For quite a while, we have faced issues with teams in the NL playoffs being reluctant to get promoted due to the high financial risk associated with promotion. We have investigated the causes and we are glad to announce changes that are planned to apply starting the end of season 104.

Distribution of prizepool

Our main goal was to create motivation to:

1. Get teams motivated to get promoted. After the update, second place in a lower division will always earn less than the higher division’s last place, due to increased prizepool gaps between the divisions (e.g. NL2 will receive 46% of NL1 total prizepool, compared to 65% previously). This eliminates financial disincentives for promotion. No more risk of getting promoted and losing bonus at the end of the season.

2. Get teams motivated to achieve as high a position as possible. We tried to keep the gaps between the positions as big as possible in the places that do not really change anything in terms of promotion, e.g. 5th vs 7th., despite having all teams getting bonuses.

3. Get teams motivated to sweep the series. Some managers used to lose the second match on purpose to play additional home match and increase ticket revenue. The early win bonus in NL and WL will be increased to the expected match profit that would have been received using expensive tickets.

This is how the changes will look:

Balancing prize pools across all countries is challenging due to differences in leagues' strength. By achieving these goals we spread the prizepool more and increased the gap between the divisions to create incentive to get promoted. However, that comes at the cost of lower level leagues that won't get as big prizes as before.
We understand this is not ideal, however, the prizes from national leagues constitute only a small part of teams' income and we hope it will not affect teams very much.

We hope that this update will solve some of the long-term issues we have faced and will make playing in NLs more exciting.