First I want to say that I think the overall format for tourneys and prizes and such things here at WGT is excellent. Multiplayer CTTH will be a great addition too.
Now I've recently placed in some CTTH tourneys and the payouts were laughable
Now they were free tourneys and no I dont think WGT should be giving away the farm here but when you come in 12th place and get 12 credits, lets just say that was a let down. I worked hard to get in that 12th place finish damn!!! I'm not even close to buying some balls with that.
I also came in 52nd place once and I got 1 credit. I think most people would agree that 1 credit is really NOT going to be very useful to anyone.
I think I see why its done this way, to give people hope and encourage them and to also "spread the love" so to speak but when you actually win and come out with 1 credit, I'm not sure its doing what it was intended to do. I also know that the site needs users to contribute in order to survive and grow so I understand that having too many payouts that are too big defeats this.
My suggestion would be to not payout the top 70 players since trying to split up 500 credits (Pro tier) for that many people results in very low payouts. Maybe keep it to the top 25. Also increasing this to maybe 1000 credits AND having the top 25 win, might strike a nice balance, see more below.
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On another somwhat related note, the fact that WGT gives away these BIG prizes like trips is really commendable. Not too many websites I can think of give away trips that big, and maybe no others I can think of that give away multiple trips many times through a year. For me, and probably many others, its certainly one incentive to stick around and play just to have a chance to win something so cool.
These trips are random, which is a good thing IMO to give everyone a chance, but I have seen them been given away to completely non-active users and even after winning, they are still non-active.
Such is the nature of these things but I might suggest putting a small restriction on winning such a big prize, user must have been active in the last 6 months? Just an idea to keep the actual active community the ones happiest instead of giving away a $4000.00 trip to someone who is over playing at TWO or someone who just doesnt play at all.
One other thing related to the very top point, I'm not sure how many big prizes are being given out, it seems like a fair bit. Maybe a slight reduction in big prizes could free up a little money to make the other payouts mentioned above a little bigger. However a much better idea than that since there are a lot of users on WGT and I'm sure the website has tons of traffic, get some companies to pay for ads here, shouldn't be that hard I would think because of all the traffic and new users that sign up everyday and this would sure help bring in more revenue. So more ads like Acura one! :)
More than anything I just want to see the site survive and flourish.