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I was very surprised when the prize distribution Valve announced for TI4 was met with approval by most "dota personalities". I see three major problems with the distribution:
1. The first place prize is extremely large compared to 2nd... You'll basically have a team that is marginally better than the 2nd team get three times as much prize money - this is, simply put, dumb. Even ppd said in the interview with Cyborgmatt that the first place prize is too large. For some reason, as far as I can remember, Godz and 2gd (for example) praised the decision to go with a million per player because it's supposedly good for PR - in my opinion, this is a horrible reason for the decision, and it's also pretty surprising that 2gd supports this when he's always been advocating less top-heavy prize distributions (and this one is horribly top heavy). You don't need more PR than "10 million prize pool".
2. The drop off from 8th to 9th is horrible... Seeing both TL and Titan lose the 500k BO3 is really sad and completely unnecessary (see bottom of the post).
3. 3rd-8th is kind of similar. For example, 644k for 5th, 510k for 8th (remember, 48k for 9th?). The difference in skill between the 5th team and the 8th team is probably a lot bigger than the difference between the 8th and 9th team, yet this is not at all reflected in the prize money (on the contrary, it's quite the opposite).
Often in life, the simplest solution is the best solution. So, consider the simplest prize distribution you can have. Say you have a certain factor f. The 16th place team gets some number x, the 15th team gets f*x, the 14th team gets f^2*x etc. (I'm aware they don't differentiate between some positions and you can trivially account for that, but for simplicity, let's ignore that). You can then pick some factor f and given the total prize pool, you can see the distribution. For example, for f=1.4, you get (approx)
1. 3084279 2. 2203057 3. 1573612 4. 1124008 5. 802863 6. 573473 7. 409624 8. 292588 9. 208991 10. 149279 11. 106628 12. 76163 13. 54402 14. 38858 15. 27756 16. 19825
Obviously, this is just an example and another factor might work better (probably a slightly lower one), but even this distribution seems better than the one Valve are using in every single aspect. The finals is a million dollar BO5 - if that's not hype enough for someone, then they have a serious problem. The differences between the various positions are bigger than in the current distribution except at the very top (this is a good thing on both accounts). Nobody goes home crying and the decider games up to the say 11th place are as big as the finals of major non-TI tournaments.
Most importantly, you'd support a large number of players for playing full time. This is the opportunity that was missed in my opinion - the scene would have been served a lot better if a larger number of teams got good money for continuing their gaming careers. The fans of all these teams contributed to the prize pool. Titan and TL fans probably want their teams to "survive" or have a positive year and don't really care if five players become millionaires.
Anyway, this blog turned out a lot worse than I'd like but Na'Vi is playing now so I might take time to fix it up a bit later
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I think it's generally a bit anti-climatic to be playing for less money than you've already won. If players have 2.2 million playing for another ~.9 million just doesn't feel quite the same. Having an increasing amount won by advancing is meant to coax out the best play for the game (especially the finals). Yeah it may not matter as much with such large pots, but still. That said yeah TI4 is probably a little top-heavy in distribution. For larger tournaments you can't really follow that down to like #10th or even #8th position, but I think it's a bit more exciting if #1st place is twice the size of #2nd.
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I really like the fact that 1st basically gets the largest chunk. TI4 is not an easy event to win, and the prize should reflect that. However, ideally you would want every team to get at least 100k. I really feel like you are suggesting Valve be like Riot and support the teams more. I think Valve's approach to TI is simple....this is the tournament to determine who is the best team in the world this year. TI isn't like a year long tournament with matches every week. There are so many different leagues that pay teams money. Valve's job isn't to pay money to support teams, Valve's job is to make money. The only reason the prize pool is so huge is because the community contributed so much. Valve isn't spending a ton of money on this event. I mean hell streaming on twitch isn't that expensive at all.
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That's a valid objection I guess, but it's still almost a million dollars for one BO5. The thing is, this prize pool is unprecedented in eSports and you can't really compare it to sports that have a much more stable structure supporting the pro players. Anyway, you can easily achieve this property by tweaking the model slightly (for example scale the factor at each step so that it becomes 2 for the finals) and you'd still get a significantly saner distribution. The point is, it seems really silly to model the prize distribution with the primary goal to give the winning team a million per player.
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On July 15 2014 05:45 HeeroFX wrote: I think Valve's approach to TI is simple....this is the tournament to determine who is the best team in the world this year. Right, but like any other tournament, it doesn't do that. All the remaining teams in the top 8 have beaten each other in the last several months in different events. It's fairly likely the champion will be determined by small details and awarding that with 3.4 times more money doesn't seem worth it to me.
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
I agree that the prize distribution is a bit wacky. I'm fine with 1st getting the biggest chunk, but the drop off for later teams is just unnecessary and detrimental. The biggest loser here is titan because SEA teams need the most support, losing out on 450k hurts them far more than a team like Alliance. More prize money allows them to support themselves for the next year and gives them a real chance to develop further and gives the SEA scene a greater chance to develop.
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On July 15 2014 06:13 Plexa wrote: I agree that the prize distribution is a bit wacky. I'm fine with 1st getting the biggest chunk, but the drop off for later teams is just unnecessary and detrimental. The biggest loser here is titan because SEA teams need the most support, losing out on 450k hurts them far more than a team like Alliance. More prize money allows them to support themselves for the next year and gives them a real chance to develop further and gives the SEA scene a greater chance to develop.
yeah I think that's the biggest problem. What I would have liked to see it them take 5% of 1st place (so ~250k) and distributed it to teams in 9-14th. Ultimately that would have meant +30-40k for each team in those spots giving everyone enough money to be a pretty good prize (i.e 50k minimum).
Giving a prize for 15th/16th seems odd in a tournament where many teams get in based on invites and geographical location. I sort of like that teams have to work to get a prize.
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On July 15 2014 06:13 Plexa wrote: I agree that the prize distribution is a bit wacky. I'm fine with 1st getting the biggest chunk, but the drop off for later teams is just unnecessary and detrimental. The biggest loser here is titan because SEA teams need the most support, losing out on 450k hurts them far more than a team like Alliance. More prize money allows them to support themselves for the next year and gives them a real chance to develop further and gives the SEA scene a greater chance to develop. Both you and a post above mention "1st get the biggest chunk". Well, did someone EVER suggested that 2nd or 3rd place get more money than 1st? w0000000000t. Almost everyone agrees that this distribution is too top heavy, especially considering 1st place almost gets 1M per player. It's insane.
I would have been perfectly fine with them saying "hey guys we reached all the goals, the next goals up to 10M raise money for other tournaments" and give it to like DH, SL, ESL and the Chinese tours I can't name, pretty much like they do for CS with esports keys, because like the OP mentioned above, TI doesn't determine the BEST team in the year, they all pretty much won a tour against each other in the past year, it just determines the best team in this specific month.
Take alliance for example. They DOMINATED the entire last season. And they were inches away from loosing to Navi in the finals. Would that make Navi the best team in the season? Not by a longshot. Then what did they do? They got almost 300k for player and basically slacked 4 months and never came back up in the horse. What will the players that get 1M do? Does this grow the scene? Sure it brings more viewers this year, but what happens next 2 or 3 years when all the players are in the Caribbean enjoying their hard earned money?
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On July 15 2014 06:32 Logo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 15 2014 06:13 Plexa wrote: I agree that the prize distribution is a bit wacky. I'm fine with 1st getting the biggest chunk, but the drop off for later teams is just unnecessary and detrimental. The biggest loser here is titan because SEA teams need the most support, losing out on 450k hurts them far more than a team like Alliance. More prize money allows them to support themselves for the next year and gives them a real chance to develop further and gives the SEA scene a greater chance to develop. Giving a prize for 15th/16th seems odd in a tournament where many teams get in based on invites and geographical location. I sort of like that teams have to work to get a prize.
Both 15 and 16th were Qualifier teams though. I think qualifiers should have some prize pool tied to it. Invited teams might feel gimped by not being able to compete for that prize but they are invited because they won some money that the qualifiers team didn't. I also don't have a problem with giving money to 15th and 16th because even if they were invited, they worked at least 6 months to deserve said invite.
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On July 15 2014 06:13 Plexa wrote: I agree that the prize distribution is a bit wacky. I'm fine with 1st getting the biggest chunk, but the drop off for later teams is just unnecessary and detrimental. The biggest loser here is titan because SEA teams need the most support, losing out on 450k hurts them far more than a team like Alliance. More prize money allows them to support themselves for the next year and gives them a real chance to develop further and gives the SEA scene a greater chance to develop. And the counter-argument is that if the SEA scene can't support local teams through sponsorships and local tournaments then why should valve subsidize that scene? They already gave them 2.25 slots at TI (1 invite, 1 qualifier victory, 1 wildcard slot). If the players there suck that doesn't mean valve should simply throw money at them to somehow make them better. NA can support TL/NAR/EG/Dignitas etc despite potentially questionable levels of play simply because the sponsorships and prize-contribution is there. The nations are simply rich enough for a fanbase to pay professional players to essentially entertain them. The SEA fanbase simply hasn't demonstrated continued ability to sustain their own scene beyond Orange/Titan aka 1 team. Valve throwing money at them doesn't change that. Valve certainly already gave an enormous amount of publicity to the players and teams of SEA.
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Here is an example of how real sports allocate eight-figure prize pools :
http://www.tsmplug.com/tennis/prize-money-of-all-grand-slams-which-is-highest-paying/
Much better than what Valve is doing IMHO. Also much better than the distribution proposed in the OP, whose formula is overly simplistic (multiplicative from bottom to top is inferior to divisive top to bottom because it results in final matches having relatively small stakes).
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I think the million dollars per player on the best eam is pretty nice, worth some sacrifices in the lower payouts.
The one that really got me was the 8th to 9th jump. I still think that was a mistake. The elimination BO3's in the last two days were worth 450000! Yet there were played with no audience with no real hype. I think that was the biggest opportunity valve missed.
Getting to Key Arena was its own reward. Valve didn't need to also make it worth half a million dollars
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I think if the idea is that winning TI should be that hard, prestigious and thatextremely paying of, so that the winners could easilly retire from the scene, and it will make scene grow even more, it's kind of artifical booting competetion mechanism, but that's just my two cents.
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i agree on the 8th and 9th place difference being too much, but i dont see a problem with 1st place taking by far the largest portion.
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I thought Godz mentioned on In the Studio that he didn't like the prize pool distribution?
Either way, I think Valve should have also done tiebreaks for the 6th place spot, just simply because of the prize distribution issue.
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On July 15 2014 09:10 GeneralStan wrote: I think the million dollars per player on the best eam is pretty nice, worth some sacrifices in the lower payouts.
The one that really got me was the 8th to 9th jump. I still think that was a mistake. The elimination BO3's in the last two days were worth 450000! Yet there were played with no audience with no real hype. I think that was the biggest opportunity valve missed.
Getting to Key Arena was its own reward. Valve didn't need to also make it worth half a million dollars yea, especially with the way 5-8 after round robin phase were determined by head to head when only 7-8 were eligible for elim, felt kinda sour for 9th and 10th
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On July 15 2014 09:20 ForTehDarkseid wrote: I think if the idea is that winning TI should be that hard, prestigious and thatextremely paying of, so that the winners could easilly retire from the scene, and it will make scene grow even more, it's kind of artifical booting competetion mechanism, but that's just my two cents.
Who the hell is gonna retire after a $1 million payday for playing a game? If you just won, why not run it back for another year and try to do it again? If anything, this pay structure seems likely to stagnate the top few teams while generating massive turnover in the lower teams.
I think the split is overly punitive for the lower teams. The tennis prize splits that someone linked earlier is pretty interesting, as it seems much more egalitarian. Personally, I would aim for something in between. Everyone's gotta eat.
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On July 15 2014 09:20 ForTehDarkseid wrote: I think if the idea is that winning TI should be that hard, prestigious and thatextremely paying of, so that the winners could easilly retire from the scene, and it will make scene grow even more, it's kind of artifical booting competetion mechanism, but that's just my two cents. The winners will be one of the team that plays the top doto. Can the scene really afford to loose 5 of the top 50 players to retirement every year because they won the big bucks + the ones that naturally retire? Like srsly, where would we be now if Navi retired after TI1, IG after TI2 and A after TI3?
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On July 15 2014 09:43 misirlou wrote:Show nested quote +On July 15 2014 09:20 ForTehDarkseid wrote: I think if the idea is that winning TI should be that hard, prestigious and thatextremely paying of, so that the winners could easilly retire from the scene, and it will make scene grow even more, it's kind of artifical booting competetion mechanism, but that's just my two cents. The winners will be one of the team that plays the top doto. Can the scene really afford to loose 5 of the top 50 players to retirement every year because they won the big bucks + the ones that naturally retire? Like srsly, where would we be now if Navi retired after TI1, IG after TI2 and A after TI3?
Just like NBA players would retire after they get paid millions for their rookie season.
OH WAIT
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