SPS Governance Proposal - Update Tournament Formatting and Reward Allocations
Community Proposal #9
The purpose of this proposal is to start the process of finding meaningful reform of the current tournament structures to account for the release of Land and the Rebellion set. There will be future proposals related to tournaments to address other issues in the coming days. In this one, we're simply looking to get consensus on a fair way to breakdown the rewards distribution.
If this proposal passes, future tournaments will fall into one of 4 categories: Rebellion, Modern, Wild or Classic. Rebellion is for the current main set only. Modern is for the current Modern format sets, Rebellion and Chaos Legion. Wild is for all sets to be used. Classic tournaments will consist of only the Alpha, Beta and Untamed sets, which will be pooled together.
The reward pool percentage for each League and Format as well as the number of tournaments for each 2 week cycle are listed in the table below:
If this proposal passes, there will still be 4 tournaments per day. The total tournament reward pool will remain consistent with the whitepaper distribution details. As stated previously, there will be more proposals related to tournaments coming soon.
Author Notes
I feel it is absolutely critical to vote on how to apportion tournament rewards and reach consensus as this is something we've never done. The white paper outlined a distribution number, but I feel it is up to the DAO to come to consensus on how to apportion that inflation in responsible ways.
This proposal is not going to make everyone happy. Those hardest hit and most likely to be upset by this proposal will surely be those that participate in the Alpha GF tournaments. The Classic format is an honest attempt at maintaining some form of tournaments that should help to maintain value for the oldest 3 sets of cards while also taking into consideration that a large amount of those sets are now being utilized on land.
Is it a perfect solution? No, but after more than a month of discussion on how to reform tournaments it was the solution presented that seems to have the most support. This vote will help to determine if that assessment is accurate or not.
While trying to build consensus it became clear that tournament reform would have to be done on a per issue basis as there are too many conflicting interests to create a "one and done" proposal to reform tournaments.
There will be a proposal on how to breakdown prizes for tournaments. Currently the discussion group is split between top 256 places with half of those spots getting their buy in back and top 64 places which get much higher prizes. I'm going to be exploring another option altogether over the next few days to see if we can find a good middle ground and I hope those of you that are passionate will join the discussion as well.
Other issues that we should probably vote on are the CP requirements and the SPS staking requirements for each Format and League as well as whether or not we want to limit access to tournament by a player's league. Some players want accounts limited to one League below their current ranking, others want no downward restrictions. We'll keep working to build consensus.
Some of these decisions were made for us in the past. That is not how I want to operate. If this proposal passes, I will work on rebuilding tournaments and getting the new formats in place for early January to match the outline in the table shared in the proposal above.
Thanks for your time and consideration.
this is excellent, love the spreadsheet!
I support top 64
I think the proposal is a good compromise.
With so many of the old cards now working on land, I think there's no point in still having dedicated tournaments for a specific old set. The "Classic" tournaments seem like a good solution and anybody with a full selection will still have a huge advantage in terms of potential rewards compared to players that only have cards from specific sets.
Is Classic supposed to be the new Alpha? Why do we need a format that gives them a huge advantage in terms of potential rewards when they can just play Wild tournaments? Is it the potential for less rewards because Wild is more accessible that people are afraid of? I really don't see any point of a Classic format aside from this. Why not use that 20% of the reward pool for something like special event/holiday tournaments, more of the Open format ones, or redistribute it among the GF ones?
jumping in here cuz I saw Open Tournaments
@clayboyn is there any plan for Open Tournaments in this system? Like the promotional ones WB is doing?
Check out what @leveluplifeph, @mangomayhem and the TEAMPH gang is doing. They have a way better third party system for this.
personally not a huge fan of the GF tournaments being worth significantly less (20 v 15) than the RF tournaments, I think GF's have had the short end of the stick in pretty much every aspect of the game and they also cost significantly more when compared to RF counterparts. I would think these need to be reversed
but otherwise seems good to me
EDIT: thought on it and there's less GF Tourneys so maybe the numbers will work out differently than how I see it in the table - what would this look like in practice?
We're going to have to have a vote on how to handle this part. The number of tournaments is different per format. For example wild GF would have exactly 2x the rewards per tournament as modern GF but with half as many tournaments. Here's a rough draft of what I'm thinking (it's broken down for 4 weeks instead of 2 since rewards are calculated monthly):
This is super helpful to see, thanks @clayboyn - this gives a more clear example of what I was wondering about
I'm glad to see the Alpha tournaments going away, but I don't really understand the point of the Classic format. It's basically just Wild Lite. I'd rather see that 20% of the reward pool distributed among the Wild and GF tournaments in the other categories. I get that there's fewer GF tournaments than there are RF tournaments, but the proposed reward pool percentage still seems a bit low considering how much more significant the investment in GF cards is.
In the Modern format, there's 20% distributed between 20 RF tournaments and there's 15% distributed between 6 GF tournaments. All things linear (even though we know it doesn't work that way), that's 1% per RF tournament vs 2.5% per GF tournament. I'd be curious to see what the proposed payouts would actually be. Maybe it maths out well enough.
Check the reply on this comment:
https://peakd.com/spsproposal/@clayboyn/re-jakkal-s5ufy3
I think this is great! Also great for the future. The classic now doesn't have many card sets, but that will grow over time, making it a nice league.I also think modern leagues will benefit from this change! SUPPORT!
I'm good with this @clayboyn ... We can always amend it if we notice a big problem, but I generally support having more people participate and encouraging payouts deeper to touch more players.
I admit that I've been distracted lately and don't know all the nuances of it, but I'd vote for it. Encouraging new players and people that own the new set are 2 big priorities I have, I think that's how we grow!
good proposal
I think this new breakdown makes a lot of sense and is a great starting place to move forward with our competitive organized play model.
I like everything except "CLASSIC". I feel Wild is sufficient. As many others have posted it feels like Classic is the new AB tournament. Let them rotate and be used on lands where they can harvest grail until the end of days. Redistribute those rewards to Wild to make Wild more relevant and rewarding, but classic is just... strange. What are you going to do, rotate Chaos Legion into "classic" in less than a year? It will no longer be in standard, and everyone will have those "older cards", further diluting the "classic" card pool and flooding it with cheap CL. May as well just nip that bud right now and fully fund Wild with those rewards IMHO.
I think classic - especially as a ranked reward format - is not only a great idea but essential to ensure confidence in the project long term so we aren't all expected to keep spending thousands on more cards every few years. Rewards being disproportionally distributed to owners of newer sets - with the exception of occasional promos to launch them, I think will also put off new buyers when they see what happened to holders of earlier sets.
I would prefer to vote 1 issue at a time because there are so many aspects here that it is difficult to vote
It actually is a 1 issue vote, it just has impact on the whole tournament scene. The 1 issue is "how do we want to allocate tournament rewards." I get that it's not going to be popular with everyone, but it's also important to keep in mind that at no point have we ever had any say in how this is done.
The DAO has been printing and paying inflation for these tournaments for over 2 years and we never at any point took a vote on how we wanted to apportion these rewards. We've just been letting it be done the way it was done. This is the first time the DAO is taking a vote on how it wants to do this, if this proposal fails there will be another one.
My suggestion would be that if you don't agree with this one, then vote no and please join in the conversation for the next one. We had people discussing this one for over a month in Discord before it got enough consensus to go to a proposal. I'm pretty sure I was the only one even pushing to have a "Classic" mode. Most people just want Alpha tournaments gone. I felt it was a better compromise than just going full Rebellion/Modern/Wild. I don't even know if this will pass as is, so we could be going back to the drawing board.
I think classic is a slight for the alpha players, if there even are any alpha players around anymore. However, I think classic is just going to get overrun with the best new cards, so I would recommend having NEW/MOD/WILD/ALPHA with a split of 20/30/40/10. I think classic just moves the value to beta/untamed and devalues alpha, so I would keep the alpha designation with a much smaller prize allocation.
Within each category, RF/GF split should be AT LEAST EVEN, but I would prefer to see slightly more prize for GF since those are the more expensive cards, but that's just my two cents.
I think Classic with Alpha Beta and Untamed is fair, with no new sets ever added. Those sets were before the game really blew up. Certainly you'd at least include Beta surely. I don't see why the prize allocation should be smaller either. If you invested $5k in 2019 you should earn the same per victory as if you invested $5k in 2023. Allowing otherwise is just asking for card values being almost guaranteed to gradually depreciate over time.
While there are certainly some positive steps incorporated here, I think there are too many flaws with this proposal. As a result, I plan to vote "no" so that the proposal can continue to get refined and a better version can be re-introduced in a few weeks:
#1. As @jacekw pointed out, it seems like this proposal incorporates multiple issues which complicates the process. Other people I have talked to also feel like this is a multiple issue proposal.
#2. This also puts the cart before the horse (or cart before the kittens) in that we should decide on some fundamental aspects of tournaments (regarding league gating and how top heavy or bottom heavy the prize distribution will be). I don't think it's possible to make an informed decision on allocating prize % per league, until we first determine who has access to each league's prize pool. For example, if we look at regular tournaments there's a BIG difference between 9.5% (1.5% + 3% + 3%+ 2%) of rewards to Silver when only Silver league can access it, versus if Silver and Gold league can access it, versus if Silver, Gold, Diamond, and Champion league can do so. At the moment, possibly due to an error, Diamond/Champion can enter regular Wild Silver tournaments for cheap. So when we look at Diamond/Champion league as a whole, do they have access to the prize pools of Diamond, Gold, AND Silver?
Also, if we do decide on gating, is it going to address the longstanding issue whereby after a season and players drop in league, that they may enter tournaments in the lower league for cheap before advancing to a higher league?
So I think we should table this current proposal and first do some votes on the fundamental building blocks (like league gating and distribution schemes for Top X) before allocating SPS %'s.
#3. The Classic category is something that no one (or very few people) asked for and isn't really a good compromise. Some players (like @torran and @psilence) complain that this is just the new version of Alpha. Alpha players complain that Classic is really for Beta and Untamed because there is no benefit to using Alpha cards rather than Beta. If we want to come up with a compromise, I think we should go back to the drawing board and come up with something better because the Classic category isn't very good.
#4. There are also some obvious errors with the existing proposal. For example, with Classic, why do Silver league and Gold league have the same distribution? You would think that a higher league (which requires more cards and more investment) would not have the same amount as a lower league.
In fact, it would be better if the league proportions be based on some quantitative factor. Even though the previous CP system had its share of flaws, at least it had a numerical basis (whereby prize totals were proportional to CP requirements which were based on what was needed to have full decks). This proposal (and also a few past SPS proposals) have just used arbitrary numbers to allocate between leagues.
For example, instead of CP we could use market value or just use BCX required as a metric.
@jakkal pointed out that the difference between regular foil and GF also seems to be off and I agree, given the higher cost and scarcity of gold foil cards.
--> So as a result, I hope that this proposal gets voted down so that we can take the best portions of the proposal and refine it for an improved iteration. I definitely agree that the tournament system needs an overhaul and needs some changes, but this current proposal is a chaotic jumble right now (unless you want to justify why two leagues should have the same shares despite one league requiring a lot more cards).
That being said, the GF/RF distribution can be discussed in another proposal.
The elimination of alpha and the increase for modern rewards (reb+cl) was the main issue this proposal is trying to tackle.
What happened to wild silver tournaments is a mistake already recogniced by clayborn.
#1. @clayboyn @eldon1 If this were a single issue proposal (which it is not, as @jacekw has pointed out), it could be structured as:
Which formats should be supported in tournaments?
And the proposal would be Rebellion, Modern, Wild, and Classic.
(Optionally you could also include %'s for each of them).
And then later proposals would deal with the % between foil types and the % between leagues.
But instead, the proposal includes many additional aspects including:
In fact, as both jacekw and @jakkal have pointed out, the proposal surreptitiously hides that this is a pretty massive shift from GF to regular, under the guise of "oh we're just getting rid of alpha" as eldon1 suggests.
eldon1 states that we could just refine rf/gf in a different proposal but if this passes, it becomes the entrenched status quo and there will be a lot of inertia making it hard to change. Think of it another way, if it's simply "we'll fix it in a later proposal" then why don't you just initially structure it as "90% GF and 10% to RF and we'll refine it later on?"
#2. I'm really interested to see what Alpha players actually think that Classic is a "compromise to 'alpha holders."
On the surface level it could appear that way but it doesn't take long to realize that any benefits to Alpha are quite minimal and the primary beneficiaries of Classic is Beta and Untamed.
#3. @davemccoy @clayboyn The more I think about it, I think we actually should be going in the opposite direction. Wild is actually problematic for various reasons.
I think a better approach (and one that actually IS a "compromise") would be:
A. Keep the 10% to Rebellion and 45% Modern (and do later votes for distribution between foil types, between leagues, and how top heavy or bottom heavy the prize distribution is for Top X).
B. Instead of 35% Wild and 20% Classic, do something like:
i. 5% Alpha, 5% A/B/U, 5% U/CL, 40% Wild
OR
ii. 5% Alpha, 5% A/B, 5% A/B/U, 5% U/CL, and 35% Wild
Open Wild format is often touted as a way to keep old cards relevant but the problems are two-fold:
Power creep means that newer cards will overshadow older cards
Chaos Legion and especially Rebellion were designed and playtested with only Modern (whatever was Modern at the time) in mind. How Chaos Legion and Rebellion might interact with older cards and what impact it would have on Wild were not considerations. As a result, Wild is a bit of a random mess.
So if you really want to let older cards maintain some use case, then it would be better to keep (on a SMALL scale) some of the older formats. And you don't have to give a lot in prizes (I definitely agree that Alpha prizing should be massively cut down).
REPOSTING MY REPLY (ps we have way to many places these convos are taking place :) )
Byz that's a lot of information to unpack. I like that you are trying to compromise by 1) reduction of alpha only and 2) by including the other older sets (they need love too). I don't agree with you on not including the Rebellion, I think adding Rebellion to be paired with the older sets will INCREASE participation and also increase the fun.
I realize this is a very tough vote to reach any kind of consensus on. I think coming up with more formats is one way to reach a compromise.
We all should be trying to have as much participation as possible, and encourage everyone to go for these prizes. While at the same time it would be necessary to have some of the older cards in these tourneys, so that would increase the utility of those cards as well (thus future demand).
@clayboyn is of course in charge of this process, but that's my opinion. I don't even know if you can amend the vote now before it goes live in game, but I'd be much more comfortable if we had something that you and @jacekw could agree to, but at the same time ended the MASSIVE imbalance we have now. That's why reaching out to the various parties is how best to reach a solution. Its better to have a solution that everyone gets something they want, and at the same time gave something in return.
Whether we have enough time and enough will to compromise on this is the question. I do support the principle of fixing what's broken, the question for me is will you guys compromise and accept that alpha only players need to accept less that what they were getting so that we can all move forward? If yes, then I would consider voting against this (if its too late to fix it), if no, then I think this proposal is way better than doing nothing.
ps. the conversation regarding leagues and foils is another topic as well, and I agree it should also be part of that conversation. But we need people to think in terms of growth overall for me to give validity to the POVs.
I don't really understand what this is about. My braincell was consumed in the other proposal. I just want to say something about this:
"if you really want to let older cards maintain some use case, then it would be better to keep"
Why won't we errata the older cards and buff it? I normally quote Yugioh regarding this. In Yugioh, they have a ban list for certain cards. While these cards are techncally useless since they cannot be used, some still collect it because there are times they were allowed. Raigeki, a card that destroy all opponent's monsters, were banned for like 2 years, I think, then suddenly, it became usable since more cards (after the 2 years) became resistant to destruction effects, therefore, indirectly nerfing Raigeki.
Same as here but the opposite. We can buff some cards and nerf the others. That way, everything is still relevant. Haunted Spirit, for example, if only I can use it in Modern, I would. It is a beta card but even until today, still I think is one of the strongest Death card due to his Heal ability.
So, while the power creep is true, it really isn't true on all cards. I still haven't found a better card than Cerberus for low mana Little League. Actually, even though he is a beta monsters, he even got better with Tarsa, from the Chaos Legion.
I feel like we should make things easy and I don't understand why we are trying to jump through hoops to over complicate things.
Use the KISS technique and go with 3 formats: Rebellion (Current Block), Modern (2 blocks), Wild (all cards).
I don't see a need for "Classic" at all. Alpha holders were already rewarded for YEARS with all the benefits that came with those exclusive tournaments (and don't get me started on the SPS airdrop!), and now those cards can all be used on lands, or in Wild! To say that would Alpha cards no longer have a purpose is completely disingenuous since the GOOD cards will still be played in wild! I don't know of anyone who would say that owning Master of Waves, Lord of Darkness, or Spirit of the Forest doesn't give them a competitive advantage over those who don't have them, and therein lies their continued value. I feel like I've been saying this forever: Good cards are good, bad cards are bad. You don't want to create formats just to artificially add value to cards like "Animate Corpse" which are just outclassed these days.
The whole premise of "classic" existing to keep older sets relevant (or something?) is flawed, as that the cards are still playable in wild (see above). In less than a year from now when the new set comes out, Chaos Legion will rotate into it allowing the masses to play in this "classic" format anyways which certainly doesn't make it "classic" anymore.
It's not flawed because power creep is evident in Rebellion. It could be worse, but it's definitely there, and realistically there will be more of it in any upcoming mini set + future main sets. I think early investors deserve to have the chance to remain competitive in at least one format if they put thousands into the game, without being expected to spend more every year or two. They might have some strong Alpha or Untamed cards but not have spent anything on Rebellion or CL and therefore even with LOD or SOTF they might lack enough cards to keep up with Rebellion's meta changing abilities. I say this by the way, as someone who only entered the game at CL so most of my deck is CL, but who has picked up quite a lot of Beta and Untamed cards yet only has a single Alpha card.
When that happened first time, I stopped playing. Because programmers were so lazy, they did not stop people with 100+ accounts autoplaying, they just set leagues that pay you nothing, cards that can be made by players ( why did the price of all cards fall so much?) , different formatting... I think you gotta go deeper than this
Cause without Alpha-tournaments you have no usecase for this cards anymore, so Alpha-Card drop a lot in price.
Cause without access to modern tournaments you have much less usecase for untamed-cards, so untamed cards drop a lot.
Cause with Rebellion-Set people realise that Chaos Leggion cards will go out in roughly one year from the modern set, so Chaos Leggion cards drop a lot.
All sets together: Cause every edition should be stronger than the edition before old sets loose usecases even in wild-format. Just think that the Alpha-Edition has a maximum of 7 Mana, Chaos Leggion was already at 15 Mana and with Rebellion we have even the first monster with 16 Mana (don't know if even more will come) and with all this high mana-matches use-case for cards with maximum 7 Mana will decrease and decrease.
Other games (like pokemon) value old editions - Splinterlands doesn't do and this hit the whole ecosystem as every investor know if he buy today Rebllion for a huge price he can sell them in 2 years only for a very cheap price - How this can be attractive ?
Seems like a balanced approach, Clay, so I will vote for it.
#spt
#pimp
I really don't have a problem with the proposal, but I do have an issue with restructuring it using the proposal system. I can see tweeks done, but a full rebuild? with many of the voices looking out for their best interests (as it should be). The problem, though, is that this system won't really create a fair system. The fair system should have been implemented and presented as a fiat accompli. and then bring up specific friction points using proposals.
Here's my point. For myself personally, the only issue I really had with tournaments was the bots and the insane rewards for some of those Alpha tournaments. I read above that many people were feeling a similar way. You really didn't need to do a complete rework to simply kill one tournament and then reallocate the rewards. And as far as reallocation, I really don't care as long as it doesn't have any crazy outliers (like the Alphas).
I say leave the tournaments alone as a system, but go in and tweak that system to be a bit more fair. adjust it over time, the scene will evolve, and it'll be organic and maybe more community-driven.
eliminad bots de todo el juego
Vote NO to this proposal. Vote to give MORE of the pot to the alpha/older card tournament prize pools!
Don't need anymore high P.P cards farming land. Keep them all in the arena where they belong! 🤣
.
edit: Wish you guys the best in getting the balance right. 👍
At a glance my vote is against because "classic" while I welcome it's appearance as a tournament format (it should be a ranked battle league too), it has a smaller reward pool. I will vote against anything that encourages power creep and gives greater rewards only to newer buyers. It's unfair as early buyers should have just as much right to reward as newer buyers. If you spent $5000 in 2019 you should earn as much per win as if you spent $5000 in 2023.
Against, don't want Alpha tainted with cheap Beta and Untamed.
They are OG cards for a reason diluting them doesn't benefit anyone, it made sense in brawls since some went to land, and having the tourneys not be filled and some SPS returned is fine it still provides a value to people willing to rent and utilize those cards.