyway, they allow Fantasy Sports too, which, as I understand, works very similarily to what I described. IE players buyin, then the winner/s take the majority of the money.
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Hungary11304 Posts
What would the problem be with automated tournaments that are held by battle.net without spending money for the buyin? Currently Warcraft III i.e. has a system that gives you special icons and statistics for wins in tournaments. If they would set up something like a personal record page, with tournament wins / statistics / etc, it would be motivating enough for me. There could be special tournaments with entry requirements, such as a solo level of 40+ (assuming the cap is at 50) and similar things.
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
FA the principle concern i have about such a system is that you may get a division between those willing to pay to play in tournaments and those that just play casually
I would never pay to play in a tournament, i simply dont have the skill nor the $$ to do that. However lots of players may only chose to play in that style; effectively isolating them from me..
Im also sure people could rig up the tournament into a 2 man tournament for betgames..
There are pros and cons to this idea.. but on the whole i'm in favor of it; i just hope it doesn't divide the community
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