Proposal Tournaments are not tenable without cash prizes. This section will die.

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This is going to kill our competition. It has been killing it. We need to fix this.

For the decade I've participated on this website, there has always been equivocations, excuses, and pushback against cash tournaments. In my younger years, before it became more normalized in other communities, the difficulties of "paying minors" was emphasized. And then it was "there will be cheating". And then it was "who will put up the money"--the latter is probably the most honest.

The owner of this website, chaos, makes well over 6 digits a year. Zarel is probably in the 7 digits. The competitive allure of this website is what has kept the brand afloat. And yet we do not incentivize our players outside of pixels and custom avatars.

In my view, the best tournament of the year is the Callous Invitational which has a 2k+ prize pool entirely comprised of donations (which I think is a cool format, fwiw), and it is organized completely off this website.

There ought to be different prize formats; buy-ins, donation pools, SITE-ORIGINATED PRIZES. Hosts ought to be paid. Smogon is a uniquely terrible community when it comes to supporting the hosts, contributors, and players that maintain the website. We can't continue playing like this.

Hosts are burning out, the playerbase is stagnating. Everything feels so tired.

What can we do? Do we just quit playing competitively until things change? How do we demand more? We deserve more. Discuss here.
 

MANNAT

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Excellent post by dice, I really hope that this thread isn't closed prematurely because it truly is an important conversation that needs to be had. Communities much smaller than ours give cash prizes to winners of their tournaments. Obviously, chaos can't singlehandedly pay literally every person that contributes to smogon in some way, but we have to find a middle ground if we want to keep our community afloat. So many great players have quit over the years due to a lack of incentive to actually strive for greatness or win in this community besides personal pride and satisfaction and it would be great if we could do something about that. Not to mention, those incentives would simultaneously pull in new players that are high level players in other competitive strategy games or even just in different parts of the Pokemon community to pick up Smogon and compete.

I really implore that we have a proper discussion about this for once and try to make headway towards finding a solution. Thank you so much for making this thread.
 

xray

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Echoing this. It's about time (again) to discuss that, thanks for bringing it up, dice. The level of participants in tournaments / Smogon Tour is on the decline. SPL and other tournaments used to be the peak of competition. Nowadays, many of the best players and veterans don't bother signing up for it anymore and instead sign up to play Invitational cash tours on discord. Something needs to be done here if this site still wants to represent the elite of competetive Pokémon gameplay. But let's be real, PS/Smogon only really care about the casual mons player or am I wrong?! chaos Zarel
 

Heroic Troller

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If you guys want moneys so much, get an honest job and earn them. I'd rather soon give them to contributors if anything.
We had the Mazar thing happen with no money prize. The only thing this proposal would bring about is 9000% more ghosting, and people getting more frustrated over luck. If money is what motivates you to play pokémon, perhaps you shouldn't play pokémon but poker.
Trust me i didn't mean to be such a party pooper but it has to be said, being paid for your hobby is a privilege not a right.
 

awyp

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As someone's who has been part of this website for over 12 years, I can say I never went on hiatus or left + numerous people I know who used to play never left because they were like oh shit there isn't any cash tournaments. Your post will keep getting likes because who isn't going to agree and say "yeah why not get paid if we win a tournament / free money is great". I play the game because I enjoy it, if I needed money I'd go find a job. The site's traffic has been increasing ever since the inception of December 2004, it never has decreased because people had no reason to play competitive Pokémon anymore. You're still here playing in the SPL right? that hasn't stopped you since you don't get paid at all from Smogon?

There are actually more cash tournaments then there were 10 years ago, so that already is an improvement. I'm not disagreeing that there shouldn't be cash tournaments but it would be great if you can at least make one suggestion on how we can consistently have cash tournaments for each major tournament?
 

chaos

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My positions on Smogon and PS are a lot of work and I unapologetically make a living off it. The tours community doesn't actually know my salary and I prefer to maintain some privacy. A conversation about prizes is not unwelcome but I won't entertain any thread that comes from a place of disdain that I have a job.
 
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