The Spoils Tournament Experience

Well, the big announcement from Tenacious Games regarding their Organized Play came this morning. And I must say......I am rather disappointed. You can read about it here.

Not on to be a pessimist, let's start with the good stuff. The Spoils World Championship is going to have the largest prize pool ever for a CCG or CMG. It's also going to be on a Caribbean cruise ship with all the players getting to go on the cruise for free. I know what you're thinking, what's not to like here? I actually agree with you, this may be the coolest thing in CCG history. This part of the STE I actually think is incredible, it's everything else I don't like. Obviously, Worlds will be invite only and the only way to get invited is to accumulate a certain amount of points. The only way to accumulate points is through a bunch of tournaments that will give no one a reason to play in them if they are not within driving distance. Let's just cover them all shall we?

The $200,000 Invitationals

This is a series of 200 $1000 tournaments. But since they are divided up into regions, everyone will only get to play in three or four. Not that you would travel to play in a tournament where first place is barely a week's salary. Or a Nintendo Wii. That you already have at home anyway.

The $300,000 STE Summer Tour

Okay, this sounds promising. But then you read on. 10 straight weekends of $5000 tournaments with 3 $500 tournaments leading up to the big weekend. The winners get to ride around on a bus with the all girl Spoilers. This would have been so much better if they had taken the $50,000 from the "main events", the $15,000 from the lead-ups, saved the money they spent on the tour buses and paying "the Spoilers" and just made the summer tour a couple of $50,000 events in each region. And the whole riding around on the tour bus thing is just a bad idea. The game is marketed to a more mature audience, but then they expect the winners of the $5k tournaments to be able to just drop their life for a week to ride around on a tour bus. Riiight.

$100,000 for Special Events

At the end of the article they say there will be 10 special events. So unless my math is lousy or the payout will be different at each one, that's $10k per event. I think VS. has already shown us that $10,000 alone is not enough to entice pro players to travel to these events. Throw in that two of the special events will be at GenCons Indy and SoCal, which happens to be the site of the only two American VS. Pro stops and that will hurt the attendance even more. I think this is another area that would have benefited from fewer tournaments and more money per tournament.

Overall, I'm not very enamored with The Spoils Tournament Experience. The game was supposed to be targeted toward pro and competitive gamers, but with the exception of the World Championships, the STE offers nothing a pro gamer is going to want.