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One of the dreams of the tournament system is realized today! Everyone now has the ability to create their own, fully automated, Steem Monsters tournament that runs in an open, transparent and fair manner on the Steem blockchain!!!

Promotional Tournaments

Steem Monsters currently has ~2,000 daily active players who are all at least somewhat involved in the crypto space. You now have the ability to reach them by sponsoring your own tournament. You can put up prizes that can literally be anything. Have a cryptocurrency you're promoting? Make a tournament that pays that out as prizes which will get it in the hands of more people. Have a product? Offer it as a prize too!

Include your brand or product logo in the tournament details page and have it shown on the arena floor for all of the battles! You get the chance to get your product or service in the hands of your target audience, and players get the opportunity to win more stuff, so it's a win-win for both parties!

Fund Raising Tournaments

There is also the option to use Steem Monsters tournaments as a way to raise funds for a project or cause! You can create a tournament with entry fees in STEEM or SBD and you can pay out a portion of that in prizes and keep the rest for your project.

You can set a minimum number of entrants necessary for the tournament to happen so that you can ensure that you will raise enough funds to cover your costs. We currently don't support the ability to have variable prizes based on the number of entrants as this presents a legal issue in certain jurisdictions.

What's the benefit to players?

We hope that this tournament system will bring a lot of money into the game, all of which will flow directly to players. This is a huge part of what the Steem platform, and more broadly the entire decentralization movement is all about. Your time and attention is valuable and it's high time that you get compensated for that rather than giving it away to centralized services to profit off of.

This is Steem Monsters' way of trying to make that a reality. As we grow the game, we will hopefully be able to attract more tournament sponsorship money for our players. This should also increase demand for the cards which benefits everyone.

We will also work hard to go out and bring in as much tournament sponsorship as possible. We'll start with some of the local businesses we know and are interested in advertising with us, but we'll work to bring on larger, mainstream brands and products and divert their ad spend directly to you!

How does it work?

Starting immediately, you can click on Tournaments and now there's a "Create Event" button. You'll have a few logisitcal steps to go through, but essentially you're able to put up prizes and add your branding and message to get player attention towards your website and products!

There are a few steps to go through.

Name the tournament, give it a date and time, put in a description (markdown formatting supported).
Determine the min/max number of entrants and a tournament entry fee (if any)
Choose the types of cards that will be needed, level caps, and how many matches is required to push through each round
Set up your prize structure (any non-STEEM or SBD prizes will need to be paid out manually by the tournament creator)
Add your sponsor name, website URL, and logo images

Currently we do not support uploading of image files, so you will need to enter a URL. We recommend sites like imgur.com to upload your images and get a direct link URL to them. The logo image should be square and at least 256px x 256px in size. The arena background image should have a 3:2 aspect ratio and be at least 600px x 400px in size.

Once all of that is together click next and pay. There is a tournament creation fee of $2 USD, and if you are giving out STEEM or SBD as prizes you will need to pay that upfront and Steem Monsters will hold it in escrow to pay out automatically once the tournament is ended based on the prize structure you set up. If the tournament is cancelled, either manually or due to not having enough players, the prizes will be automatically refunded to your Steem account.

Tournament Design Tips

There are many options and different ways to set up the tournaments, so here are some things for you to think through. We've found that it's generally better to spread the prizes out to many players.

If you're looking to get the maximum eyeballs on it, you should set the Level Limits to Novice, Bronze, or Silver league. This evens the playing field and gives more players a shot at winning.

If you're looking to specifically target players with the most disposable income, you can choose a Gold or Diamond league tournament, or even choose to allow only the rare Gold Foil cards.

Fine Print

This is a brand new feature and, like all brand new features, may have some bugs or issues. So, while we have tried to catch all of the issues in our testing, we ask that if you do encounter any problems that you contact us in Discord and we'll help you get it fixed asap.

Secondly, we currently do not allow you to make changes to any parts of a tournament once it is published, so please try to double check everything before submitting a new tournament. You will have the option to cancel a tournament after it has been created if there has been a mistake and then you can set up a new one in its place.

There is a $2 USD fee associated with creating a tournament on the site.