As the full priority of the Steem Monsters Dev team is on tournaments, we're happy to announce the first stage of this: Challenge Matches!
A challenge match is essentially just a simple 2-person tournament, but it opens up the possibility of much more, which we'll get to later in this post.
With the challenge match option, you can choose a specific player you would like to challenge, and specify some different options about the match:
Your opponent must be logged in to the steemmonsters.com website in order to see and accept the challenge, and they will have up to 10 minutes to respond, so it's probably best to coordinate with them ahead of time.
When you receive a challenge from another player, a notification message will show on the website which will allow you to view the details of the match and either accept or decline it.
Challenge matches are not rated, and there is no risk or downside to declining a challenge if you don't want to play. If you accept a challenge that includes a wager of booster packs, but surrender or fail to submit your team in time your opponent will be considered the winner and receive the packs.
Additionally, any booster packs being wagered in an active challenge will be "locked" until the battle is cancelled or completed so they cannot be opened or transferred. Once the battle is finished, the specified amount of packs will be automatically transferred to the winner's account and they will be "unlocked".
The new challenge match feature also allows running larger tournaments with a bit of manual organization and coordination.
You can get a group of people together in Discord or another similar messaging app, create your own tournament brackets, and let the participants know who should challenge whom. Then you can check the results by looking at players' battle histories on the website and see who moves on and who is eliminated until the winners are crowned!
You are also free to require entry fees and give out prizes, however that will all need to be done manually. For tournament participants, please make sure you trust the tournament organizers.
This is just the first, small step in creating a complete tournament system that will be fully automated, decentralized, and trustless, which we expect to deliver in January of 2019. Hopefully we'll see some tournaments start to be run manually in the meantime and whet your appetite for what's to come!
We're completely committed to getting tournaments out the door and rewards for playing Steem Monsters rolling. We can't run them automatically yet, but we can start with manually hosted tournaments! You can run your own now too, and that would be awesome. Starting immediately we're offering free roll (no entry fee) tournaments.
Steem Monsters has a handful of people we'll give 20-25 SBD to and ask that they run games at a convenient time for them in various continents, countries, and primary languages. We'll try to run them daily until automatic tournaments are functional.
Tournament hosts that have Steem Monsters purses they manage need announce the rules of the game and the time of the game prior to it starting. They must keep it open to anyone in the community. They're expected to cycle through the various card levels to open it up to both new and established players. The host is responsible for paying out the purse to players.
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