if it's just a one time payment for a season, 25 should be the bare minimum. if this community wants a decent league and additional resources provided by cevo, it should consider paying more, assuming the money is going to the right place

a breakdown of where the money is going would be useful

Why not put up a new poll asking what each individual player would like to pay for the first season of CEVO? People could input their own amount, you'd get more accurate data from the average of that poll, and it seems less biased (but I'm no statistician, nor a market researcher). You could even do a follow up question asking what they'd like to pay if, hypothetically (and hopefully!), in a couple seasons, CEVO completely dominated the NA scene and literally everyone in ESEA atm switched over.

We are reading these forums so no worries on what is said, your voice here and in our forums are recognized

i think paying ensures that people are competitive and actually play. I remember I had a cevo team a few seasons ago, and we got sooo many ffw's just because people signed up and didn't play.

thats why i want people to have to pay a non-joke amount of money, i think 20 is good per player personally.

I'll just assume that you aren't trolling Mr. Slin.

To build off of what Hawkeye is saying: More than simply testing the degree of commitment or interest, they're trying to market themselves (or Nahanni, wisely, is trying to market it as) a league which cares about what the individual players want. Why? Because the whole possible "exodus" was based off of discontentment with the way ESEA was doing business, ie, coin mining without your knowledge or consent, etc. So the response from CEVO? Doing things with your knowledge and consent. In truth, this isn't what CEVO is doing but what Nahanni is doing because she realizes a lot of the issues that people had with ESEA.

Simpler:
Problem -> understand problem -> response to problem.

I don't really understand all this ranting and complaining, honestly.

.

You don't have the ability to scrounge up 10 dollars twice a year and then 7 bucks a month?

the point is i dont wanna pay money to play a free game :[]
edit: oops i take it back

To my understanding, this poll basically asks how much money we'd like to pay into the prize pot. Most players probably don't care about the prize pot, and any extra money paid into it is purely symbolic support for the league. I believe that a league fee is mandatory in order to ensure commitment and competition, but I don't think the $ amount is actually important (provided it's not unreasonably low or high).

I'm not particularly interested in paying extra into the prize pot, but I am interested in paying to directly support and improve our league. As of now (assuming my info is up to date) CEVO plans to provide the structure for the league, handle the money for the prize pot, and provide anticheat. I would happily pay $25 or more if it meant the money would go towards paying writers covering the divisions, official league match servers, periodic events similar to the Zowie Invitational, and hiring enough league admins that all problems can be resolved before they significantly effect matches.

I think that these are the areas in which CEVO needs to be strong, because they are where ESEA is weak. They dropped coverage for everything but invite, have unreliable servers, have no extra events, and only two admins to cover every division. I understand that it's a lot to throw together before next season, and CEVO probably isn't prepared for these kinds of steps yet, but I think that this poll we're answering is asking the wrong question.

I would still be happy to pay more this season for the above services, even if they don't begin until the next one.

I still think the prize pool should scale with the difficulty of the division. Because if its the same for all leagues what would happen is you would get a team of scumbags that stomp the lowest div with alts because it's not worth it to play in the higher ladders.

so you wouldn't pay money to join a basketball league or to enter a race?

I have great news! You don't have to pay money to play a free game! Unfortunately, you have to pay money if you want to play in some leagues, mainly, the leagues which offer, when you win, some prizes which is paid for, you guessed it, by the money you put in. Crazy.

get a visa gift card you have 1.6k hours in the game i think you can hold off on the soda fund.

Money isn't an incentive for most of the people in the bottom division. For me, the money is an insurance that I'll actually get a good game. $5-$10 is a decent amount to make sure a player is going to invest some amount of effort. No one is going to pay more for this than ESEA, when one of the biggest complaints for ESEA was the money wasn't actually getting you anything. Premium is completely a waste. If you want to beat ESEA, just undercut them by having a $10 league fee and no premium

The only ACTUAL data you get from something like this is the difference in popularity of the choices.

However, that gives you solid data.

What this has found:
Cheaper=better. |_______________________SURPRISE_____________________________|
Community of try-hard psuedo-intellectuals.

My understanding is that with the exception of a few Higher level esea teams, this seems to be the ugc-open league. Which, could be a very good league, given that the prize pot is valuable enough. The issue that arises is free league vs pay league. The UGC folks are in an F2P league, the ESEA folks just want a service that isn't going to put nigh-malignant software on your computer.

Which brings us back to CHEAPER=BETTER.
The good news is, as a business major, you should understand that if you overprice a service, nobody takes it. Thankfully, this gives them a general idea that 20 is pushing it in the eyes of the community.

while ultimately not the best way to determine the price, it has determined that they indeed don't care as much about the prize pool, as they do a league that isn't esea and is pay to play
Now they can do legit market research, and figure out the best price for what the product actually is.

You see, we set up a very, very strange dynamic in this community. We bitch because there isn't any money in the game, but are also hard-pressed to put money into the pool.
Makes polling us a little difficult.

hey guys here's a few thoughts (i managed to read through this thread at a staggering 919 WPM but i'll only have about a 70% accuracy rate at that speed so forgive me if i missed some points in these essay length posts on the intricacies of modern economics):

It seems the main desire to switch to a new league has come from the perceived untrustworthiness that ESEA has displayed in the past year. The main points of value that ESEA has are: multiple skill divisions, stat tracking, automatic STV recording, a client to prevent cheating (lol), and a LAN (if you play in the 99th percentile of players, so it shouldn't be relevant.)

I can't speak to the efficiency of the client, or the existence of any demo recording / stat tracking on CEVO's website, but as far as having skill divisions in place to ensure good competition, CEVO seems to be making that happen.

But then I get confused at this strawpoll. Why on Earth would you ask consumers what they would be willing to pay??? Mr. Slin kindly calculated the price for playing a season of ESEA in open at $31. So why are peoples opinion's being collected as "market data?" (LOL). All CEVO has to do is have multiple skill divisions (open, im, main, invite) that cost less to join than ESEA. This goes for both HL and 6v6.

In addition, a free to play division is nice and could potentially take some players away from UGC, but IMO an entry fee is the only thing that will make people give a damn about actually playing instead of FFW'ing after their 4th match. Have you ever joined a free fantasy football league? How many people are still playing halfway through the season? Yeah.

Also Strawpoll is an excellent and trustworthy site that is not susceptible to vote manipulation in any way - http://strawpoll.me/894234/r/

On the topic of "I dont wanna pay dolla" - I've been in two seasons so far, competitively. The first one was UGC, and I remember maybe one match where we didn't get mad about some bullshit the opposing team tried to pull on us - whether it was fulltime heavies, playing like idiots, trying to get the FFW, or just plain not showing up. Last season I moved to ESEA, and I distinctly remember only one match where I legitimately got mad about the other team - and the week one client bullshit had a lot to do with what happened, so I'm not as mad about what happened in the end as I was back then.

Putting money into the equation changes your mindset immensely - suddenly you are invested in it, and pulling bullshit that could get your match overturned seems like a much worse idea because you've actually put more than your time into the ring. I really don't want to see a free division/open to be free. Leave that to UGC and make it the learning grounds it already is.

just make the divisions cheaper than ESEA

I'd pay 10 bucks a season for open max.

Tonight, on In This Thread!

• Nahanni and CEVO ask how much money people want to pay for video games
  
• People say "not much"
  
• SLIN indirectly voices his support for ESEA and/or pleasuring lpkane's butt

--------------------------------------------------------

Seriously though, what's all the fuss? CEVO has stated time and again that this league is not part of their business model; they make all of their money through their actual business.

Given that, this isn't "market research" because they're not selling anything, they're funding a prize pool for the players. As others have mentioned here and there, this poll is essentially asking how much people would donate to a prize pot. Not really sure what's missing there.

The answer is nothing for everyone who isn't a playoff contender. I'm a shitty player so I get nothing out of a prize pot. People are okay with a league fee because it makes people approach the game differently, and most people are perfectly fine with $5 for a bunch of ggs over the next few months. But $20 so the exinvite player who made a team with his friends can roll our team and then win the division is retarded. Make open cheap as shit, since the money is way more symbolic than anything. Invite and Main could have larger prize pots and donations and shit since (theoretically), any given team should have a reasonable chance of winning. Open and to a lesser extent IM aren't as well put together, lacking a round robin format and given Open's large skill range.

Not sure how that's different from ESEA...

The only other benefit we got were provided servers, which were good an bad: good when they weren't all booked and did't have ping/dc/etc issues, but bad when they did.

It's hardly symbolic. It's an investment that commits people to actually playing instead of forfeiting whenever the time-frame interferes with breaking bad or whatever. Unless you can find something symbolic that people can commit to?

force people to wager their hats
I only race for pinks yo

$20 isn't exactly a weighty sum. I'm sure a lot of us have spent more on steam games that we didn't bother to open. The actual investment isn't that severe, but it's still enough to weed out people who just want to sin up and fuck around, and people who aren't serious enough to bust out the credit card. The compound of 5 other people paying is also a decent psychological incentive to at least try.

Copying ESEA is probably not the best idea. Providing the average player with a better value + not stealing my identity is a very good business idea. Making the bottom half of open only pay half as much into the pot would at least make me feel better when I end up with another season where I don't win a round.

ESEA does suck a lot of money out for features that we don't use. If CEVO is just gonna make me pay that same amount and put it in the pot that I'm never going to see, the actual benefit is fairly minimal for me. The online upside is the teams at the top who were gonna roll me are gonna try harder since the pot is bigger. Seeing as the actual benefit for the lower level players is nonexistant, we're now faced with the dilemma of signing up and paying for CEVO, a league that very few players have shown support for, or ESEA, which at the very least, I know people will be playing in. CEVO has to give a large, and strong motive for people to abandon ESEA, and these players need to come from every level, not just play off winners and good players. So far they haven't shown a good incentive for low open players to join their community over ESEA. Making their price point lower would be a solid advantage

The benefit for lower players has been, and always will be, to improve. You don't get better winning UGC _____ 5 times in a row, just as you don't get better cashing in an Open check four seasons straight. You get better playing against better teams.

Now, given that the actual cost for a season of ESEA is something like $30-40, paying half of that to drive yourself and others to win really isn't that much of a stretch, is it? And if you don't think you can compete in CEVO/ESEA Open, then why play there in the first place? Either you want the competition, or you don't, is what it comes down to.

i would say anywhere between $15-30 for such a long timespan of a tournament

in fighting games, i think the most i've ever paid for one tournament is $30 (pot + venue fee), although that doesn't include fare to get to those places in the first place lol

What do you think they expect? Everyone to want to pay $25 along with ESEA's prices to play in a second league? Remember that most of us are not willing to ditch ESEA for a brand new league with no certainty?

I put $15 because I would be willing to spend $15 this season. If, in a couple seasons, CEVO is working out, has attracted some top teams, and is actively planning a LAN, and they want to raise it to $25, that's fine, but I'm not willing to pay ESEA premium + ESEA fee + $25 for a new, experimental league. Sorry if that ruffles feathers.

its for a fucking season of tf2 how about hustlin abit and getting some sweet ca$$$h
and slin is right why would you want the people to choose what they wanna pay? as long as you're cheaper as esea they won't really question it anyways
and eee & maybe some other ones what the fuck are you talking about? you know what you get for paying the money? a good league thats what you pay for, so as long as they make a good and functioning league your money isnt only going into a pricepool that you dont see

god damn i dont really care about na but what the fuck