b4nnySeeing as there is no way to force people to play in and pay up for any division, sandbagging will always exist. Perhaps lowering Invite fees would have some impact, but almost certainly the best way to tackle it would be to increase the incentive to play in Invite instead. For example if you made more money than the winners of Open regardless of your placing in Invite, then you'd probably get many more of those people who are wasting their talents in lower divisions to tough it out in Invite. This would either take a complete restructuring of the prizes and fees for ESEA TF2 or a significant influx of cash. But of course, we are lucky to have the little prize money we already have so its kind of a pipe dream.
Not sure exactly how to interpret this but it's already the case that the minimum prize from invite (namely, fourth place: $2100 per team, or $2590 subtracting fees, which is still around $430 a person) is bigger than any of the prizes in open or IM ($1500 and $1000 respectively, or $250 and $166.66 each). Getting fifth place or otherwise narrowly missing playoffs does suck though because you have a net loss of $510 per team (not to mention the time investment from scrimming regularly and starting matches at 11est) with nothing to show for it.
This could also be interpreted as having invite teams that don't make playoffs get a smaller cut of the prize money as an incentive to finish the season and get some sort of reimbursement for dropping $85 a piece, but I don't think that would be very wise. For example, if it were the case that everyone won money regardless of their place you could have last place teams that coast all season with no incentive to get better because they know they will already get money, even if they don't scrim and are terribad.
https://play.esea.net/index.php?s=news&d=comments&id=14846 (most recent prize breakdown I could find on google)
speedyplaying open for "money" is pretty sad
As others have said I doubt anybody has played strictly for the money, if you wanted money you would play overwatch or get a real job with an hourly wage. As far as I see it it's perfectly fine to have fun with your buds in open and collect a check afterwards. My first season of open (s17) ended up with dingo+5 vs hero+5 but nobody complained on the forums or got butthurt about it. The way I saw it, it was a good thing because it gave my team the opportunity to play teams better than us and give us a challenge. It's like scrimming teams that are in a division higher than you (in playoffs for example when it's harder to find scrims), sure you might get out DM'd and generally out played but if you never go out of your comfort zone and keep playing shit open teams you will never improve. The second season I played open (s19) it was being 'sandbagged' by 6cuties who were supposedly unbeatable but we took it as a challenge and didn't care that they had a bunch of 'invite players'. Since we didn't whine and moan like a bunch of babies we were able to actually play tf2 and ended up beating them in a super close golden cap (probably because paddie wasn't playing that night lol). The point is it's all about the way you look at things. If you ever go into a match thinking you're going to lose (because they have so many spooky ex low invite players :o) you're going to lose lol.