I wanted a place where I could more plainly lay out my thoughts on a proposed entry fee bump for S16 PMFT, and wedging it all into a survey question didn't really do it justice.
Kinda-sorta unrelated to the price bump, allowing participants to use their best results over the course of the Regular Season seems more fair to me. When we collected money for each event ahead of time, there was no other way to do things—if you paid, then that was the event during which you collected points. But with our new pay-if-you're-going-to-attend points system, it's a perk to those who attend more frequently to just use their best results. And those are the people we're trying to encourage through the PMFT pricing system—the more you attend, the more you benefit. But to be very up-front, this will always be a benefit to the hosts as we're pretty much guaranteed to attend all the events.
Being able to use your best results could only benefit attendees who have earned full stacks via "direct buy ins". For S15PMFT this was a majority of entrants (17 of 27).
Seasons 13 and 14 had PMFT prize pools of about $3500 for about 27 entrants. Those seasons used a pay-up-front-per-event entrance fee, which worked better when we had about 10 entries, but didn't scale up well for a larger group as we were unable to accommodate folks when someone's schedule changed. So for Season 15 we set a date and only collected entry fees from folks who could attend. This had the effect of dropping the prize pool to $2775 (roughly a 20% drop). I'd like to return things to approximately the previous level.
My very first thought was to bump the per-Saturday price from $15 to $20, arbitrarily, but then I broke out the spreadsheet to see what effect that would have had on our S15PMFT prize pool and saw that this bump would only close our prize pool shortfall by half the desired amount: adding back about $395 to the prize pool if the same 27 people still attended. It's a bummer, as moving from $7.50 per tournament to $10 per tournament (which is how I think of things, rather than a per-Saturday amount, I treat the Standard Tournaments as if they were two individual tournaments on any given Saturday) is a nice clean, easy-to-describe change.
The other arbitrary price we have set for our tournaments is the "top off cost" for folks who hadn't attended enough "direct buy" tournaments to get to a full starting stack. This number is $5 per 1000 chips. I don't want to increase that amount as it's already significantly higher than the direct buy cost, and this disparity is what led to a player backing out from the S15PMFT at the last minute (after seeing how much more they would've had to spend compared to the rest of the more-frequent attenders). Additionally, this cost gets rolled into the non-capped-through-direct-buy-in pricing (which affected 10 of our 27 entrants), and they're already losing a little bit of ground compared to the folks who can take advantage of the "use points from your best tournaments" crew. So that's why I'm not considering changing this number in this analysis.
So here's how things would have looked with the bumping from $7.50 to $10 per tournament change:
Average per player increase: +$12 (from $103 to $115)
Average per player increase for already-topped-off frequent attendees: +$9.12 (from $93 to $102). Five people would've paid the same, one person would've paid $10 less (because their stronger results were late in the season and went unused), and the rest would've paid between $5 and $20 more.
Average per player increase for folks who also topped-off: +$24 (from $123 to $147). The increase would've been between $15 to $35 more per player.
So if this change only gained us $395 of the $725 shortfall, let's look at how much more it would take to get us the rest of the way there.
We don't have to go very far. If we, instead, collected $11 per tournament, then we'd recoup $668 of that shortfall. $12 per tournament would blow right past the target, to $941 (putting the hypothetical prize pool at $3716). I have no interest in engaging in prize pool inflation, so let's drop the $12 price point and instead focus on what the numbers would look like at the $11/tournament price.
On average Season 15ers would end up spending $28 more for their total entry (from $103 to $131). For folks who maxxed out via direct buy-ins this average increase would be $19.35 and for folks who had to top-off, this bump would be $33.90. The entirety of the two groups would be adding an additional $329 and $339 to the prize pool (getting us to the $668 number in the previous paragraph).
But the $11 cost per tournament is a little bit clunky. We never collect fees at the $1 level, so instead if we round up to the nearest $5 (turning all the $99 buy ins into flat $100), we completely eliminated the prize gap, and would have collected $3590. This is actually what I'm proposing for the survey.
In addition to allowing folks to use points from their best tournament performances, charge $11 per tournament (or $22 per Standard Tournament on the 1-tournament nights) to earn those starting chips. At the very end of the season, round up starting chips earned by regular season tournament entries to the next highest $5 increment. All other things kept the same, this would bring the Season 16 PMFT prize pool in line with the prize pools we had for Seasons 13 and 14.