Proposal to cancel low participation tournaments

ce4487a98d434bf3b41469f830de9c7dfc0caea5

Current situation:
A lot of tournaments are hosted which have either low appeal or a very small number of people who qualify to enter. Typically, these tournaments will guarantee prizes for everyone who enters. While the DEC entry fee offsets the cost a bit, it usually means that players can buy SPS from the DAO at dumping prices. Not every season is the same, but in a 15 day sample size the DAO spent almost 200k SPS on tournament participation prizes where all players were guaranteed SPS prices. Detailed numbers can be found in the appendix.

Proposal:
Create tournaments with a minimum participation requirement, concretely if the participants do not exceed 75% of the prize positions. If fewer players register, the tournament is cancelled, the entry fee DEC refunded and the SPS goes back to the tournament pool.
Example:
A tournament rewarding the top 128 participants (most RF tournaments) would be cancelled if less than 96 players register. In the reference timeframe this would apply to 8 tournaments which paid out almost 40k SPS.
A tournament rewarding the top 64 participants (most GF tournaments) would be cancelled if less than 48 players register. In the reference timeframe this would apply to 9 tournaments which paid out over 150k SPS.

Desired outcome:
Tournaments that lack interest and don’t create active competition are simply not happening. This will prolong the tournament pool runway or allow to have more meaningful tournament rewards in the future.

Risk / potential abuse:
This change devalues cards used for very specific tournaments, like GF alpha or beta. However, since these cards have a strong use case on land, I think this is justifiable. After all, the tournaments are meant as competitions, not APR farms for old cards.
Of course, there is the argument that someone could simply register more accounts to push past the 75% threshold. While this would mean that such actors must pay more DEC and acquire more Collection Power, it also could lead to more SPS being paid out than is paid out now. Considering it is already against the ToS (to my knowledge) to play yourself in tournaments, this would be punishable anyway.

Team / DAO effort:
According to Clayboyn the functionality to force a minimum participation rate is already available, so the additional development effort would be zero. The only effort on DAO side would be for Clayboyn to set the minimum participation rate, which he can do when creating the tournaments, so the effort for him is minimal.

Appendix:

This is the data for all DAO sponsored tournaments for 1.10-15.10.2025, so approximately one season. The SPS given out is the actual given out SPS, so not the total prize pool.

For tournaments with less than 50% participation 110537,7 SPS was paid out.
For tournaments with less than 75% participation 194071,6 SPS was paid out.

RF tournaments with less than 75% participation cost 39451 SPS.
GF tournaments with less than 75% participation cost 154620,6 SPS.

All numbers were manually acquired, so there is room for error, but overall this should be at least very close to reality.

Disclaimer:
The 100k DEC for this proposal were paid by yabapmatt. Please note, that this is due to him supporting the creation of proposals and is not indicative of any support for this specific proposal.