Foreword
This is going to be a long one.
Over the last several months myself and quite a few community members with many different perspectives on tournaments have been collaborating and debating on how best to fix the current tournament situation. There were many problematic issues that were leading to easily exploitable tournaments and while there were many disagreements, generally we all agreed that we needed to do something to attempt to fix the situation.
I brought my biggest concerns to a DAO vote and have worked with the team, done a lot of research, mathed more than I have in a long time and ultimately compiled the following adjustments to tournaments. My initial goal was to have the DAO apportion its inflation by vote, which it has, and while I'd ultimately love if every minute detail was approved, it doesn't seem reasonable. I've had to take the initiative on some things like adjusting the CP requirements, asking the team to stop counting Gladiator CP for tournaments, and adjusting entry requirements. While many others have been involved in this process, I will shoulder the responsibility for all of the changes below. They're ultimately my decision regardless of who suggested what changes.
This may be a big ask, but I sincerely hope that you guys will give this a try for a couple of months. I'll gather your feedback and compile it during this window and if needed I'll make adjustments after a few rotations. Just because we're trying this doesn't mean it's set in stone. It doesn't mean I consider this "done" by any means. Myself and many big stakeholders would love to see a massive tournament overhaul, but for the time being we're going to work with what we've got and make the best of it. I realize that there's no perfect way to do this and no matter which way forward I choose, some people are going to be upset. Please deliver all feedback in a constructive manner.
Changes to Reduce Exploitative Behaviors
While my main concern with tournaments was getting the DAO to apportion it's inflation, I have been very aware of problematic behavior with tournaments for years. I'm definitely not the only one and over the last several months I've heard complaints from many people about everything from payout structures to multi-accounting to gating access by league to deck splitting and unqualified entries. In order to combat these issues there have been some pretty significant changes which I will detail below:
First, Gladiator card's CP and cards staked on land's CP will no longer count for tournament entry requirements. The point of this change is to help ensure that players entering a tournament have a reasonable collection of the featured card sets to be entering the tournament. Ideally we'd also like to stop counting duplicate card CP, but at this time I am not aware of any development work being done in that regard.
Secondly, the CP requirements have been overhauled and standardized for all tournament formats. I'll be sharing the details on how I did this and sharing the charts below, but the general idea is that players will need the equivalent CP of at least half a set of cards for each set included in the tournament format and those cards should be at least half way leveled between minimum required to earn and maximums for the associated league. The point of this change is to ensure players have a reasonably competitive deck. Generally speaking, requirements for Current Set (Rebellion only) are higher now, Modern and Wild haven't changed all that much and this new way of standardizing CP requirements has helped me to define the different 2 Random requirements.
Upon gathering feedback I have added Bronze GF tournaments back into the rotation.
Third, when building out the brackets and doing all of the CP requirement math, it became pretty clear to me that GF Bronze and Silver had nearly the same CP requirements. I considered a few options and ultimately decided to try something different with Gold Foil tournaments. For the time being I want to test only having Silver, Gold, and Diamond league Gold Foil tournaments. The point of this change is to reduce redundancy and ensure our GF tournaments are competitive and have substantial prizes for winning them.Fourth, speaking of prizes, I've been working on overhauling our prize brackets to make tournaments more competitive. The payout structures we were using, while well intentioned, had some unfortunate consequences that encouraged poor behavior, like splitting decks across multiple accounts and entering many unqualified accounts to essentially game the brackets for ill-gained prizes because there was little to no risk in doing so. Going forward we won't be doing refund tier prizes. Before anyone freaks out about that last statement, please continue:
Fifth, I am very aware that many people have voiced concern about not being willing to enter tournaments if they feel they have something to lose. I've done a lot of thinking on how best to address this situation and I came to the conclusion that with the previously mentioned changes and ongoing monitoring for potentially problematic behavior, that I'll be removing entry fees from tournaments.
Lastly, the astute among you may have already realized what the previous change means, but for those that don't: Tournaments will not be league locked by ranking as it doesn't really work correctly. The system that is in place doesn't account for the split Modern and Wild formats and with the upcoming changes to Ranked play, it seems like a good time to try this out. One of the reasons often given for much of the exploitative behavior mentioned above is due to players feeling it is unfair to restrict their access for investing more and performing well. It's hard to argue with that logic. With stricter entry requirements, it is going to be much more expensive and most likely unprofitable for people to try to flood tournaments with alts or sacrificial accounts. With no entry fees, anyone with the appropriate amount of staked SPS and a reasonable set of cards can play in a tournament unless they've been banned from doing so for botting in human-only formats.
SPS Staking Requirements
I have standardized the SPS Staking requirements for entry. They are pretty much in line with the previous requirements, but there were some adjustments to standardize them across the various formats. The general idea being that more sets in the format equate to higher SPS staking requirements, but nothing too major has been changed in this regard. You can see the charts below:
Please note that while we may not currently have Bronze GF tournaments during this trial period, I have already done the math for requirements and built them into the rewards calculator in case things don't work out and they need to be added back in at a later date.
CP Requirements
The way CP and rewards were calculated before has always been problematic. Sets have wildly different collection sizes, inconsistent quantities of cards in each rarity and vastly different amounts of CP per card. The system we were using was outdated and is ultimately why we ended up with a situation like Alpha GF tournaments having 17% of all tournament rewards. I have calculated the CP requirements for every set in the game based on both the minimum required level to earn in a league and the maximum card levels per league using a rare summoner. I counted core sets, rewards cards, and mini sets, but I excluded promo cards. After doing all of this, I looked for a middle ground solution.
After examining previous entry requirements and learning about how they were created, I decided to work on building a formula that I could use to standardize requirements for the current sets as well as future sets while maintaining fair entry requirements for all formats. The solution I chose is to find the halfway point between a minimum leveled set of cards and the maximum leveled set of cards for the league. Of course not everyone is going to have or need every card, so the new calculations are based on players having half of the set.
When it came to the 2 Random format, I had to test several options and settled on the following formula. Both sets CP requirements are combined and then halved again to get an average CP requirement. This means that for the 2 Random format, players will need to have the equivalent of at least 1/4th of each set of cards adequately leveled. Some players may have a fully maxed collection of one set and not the other and qualify, but as long as they meet the CP threshold, they are allowed to enter the tournament.
You can review the specifics for each league and format in the charts below:
Monthly Rewards Allocation and League Percentages
Somewhere over the course of working on all of this, I ended up auditing our Tournament payouts and compared them with the whitepaper inflation schedule. It became clear we were missing the mark by a significant amount and then there was a further tax on tournament rewards by offering refund tier prizes which essentially just refunded those prizes to the DAO's tournament creation account.
Going forward, as mentioned above, we will no longer have refund tier prizes and I intend to keep us on schedule according to the whitepaper. This means that tournament rewards will be increasing by roughly 12% or so. I am attaching the calculator for the month of March as an example and will include a copy of the Tournament Rewards inflation schedule below that:
Please note that the Percent for Each League changes when there's no Novice or Bronze tournaments for a particular format to ensure that 100% of the rewards for the format are apportioned.
Payout Structures and Prize Brackets
With the removal of refund tier prizes and entry fees, we'll be having tighter brackets to encourage competition and to help drive value to the cards required to compete in these tournaments, whether you own and play or want to rent out your cards to those that do. Below you can find the prize structure for different tournament types as well as an actual breakdown of what the month of March's tournament payouts will look like for each possible format:
Please be sure to check the number of tournaments on the chart on the right side to better understand the variations in prize amounts.
Rotation
I have had some requests to ensure that we have rotating times that do not conflict with the weekly maintenance window. I have selected 4 sets of times based on Eastern Standard Time that should ensure we avoid conflicts with weekly maintenance and time changes going forward while accommodating different time zones. Every 16 days I will shift to the next set of times in the chart below:
I have standardized our rotations to have one 4 tournaments per day over a 16 day period. Different leagues and formats are also spread out as best as I could get them to help ensure constant demand for the sets in rotation for the full 16 day cycle. I am attaching examples of the first couple of rotations below to help illustrate how it will look:
You've Made it to the End!
This has been quite a long read and there's a lot of information and changes to digest. I've been buried in these spreadsheets, feedback, requests and complaints related to tournaments for most of the last month. I'm not trying to complain, it's the job, I'm just trying to provide some context for how much work has gone into all of this.
Please keep the conversation civil and remember that nothing is set in stone here. We're going to try things out for a couple of months and I will continue to observe and gather feedback. If we need more votes we will have them. If I have to make adjustments to combat new unforeseen exploits, I will do so. Let's give this a shot and see how it goes. Thanks for your time and consideration.