“I have bought a unicorn for $20 and won $50 from a freeroll tourney!! omg this game is amazing, I need to tell all my friends!!”
Sounds amazing, right?
Hey all,
this is a short, informal write-up on an idea that has been brought up by Bahis/TT in the strategy channel. Formal write-up follows if you guys like it.
Problem: How can we generate growth and lead new players into a funnel that gets them hooked on Jousting at barely any marketing spend?
Solution: Freeroll Jousting Tournaments with cash/RBW prizes where the top 10% of rankings win.
How does freeroll work?
Its simple. Players sign up for free in a huge tournament with hundreds of slots (e.g. 256 corns per tourney) and have a tiny chance of making it to the top and participating in the prize pool. Yes you heard right, no entry costs but cash/token prizes!
Constraints:
Players will be required to buy 1 unicorn. Good thing is they cant make a mistake here, since any beginner corn is able to participate.
Stat limitation to max 1300 (as of today), so any real beginner can start there and people who slept on breeding too.
Limited number of tourneys per day (depending on demand, could start with 1-2 per day max)
Cash prize should be paid from treasury, prize/cost calculation should be based on avg. return per 256 (or less?) sales on Opensea. so basically people entering indirectly pay for the prizes themselves, or at least partially.
Requirements for LG:
Add new tournament format that supports 256 (or more) unicorns.
1a. Assuming that LG has built a scaleable jousting codebase, this should not require a HUGE workload to get developed.
Do proper marketing for this big, new, fancy feature.
Other considerations:
Freeroll tourney prize pool can vary between USDC/RBW, keystones, unicorns, land. Amount can also vary, maybe even automatically adjust based on treasury returns
Exploit/Abuse: refering to point 4 in constraints - if LG can model it in a way that all of the paid out rewards are paid from the cut from purchases on OS, then the abuser would just circle their own money.
Huge Funnel Opportunity:
low scale freeroll tournament with no investment except having 1 nft → getting hooked on jousting and wanting to compete for RBW → learning that you need breeding or cash to buy good corns → a) buying land b) buying corns → a) getting into a new gameplay loop or b) supporting the economy.
Background:
Pokerstars is running freeroll tournaments daily with thousands of players who compete for hours just to win some cash for free. They are hugely successful in hooking people on poker with this format at minimum marketing costs and huge marketing effects. They can milk big freeroll tournaments to the maximum and reduce their customer acquisition cost.
We can do the same, we have a marketing hire from the gambling industry, and I would assume she knows this stuff and how to communicate it to the masses.
Personally I see this as a HUGE lever to pull in new players, since I have been grinding those freerolls years ago. I know how well they work and how they get you hooked in a non-threatening and risk-free way. If something could generate hype and pull NEW people into CU and jousting, then this could be it.
Would love to see sentiment on this feature, what do you guys think?
This is cool!
No, I dont want CU to grow
0voters
DISCLAIMER: ALL NUMBERS ARE PLACEHOLDERS AND CAN BE ADJUSTED HOWEVER.
Zed Run does these too. When I joined there was constant free races with a only a few dollars as the prize money. They were so popular you had to have some gaming reflexes and a good internet connection. Why first thought might be freebie hunters will take over these. You are half right. But they will play every day and every race. Increasing our DAU. They will also have to buy a nft. And they will tell every single person they know about the game. A weeks worth of prizes could be less then one person getting a corn drop. These tournaments would be easy to market. Even community members would have easier time saying hey try this. Jousting looks great. Lets invite the world. Thanks so much JackyAce for taking the time to write this up and thank you Bahis for starting this idea in strategy today.
Thanks everyone else for continuing the conversation. Lets get people into the game and hooked.
This sounds interesting though I think there will be technical limitations holding 256 unicorn tournaments. The UI (and maybe backend?) needs to be redesigned which I think might be too high effort. Easier implementation would be just to have tons of small tourneys and provide tickets that lets you enter the higher level tournaments. This should require significantly less effort. Also we need some sort of schedule board that shows upcoming tourneys so people get excited to join those once they have the relevant tickets.
Limited number of tourneys per day (depending on demand, could start with 1-2 per day max)
Not the biggest fan of a limit touneys per day - all current players will spam all their corns everyday. This means, statistically speaking, one of the existing players will win every time which defeats the whole purpose. We need to have much tighter limits or a lifetime limit.
Cash prize should be paid from treasury, prize/cost calculation should be based on avg. return per 256 (or less?) sales on Opensea. so basically people entering indirectly pay for the prizes themselves, or at least partially.
The vast majority will be existing players so that needs to be taken into account unless the limitation is extremely strict. If we can somehow filter out spammers then I’m all for higher rewards.
Have posted a link to this thread in the ask-the-devs channel. Maybe a dev can share some estimate on workload.
Not the biggest fan of a limit touneys per day - all current players will spam all their corns everyday. This means, statistically speaking, one of the existing players will win every time which defeats the whole purpose. We need to have much tighter limits or a lifetime limit.
The exact design will need to be decided by LG, since they have the data on how queues fill. Could also be an x-hour schedule, I am just leaning towards the Pokerstars model. Not looking to reinvent the wheel with something that has a 20 year track record.
True, that will be the case in the beginning. Obviously this is intended to lure new players into the game and give existing players with bad corns and no risk-appetite a chance to participate. The main focus is to onboard new players via this mode.
This also solves the problem of someone buying an NFT and then not knowing what to do and shortly after realizing that he needs to buy tokens for this, that and XYZ. This idea could be a low friction onboarding process.
Thanks for pulling the idea together and starting a conversation on this.
IRL Casinos bank big bucks from low cost slots. They even have some free to play tournaments. It’s a volume play. Degans are lured by that hope of a jackpot.
This could create excitement and bring in volume. We need volume.
Anyone new would still need to buy a corn.
Maybe not one just one big bracket? Perhaps on-going tournaments each day. If on-going, energy would need to be topped up if using that corn more than one time a day.
CU is sticky. Quick wins (and a dopamine hit), add to stickiness. Just like IRL casinos, feed those small wins. It might be a good idea to keep jousting gift boxes in play. Even if you lose, you could win. That could help keep that dopamine hit flowing. Just like an IRL casino. Team might need to occasionally adjust/tune, but maybe a few Jackpots in the giftboxes of even just 1 RBW. Or ??? …
High stat tournaments still have a place. A percentage of users will aspire to breed their way up to them, but a large portion of players will never aspire to rise to those high levels.
This doesn’t have to be an IF/OR… Feels like finding a win-win for a wide variety of players who are playing/having fun is needed for excitement and growth.
