Proposal Getting our money's worth

[Luigi]

My argument is two-fold and entirely hinges on the assumption that we give out money for our tours for the express purposes of:
1. getting more people to sign up for them and
2. then hopefully stick around and sign up for other tours and become integrated into the community at large.

This part is addressed specifically to chaos and the TDs, since they are the ones that decide whether that is the case. If this assumption is incorrect then let's settle what the purpose of money prizes are before we move on to the topic of how best to distribute it.

My premise is that the way Smogon allocates its money to Tours is not having the intended effect as an advertising tool, and could be put to better use elsewhere. For those unfamiliar with the current system, The winner of OST gets 200 USD, while the winners of Tour/Slam/OLT/Classic get 100 USD and the runner-ups of those 4 tournaments get 50 USD. My proposal is that the money would be better spent in 2 places that I believe work better as an advertisement of Smogon and our tournaments and are more likely to lead to players that will keep coming back for more, thus becoming part of the community. These places being Smogon Tour live tours and the OLT ladder phase.

Part 1: Correlation between prizing and signups
In 2023 I made this post that talked about many things, but most relevantly for the topic today it tried to estimate the "true size" of tours and analyze particular phenomena that caused these to spike or decline to stop some of the doomering people were engaging in at the time and offer some ideas up. To that end I collected data on Tournament size from 2015-2023. Here's that data updated to 2025 and without some of the caveats that explain the outliers, because they're not relevant to the point I want to make today (if you want to see those caveats, or my methodology, click the link to the original thread):

Tournament Signup data 2015-2025

Classic
2015: 495
2016: 508
2017: 495
2018: 989
2019: 858
2020: 700
2021: 794
2022: 699
2023: 821
2024: 976 (Prize: 150 USD)
2025: 928 (Prize: 250 USD, 100 of which came from an anonymous donor)

Grand Slam:
2015: 775
2016: 775
2017: 1839
2018: 1485
2019: 950
2020: 996
2021: 770
2022: 784*/3151 (Prize: 350 USD for RU Open, 1000 USD for LC Open, 200 for the other opens and 800 for the playoffs)
2023: 895
2024: 918 (Prize: 150 USD)
2025: 881 (Prize: 150 USD)

*check the linked thread, lol. it's a long story. slam 2022 did have money prizes but it also had a popular youtuber doing a call to action campaign and i'd rather we treat it as the complete outlier it is and not derive too much from it.

OST
2015: 621 (signups were capped at 512 and only lasted 3 days)
2016: 1011 (Prize: 100 USD)
2017: 895 (Prize: undisclosed prize pool at the time of signups, later turned out to be 200 USD)
2018: 2652 (Prize: 200 USD)
2019: 1867 (Prize: 200 USD)
2020: 1711 (Prize: 200 USD)
2021: 1164 (Prize: 400 USD)
2022: 1499 (Prize: 1100 USD)
2023: 1582 (Prize: 200 USD)
2024: 1210 (Prize: 200 USD)
2025: 1125 (Prize: 200 USD)
2026: 986 (Prize: undisclosed prize pool)

signups for OST 2026 are still open as of the time of writing but it won't climb much higher

OLT
2015: 1158 (8 cycles)
2016: 1088 (7 cycles)
2017: 1242 (4 cycles)
2018: 973 (4 cycles)
2019: 1004 (4 cycles)
2020: 823 (4 cycles)
2021: 712 (4 cycles)
2022: 816 (4 cycles)
2023: 584 (4 cycles)
2024: 590 (4 cycles) (Prize: 150 USD)
2025: 620 (4 cycles) (Prize: 0 USD)

Spring Smogon Tour
2015: 781
2016: 682
2017: 704
2018: 763
2019: 711
2020: 864
2021: 751
2022: 667
2023: 588
2024: 593 (Prize: 150 USD)
2025: 733 (Prize: 150 USD)

No more fall tour and so no need to keep track of those numbers.

Or alternatively, look at the data when sorted by year:

Tournament signup data 2015-2025, sorted as a timeline

Here's the data sorted by year, showing each tournament's signups:

2015:
OST: 621
Smogon Tour: 781
Classic: 495
Grand Slam: 775
OLT: 1,158 (8 cycles)

2016:
OST: 1,011 (Prize: $100)
Smogon Tour: 682
Classic: 508
Grand Slam: 775
OLT: 1,088 (7 cycles)

2017:
OST: 895 (Prize: undisclosed, later $200)
Smogon Tour: 704
Classic: 495
Grand Slam: 1,839
OLT: 1,242 (4 cycles)

2018:
OST: 2,652 (Prize: $200)
Smogon Tour: 763
Classic: 989
Grand Slam: 1,485
OLT: 973 (4 cycles)

2019:
OST: 1,867 (Prize: $200)
Smogon Tour: 711
Classic: 858
Grand Slam: 950
OLT: 1,004 (4 cycles)

2020:
OST: 1,711 (Prize: $200)
Smogon Tour: 864
Classic: 700
Grand Slam: 996
OLT: 823 (4 cycles)

2021:
OST: 1,164 (Prize: $400)
Smogon Tour: 751
Grand Slam: 770
Classic: 794
OLT: 712 (4 cycles)

2022:
OST: 1,499 (Prize: $1,100)
Smogon Tour: 667
Grand Slam: 784*/3151
Classic: 699
OLT: 816 (4 cycles)

2023:
OST: 1,582 (Prize: $200)
Smogon Tour: 588
Grand Slam: 895
Classic: 821
OLT: 584 (4 cycles)

2024:
OST: 1,210 (Prize: $200)
Smogon Tour: 593 (Prize: 150 USD)
Grand Slam: 918 (Prize: 150 USD)
Classic: 976 (Prize: 150 USD)
OLT: 590 (4 cycles) (Prize: 150 USD)

2025:
OST: 1,125 (Prize: $200)
Smogon Tour: 733 (Prize: 150 USD)
Grand Slam: 881 (Prize: 150 USD)
Classic: 928 (Prize: 250 USD)
OLT: 620 (4 cycles) (Prize: 0 USD)

2026:
OST: 986 (Prize: undisclosed, signups still open)

So to recap, OST has had a prize size that varied a bit in size since 2016, and other than Slam 2022 which is a huge outlier for a variety of reasons, the other tournaments started getting prizes in 2024. OLT randomly did not offer one in 2025.

What I notice when I look at this is a very weak or non-existant correlation between prize money and signup numbers, and instead a strong correlation with the ebb and flow of Smogon tournament general popularity. Just looking at OST you notice a few things:

• that OST 2021 had twice the prize money as OST 2020 but got 600 fewer signup,
• that the OST that had the biggest prize was bigger than the one preceding it, but then the following OST, which went back to the regular 200 USD was even bigger than that one.
• that as we limp into the 4th year of SV, OST struggles to even get to 1000 people
• that no other OST, regardless of prize money comes close to the numbers we were pulling in SM, when Smogon Tournaments were popping across the board.

You can very clearly see the rising tide start in late 2017 with Slam that year and keep going to make the 2018 numbers absurd, and then a decline in 2021 from the pandemic ending and SS not being very popular. Basically, when OST offers a current gen OU people are interested in it gets a lot of signups, regardless of money.

As for the other tournaments, we amusingly get 4 entirely different scenarios that all point to the same conclusion:

• Slam: 2023, 2024 and 2025 had the same signup numbers despite 2024/5 offering money
• Classic: 2024 offered money and had more signups than 2023, but 2025 offered more money than 2024 and had fewer signups
• Smogon Tour: 2024 had the same signups as 2023 despite offering money, and then 2025, which offered the same amount as 2024 had a huge spike in signups.
• OLT: 2023 and 2024 had the same number of signups despite 2024 offering money, then 2025 stopped offering money and got more people

I think the conclusion that offering money to the champion has a very low correlation with getting people to join these tournaments is inescapable. Having observed this phenomenom, I attempt to explain it:

Obviously there is a logical link between tying the money prize to the trophy prize, as the culmination of the tournament, but the trophy has a specific function: to recognize the champion, the one who beat everyone else in that edition of the tournament, and the money, as I said at the top, has or should have a different function: entice people that will then get hooked and stick around.

Winning any one of these tournaments is absurdly hard. Between practice, prep and playing the actual games you're looking at a time investment in the dozens of hours, if not low hundreds. And generally the serious contenders for these will have multiple years of tournament experience under their belts. The rookie that we are attempting to seduce with the money probably realizes that they don't really have that much of a shot at beating M Dragon in Classic or Vert in OST and so the tournament could offer $200 or $10000 and it's the same to them. In contrast, all of the people that are hardcore dedicated to these tournaments and have a good shot at winning them are already signing up regardless of the prize money because they value the experience of getting to play in these tournaments, not to mention the prestige associated with the pixels. The people that keep coming back every year played these tournaments for free back in the day, and will continue to play them if they stop offering a prize, life permitting.

Winning a singular Smogon Tour on the other hand is infinitely more achievable than winning the trophy. Even Bouff won one. Additionally the Live Tour format is familiar from Room Tours. As for OLT, the ladder is an even more familiar setting to the prospective rookie we want to recruit and people regularly top it with nonsense. Of course topping it during OLT ladder is tougher than outside of OLT season but, it's still easier than winning one of our major tournaments. And recall that we don't need our prospective rookie to actually win the money, just to believe they have a shot at it, and then enjoy themselves once they play the tournament. It's a lot easier to see the money and commit to playing a live tour that lasts 2-3 hours or to ladder, something they might do anyway, than the 3+ month long commitment represented by trying to win a trophy.

Another factor worth mentioning is the distance in time between typing "in" in the signup thread and typing "won, ggs" in the finals thread, or even in round 1. All of these tournaments last several months, and have 1 (or 2 in OST's case) week/s of complete downtime between the original advertisement and getting to play games. An absurd number of people sign up to these tournaments every year and then never log in again, causing things like the first 2 rounds of Classic having 33% of games ending up in activity wins. Which brings me to my second point.

Part 2: Player Retention
Imagine a player that sees the advertisement for OST with the money prize. They sign up and now have to wait 2 weeks before a Pokémon can hit the field. In the meantime there is nothing to talk about pertaining OST with anyone, even if they follow the trail and end up in the smogtours discord. By the time round 1 is posted they already forgot they signed up. If they didn't they might get bogged down in the complex and inevitable scheduling politics we have for these tours.

Contrast this to OLT, where you can start laddering just as soon as you sign up, and also join the OLT room in PS to start watching battles, talking about the tournament and getting immersed in the vibes of the community, or Smogon Tour, where you can join the Live Tour right as it is being advertised and play your round 1 opponent within 10 minutes of that, then talk with the other players in Smogtours, or watch other games between rounds/after you lose. It is a much more hollistic tournament experience than what is offered in the other tournaments (OST, Classic, Slam) and much more immediate: from the second our rookie's eyes see the advertisement (mentioning a potentially achievable money prize) they can already get to playing and (the most important part) talking to people about these tournaments. Ask anyone that's been around tournaments for a long time why they stick around. 99% of people will tell you it's because of the people.

Somewhat paradoxically to how simple it is to get from "in" to a battle, I think the added complexity of the Smogon Tour and OLT formats make them stick in people's minds more. It's very easy to sign up for OST/Slam/Classic and forget about it, but the nature of Tour and OLT make it so that once a person has committed to them, they're really committed. For Smogon Tour you need to mark a specific time in your calendar and show up like an appointment - you're gonna be locked in, and at other end of the spectrum you have OLT where the ladder is available at every hour of the day beckoning to you, but you also need to constantly climb to beat decay and also always keep an eye on the competition. They're much more engaging experiences, especially to a rookie.

This is entirely subjective and anecdotal but I'm willing to bet over 50% of the population of people we consider to be tournament regulars really got their start on Smogon tournaments with one of those 2 tours, and I think the reasons I outlined are part of the reason why. Logically, if they've worked in the past to recruit people into the scene, our resources should be focused on them.

Part 3: Implementation
It appears that the "budget" chaos allocates to individual Smogon tournaments per year is 650(2025) or 800(2024) USD (200 OST, 150 Slam/Classic/Tour and OLT in 2024) So in keeping with that, there are 27 Tours and 4 cycles of OLT with 8 qualifiers each. Assuming OLT not having money last year was an oversight and taking the bigger number (of course, entirely up to chaos what his budget is) divided so that everyone that won a tour and everyone that qualified for OLT would get the same amount we get 800÷59 which equals about 13.5 USD per person, which I think is close to reasonable for Smogon Tour but kinda low for OLT.

My idea instead is:
15 USD to the winner of each tour of the season, sent in a big batch at the end of the season instead of having to send the money out every weekend. (405 USD)
50 USD to the top 2 of each cycle of OLT. (400 USD)

Of course if chaos is willing to put more money into it, all the better.

And this would be heavily advertised in PS!. A new section in the news header every weekend during Tour season advertising the 3 tours that weekend worth 15 USD each and an ongoing banner during OLT season advertising the money for the people that top the ladder with the OLT prefix. If we're spending money on it we need to make sure as many people know about it as possible.

The playoffs can keep having a money prize or not, depending on chaos' budget, I do not care as long as the first priority is funding live tours and ladder cycles. Heading off the argument that it diminishes the prestige of the tournament to have money associated with the qualifying phase but not the playoffs, I don't think this way and think most other people that take our tournaments seriously don't either. Consider that no one values the Classics that offered prize money higher than the ones that didn't. Or that I can confidently say that given a choice between 200 USD or my Smogon Tour trophy I'd choose the trophy 100 times over, a sentiment that I believe is shared by almost all other individual trophy winners. For people that are already invested the money is neat but not the most important thing at all.

Beyond that i don't have much to say on the implementation. Specifics can be discussed at length and figured out. My main point is that the current way money is being spent is not aligned with what our goals for that money are/should be.

 

[Dave]

Luigi, I see what you are cooking and you bring some great points to the table. I am here to add to your post, not really argue against it, but I do see some flaws that is more so attributed to human nature than current site structure. A lot of what you are pointing at is correct, and there are a few trends and tradeoffs worth making explicit. Apologies in advance if I drift a bit, because this touches some deeper issues I have cared about since I was a TD.

Let me be clear first. The current tournament budget is not driving growth. At the amounts we are talking about, the prize pool is not large enough to meaningfully change signup behavior. If you took the money away tomorrow, I honestly think you would see roughly the same number of people entering most majors, because the real motivators right now are prestige, competition, and the trophy or CA. That part of your analysis is dead on.

Where I agree with you most is that if the goal of money is growth, then it needs to be spent where people can feel it immediately. Weekly live tours, OLT rounds, live tours in the tournament server, things people can jump into right away and get rewarded at the conclusion. That is where money actually acts like an incentive instead of just a post-hoc reward. In marketing terms, that is where interest turns into action. This is because we are rewarding urgency and impulsive decision making. There's no "sign-up and deletes", there's no "i don't have time for this" - it's the "let's get it and do battle" mentality. It's the ease of signing up and immediately playing combined with the stakes and short-term adrenaline/dopamine, right?

To restate your point in simpler terms: Live Tours and OLT lower the barrier to entry, they create immediacy, and they give new players a believable shot at winning something. That makes them much better acquisition tools than a three-month bracket with a payout at the end.

There are also real limits to this, though. We have seen it before. SPL predictions had weekly cash, and engagement still tapered off over time. That is not a failure of the idea. That is just how communities work. The core stays, the casuals drift. The win is not keeping everyone. The win is converting a few more people each year into long-term tournament players. You're reinventing new reasons for people to care.

The VGC live tour is a really good example of this. The turnout was not just because of money. It was because we combined a bunch of things at once:

• hype and pre-advertising
• novelty and tapping into the most popular format
• media coverage and support from sites like Victory Road
• buy-in from known players
• outside coverage
• reaching players who already cared about competitive Pokémon but lived mostly outside the Smogon bubble

The prize helped, but it was not the main hook. What mattered was that we actually marketed something new to a new vertical. That is the part we should be paying attention to. Growth does not come from just serving the same small core better. It comes from being willing to expand who the system is built for. Not all Smogon formats may be enjoyed by VGC players, and vice versa. But there are some that do convert and get involved, and that's incremental growth that we care about.

From a growth perspective, the bigger issue is not just where Chaos spends the current budget, but how small that budget is. Smogon has a huge, passionate user base. There are real ways to generate money inside the community and feed it back into tournaments and the site, whether through the shop, collaborations, donation drives, or other projects people actually care about. That is how you get to prize pools that actually create stakes instead of the irrelevancy it currently holds.

So, all of this to say, I agree with your core point. If the goal is growth, money should be moved earlier in the funnel and attached to things like Tours and OLT where people can feel it right away. I just think the longer-term play is not only reallocating a small budget, but figuring out how to grow the pool itself so we can actually create incentives that matter.

This was something I was passionate about when I had time to push it last year. But people get fatigued, projects stall, and without incentives you are running purely on passion. At some point, that is not enough. There's many additional ways to invest into the community and create compounding growth, but it does involve people who have charisma for the project while having the ability to overcome burnout.

That is where we stop thinking about how things have always worked and start thinking about how to evolve the ecosystem and current tournament infrastructure.

 

[sunny]

My argument is two-fold and entirely hinges on the assumption that we give out money for our tours for the express purposes of:
1. getting more people to sign up for them and
2. then hopefully stick around and sign up for other tours and become integrated into the community at large.
---
My premise is that the way Smogon allocates its money to Tours is not having the intended effect as an advertising tool, and could be put to better use elsewhere.

Where I agree with you most is that if the goal of money is growth, then it needs to be spent where people can feel it immediately.

Forgive me if there is an obvious reason that this won't work, but if the only function of our prize pools is to draw in new users, then why don't we do away with prize pools in their entirety and just spend all of that money on actual advertising instead? (e.g. Google ads, "promoted" social media posts, etc.) You could even take it a step further and sponsor Pokemon-oriented content creators to advertise for us.

Obviously, this assumes that advertising will bring in more users than our current system (I don't have enough data to know; this entire post is just for the sake of argument / exploring all possibilities). If we don't want to just buy ads, then I think there's some other intrinsic value of prize pools that we should seek to explore and promote as well.

 

[Dave]

I think that we need to eliminate the "secondary motive" behind the prize money. We want to reward people who win the tournaments. Bottom line. If we had a $10,000 budget, Id want to give it all to the winners without the goal of bringing in new users.

If the goal is to bring in more users to tournaments, Luigi's idea makes sense. If that isn't our goal, then his idea doesn't make sense because we ultimately want to pay cash prizes to all of our majors winners.

The budgeted amount for advertising would not do us any good, for a few reasons:

1) Google ads (or any ad spend) is meant for bringing in revenue dollars. The goal is to sell a good or service with the idea of converting the person who clicks into revenue dollars. Us using ads would result in clicks -> money spent -> no ROI at the end of the pipeline. We'd be paying money with our only ROI being "new users that don't recoup the money spent". Smogon thrives off SEO and the sheer amount of articles and subject matter experts - that's what brings in the traffic and why it's successful. And not to mention, most clicks we'd get that cost us money are likely to be existing users.

2. Most Pokémon oriented Smogon creators are Smogon adjacent in some way. The goal here isn't to educate people about Smogon's existence, it's to instead get them regularly participating in tournaments. Which quite honestly, is lower hanging fruit as tournaments is a very small section of Smogon and its profitability, as a whole. This is why expanding the tournament scene through Luigi's methods isn't a bad idea - it's cheap, it increases participation incrementally. But again, it's only a good idea if the goal is to drive new competitors. But it is a way to maximize the budget given.

Finally, the amount of current funds budgeted isn't enough to even warrant spending it on content creators, and it's not even a fraction of the amount needed to make any reliable dent in ads. This is why Luigi's idea does a good job of solving a very small problem.

For prize pools to be relevant, you'd need to scale the prize pools ten-fold. Achieving this organically is possible, but takes a lot of time, commitment, and motivation from our users with little to no incentive. Awareness, community buy-in, prestige, and regular yearly content about the users, and the tournaments upcoming is the best way to build a system from within that will last and give meaning behind what we do.


This suggestion isn't pretty. It's just the reality.

 

[RADU]

All timer good post by Luigi and I agree with all of what both him and Dave have said so far. Something that Dave for sure knows very well but others reading need not to forget is that tied in to the idea of putting prize money on tournaments to attract new users is to actually use Media to advertise the existence of said prize money and hype up these tournaments.
I hope this isn't too off topic but I swear all the thought process I'm about to iterate through is worth it so bear with me:

The average person on the internet knows about Pokemon Showdown. This is something that we forget and maybe take for granted that is a huge deal to consider. If I'm the developer of Super Auto Pets and I'm hosting some tournaments, the barrier for entry to get new people into the tournaments is gigantic. First I need to show people that SAP exists, then tell them what it is, then show them why it's interesting, then show them there's tournaments, then convince them it's worthwhile for them to play this tournament. But we are operating at the levels of gigantic games like Chess and Smash, everybody knows Pokemon, and majority of people know Pokemon Showdown; even if they don't, it's one sentence: "u can play Pokemon on a website, with fully customizable teams/pokemon". Our barrier for entry is extremely low. With that in mind it is pretty ridiculous that the level of community engagement we get is so damn low compared to some of these other games. Chess got as popular as it currently is because streamers decided it would be good content, and it was. Pokemon is also good content, big ass streamers play it all the time, but the lack of outward structure from us befalls us. Chess.com did a monumental job to help drive forward the reputation of Chess as it currently stands. Smogon has no outreach. We don't do nothing.

People already are on Pokemon Showdown. I remember when I first started playing. I knew about PS for years, and I would occasionally hop on in computer class to play randbats with my classmates. I was on the website for a long time, and I mean I hopped on many damn times, and I had no idea what a "Smogon" was. This is what inched me closer to knowing about Smogon. I had seen some other Bandit vids before, but this video got me thinking "Man, I wanna start spamming some OP moves to get OHKOs too", so I did. I hopped on 1v1 ladder. I don't remember specifically afterwards, but I must've figured out how to join 1v1 room, and from there I eventually found some sort of link that got me to find out there were tournaments for this stuff. Are you seeing the problem? I was already on the site, and I was playing Pokemon, very often. There had to be a YouTube video that got me invested into a specific tier so that I could then figure out how to reach the room and find some other link. This is so many steps from PS to just even know what Smogon even is.

This is obviously just my specific experience, and I know not everybody has gone through the same, but I challenge you to imagine yourself as a complete noob that pops into PS:

Spoiler

How likely are you to actually land on Smogon through this information overload of buttons?
Tangent: the News slot has serious visibility issues. I was on the site for so many years and I never read anything on the news slot until I was actually running a tournament that was going to be posted there. I tried to suggest an improvement, but it didn't seem to go anywhere since the news slot still looks identical.
It's just a big wall of text with a lot of terminology that you don't know about. If I read OM Homefield Advantage & 1v1CL as the title and i dont know what it means im not reading anything below TBH. If I didn't read it or find it useful the first time I see it, its UI makes it so easy to just block out from your view forever. The UI change when the news slot is "new" is something I never even fully registered as a thing until they told me directly. News slot seems to be more specifically targeted to existing smogon users than anything.
Obviously the news slots have their effects but with 11.4k users online and 1.7k active battles at a random point in the day im inclined to believe we're hitting the lower side of the News slot's effectiveness.
The Tournaments button is similarly problematic with the layout of the page once you click it, but I don't wanna digress on this too long.

You wanna get your money's worth?
The first step of the process is to make it easier for people that are already on the site to reach the information they could care about. Make the News slot prettier. Give the buttons icons. Overhaul the "Tournaments" tab to be less of a mess.
This could be a policy post in and of itself, it could even be a bigger overarching movement that needs to go into the nitty gritty of stuff with Zarel directly. I think it's an incredibly important topic, and you have hundreds if not thousands of contributors. Someone good at UI has to be somewhere; I'm qualified but obviously I couldn't do it alone. If HiZo can spend a month of his life coding Bio Mech Mons and can make a side server messing with UI to make a PS Roguelike surely he would lend his hand to make the PS UI prettier. Anyway, I don't wanna digress too much.

On Media
People are on the site, but not all. And people are not always on the site. People are scrolling TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, whatever else. I see posts from random ass creators talking about Pokemon Showdown that get 68.3k likes. There are hundreds of thousands if not million of people there that know about PS and love PS and just know randbats and have never been exposed to anything else.
The Smogon Video Creation team is still there, we're working on a longer form video right now because we think that's a viable road ahead, but what we've seen for a long time is that there's few contributors, for whatever reason. There's a ton of people out there doing C&C, Translation, and all other type of work, but either they dont know about smogon videos or are not willing. We are out there, if you want to have anything posted on the Smogon youtube channel, or the Smogon tiktok, all it takes is for you to drive that specific piece of content forward. We're still going through the motions as a team and making sure that making the content is worthwhile for you, streamlining resources and processes, and we will improve constantly, but just like every section on the website we need contributors.

If the objective is to get new people to play tours, they need to know about those tours, and their prize money, and the answer is media. Currently the only real way to know that OST has prize money is to be on the thread specifically and to read through the wall of text til you hit the section that says "ah yeah this tour rewards some cash". You want some video out there, some tiktok, some short, something. Cause what else are you gonna do


ok, you wanna really get your money's worth?
Where is the Official Random Battles Tournament?
Seriously, where is it? Is there something I'm missing? Is it there and I just haven't seen it before? Is there a specific exact reason why we can't have the biggest tier on the site have an official biggest tournament on the site? The RBLT freezai hosted in 2024 is the closest thing to what Luigi wanted, with a $1450 prize pool, it got 2000 signups between the 4 cycles. The prize money wasnt exactly on the cycles themselves but still. Why is this tournament not ran on a consistent basis?
I guess there's just some level of discontent from me to see Random Battles, the biggest format on the site, be kind of completely disconnected from Official Tournament Administration, and the lack of structure it has compared to its potential. Also the location of the randbats subforum overall makes it more difficult to spot if you're not linked there directly. This as well could be its own policy post tbh

But yeah if your objective is to get people to play smogon tournaments and stick around, then start by eliminating the need for them to even learn a tier. If someone sees a video of some 1000$ prize pool random battles tournament, they hit the site at the right time, drop a post and immediately start playing, no attrition whatsoever. You know how easy it would be to loop in some popular streamers if you were doing a live tournament in random battles? They love random battles, and that's free ass content.

tldr Generally speaking I agree with what Luigi is suggesting I just think you need to pay more attention to smogon media as a whole especially if you're trying to make this work, and maybe put some focus on rands. Other than that if you wanna have any sort of discussion about player influx and retention there are very many underlying issues that remain unaddressed that you could start addressing asap. Pokemon is a franchise that is constantly growing, if we're the ones on the decline that means we're doing stuff wrong and we should take accountability.