Optioned prizes?

Unknown

After a short conversation with Zathrus, I've began wondering. Do you think they should try out giving options as prizes? For example, if you placed top ten in a bracket, you could make your choice of prize from two or three options? Maybe you could pick from a Red Thor, a Yellow Wolverine, or an additional 500 ISO. That way there are less people giving up early because they know they won't get a useful prize. The only problem with this is it could possibly help the top players get exactly what they need easier. Idk. But, it's frustrating when you miss your prize by a rank or so, and end up with 125 ISO instead, because you don't need that particular prize at all.

mischiefmaker

In general I like the idea of prize options (who wouldn't?) but I'm not sure what problem you're trying to solve.

People giving up earlier because they won't get a useful prize: is this really a problem? I've yet to find a tournament where I don't want *something*.
Missing prizes by a rank: I've only found this to be an issue in the recent tournaments where I want to be #2 but not #1. Isn't an easier solution just to widen the prize bands? For example, taking the recent tournament as an example, you could have #1-3 get Invisible Woman, #3-10 get Spider Man blue, #11-20 get Spider Man purple, #21-30 get Spider Man yellow. Then people can aim for whatever cover they want most, and as a nice side effect, you don't have to worry as much about people collecting all the covers and getting bored. I feel like the lower bands are wide enough that you should be able to hit them consistently if you're playing in the last hour.

Also, having prize options means that you have to build UI for the player to select their prize, plus maybe some systems for handling prizes that have options, depending on how the current systems work. It seems like it could be a non-trivial amount of work -- I'd rather see the dev team spend their time on something else.

Unknown

mischiefmaker wrote:

In general I like the idea of prize options (who wouldn't?) but I'm not sure what problem you're trying to solve.

People giving up earlier because they won't get a useful prize: is this really a problem? I've yet to find a tournament where I don't want *something*.
Missing prizes by a rank: I've only found this to be an issue in the recent tournaments where I want to be #2 but not #1. Isn't an easier solution just to widen the prize bands? For example, taking the recent tournament as an example, you could have #1-3 get Invisible Woman, #3-10 get Spider Man blue, #11-20 get Spider Man purple, #21-30 get Spider Man yellow. Then people can aim for whatever cover they want most, and as a nice side effect, you don't have to worry as much about people collecting all the covers and getting bored. I feel like the lower bands are wide enough that you should be able to hit them consistently if you're playing in the last hour.

Also, having prize options means that you have to build UI for the player to select their prize, plus maybe some systems for handling prizes that have options, depending on how the current systems work. It seems like it could be a non-trivial amount of work -- I'd rather see the dev team spend their time on something else.

The only way to widen prize bands would be to have 500 or 1000 man brackets (as opposed to 200). Of course that opens up some other problems (namely, newer or even average players cant compete with the big boys).

Unknown

I've suggested before that you let the player choose the reward tier they want, from any of the options at or below their current tier. So if you came in 1-3, you could choose the prize for 4-15 or 16-25 instead, etc. Doesn't completely solve the issue, but I think it would help.