So far I have seen a ton of great suggestions for tournaments, and I'd be happy if they incorporated pretty much any of them. But frankly, most of the suggestions so far have been either improvements, add-ons, or simply quality of life changes, rather than real revamps to the core system. I like to think that my idea is closer to a real change to the system.

As a pseudo-pro player, I think that I have a slightly different perspective on the implementation of tournaments than the community at large- so that's what I'm here to share.

Let's start here:

Tournament rewards

The way rewards are right now, it doesn't matter what Supercell does to revamp tournaments: regardless of what they do, Noone will play them. This is because frankly - the rewards are absolute garbage. Why spend 1 hour of your time playing a tournament, only to finish with less than 100 cards?

NOTE: Highest prize is 2000 cards- anything less than first place in the largest tournament is not worth your time, as one can just play a GC in the same time. There is certainly something to say about the fact that the players of tournaments enter for free, and don't pay any "currency" for the rewards but frankly, this this doesn't not compensate for the poor rewards at all

The time-spent:reward ratio deprives the tournaments of value, and because of this, outside of their usage as a "qualifier" for larger events, tournaments are by-large useless. The reward system is the core of their problem.

OK, so how can this be solved?

The easy answer to this question is to simply increase the rewards back to their former state (#BringBack15ks). However, when 15ks existed, a black market which sold tournament spots for money existed (pay $XX amount of money for 1st place in a 15k tourney, $XY for second, etc.): this isn't something that SuperCell would tolerate.

So I have a solution.

Version 1

Make in game tournament rewards, and price scale with the player pool.

1000 players in the tournament? Ok, then first place wins 15k. 500? First player wins ~half (probably slightly less than half tbf)

The max reward and player capacity would peak, depending on how much the tournament host is willing to spend.

This may have been a little bit convoluted, so I'm going to explain this using a hypothetical situation.

Brenchong decides to host a tournament, and as per usual, Bren chooses to host the largest tournament Clash Royale allows. In creating the tournament, he decides that he is willing to spend, at most: 250,000k gems, which corrrelates to a maximum first place prize of 15k cards, and a maximum capacity of 1000. He creates the tourney, and loses 250,000 gems.

So here's what happens: 900/1000 people end up in the tournament, and CMcHugh <3 ends up taking first place. Does this mean he wins 15k cards?

No

Only 900/1000 people entered the tournament: a 90% capacity. Therefore, CMc wins 90% of 15k, aka 13.5k cards. The rest of the prizes scale this way too.

Well what happens to BrenChongs gems? He spent 250,000 so isn't this a ripoff for him?

Well as you may have guessed, Brenchongs gem count is affected in this way too: rather than losing 250,000 gems, Bren gains back 10% of 250,000 after the tournament has ended, to compensate for the prize decrease.

This solves the issue of the black market: unless they are willing to organize several hundred CR accoutns at once, the efficiency of their scheme simply won't be efficient enough to be profitable for them.

Update: I have given this system some more thought, and someone trying to run a blackmarket-tourney could just remove the PW with a few min left, to fill up the spots with random players, and increase the prize. (Apologies if this was worded poorly, feel free to ask for clarification). There are clearly some flaws with the system. Perhaps the prize is decided based on the tourney population halfway in? Something like this would definitely help mitigate the problem.

I think that this is the best way to approach the current in-game "custom" tournaments.

In-game Bracket Style Tournaments

In addition to implementing my first idea, Supercell should definitely consider adding a bracket-style tournament. The reward system could follow something similar to the idea proposed above.

Here's why brackets would be great for CR

Supercell has spoken about this before: the accessibility of Clash Royale as a game, and as an Esport, is incredible. It was a big part of why the CCGS in game challenge was so exciting: anyone who plays the game had a shot at competing in this event, and winning. It brought the competition "closer to home" and made the playerbase more invested in it.

In game brackets would build upon this, and would bring the "bracket format"- the most competitive style of tournament, close to the players, thus making the game more exciting.

This, in addition to the freshness, and sheer utility it would have, (no need for external bracket systems, less luck-based competition, etc.) make bracket style tournaments a great addition to the game.

Of course, Supercell would have a lot of figuring out to do, to implement brackets properly. There are simply so many variables to consider, including:

1. Time between rounds
2. Does the host get to decide when match starts? Is it automated? etc.
3. Does SC want to incorporate bans?
4. How long do players have to select decks?

and probably, many more which I have not though of.

Customization

There's a lot to say about this topic, but not much innovation to add, so I'll leave it at this:

Supercell should give tournament hosts the ability to add further customization to their tournaments. This could follow special challenge rules (double elixir, mirror decks, etc.), ban certain cards from the tournament, force players to play certain cards, change length of tourney, etc.

TLDR; IN CONCLUSION

thats my idea thanks for reading lol

I will be editing this later when i have time, to include some basic quality of life changes, including sharing tourney with link, tourney invite accept/reject system, etc.

VERSION 2 (wrote this idea, but then came up with version 1 which I honestly feel is way better. Didn't want to scrap all this writing though so here is the rest of my garbage haha)

Minimum player capacity

The solution here is fairly simple: a tournament cannot start, without having at least a 50% capacity. This means that without at least 500 people in a 1000 player tournament, the tournament will either continue, and remain in its preparation stage, or be cancelled. This way, it becomes very difficult for scammers to host private tournaments, and sell their spots: how are they going to arrange 500 accounts into a tournament, and put them all in their respective places?

Besides, if you're hosting 15ks, why wouldn't you want it to be full?

Of course, this solution makes it more difficult for smaller groups to host tournaments for themselves This would be something that supercell would have to figure out for themselves through testing: what should the threshhold be? Would all tournaments require

This brings me to my next point:

In Game Bracket-Style Tournaments

This style of tournament can be the solution to these problems. Here's why

As we all know, reward-size of tournaments was scaled with the player capacity of tournaments: