$10M – the second-largest prize pool in all of eSports

Big news today from Vulcun – we’re increasing our 2015 Prize Pool from $4 Million to $10 Million. This is the largest prize pool in Fantasy eSports, and now the second-largest in all of eSports after Dota2’s The International.

Top 10 Prize Pools in eSports

1. The International 2015 – $10.9 M [Dota2]
2. Vulcun – $10.0 M [Fantasy eSports]
3. League Championship Series – $5.5 M [League of Legends]
4. DAC 2015 – $3.6 M [Dota2]
5. Smite 2015 – $2.6 M [Smite]
6. HOTS Championship (Heroes of the Storm) – $1.2M
7. ESL ESEA Pro League (CS:GO) – $1.0M
8. COD World Championship (Call of Duty) – $1.0M
9. LPL Spring & Summer (League of Legends) – $756K
10. i-League S3 (Dota2) – $420K

Changes in Tie-Breaker Rules

Vulcun has now paid out more than $500,000 in cash prizes in 9 weeks of operations. With the ever-growing base of users, we’ve had an increasing number of tied scores, and the need to refine and improve our tie-breaker policy. Here are the new tie-breaker rules:

Upcoming Vulcun scoring balance changes – Week 6

Yes, Bjergsen on Ahri is a points machine

We’re always trying to find ways to make Fantasy more balanced so that various team play styles remain viable for fantasy picks. Some problems we’ve noticed in our first 5 weeks:

• Bloodbaths: Scoring rewards games where there are bloodbaths. Kills and Assists garner far more points, with no major penalties for dying.
• Objective control: Scoring currently favors assassins (more kills) or pick comps, rather than objective-control. Teams such as Cloud9 that play a heavy objective-control game are picked less.
• Support-oriented champs: Champions like Lissandra get you far fewer points than Ahri. Top lane and Support suffer as positions.

Making your first private contest

So you’ve clicked the PRIVATE link at the top. What are private contests? Pretty much what they sound like. They are private – only open to people that you share a link with. They are not shown on the Vulcun homepage, and not visible to anyone without your special link.

This means that these are great for 1 vs 1 matchups and small contests between friends, class mates, co-workers or online communities. Let’s try making our first private contest. Go ahead and click on this button on the Private page:

How to get Contests named after You

Several users have asked us how to get contests named after them, like the lucky players above. We thought we’d lay out our thoughts on this so everyone can have a fair chance.

It’s pretty simple: we name contests after players who are active & helpful to others in our community chat. By being helpful, these players are helping newcomers learn the ropes and settle in. By not being abusive, they keep the community friendly and welcoming. By being active, they are there when others have a question or when MrJakeCakes is not around to help.

This is our little way of saying thank you. Keep up the good work of NOT letting this turn into Twitch chat. If you’re active & helpful, we’ll keep an eye out for you.

Balance Changes – Jan 30th

The first 2 weeks have been fantastic. The community’s response has been so much bigger and better than we expected. However early on, we noticed some issues:

Drafting 101: The Basics

Many of you have requested a basic guide on how to go about building your first team. We’ll go over that in this post.

Preliminary Reading: Contest Rules & Scoring
Watch Pro player videos: Homepage

Done? Good. So you know the rules and how scoring generally works. Now let’s get to work.

Statistical Experiment: are Fantasy Sports games of Skill or Chance?

The UIGEA 2006 law specifically forbids online gambling in the United States, but makes an exception for Fantasy Sports on the basis that these are primarily games of skill, not chance.

Great, but I still had my doubts. I was about to start a Fantasy Sports site, and I needed to be sure. Empirically sure.

So I decided to do a little experiment. I signed up on Fanduel, DraftKings, and Victiv, which are fantasy sports sites for traditional sports such as Football and Basketball (things I know very little about). I created 22 teams and entered into 22 different contests, all with different win probabilities. I satisfied all the games’ rules – pick a player in each position, spend less than your team budget, get as close to spending all your budget as you can etc. The games were various types (50/50, tournament) but all were in the salary-cap format.

This meant that it was possible to do a Skill vs Chance test.