Intro
The purpose of this proposal is to address concerns that there is no risk or loss of opportunity for players that want to mass join tournaments since the entry fees have been removed and that there are also no economic benefits for the SPS DAO in hosting these tournaments. I'll first discuss the concerns and then propose a solution so that we can gauge stake-weighted consensus on this proposed solution as well as gather feedback in the event that aspects need to be adjusted or a different approach is required.
Issues to Address
One complaint that has been made by some players is that by removing entry fees, they often face many flees in round 1 of a tournament and it's been pointed out that this is theoretically exploitable by signing up many accounts for a tournament to push other accounts to qualify for prize payouts. While there are clearly more flees in tournaments without entry fees, I think it's important to look at the benefits and quality of life improvements that have come from removing the fees:
- It's much quicker to sign up for tournaments now.
- Tournament entries only require posting key now.
- We've removed a tax on rewards by eliminating the refund tier prizes.
- We've limited the barrier to entry for tournaments to being entirely dependent on SPS stake and rented or owned collections, which even the fleeing accounts are required to meet.
Now to address the economic concerns, there have been players that feel we should have entry fees or cut tournament inflation because they feel that there is no value being created for the SPS token. I personally feel that tournaments are meant to add value to cards and encourage SPS staking, but I do also think there needs to be a major rework on tournaments overall to make them more attractive to users. That said, we're not going to get a major rework on tournaments anytime soon, so let's look at a possible near-term solution.
I've been gathering feedback and pitching out ideas when I have spare time as well as having conversations with the devs and even Matt himself to determine what can be done in the near future to make tournament entries more dynamic without detracting from the generally well-received changes that have already been made. To be clear, the scope of work for what I'm about to propose has been approved by Matt and I spoke to the tournament developer, @cryptomancer, and he agrees that it seems doable with minimal dev time.
Proposed Changes
If this proposal passes, the SPS DAO would like to request the Splinterlands team to implement a modified "energy" system for tournaments. The purpose of this energy system is to make which tournaments a player chooses to enter more meaningful as well as to create a new DEC sink for the SPS and DEC flywheel mechanic. It should encourage players to sign up for the highest level of tournaments they are qualified for while removing the incentive to join lower tier tournaments with smaller prizes.
The specs for this new energy system are as follows:
- Players have 2 tournament entries per day.
- One tournament entry is refilled per 12 hours.
- Players may choose to burn DEC or DEC-B to acquire up to 2 additional tournament entries per day.
- The price of the additional tournament entries will be 2,500 DEC or DEC-B each.
Author Notes
The purpose of the 2 tournament entry limit and 2 additional purchases per day limit is to essentially give players access to all 4 tournaments that are run per day without allowing tournament entries to be "banked" to prevent card swapping exploits.
The purpose of the 2,500 DEC burn is to encourage players to choose the tournaments they have the best chances of winning the largest prizes in while discouraging "smurfing" in lower tier tournaments with these same accounts which will likely be unprofitable.
Having to actively choose 2 tournaments per day (or 4 with additional purchases) should help to prevent players that are indiscriminately signing up for tournaments in which they have no intention to actually play.
Obviously this is solution cannot solve every possible problem, such as people using alternative accounts to qualify for lower tier tournaments, but I think it would be a noticeable improvement to the current tournament environment while providing a new DEC sink without rolling back the positive changes that have been made in the past year.
Honestly, my fear is that a game that was play to earn will become pay to play. I see more and more costs for players. The focus should be on bringing in more players so that tournaments become more competitive, not on bringing in more costs.
Previously every tournament had an entry fee and the proposed burn for extra entries is lower than many of those were. I'm not attached to this thing either way, I've been dealing with people asking me to bring back entry fees for months and I think this is a better option than bringing back entry fees though.
Was there a DAO vote to remove the tourney buyins and to make the other changes that were done?
Also, all of these posts that are done as an employee for the DAO, should have 100% of the rewards go to the DAO.
I have seen you say that there has been discussion about it and it isn't a big deal either way, I disagree, it is the principle.
You are paid $60,000 a year to work on behalf of the DAO, and these posts are part of that work. These posts add up and could easily total a few thousand dollars over the year, and are part of the value proposition of hiring for the position you hold.
If you are going to take additional DAO money on top of the $60,000 you are paid, that needs to be voted on.
This is the number you're looking for... feel free to go back and double check my math if you'd like. If you want to go make a proposal about whether or not I should delegate the post rewards, be my guest.
Again, whether it is $1 or thousands of dollars, is not an argument why it is okay for you to tip yourself extra DAO money for the work that you are paid very well to do.
There should be a DAO President account or similar type account where all these posts are made from that is owned by the DAO.
I find it interesting how you seem to be so principled about the technical side of things when we discuss any other DAO subject (such as our most recent conversation about Hive Power proposal/vote process) but in this conversation, where you financially benefit, you are not concerned about the technical side, and instead get defensive and dismissive.
If you want to be paid a bonus for the work you do on behalf of the DAO, you should be the one writing up a DAO proposal, because as of now, a proposal shouldn't be needed for the DAO to be the one to benefit from DAO paid work.
No and there wasn't one to add them before that either. The team handed off tournaments to me shortly after I took this position. I spent a few months hearing opinions in discord and running proposals and by the end everyone was pretty much tired of it and just bickering. Ultimately we passed a proposal to apportion rewards (which is how Alpha tournaments went away and we got 2 Random tournaments) and the rest was up to me to figure out. The team removing league level limits and adding forced advancement kind of led some of my thought process. I have 3 ongoing stake-weighted polls that I shared in the Tournament room on Discord you should check out since this proposal seems like it's going to fail.
Tourney entry fees predated SPS creation and thus did not need a vote to be 'added' as that was the Standard Operating Procedure for tournaments, which included legal expertise to ensure it would not fall into the gambling category.
just bring back entry fee . make entry fee like a deposit. those that don't play and flee can't get back their entry fee
each league has their own strategies. I wouldn't really consider it smurfing
I don't personally have any problem keeping things exactly as they are, but people have requested these issues be addressed and this is the best system I've come up with to find a middle ground solution. Voting against it is simply saying "keep things like they are" as far as I'm concerned. It's not going to bother me if the DAO rejects this entirely. That said, I'd suggest considering that there's a lot of people with a different perspective that actually do want something like this, which is why it's up for voting.
aye I have no problem either way. I was more sharing my thoughts on the proposal. I'll support what the community decides
This is the first idea I had. After thinking more, I do think that the energy system is more friendly towards the newcomers + it burns DEC from heavy Tournament players.
i dont like the energy system. we shouldnt punish people for playing more. there's other ways to burn dec. I know we are a web3 game but we can't compete against web2 games if we gonna restrict people from playing with energy. people can play hearthstone for 12 hrs + etc.
if they need something for newbies they can easily do that by restricting based on account creation date. dont think someone will spend 10 dollar spellbook to keep playing tournaments
Most Web 2 games (especially on mobile) use an energy system. Mobile games also tend to be the ones to make the most money. There are no perfect solutions that can make everyone happy. I don't have the statistics on user activities. I work under the assumption that @yabapmatt and others have a data backed reason to come up with these Proposals in the first place. These systems will have to be improved over multiple iterations.
i guess it depends on the game but what games are u comparing it to? If we looking at other TCG games, I don't see yugioh duel links, MTG, hearthstone. Even web3 TCG like gods unchained or cross the ages doesn't have an energy system. I mean people there can only play 10 games to earn their token but after that they can play as much as they want.
I agree that there is no perfect solution but I just don't think this proposal is the way to go about it. i think tournaments was a good way for the people that i enjoyed playing the game to not have to worry about not being able to play cause of no energy.
oh well i could be wrong. we will just see how the vote goes if people really think this is a good idea
I will be voting No for this proposal. This will only promote multi accounting and players splitting their decks. It adds more barriers to players that enjoy playing and using their cards. Personally, I like playing this game for Brawls and Tournaments and limiting players like myself to 2/day is not the way to go.
I get it, if this fails it's fine with me. I'd rather something like this than bringing back entry fees though personally.
This seems like a good move to. I've been doing all the tournements I possibly can and getting a fair bit of sps from them. I think its a bit wrong I haven't had to pay any entry fees
please, please, please stop adding barriers. company is already doing enough of that and driving away people.
not that it's a problem for me, because I only play selected GF tournaments. but this environment becomes more and more unattractive with all those changes.
simplification, fun, adequate rewards might be things to look into.
Agreed. I play mostly for tournaments and brawls. I buy a lot of cards to be successful and now I will be limited to playing 2/day or pay a fee. No thanks.
There's always another perspective... There's quite a few people that have complained that I removed entry fees entirely. This is a bit of a middle ground approach in my opinion. If the DAO doesn't like it though, they can vote it down. It's not going to hurt my feelings if this doesn't pass.
I personally liked entry fees more than what we have now. This proposal would be my least favorite version.
Thank you for participating in SPS DAO Governance @clayboyn!
You can place or monitor SPS Stake Weighted votes for and against this proposal at the link below:
Link to this Pre-Proposal
Updated At: 2024-08-06 02:25 UTC
That's only valid for DAO Tournaments, correct? Or also for third party tournaments?
Not that there are many non-DAO tournaments, but just in case :-D
I like the proposal. The limitation is not that hard, but makes you choose the tournaments that will probably have the best outcome, depending on one's skill- and decklevel. Up to Silver-Level, you don't even have that many options, so there's no barrier for new players.
The idea would be to do this for the DAO Sponsored Tournaments.
Since players can often register far in advance for suitable tournaments, I think an entry every 12 hours won't much reduce those wanting to "stuff" or "smurf", and they will still be pretty commonplace - I'd suggest reducing to only one free signup every 24 hours (with ability to bank up to 4 days worth), which would still give players a lot of flexibility to participate in tournaments that match their deck/skill level
I considered whether or not I think it's very exploitable and this is actually something that I thought about for a while. Theoretically, yes this is a potential exploit, keep in mind the cards have to be moved around and played with... so hypothetically you could have one account playing and another account trying to register for tournaments, but you'd still need to qualify for the tournaments (have SPS and CP) and the cards would have to not be on cooldown to be played. So it's theoretically possible someone could get a few extra entries this way, but I'm not really sure how much the hassle would be worth the minimal fees (2,500 DEC/DEC-B) to not deal with it.
I think it would only really be feasible to attempt this with the low end tournaments and the prizes and entry requirements for those are already so low that it's easy to circumvent either way. Also how many people have multiple accounts with all soulbounds + glads?
I'll take this into consideration, but like I said it's already been on my mind and I just don't think it's that serious of a concern. I think 1 tournament entry per day may be overkill.
That's fair enough. At any rate, this type of measure will reduce the most prolific tournament smurfing so it's definitely a step in the right direction. Appreciate the dialogue Clay!
I do have some "big picture" ideas that I think could make tournaments about a bajillion times better (conservative real math number number) but realistically they just aren't going to happen in the near future... so I'd rather not spend time getting people's hopes up on things we have no ability to deliver on. Big picture I'll keep pushing for them.
Seems a reasonable enough tournament improvement.
Just a thought, would it be possible to simply prevent a player entering a tourney if their cards were, say, maybe 30% over?
Like if you have mostly silver level cards you can only play up to silver, until you get, in this example, 30& of your cards leveled to gold. Once they are, you can't play silver any more.
Adds to the motivation to level up your cards too.
Not really. GF cards alone break that entire idea... plus there's the question of why you'd want to penalize partially leveling up your deck even if it can't be used in the tournament. I think it would actually motivate people to not level up cards. "I can go this far, but if I level up any more of my cards I have to go into gold and I don't have enough to level up all my cards."
You certainly know more about these things so happy to take your advice.
I like the idea of limited entries, but I think 12h cooldown is too low. 2 entries per day when there are on average 4 tournaments per day seems too much, especially assuming that not all players can join every tournament. Assuming you use different cards for differently level-limited tournaments it might just force splitting your collection between two accounts. Also what is not specified in the proposal is the maximum entries to stack up? Is it just two? Because that would incentivize daily joining up for tournaments over making a schedule for the week or however long ahead one wants to plan.
At the topic of benefit for the DAO, I doubt that farming SPS print brings in too many new people. I get the argument about card value being pushed with more earning opportunities, but this is at best an indirect benefit for the DAO, so why should the DAO pay for it? As the print will eventually end this seems like an additional expense that needs to be covered at some point by something else anyway, so what if ticket costs are not entirely burned and instead at least partly substitute the prize pool. At the very least this would prolong the SPS print runway and whether you reduce SPS emissions or burn DEC is probably not much difference in the short-mid run anyway.
In the mid-long run I could imagine this tournament energy being the "bet on me" currency for tournaments, where you can have zero ticket promo tournaments and on the other end of the spectrum high stakes tournaments which require a lot of tickets to enter. That way this can also be harmonized and used for non-DAO tournaments as well and people could actually try to earn something by offering exceptional prizes at high entry costs. I could imagine tournament organizers finding good deals on the market to offer high value prizes in exchange for a cut of the tournament entry costs. That way you could outsource tournament creation to semi-professional organizers instead of just having tournaments as SPS farming 99% of the time.
The purpose of the limited entries to address the signing up and not playing and card swapping. Technically players could schedule a few days in advance if they want to take a few days off. Someone else mentioned 1 entry per day, I'll take it into consideration and keep gathering feedback. As far as the DAO paying for it... the DAO is and has been "paying for it" for over 2 years now and has a few more to come unless something changes via proposal. It's part of the whitepaper inflation.
Sounds like a great proposal to me. I'm all for this since I am definitely part of the problem! Make me stick to two per day please!
Will we still be able to sign up for tournaments all at once and be limited to two per date or will the limit work like we can only sign up for two events each day no matter what date the events take place?
I suppose technically you could sign up for future tournaments, so perhaps I'll dial back making them a month in advance if this happens and it starts getting exploited. One of the big points to address is having people more present and conscious about signing up for tournaments, so you could sign up for the next day, show up and play, sign up for the next day and so on. If there's a day you really want to play more than 2, burn a little DEC or skip a tournament the day before.
Thanks for clarifying!
release new tourneys on a weekly basis. every sunday, the next set drops
The system we have is not that bad. That being said this ticket system could be better and not have too much tournament spam from the same accounts.
On another note, why is this post not delegating rewards to the dao?
The topic of delegating my rewards got brought up early on, but most of us involved in that conversation, myself included, didn't think it really mattered either way as the rewards are pretty minimal.
Either put a entry fee on in which generates some revenue like any normal tournament would do. If you keep paying out more then you bring is is the real issue here.
I'd also like to see more sponsored tournaments from other games etc that sponsor it for branding or can put up their own prices. This is a great "burn" or way to bring revenue back into the game. It should have been implemented long ago and might be too late now.
I don't think there's enough support to bring fees back. I'll make a poll when peakd lets me know the SPS stake weighted polling is ready and we can see what people think. The main reason I wanted to get rid of them in the first place is that they were more or less acting as a tax that no one had approved.
For example, some tournaments had like 20% of the pool relegated to simply refunding entry fees for people that didn't place high enough to get a prize... That means we're giving out 80% of the prizes we have apportioned in the whitepaper. If we want to do that, that's fine but we need a vote to reduce inflation, we don't need an unapproved tax on all tournaments.
I'm definitely open to suggestions on how entry fees could return. Like I said, I'll get a poll up with some options soon, I think the Peakd team is about ready to have SPS stake weighted polling and then I can make more dynamic, multiple choice options.