Fencer: Sure, a test never hurts as this is my hope that it is being tested. We want the best for it and feel we need to speak up when something doesn't look right. I have no way of knowing how well it is working since I'm on this end of the operation. Just acquiring the BK Brains to use for the entry fee alone is a major hurdle and will keep the tournaments from having very many participants. If we all have a 100 or more BK BRains it'd make it work lots better. As I asked earlier, just how many people on the whole site even have any BK Brains? I also noted that Pawn members will not very often have any BK Brains either. If only us paying members have the BK Brains this is a very small pool out of the whole membership. It will take a fairly high percentage of members to make it work.

If you're fairly sure that you don't want to make any change to the set up as you now have it, you still need to get BK Brains into every member's hands. One way might be to give free Brains to a member upon joining the site or renewing a paid membership and having no restrictions on the tournaments entered if a fee is charged. You might keep the free tournaments and sponsored tournaments without a fee restricted as now by membership level. Just 50 BK Brains would probably be enough to get everyone started, or maybe 100 of them. Since these BK Brains are free and members could always buy more of then after using them up, a lot of the objections about the 30% cut would go away. Everyone would at least get to join one entry fee tournament for free and have a chance to win more BK Brains. If BK Brains can be transfered to other members and you do adopt this proposal, I would restrict the transfer of BK Brains to those that are purchased, earned through the referal program, or won in a tournament. I could imagine all sorts of shenanigans if free BK Brains were able to be transfered.

Even if you were to adopt some or all of the other things I and others have talked about, it isn't going to work well until most of the members have the unit of money to spend. I have 50 BK Brains. How many others have just that many? More? How many people have none at all?

My original post on this subject yesterday has the idea that the creator of the tournament get a piece of the action and you getting a cut of it instead of all it. It also has the creator being able to have more range in the percentage payback of prize awards. I think this is a better system for encouraging more prize tournaments. If the creator doesn't take any rake off the top (Sets it at 100% payback) you could charge him a few hundred BK Brains or require him to offer a prize of a paid membership. Then you'd have a sponsored tournament and those usually are well attended.

One way to understand the whole brouhaha is to compare charging your BK Brains fee up front. For your 30% cut on the entry fee, this would be like charging 71.5 BK Brains with a 100% percent payback of 50 BK Brains per entry. This example should show you why many people have objections to how it is right now. With 50 BK Brains as an entry fee, it breaks down to everyone paying 15 BK Brains to enter and leaving 35 BK Brains for the winner's payback pool. Since only three people can win any prize at the end it takes a minimum of of 10 people to enter a tournament and have third place, if paid 10%, to get their enter fee back. What Czuch Chuckers says about the payback is what happens when only a few people enter a tournament. With 20 people entered and a 40-20-10 payback on the initial 50 BK Brains entry fee you have 400-200-100. Which seems OK, but with twenty people it'd be nice to have some lower places get some prize Brains too. If the cut is lowered it would be possible to have fourth and lower places get a prize too. 5% of 20 is 1 and that would get someone their entry fee back in a 20 player tournament. Perhaps a place could be added for each ten or so entries?

If you're going to keep this present set up you should have a chart showing the payback for the tournament in BK Brains on the sign up page. A chart with the current signees and maybe a couple of example charts to illustrate how the prizes increase as more people join in. In fact I'd make such a chart for the tournament payback no matter what set up you finally adopt.

Good luck on your test.