Challenger Circuit Prize Pool Is Too Top Heavy

The announcement of the Challenger Cup for S7 was very positively received. After all, being able to make 40k a year in SML is quite impressive but I believe that is a poor representation of the whole of the prizing for the Challenger Circuit.



With Season 7 the SCL and the bottom 2 SPL teams have been removed. This is going to lead to many more players looking to try and get a Challenger Circuit spot. Many of these players are very good and could arguably be SPL caliber or very close. NA SML had three very competitive teams last year and EU SML was very competitive nearly top to bottom. SML teams routinely took games off SPL teams in S6. The point I am trying to say is SML last year was very competitive and had a lot of good players. It is going to be even more competitive this year and have even more good players.



The problem is the prize pool is very very top heavy. Teams that finish 3rd-6th in their region get 1.4k a year per player. If one does not go to a single LAN they get 1.4k a year. It is entirely possible with the large influx of new talent that teams that consistently showed they were competitive could get just 1.4k a year.



A hypothetical for NA CC:



Hype Unit SCL, Hype Unit SML, SnG, Armada, SPL drop outs, assorted SML players/ranked players.



There are 6 teams here. Five of these six teams would likely very competitive with lower tier SPL teams and certainly not deserving of 1.4k a year.



EU CC I can't comment on as much as I don't know as much about the EU scene but EU was a more top down competitive scene than NA last year and some previous EU SPL players will be going back to EU leading to similar problems.



I like the general idea of making it more prize pool oriented and adding back in relegations. Both those are good things for keeping people's drive high. But the amount of grind needed to get top two will be a pretty decent amount. And say if one doesn't get it in any of the four phases in that year and just gets 3rd or very close to top two but not top two that person is in a very poor spot. It is a very hard thing to justify scrimming 3-5 days a week for 1.4k a year while working a full-time job or going to school.



I also think in general taking some of the prize pool away from LAN's and back to online play would be a good idea. It doesn't have to be a 10k salary with no prize pool incentive or anything that extreme. Just a distribution that doesn't have one team potentially making 40k a player and 8 teams potentially making 1.4k a player. That's too top heavy.



After talking to some other SML players we came up with a rough idea for what we would like a potential “new” distribution to be:



Top Open Circuit doesn’t go to LAN, instead have 3rd place CC go to LAN. I suggest this because the CC next year is going to be absolutely loaded with talent and will result in the LAN games being better/more deserving/better teams at the LAN. And with relegations back I believe there is enough of an incentive for players to grind Open Circuit. Then have a prize breakdown of per team per phase:



1st LAN: 30K

2nd LAN: 15K

3rd/4th LAN: 10K

5th/6th LAN: 7.5K

4th Online: 7K

5th/6th Online: 5K



This works out to the same total prize pool as the previous distribution, but it makes it so the lowest a player could make per year is 4K and the max a player could make would be 24k. I believe a prize pool along these lines would lead to a much healthier amateur scene. I also like this because it takes away the incentive of some players to just sit in CC and not try and advance to SPL as their max earnings caps below the minimum of SPL (For example a team of all SPL players could (completely hypothetical) just sit in CC and not have an incentive to try for SPL if they could make more than the min on a SPL team.)



NOTE: In this scenario 4K per split that was assumed to go to the top Open Circuit teams that go to LAN was just given to CC teams. Taking out 4K per split and giving it to Open Circuit would be perfectly fine as well.



And again, this is a general idea that we came up with. It is much more balanced than the previous distribution and this format having 3rd CC at LAN would lead to much more competitive LAN’s than top Open Circuit.





TL;DR: The proposed Challenger Circuit prizing is far too top heavy. I generally like adding relegations and making it more prize pool oriented but the prize pool's current state is too much prize pool and too little guaranteed.



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