let's give official individual tournaments prize pools

[talah]

title. conduct them similar to tours like CALLOUS's ADV invitational and BKC's DPP Ubers invitational which are open to user donations. they typically start with a small prize pool of their own, but seeing as the hosting situation here would be totally different (unless the site itself is willing to provide a starting amount) then i don't think it is necessary. we have seen how willing people are to donate to tours like those or even draft tournaments on discord, and even if they don't get that big of a pool it's totally fine. it provides an extra incentive to veterans and is a surefire way to attract more interest from newer players.

 

[Gilbert arenas]

My only issue w widespread $ tours is that people will act up over small amounts of cash.
Player a is doing well getting ghosted by player b
Player b says give me x amount of money if u win money
Player a wins money doesn’t give money to player b
Now there’s no winner and we look like assholes
Someone makes a pr thread calling into question the legitimacy of money tours
Feel like this is inevitable w widespread cash tours
Just seems like systems need to be put in place before we commit to anything
Moral of the story get a job

 

[Martin]

I wonder if using Matcherino could be an option for funding prize pools for officials on Smogon. I’m not sure how getting codes on that site works, but orgs in the FGC use it all the time as a way of boosting the size of prize pools at locals/for regular online tournaments (especially free-entry ones—if you have codes etc., it’s basically just free money), and you could very easily encourage players who sign up to enter a code/do sponsor quests/etc. to build up a decent sized prize pool. It could even potentially allow for team tournaments like SPL to have prize pools (albeit significantly smaller) as it lets you pay out a portion of the pot to multiple players, though once again I’m not sure specifically how the site handles pot splitting or if there are any restrictions on it.

 

[Texas Cloverleaf]

This is the actual answer to all the other garbage in the other threads and the only answer with long term sustainability. Prizing solves all problems of prestige and representation once you remove arguing about pixels from the equation. TDs need to align site ownership with that vision for this to be possible.

Re: problems that may arise; yup. deal with them.

 

[Corazan]

@ TDs please make it happen. we all tend to forget that some of us play this game almost everyday for absolutely free, i'll be glad to give like 10$ for a tournament such as the OST, if we could get a cashprize with like 4 numbers that would be super sexy. also im just tired of hearing the same argument for every tournament "we just do it for pixels anyway"....