Zed Run have opened the floor for suggestions and ideas surrounding the refreshment of the weekly tournament landscape.
This has included the idea of taking a portion of the monthly Maiden prize allocation and redistributing it toward the weekly tournaments.
Personally, I think this is the wrong option and I think that there are many other ideas that are worth trialing before removing any money from Zed’s flagship event.
Us Zed Headz love to breed new foals, especially for the thrill of unboxing them in a Maiden Tournament.
A big part of that thrill is the hope that our new horse is going to bring home a major Maiden prize.
By diluting the size of the prize we will be watering down that whole experience.
This could have a very negative effect on breeding numbers for very little gain elsewhere.
So why don’t we try some other options first?
Here are a couple of ideas I came up with that I think would boost weekly engagement;
1) Skin entry tournaments.
Remember the Halloween and Christmas events?
Those skin for entry tournaments complete with great leaderboards.
The infrastructure is ready to go and we have the “Special” tab ready to click on.
Perhaps we could make more use of this system?
What if we had a monthly “season” skin?
You purchase a skin for $100 or even $300 and that gives you access to a tournament a day for a whole month.
For example, a monthly skin would be access to 30 daily tournaments.
These could be things like Legendary day, Buterin day, 4.0 day, 3.0 day, sprint day, level 300-350 day, legends of Zed day, pity point day etc etc.
Zed could share the tournament schedule before skins are minted so players could decide if the months events are suited to their stable.
I would suggest they offer enough variety to suit a vast array of horses so everyone wants to get involved.
I imagine if they did, many stables would mint more than 1 skin.
If 650 people buy a skin at $200 each, we have $130,000 in prize money!
That’s $4,333 a day!
With top heavy payouts of 1st $3,000, 2nd $1,000 and 3rd $333 it’s pretty juicy stuff.
The only downside I can see is that this could take away attention (and rake) from the regular weekly paid racing tournaments which would therefore reduce their weekly prize pools.
To combat this, we could make the “Season” qualifying races $1 entry races in open class which could then replace the missing weekly prize pool.
Or we could make the qualifiers free races (include GEO blocked areas), focus all the attention on seasons for a while and take all the rake from regular paid racing to inject it into these “Seasons”.
This would further boost those prize pools.
It depends what the community prefers.
2) Daily Variety Tournaments.
Weve had our current weekly style formats for a while now and I think perhaps switching to a daily format could be a fresh way to spice things up and drive more engagement.
If we incorporate a wider variety of entry requirements and announce each format the day of the event, we could keep things interesting.
For example, each day at the same time, a new 24 hour tournament is announced.
This gives everyone an exciting reason to log on to Zed each day.
Perhaps one day it is Legendary Nakamoto’s, one day it is 3.0 horses, one day it is level 120 to 250 horses, one day it’s under 250 race horses etc etc.
There are so many horse varieties and scoring formats that could be used.
Races are held in open class with entry fee announced with the format each day.
To make things even more interesting the prize pool should come directly from the rake in that daily tournament, so players would not know what the grand total would be until finals time.
Above the leaderboard a tally keeps track of the prize pool as it grows and grows.
If the format is one that is well contested I expect the prize pools would be pretty good.
(I imagine players would keep checking in to see how large the pool is as the day progresses!)
These varieties would give a much wider number of horses and stables a chance to compete and live ops could poll on Discord, Twitter or directly on the Zed Run platform to see what the player base is most keen on seeing happen.
In summing up I would love to see either of these ideas in play or perhaps another suggestion from the community before diluting the monthly Maiden.
We really shouldn’t mess with our most coveted event!
That said, I understand we are in a state of transition while we await the announcement of a new roadmap sometime in the next 12 weeks.
Perhaps the skins idea is too much of a commitment for the team right now.
However, I think the switch to daily varieties with a direct rake is something that is very feasible and worth a shot.
What do you guys think?
Let me know on twitter/X: CLICK HERE