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(Edited 2012-10-07, 18:23)

To help.

To help.

While I am very much in favour of playing QW tournaments to win (rather than purely "for the lolz" there are some potential downsides to running tournaments fuelled by player cash:

-Increased risk of cheating as they seek every advantage they can get to get their hands on the cash
-Increased risk of 'lame' play or "unfairness" as you call it such as manipulating the schedule to your advantage, not breaking when a player is lagged or has some other problem (I bring this up primarily because of your column a couple of years ago where you were quite critical of Milton playing to win by killing Locktar when he was lagged): http://www.quakeworld.nu/blogs/2231/251/


In other words if you are telling everyone how great it would be if winning meant everything in tournaments, you also need to think about how that could result in much more unfairness from players which by your own admission insanely decreases the worth of such players. Do you want to have a scene populated by players that you have no respect for?

-People feeling that they have much more of a right to dictate how a tournament is run because they have funded it. I paid my €10 so I want rule XYZ implemented, I payed money so I want admin ABC dismissed etc, this is ****ing lame my best map is 123.bsp but it isn't included, meanwhile other players who haven't paid any more than me have their best map included
-Administration issues i.e. how is the money collated in escrow, how do people know it is same, if it is a reasonable amount like the €1500 you quoted is there a risk of somebody running off with it (don't forget how much drama money has already caused in the QW scene, such as Link owing all that cash to some other Norweigan player [Timmi?], arguments over delayed payment of LAN prizes etc)
-Risk of it devaluing other tournaments i.e. those who don't want to pay cash have to put up with sub-standard tournaments rather than the many free tournaments that we've managed to survive on for the past 15 years.

Hello HangTime,

1. About cheating: I actually didn't know it was even possible to cheat in quake anymore. Cheats in general are often quite easy to recognize, so I guess admins will have to keep an eye open. Other than that - I don't know.

2. If such an event would happen like the Milton vs LocKtar game, an admin has to step in of course. Just like in StarCraft 2, if one player drops, admins decide what to do and not the players. I.e player 1 leads 20-5 on dm4 with 2 minutes remaining and player 2 (with 5 frags) lags out, an admin is likely to either let the game go on or give the win to player 1. If scores are 10-10, 7 min left, and a player lags out, the game is likely to be replayed. Doesn't matter if it's fair or not - admin decision should be final and nothing to whine about.

CSing or any other GAMESTYLE is not unfairness or anything like that. I encourage CSing or playing "lame", hiding behind corners, doing anything you can to kill your enemy. As long as he is present in the game.

Donations are not equal to buying shares of the tournament. Donations is helping the tournament grow, helping the tournament attract new and old players, and helping motivating people to try to win. No donator should have any say in how the tournament is set up.

I hope this covered your concerns.

Yours,
Andeh

What?? I don't remember this
Anyone has more info on that? I remember there was some issue with ScaryM(??) and some tournament prize pool in the early days of QW. Apart from that, I was rather annoyed with my prize money from DreamHack. First they took like 50% in taxes, and then i didn't get my price money for 6 months. In the end i got it though and it was a decent amount. Not much though once you deduct taxes, travel expenses, and the fact half the pricemoney was given in junk hardware from some german gaming peripheal company.

I agree it's hard to introduce money prices in such a nonprofit and small scene as QW. It is better suited for bigger eSport events and games where you have proper organisations. Sure I would love price money in QW... but I want like 50.000 pricepool for 4on4 at DreamHack... not 1000 kroner.

Hell I think it might even be better to have Sponsors give away hardware as prices instead of cash for online touranments.

Regarding donating.. I would like to see some form of organized donate system for QW, 100% transparant. We would give out donations to community contributors, developers. Or help being a channel for projects, like donate page, where people could donate small ammounts to their prefered project.
Or how about very small subscription fees for quakeworld.nu membership.

Lets say 30 kroner a month that's like 3 eur. Money would go in part to cover hosting costs. We could give out yearly/monthly rewards to projects we think deserve extra attention. We could make a fond to help people travel to QHLAN, or help persons like Defcon-5 to come and do another movie

What would you get for the extra 30 kroner? Well you would have full transparancy in seeing what the money would go towards, a warm fuzzy feeling. Perhaps unlocking certain features on the site. Extra rewards. Just some thoughts

I can't remember exactly the drama between Link and TiMMi, all I remember was that Link owe him some money (think it was closer to 3000 euro), not entirely sure if this was from prize money.

There's also been another scenario where Zander97, who was a fairly unknown guy who didn't play the game, he entered the scene as an organizer and manager for Clan 9 back in the days. He organized arguably what was to be the largest official Swedish Championship in Quakeworld, the prize money was something like 20 000 euro, huge sponsors were involved and other commercial aspects. What happened? Well, the guy basically took all the cash and disappeared forever. GG Quakeworld.

Regarding the Link thing my memory is pretty hazy but basically my understanding was something along the lines of they were sharing accommodation but Link wasn't paying his bills, also I think somebody lent him money to travel to QHLAN which didn't get repaid. There was a big comment thread about it on the NQR site (buried in some random topic probably about custom maps) but I suspect that will hard to unearth now.

In terms of LAN prizemoney I remember mrlame telling me he was still waiting for 2on2 prize money by the time the next lan was starting or something like that (don't quote me). Either that or the tournament prize fund was lower than announced.

Heck I even went to a LAN in Sweden once (Reunion LAN) and won the 4on4 tourney but because there were fewer entrants than expected I never got any prize. Wasn't too bothered as I didn't go there to win money but again just leaves me with memories of failed promises on the money side of things.

I must say i always got my money straight away from QHLAN, Also got them straight away when I was in Russia
But more interestingly, what are your contentions on being a paying member of qw community? Where money could go to a range of things, running the sites, helping ppl abroad attending QHLAN, donating to projects?

Yeah that's what I think as well Para. I think the money would be better spent elsewhere than small prizes for duelers. Why not use the money to test advertising nquake.com and #qwrookie or whatever, etc.

Then setup donate options for those projects.
This blog/article is about donating for Hymn of Hope.

Does anyone know what www.quakeworld.net & www.quakeworld.com costs? I think it would be pretty cool to buy those domains =D

But anyway, I think a way to make a monthly donation to the quakeworld community in general wouldn't be the worst thing. We are no kids anymore and most of us have jobs so to donate a few euros per month isnt that much. Maybe the money could be used to hire a programmer, if there are things to be done which take just to much time for our volunteers. Stuff like that.

You can't buy domain already owned by someone else, duh?
Anyway we can buy qw.nu but it cost like 250 eur a year

Bps said it pretty well Money is needed everywhere, we could upgrade everything in Quake and give developers money for their work, fly in australians (reload )/americans to QHLan, fly in BuLaT, buy domains, bla bla bla bla. Money is needed everywhere.

HOWEVER; this thread is all about prize pool in a tournament and giving motivation to the top players. With cash prizes, tournaments will be more tense than ever, and even Milton will WANT to win it, and LocKtar won't show up hungover (or... dunno it's LocKtar).

Anyway, please stick to the topic =)

Yours,
Andeh

Although your discussions are very interesting i tend to agree with the original author to the topic. Please start another thread to continue the general donation idea discussions in.

Just gotta add;

if you have donated and wish to be named on the Hymn of Hope homepage, contact Zingao at #HoH @ quakenet.

I guess I'm taking a wait and see attitude. I don't think prizes unless they are substantial will do anything. If they are substantial who is going to be able to keep paying for them? Even if say you raise 1500 euro for one tournament and say dag comes back, what happens next tournament when there is only 200 euro? I'm not even convinced a big prize will get any old greats back or make top players focus more. Even at big money lan events in Q3/QL top pros have issues with drinking or staying up late or not playing 100% effort. I am just extremely skeptical money will change anything unless it's major cash $$$ on a standard basis over and over. It's like I said on the column there are QL duelers in NA who make major money and are sponsored so I assume their expenses and training are paid for. Yet the NA QL scene is dysfunctional and these large prizes don't seem to make any difference. You are saying money will keep top guys interested but I just don't agree. There has been big money in Q3/QL duel almost continuously yet most of the top guys have long since quit despite some of them winning many thousands of dollars.

Noone is forced to donate!

Nobody will think less of someone not donating, it's all up to oneself. The tournament participants and admins will of course love every donator, be it 1, 10 or 100 euros, but noone will have any bad feelings towards anyone not wanting to contribute with anything.

Yours,
Andeh

Thank you for all donations thus far! I will now bump this thread, as donations for the next edition of the tournament is now open.

If you wish to contribute to increase the prizepool, you can do so easily over at the donation page. Please help us make this an even better tournament! Any donation is MUCH appreciated.

Yours,
Andeh

(Edited 2012-04-18, 01:01)

UPDATE:

We have now added a Flattr-button. Flattr is an easy way to subscribe to the tournament.

Flattr: subscribe HERE!

Please visit THIS PAGE for other ways to contribute!

Yours,
Andeh

(Edited 2012-04-25, 00:47)