Stats from $10000+ of high level 1v1 FAF tournaments

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I've recently compiled a spreadsheet of every high level 1v1 FAF tournament I could find with a prize pool. For the sake of simplicity, I've defined this as 1v1 tournaments that allow high level players to participate. This excludes teamgame tournaments, rating restricted tournaments, showmatches, and tournaments with weird formats. If anyone wants the raw data, feel free to msg me on discord.

To the best of my ability I've cataloged every tournament that meets the above definition with a prize pool since FAF was created. A full list is below and I know that I've missed things so if you have tournaments that I missed please send them to me. I might expand this dataset to include all FAF events at some point.

The juicy stats:
There has been $10337.76 given away since 2012 in high level FAF 1v1 tournaments, with $4,222.01 in 2020 and 2021 so far.

Prize money by year:
prize money by year
Early FAF was dominated by no prizepool or low prize pool tournaments. There are dozens of random blitz tournaments for avatars littered throughout the forums. We started to see serious tournaments for 1v1s starting in 2015 with the $500 Prime Commander tournament. Then in 2016 we had the 1st year of LoTS which has been huge for high level 1v1 tournaments.

LoTS has accounted for $6333.25 in FAF prize pools or 61.2% of all prize money. For reference, the seasonal invitationals have had a combined prize pool of $1527.01 or 14.7% of the total.

Prize money by player:
prize money by player
I have 43 different players in the spreadsheet, 16 of which have earned >$100. Petric is the highest earning player with $2028.15 earned across 11 tournaments. Nexus has the most tournaments with winnings with 12. The top 4 earning player, Petric, Nexus, Blackheart, and Adjux account for a majority (57.5%) of all earnings.

Current tournament list:

  • IMBA Cup
  • IMBA Cup II
  • Grand Masters Cup
  • The Universal Resurrection Cup
  • Prime Commander 1v1 Tournament
  • 2016 LoTS
  • 1st 2017 Blitz
  • 2017 LoTS
  • The Galaxy Cup 2018
  • 2018 LoTS
  • FAF Masters Cup 1v1
  • 2019 LoTS
  • 1v1 All Welcome
  • Blitz Tournament Series
  • 2020 Summer Invitational
  • 2020 Fall Invitational
  • 2020 LoTS
  • 2021 Spring Invitational
  • 1v1 Mapgen Tournament
  • 2021 April League Invitational

Where is my WWPC with 50$ per championship defense mr. accountant

actually feels like a lot of early era tourneys are missing but idk

@fremy_speeddraw Yea early tournaments are hard to find because the tournament forum is completely screwed up starting at ~2015. Which WWPC had a prizepool?

Lots of old tournaments also do not list who won them in the tournament thread and no longer have a challonge that exists.

O1800 division lextoc sponsored 50$ per championship defense, naturally during the time I was camping the title fighting off plebs like zock and such. But yea the list is heavily skewed towards new era especially in terms of tournament wins and such which would heavily impact bh stats for example.

Should impact the wins but money is likely inconsequential because I don’t really think any large funds were thrown around back then. Everyone made a big deal about $500 LotS in 2016.

Well what's the point of these stats? If it's to count the money then sure, if it's to give some high lvl 1v1 tourney overview then it's important.
Tourneys now have more prize money but the competition trend is the exact opposite, e.g. in 2013 there were random no prize pool ghetto tourneys thrown in literally 30 min and they had 20+ players with every top player online available gathered there and then, even without prize it's already on par or higher competition than a lot of the "recent" stuff.

Its missing all the BO15/BO7 i played for example, + some other tourneys early era as petric said.

Still funny overview and good amount of work probably, good to see monetary growth but what Petric said holds true.

Ban Anime

So is there a point to donating to tourneys anymore? Per petric and bh it seems to have attracted people to play only when $ is involved rather actually grow the competitive player base.

Glad to see people are investing more, but the ROI appears to be nonexistent.

As people age they have more money and less time. Can't wait till FAF is mainly played from retirement homes with 20 apm and players falling asleep during a game.

@swkoll wow!

this puts a sence of scale onto FAF itself. very much appreciated compilation of stats!

This would be a great place to have a duplicate of this post : https://forum.faforever.com/topic/309/ai-megathread/27

I was mainly interested in the question "who has won the most money in 1v1 tournaments?", "Who has won the most tournaments?" and "Who has won the most money overall?" are also interesting questions, but are much harder to answer.

There are basically no tournaments with prize pools pre-2015. I'll add WWPC if I can find some overview that doesn't involve me going through the 169 page forum thread.

@swkoll said in Stats from $10000+ of high level 1v1 FAF tournaments:

I'll add WWPC if I can find some overview that doesn't involve me going through the 169 page forum thread.

some of us are made of sterner stuff

@ftxcommando said in Stats from $10000+ of high level 1v1 FAF tournaments:

some of us are made of sterner stuff

facts

Also disagree with the competition stuff, 2016-2017 FAF had periods where you could find like 15 active players maybe in the top 50. Nowadays the level of activity has certainly increased and whether you want to pull teeth about there being no new age you or Zock to dominate 80% of tournaments, the general tiers below are about as vibrant as they were in the early days. And the fact that’s true with the larger distance from the veterans of GPG shows that things are improving.

My man, 2016 onwards IS the new era already. And it's not a matter of opinion, it's facts. Here's a tourney from 2012:

alt text

2v2 format (much harder to organize than 1v1), only 11 days to sign up and 120 euro prize divided between 2 players for each winner.
Signups?

alt text
16 good teams within 11 days, trailer present, and even a ton of official casters secured alt text

And this is even considering community as a whole was a whole lot smaller.

Another one from 2015 alt text
500$ prize pool, how many sign ups?
alt text
alt text

  1. The craziest part? Check the date the tourney post went up and then the date the player list represents. Yeah.

Spring invitational is the most recent tournament that coincidentally also had 500$ prize pool, there were 20 sign ups for the qualifier + 6 accepted invites for a total of 26 players. Do I need to point out the magnitude of difference?
This isn't shade thrown at the invitational, I think it's a very solid tourney and one of the better organized ones but it's simply a matter of FAF competitive scene situation now compared to back in the day.

And how many of those players had a 5% chance of winning the tournament? It hardly makes a fair comparison if no tournament in the past 3 years has gone ahead in an attempt to pool wide ranges of players with no competitive chance. The closest one that was recent was the Holiday tournament which pulled like 40 players at the 1000-1500 level.

That 2v2 tournament also looks like either it intentionally removed a high swath of the toppest tier of players back then or they just all randomly decided to not be part of it. If we made a 1600-2100 rated 2v2 tournament, I'm sure you could get like 8 teams or so for sure, no idea if it would be 16.

Teams with csoller and sui in the "back then things were competitive and vibrant" post, brother.....

Yes they were competitive, and yes they had very fair chances. Just because chosen nowadays is out of the picture doesn't mean he was "bad" back then or everyone was bad, people don't get better as game ages, meta progresses and it's up to everyone individually to keep up with it or to step back if they aren't interested. 50 people competing then and 50 people competing now is the same 50 people competing, even if me from now would crush me from 2013 because by now there had been a lot of developments as a whole to meta and my experience, there is 0 doubt in my mind me in 2013 was the superior player in every way and the effort I had to put to compete was certainly higher than find the FAF icon once in 4 months and get my 3rd or w/e place. And same goes for GPG, you can laugh at how "poor" they played but Zock in 2017 said the same thing to me, even tho was crushing he knows that him from GPG days had been the better player.

The thing with 70+ ppl signing up is absolutely insane even if Ftx wants to ignore it. Remember back then FAF had like what, 1/5 of the users? And yet you get over 70 ppl interested in competing in a tourney vs nowadays 25?

Doesnt matter if 50 of them never had a chance, they still signed up and played, there was a will maybe even honor to play in tourneys and try to perform in them. The interest in playing good isnt there to a degree it was during those times. We were all young and sitting in aeolus 24/7 actually caring who is king of ladder.

Ban Anime

@fremy_speeddraw said in Stats from $10000+ of high level 1v1 FAF tournaments:

Yes they were competitive, and yes they had very fair chances. Just because chosen nowadays is out of the picture doesn't mean he was "bad" back then or everyone was bad, people don't get better as game ages, meta progresses and it's up to everyone individually to keep up with it or to step back if they aren't interested.

Well yes but regardless, these people were still not close to one another in TrueSkill. It shows a higher competitive drive back then as even lower rated players were trying to join into events they had 0 chance of getting beyond 2 games in. But as always I'd rather see whether this holds true or not based on the interest in lower rated tournaments that do get hosted. Unfortunately those do not exist at the moment.

If you define competitive level by the quantity of players able to take a win off of top players in a BO7, I don't know which era has the most competition.

50 people competing then and 50 people competing now is the same 50 people competing, even if me from now would crush me from 2013 because by now there had been a lot of developments as a whole to meta and my experience, there is 0 doubt in my mind me in 2013 was the superior player in every way and the effort I had to put to compete was certainly higher than find the FAF icon once in 4 months and get my 3rd or w/e place. And same goes for GPG, you can laugh at how "poor" they played but Zock in 2017 said the same thing to me, even tho was crushing he knows that him from GPG days had been the better player.

I'm not sure what you're really saying here. To me competition is relativist in a game. I don't really think a scenario where 1 person is so high above the rest that he always wins everything means that a game or event is at its competitive peak. That player could have reached a new peak in skill, but competition is impossible without comparison. Rock Paper Scissors is always competitive even when you're Rich Piana against a 90 year old granny. But that doesn't make it interesting as a spectator 4head.

Also just did a quick count through the top 75 in that thread from 2015, looks like 12 or 13 are in the top 100 on ladder nowadays. I think that's still a decent sign of turnover since there doesn't really seem to be any reason to think a 2015 1600 is any better than a 2021 1600. (But then again I don't even know if these guys were all above 1600 back then)

What I'm saying is your "haha csoller sui" is dumb and just because they are not considered good players now doesn't mean they weren't in 2012 and had no chances in tourneys.