Hello lovely Dirty Bombers, forum residents and more importantly, employees at SPLASH DAMAGE and/or NEXON.
I made a strawpoll for you guys! :stroggtapir:
http://www.strawpoll.me/11184912
First off, allow me to thank you for a great game and thank you for your increased efforts to optimize the game for us!
Now, let’s begin.
As the developers have stated on more than one occasion, Dirty Bomb is a highly competitive game at its core.
With that in mind, i have an opinion on why the competitive scene has more or less died dried out completely. Additionally i believe the problem at hand also has big deal to do with the declining player numbers, even if they aren’t as horrible as some would have you believe.
What am i getting at here? I’ll tell you.
Prize pools.
The single biggest attraction for competitive players. Cash prizes are literally nonexistent for Dirty Bomb at the time of this post and has been for quite some time now. This is sad, because it means that there’s no incentive for top level competitive teams to practice and play the game, nor are there currently any tournaments or cups running that cater to these.
What can SD do as a developer and we as a community?
I have a proposal.
Look to DotA 2 and how they have managed to amass the largest prize pools in gaming history (The International).
Crowdsourcing!
Now you might argue that Dirty Bomb is a minor title compared to a mastodon like DotA 2. But evidence suggests even smaller titles can make it work!
“As a testament to the effectiveness of this model, a smaller competing MOBA, Hi-Rez Studios’ Smite, crowdfunded $2 million to its world championship prize pool in 2014, making it the third-largest esports tournament of the year. Not bad for a clearly smaller title!”
Wow! $2 million 
Let’s take a closer look. A lot of that revenue comes from selling cosmetics, something that probably wouldn’t be possible to the same degree in Dirty Bomb. But what if they bumped up the prices of the current in game shop items by, let’s say $0.50 and let that go towards a Dirty Bomb championship prize pool?
that might scare some away because it’s more pricey, but it might also incentivize some people to actually spend money on the game, just to support the competitive scene! I know i would personally be one of those people.
But let’s not disregard cosmetics completely. While i believe most would frown upon ridiculous looking top hats (Yes, i’m looking at you Team Fortress 2), i don’t see a problem as long as you continue with the current way of doing cosmetics, by not changing the models, only doing tasteful re skins which give no discernible advantage in game, in terms of coloration. We are, of course, looking forward to the next event which will bring skins, but perhaps some permanently available skins wouldn’t be completely out of the way, especially if some % of their purchase would go toward funding a respectable Dirty Bomb prize pool?
This is just an idea that i had, i’m sure SD/Nexon are well aware of the way crowdsourcing works. But perhaps with enough support from the community, they will look into this option more actively. That is my hope at least, and i believe it could work. Perhaps SD/Nexon already has a proper prize pool in mind for when the game gets out of beta, who knows?
What do you think?
I apologize for any grammatical errors in this post.
Thank you for reading my 2¢.
/Katarn :stroggbanana:
Sources:
http://www.kilkku.com/blog/2015/09/the-secret-sauce-of-dota-2-crowdsourcing-and-crowdfunding/
