Thoughts on Improving Community PvP Tournaments

[Lacomus]

Over time, both the participants and myself have discussed ways to make the existing unofficial tournaments I’ve been hosting on Showdown more appealing for a wider audience. At the moment, these tournaments run with a 1M buy-in, and we consistently attract around 15 to 20 players. While this shows there is interest, the reality is that the overall prize pool isn’t that compelling. As a result, players (both new and more experienced), don’t feel the tournaments are quite worth the time investment, despite the matches themselves being enjoyable...we’re currently stuck on how to meaningfully improve this.

 

Our thought process. We’d likely keep a buy-in (whether 1M or adjusted). It helps maintain match quality and ensures players have some skin in the game. We may run fully free tournaments in the future, but for now we believe a buy-in helps preserve competitiveness. To elevate these events, some form of sponsorship could make a huge difference. If moving tournaments from Showdown to PRO is what’s required to make sponsorship possible, I believe players would be willing to make that transition.

 

Sponsorship doesn’t need to be anything specific or fixed. It could take many forms, such as: High quality PvP Pokémon as prizes, cosmetics (including sellable ones), additions to the prize pool, or any other form of support that adds incentive and excitement. We’re not here to dictate what we “deserve” or request anything unreasonable. Any level of support would be appreciated I think...if it helps bring these tournaments to life and makes them more attractive to the wider PvP community.

 

If this is something you’d like to see, consider leaving a +1, along with your thoughts or suggestions. Player feedback and interest would go a long way toward showing that this is worth exploring further. The goal here is simple. Reignite PvP tournaments and make them something players actively look forward to again. If there’s enough interest, I plan to host tournaments during every major in-game event (when I'm able to and have the time). The next one coming up is the Valentine’s event. Maybe this could be a good opportunity to try something new.

 

Thanks for reading, and I appreciate any feedback. Positive or critical.

[Tgbnamish]

+1.

Edited 1 hour ago by Tgbnamish

[Agresivity]

But for that we had the summer tournament that prices we're juicy before, imo we should bring that back instead of sponsoring tournaments all the time, once in a while could be cool and very attractive for most players but for me what they should bring back are winter and summer tournaments like before. But overall +1 too

[Yakuzah]

My 2 cents, 

I love the way you are hosting them so far, replays were interesting nonetheless, however, I see this logic:

- High Buy-in = only players confident enough to win it will participate. (This leads to small tournaments with few TOP players).
- No buy-ins = Not sustainable in the long run unless sponsored in other ways (people donating for the sake of having a tournament).

So, I see a solution here (more like an idea):

What if you do low buy-ins, aiming for the max number of players, add rewards all the way for different things, or right away giveaways between the participants, maybe more chance the more rounds you win... 
And to complete the funding and for the sake of having a big prize pool, you work with Guilds. 

Pvp guilds could donate to a tournament, specially if that makes most of their members play (Not just the top players from each guild).

Where I would love to land with all this is with a big tournament, where everytime you host one it is like a big event. You get 100  ish people playing, does not matter the level, everyone has the chance to win something and if in the way they end up on the top cut, they made well worth their fun investment.

Looking from the other side of the scale, from the top players point of view, I understand doing more rounds could be more "work" but Ideally you want to win a tournament beating everyone and the best ones, not the few that are ok risking X ammount of Pokedollars for fun. Also, the bigger the tournament, the bigger the audience, making it possible to scale if things goes well. 

Sorry for the long wall of text, again just droping my 2 cents, hopefully this helps in anything.

PD: I'm just thinking out load ways to get "sponsorships" from guilds instead from the game itself

 

Edited 9 minutes ago by Yakuzah