Man I'm glad this isn't a pay to play system that @aggroed said many many times it was not.
Entry Fees
The larger Steem Monsters sponsored tournaments will have entry fees. The idea is to encourage only serious players to join. The entry fees will be quite small in comparison to the prize pools, and all entry fees will be used to put back into the tournament prize pools in the future.
I love the game mechanics and appreciate the effort to make this a top notch gaming entity. But I gotta tell you, if you plan on charging people to play in the diamond level and also gold foil tourneys to make sure they are "SERIOUS", then you guys must be smoking crack. People have been "SERIOUS" enough to invest hundreds in not thousands of dollars into your "f'ing" cards. And now if I don't pay to enter a tourney, I'm locked out of getting the part of the prize pool that has been promised since day one? (btw, it was originally promised to be 70% of card sales by @aggroed, then later moved way down when they had to put in in writing)
You guys have now officially earned the "Take a great idea and fuck it up award" two times! First by producing so many reward cards that people are using bots to trade them so they can BURN them. What the hell do you plan on doing with the 275,000 Rusty's still yet to be issued???? Then setting up a rule that is so blatantly anti-"anything but hardcore insider", that you have shown yourselves to be stupid at best and greedy pigs at worst.
As you can tell, I have had enough. And for that to happen, you have no idea how bad you must be. So yes I know this is burning some bridges, but the bottom line is you need to know. If that means you consider me not welcome anymore, then so be it.
@yabapmatt, I don't know how much you are aware of the marketing fuckups, but @aggroed has failed miserably in doing his job. I know you guys are partners, but you should take a hard look at all the people that have left. They have left for a reason. They have sold for a reason. They stopped playing quests for a reason.
People like me tried to help you, but you ignore it. You think its only going to get better as you come out with better and better stuff. The problem is you don't understand (or willfully choose to ignore) the fact that "trust" is essential to success in any investment. You think because you say "trust me" that people should.
Well, guess what...
People did (and some still might) trust you... But you are losing that trust with every time you do something foolish like this. For 2 guys that value their company at $10 million, you should take a look in the mirror and see how many people you've pissed off. And rather than ignoring them or dismissing them, you should find out WHY they left. I have enough balls to tell you why, most will just go away quietly. Nonetheless, there are tons of lessons to be learned, and you continue to not learn them because you trust in the few "yes" people that you have around you.
I'm sorry to have to write this, I think both of you tried in your own ways. The mistakes are hard to ignore though, and the tendencies of your marketing department to be "elitist" is too much for me to stay quiet.
Matt, thank you very much for the delegation of your SP for all these months. I think you are a great guy individually, but don't have a handle on this marketing situation. I am ok with you removing the delegation since I don't feel that you will consider me a "good guy" after this. And I wouldn't blame you of course.
ps... I was promised by @aggroed that investors of the cards (equivalent to 500 packs) would be added to the Mavericks a long time ago. It was on "the list" as Aggy said. I invested over $10k in your cards which handily surpassed the 500 packs needed (and in fact bought more than 500 packs through KS too); yet I never got that Maverick status. Obviously I don't give a shit about the vote, but just pointing it out as its just another example of @aggroed's poor marketing. It sends a signal about what he cares about and the LACK effort he makes to make sure ALL of your stakeholders are happy. (which is limited and lip-service and very apparent)
What happens when we have a million users and the devs hold a tournament with $1000 prize money?
Guys with nothing better to do and a low-mid range deck are going to throw their hat in the ring.
Why not? I could get lucky.
Suddenly we have 100,000 entries and the tournament takes 3 weeks.
There has to be some impediment to keep those with almost zero hope of winning, from entering.
I can appreciate you're disappointed, Dave. Just do yourself a favour and hang onto your cards.
Judging by the rollout tournament, rounds take about 15 minutes, so a tournament with 100,000 players in it would expect to be finished in about 4.5 hours - far less time than large-scale online poker tournaments take every day. Hell, there's a whole popular US site that never runs tournaments shorter than that. This is not a real problem.
Wow! What an exciting news worthy event.
Is Steem Monsters the future of online Trading Card Games?
Recently, Steem Monsters, a TCG run entirely on the blockchain held a seemless 100,000 player event with a prize pool of only $1000. More surprisingly it went without a hitch thanks to blockchain technology. And even more amazingly it took only 4.5 Hours to complete, whereas a manual run tournament of this size would normally take a solid weekend to run...
Whereas a 32 player high roller $1000 event is hardly remarkable.
Forgive me for chiming in, @mattclarke, and I don't want to impolite or rude, I'm just curious... Are you seriously still buying their BS? After all this time and every promise they broke? After all the things they said, and then just did the opposite?
What's wrong with them? Don't they deserve a chance, even though they don't have the means to spend 10k on a game?
1st round - 100,000
2nd round - 50,000
3rd round - 25,000
4th round - 12,500
5th round - 6,250
6th round - 3,125
7th round - 1,563
8th round - 782
9th round - 390
10th round - 195
11th round - 98
12th round - 50
13th round - 25
14th round - 12
15th round - 6
16th round - 3
How long is all that going to take?
We need people unlikely to win, to weed themselves out beforehand.
Matt, with all due respect because I have the greatest admiration for you, the argument that you have to charge people or else we get 8000 people in the tourneys is ridiculous. Everyone has an elo rating, why not let the diamond guys enter the diamond tourneys and the silver guys enter the silver tourneys. I don't think that is a stretch and would have many benefits (not counting stopping the destruction that this will bring in the number of players that will leave). You said "wait til we hit 100k entries" and I hope to hell that happens. But right now we have to deal with things as they are and they are at less than 500 at most (and shrinking if you are honest about it). I would suggest that they make policies for close to where they are and not where they hope to be, otherwise they will destroy even more confidence if it doesn't materialize.
And thanks for the advice on the cards, I think you mean it. I have admired your strength in holding through the ups and downs and I am very much like you. So you have my total respect and appreciation for your advice! :)
Thanks Dave, for your kind words. Its so easy when we disagree on something, to start flaming the person instead of addressing their argument.
This is an excellent example of the kind of quality conversations and people that are drawn to this place.
Imagine getting to that point with free tournaments, then starting to charge.
They can always reduce or remove that fee down the road; and nobody's going to complain.
I agree about the quality conversation, and thank you too Matt :)
I will be the first guy to be happy for everyone (despite my criticisms here today) if that happens. My concern is that we don't get there if the promises keep being broken. I overlooked many many of the other promises broken and felt they were just a learning curve and gave them the benefit of the doubt. From the KS last minute "80% off" sale that directly benefited Aggy's hand picked insiders (while I spent $1000 to get 50 accts and 50 gold Runts as my perk because I wasn't in the insider club), to the point at which he assured me that they would match the demand and the supply of these Reward cards (then they went 5x over).
I can overlook all that. But charging me to get something that I was already promised (paying to enter a tourney that I PARTIALLY FUNDED to have a chance at the prize), is something that is hard for me to get past. (it feels like part of my money is given away since I will refuse to pay to get something I already paid for). And on top of that, to say that somehow I'm not "serious" if I don't want to pay a fee, is insulting. Remember Matt, not everyone has the time or desire to play all the games everyday, so if I entered the tourney with my gold cards I would probably lose. I don't mind losing, but I sure am not paying to do so (AGAIN).
One last thing, this really screws up the value of the cards, particularly for golds. It has the opposite incentive than they had mentioned in the past. I guess at this point I don't mind that they go lower since they're so cheap, but there will be many that will leave as a result of this (see my feed if you don't believe me).
Obviously its not my decision to make, so we will have to see how it plays out. I will be rooting for you and the guys/gals I've come to know for sure. I have tremendous respect for many in the community and it saddens me that they have taken this turn. But I'll keep my eyes open and be the first one to say great job if they get that viral liftoff :)
I'm with you completely here @simplymike.