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never mind – it appears none of what I said is relevant anymore.

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen.

The main issue seems to be that the cup goes a whole day. I’ve now already calculated less time for the semi finals (3h 15m instead of 3h 45m, which was, admittedly, too much) and can start the cup at 14.30 with this schedule. Or I change it based on your feedback to one of the following two options:
1) Stretch it out over 3 days (e.g. Round of 32 – Quarter finals on Sunday evening, starting at 21.00, Semis on Monday at 21.00, Final on Tuesday at 21.00 or on other week days)
2) Make the semis “best of 1” instead of “best of 3” and start the tournament at 16.45 CEST instead of 14.30 CEST.
Which version would you prefer?

Also, less subscription cups per month with higher prize each won’t solve the issue that a subscription may not really pay out in the end. It will be the same amount of money and the same amount you pay. The only solutions to this that I can see is a) more people buy premium and thus increase the prize pools and b) monetary sponsorship (which ESA does currently not have). FYI: The current prize pools are not completely covered by subscriptions, a certain amount is still pledged by Didge.
If you think a subscription is not worth it for you I can only advise you to make use of your right not to buy one and compete for the 6 headsets every week only.

I think a cup every week is just simply too much. At max it should be a cup every 2 weeks or 1 cup a month with the occasional experiment cups (new maps, unlocks, gamemodes, etc).

4 cups a month is very tiring for everyone, from the players (that loose an entire day every weekend). For the admins that go through all the work. And even for viewers that eventually will loose interest.

I think the 1 day cup format is fine, I even think its the ideal model for this org to really take off. But it should be shorter and every 2 weeks. Starting at 16 cest with bo1 semi finals looks fine to me.

You also really need to work on attracting lower skilled teams. Im not sure a skill tiered system will be the most effective or fair because as someone has said you can just slack and get on a lower tier the next cup to win it. But from all the other systems it seems the least worse in my opinion.

Ex: 4 Skill tiers, Very High, high, mid, low, each skill tier with 8-16 teams would already make for an interesting and shorter format, but Im sure there’s a lot of other formats with huge potential.

Quoted from bean

You’d need to lose a good amount of games very early to tier slum, you won’t win anything so are you’re already behind on breaking even, you need premium to get a prize anyway and we can manually (if we really needed to, we have faith…) intervene on tier slumming.

Then a skill tiered cup system like ETF2L’s should be the way to go. Just make sure to learn from what didn’t work the first cups, and I seriously think a cup every week is too much. I think 1 normal cup and 1 experimental cup (for new maps / rulesets, unlocks) per month would work great or just 2 normal cups a month. That still makes 24 cups a year and with the occasional bball, ultiduo, etc cups its even more.