A few things to consider first:
I have had quite a few people request that I bring back the old league gating system for tournaments and while I am personally against it for all of the reasons that I illustrated when doing the tournament overhaul, this is a DAO and I am one opinion. My opinion is that tournaments need a complete rebuild/redesign, but I know that's not going to happen anytime soon, so we will see what the SPS stakers want to do with the system as it currently exists.
Let me reiterate my concerns as to why I think this doesn't work.
- Splinterlands has removed the ability to stay in a particular league. I don't think we should create a system where players are forced to lose in ranked to stay at the level of tournament they wish to play at.
- This also creates conflicts for gold foil tournaments as there are too few players to restrict access by league, which is why we previously just didn't use any gating on those tournaments.
- The fee based gating that does exist only impacts one format, so for example you can be champ in modern and novice in wild and then still join the lower level wild tournaments.
It also needs to be noted that we cannot currently do this without bringing back entry fees, so if you want league gating then you need to also vote for a fee option on this poll as well.
Now onto the poll:
Do not gate tournaments by ranked league.
Keep things as they are right now.
Bring back league gating as it was previously.
Return to using entry fees to price out entrants that are outside of the targeted leagues for the tournament. Historically this has been the tournament league and 1 league above and we have not gated gold foil tournaments.
For example, bronze and silver can join a bronze level tournament. Gold and Diamond can join a Gold level tournament. Champion players can only join Diamond tournaments as Gold level is two leagues below them.
The gating was never meant to be a strict gating. Players can always pay for it granted that you participate tournament to gain playing exposure instead of earn from it.
Higher league players can pay more to join lower league tournament if you really want to train and sharpen your lower league skill.
League gating is not good for anyone. At this point, I play the lower league events just to stay sharp at those league levels because it is my only opportunity to play at those lower leagues with different strategies than max decks. I support entry fees, but do not support league gating, especially like you said because of its issues with Gold Foil events.
Let's not revert back one of the best changes in the last few years that punished players for advancing.
Maybe a discussion for another panel, but instead of gating, each account is allowed 2 free entry tickets per day. An account can pay DEC (burned, increasing amount each ticket purchased) for extra tickets for that day. I know this suggestion would require some dev work so probably something to be tabled for now but this would allow for the upper league accounts to still participate in the low leagues if they want but would have to pay for that privilege. Likewise, a low level account could pay to play against the big boys (as long as they met the CP/SPS stake requirements) if they really wanted to.
The irony...
https://peakd.com/spsproposal/@clayboyn/sps-governance-proposal-tournament-entry-rework
It's currently failing though.