It does not say that. It clearly states the toys will contribute to the fund, and that they guarantee the fund will be at least a certain size. It does not state they will be providing the entire sum to start with and topping it up with sales.
You can’t presume things that aren’t there and you can’t blame a company because you misunderstood what was written in plain English. It’s not written in legalese, it’s written in plain English.
It does
we want to give fans a chance to further support the programs
proceeds will contribute to the year’s final LAN event prize pools
25% of the proceeds will contribute toward the year’s finals LAN event prize pool for the Arena World Championship (AWC) and the Mythic Dungeon International (MDI) with a guaranteed minimum prize pool of $500,000 USD ($250,000 USD for each event.)
If the prize fund is not met then they will top it up, they guarantee a minimum amount. That is what that statement says.
They clearly sold more than enough to fund the prize minimum and more.
I interpret it as that the prize money would be 500k at minimum, regardless of how much the toys would contribute.
So if they would contribute less than 500k, Blizzard would chip in the rest to make it 500k.
But since the toys contribute more than 500k, there’s no need to.
Maybe Blizzard could’ve been more clear, but overall it doesn’t seem scummy to me at all.
You are asking me if I am daft when you are the one writing in extra conditions into a statement that do not exist.
I see you have got to that stage where abusive is the only way you can lash out when you have no argument, or leg to stand on, to back up your case.
Take it to a legal advisor. They will tell you the same. It does not say what you think it says.
Happy Halloween DUDE!
To be fair if a lot of people say that they understood it to mean something else, then the advertisement for it was clearly not well written. I understood it back then so I’m not angry at blizz, just disappointed that they didn’t cash in with the community to bring some more attention to the event.
Please provide some or any documentation of this so-called “industry standard”.
To me it sounds as if people know of an eSport event or two where it has been handled differently, and then they’re just playing it off as if it’s naturally applies everywhere and always has.
Get outta here. Industry standard… 
My argument is - it’s against the industry standart and they never stated they are going that route, missleading players into buying cheap crap!
You argument is “learn to read, regardless of 2 decades of crowd funding practise”…
As far as I can see people made a lot of presumptions. They didn’t actually read what it said.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the proportion of the toy sales that were donated to the fund were stingy and it should have been the other way round. They kept 25% and put the rest into the fund. However it wouldn’t change the outcome that Blizz are not funding the prize pool.
It does not state that they will provide the mimimum amount. It states they will guarantee it. A guarantee means they would have to make up the shortfall should the toy sales not do very well.
The prize pool is actually outrageous in terms of size already. The WoW eSport pro scene is very small. Those AWC and MDI teams are almost guaranteed to participate each year because there’s so little competition for the spots.
Compared to other Blizzard eSport games, like Overwatch and StarCraft II, where you have a much more competitive field, then WoW rewards the few pro players it has extremely generously.
The prize pool, relative to the field of players and the competition itself, is very lucrative.
Other games with a similar tiny eSport pro scene as WoW don’t have prize pools anywhere near 660k.
Plus, it probably also has to do with the fact that the transmog toy was really cool and many chose to buy it.
I kinda agree that Blizzard maybe could’ve made things more clear, but honestly some people will always find a way to interpret and spin it to ‘prove’ that Blizzard is the worst of the worst and should burn for it.
Normally if someone has made a mistake, misread something or made presumptions they apologise and move on. Some people on this thread don’t seem to be able to do this. We are only human, we make mistakes, it’s not a big deal. We’ve all done it.
Blizzard did not mislead anyone. They wrote in plain English what they were doing. It’s not a learn to read case. It’s just go back and read what they actually said.
I can not find any industry standard anywhere and many companies use crowdfunding to help build prize pools.
It does seem 25% is the magic number, DOTA 2 did the same
Prize pool[edit]
Starting with The International 2013 onward, the tournament’s prize pool began to be crowdfunded through a type of in-game battle pass called the “Compendium”, which raises money from players buying them to get exclusive in-game virtual goods and other bonuses.[48][49] 25% of all the revenue made from yearly Compendiums go directly to the prize pool.[50][51] Each iteration of The International has surpassed the previous one’s prize pool, with the most recent one, The International 2019, having one at over $34 million.[52][53][54][55]
That’s not completely fair though. Reading back on it I can definitely see what the intended message means. But people don’t usually read everything they see with their full attention, most people just skim through the lines. Advertisement departments know that and normally make their writing as clear as possible, exactly so that you can avoid something like this.
There is no mistake - if Blizzard have said that the prize pool would be 100% crowdfunded and would pinch in only if the funds were below 500k, people wouldn’t be buying as many toys.
They purposfully missled people into thinking this was a standart crowdfunding tournament, where the publisher would pinch the initial prize pool and everything above that would be from toy sales.
Yes they did!
What they said was
Which means that they have the 500k ready to go, not that they would contribute if the sales don’t reach that point, because this is not how crowdfunding tournaments do it!
That doesn’t make Blizzard the bad guy. If I’ve misread something I just say I’m sorry I misread it and I was wrong.
It happens. I don’t jump up and down making out Blizzard is evil incarnate for something they didn’t do.
No they didn’t. They stated they’d be selling a toy to raise the funds, that 25% of toy sales would go towards the funds. That they would guarantee the fund size. A guarantee means that if the money is not raised they will make sure it is at least that size.
The fund is bigger than that guaranteed size so Blizz clearly did very well selling toys.
No, a guartantee means that they have already prepared that amount of money, by the industry standart!
No it doesn’t.
Yeah most companies do 25%. But in the example of Dota they always have a Base Prize Pool (around 1.6M currently) that comes from the company. Here are the latest ones. http://dota2.prizetrac.kr/
I wouldn’t say they are a bad guy in this, unless this was done intentionally to give the sense that there was a base prize pool. But I think they absolutely did screw up in convening that information in a good manner.
Maybe, maybe not. You don’t know that.
I think the main reason people bought them is because they liked them, not to contribute to the prize money.