Paid Entry System

Paid Entry is a limited access feature

Anthony avatar
Written by Anthony
Updated over a week ago

Paid Entry is a limited access feature that is given to organizations that have been assigned a Community Manager and explained to that Community Manager what uses they plan to do with the feature.  Organizers looking to gain access to this feature should contact us at support@battlefy.com to be connected with a Community Manager.

During tournament creation, organizers can toggle the Paid Entry option on and set their registration amount on the Setup -> Settings tab.  This must be done during creation.

Players will be able to register for a tournament by paying the organizers registration amount PLUS a 10% fee that is charged on top of the organizers amount. (Example: A $5 registration fee will show a $5.50 charge to the player.)  This fee is to cover expenses incurred in administering the Paid Entry program.  Battlefy handles the incoming registration payments and the outgoing prize payments.  Battlefy’s PayPal is in US Dollars and cannot be changed to another currency.

Once the tournament is created, players will see the amount of the entry on the Overview Tab at the bottom of the About Section.

When registering for the tournament, the players must first pay the entry fee and then finish registering for the tournament.  If you have a discord or other support channel, you should make sure to announce to your players that they must complete both steps (payment and then joining) in order to be in the tournament.

After that, the steps to run the tournament are the same with some guidelines below.

Paid Entry Guidelines

  1. Paid Entry Registration Minimum amount is $5.

    - If you wish to have a registration amount below $5 then you must email us in advance of creating the event to discuss.

    - Most organizers that have fees of a significant amount have reduced amounts of refunds and better attendance to their events and larger prize pools.  Events with extremely low entry cost tend to draw less committed players as the prize pools are smaller and have a higher rate of refund requests.

  2. Tournament prizing amounts must be clearly marked on the Prizes page

    - The following copy must be included at the bottom of your prizing section: “Prizing funded from the tournament registration fees will be paid out within 2 weeks of the conclusion of the event and will be paid out to the PayPal account used to register for the event.  In the event that tournament registration fees do not cover the amount of prizing or there is an additional prize pool from a 3rd party source, Battlefy will only payout the amount collected by registration and [place your organization name here] will be responsible for any additional payments.”

    - While we do not expect it to actually take 2 weeks to complete payments, there are times where there are unforeseen delays so this is to set a maximum expectation for the players.  We anticipate that events will be paid out within 1 week of being notified.

    - If you are wanting to prize something other than an amount covered by registration fees or other physical prizing that is paid for by the registration fees, you must contact us via email for approval and the required steps to facilitate your specific event.  For newer organizations, this may mean that you will need to provide proof of fulfillment of prizing or confirmation from winners of prize receipt before we payout to the organization.

  3. Amount of prize winners must be Top 8 or less

    - If you wish to have more than 8 winners you must email us in advance of opening registration to discuss additional costs

  4. Tournament Check-in may not be utilized, Match Check-in may be utilized

    - The reason for no tournament check-in is because people are paying to play in the tournament and if they show up a few minutes late, they should have time to make it to their match.  In our opinion, if they've paid they're more likely to show up which reduces the number of no shows because in the rules we're requiring you to put that refunds will not be allowed for players that don't unjoin prior to the event start.

    - We do recommend using Match Check-in.  This is a clear set of time that if a player doesn’t show up even after there being no tournament check-in, then they will be weeded out at that point.

    - If your event is extremely large and you feel that not having a tournament check-in will be a detriment to administering the event then you should reach out to your Community Manager to discuss.

  5. Paid Entry events must use a Bracket type that is available on Battlefy.

    - Winners of prizes must be easily identifiable based on the standings of a bracket

    - When using multiple brackets, a finals bracket must be easily identified by players

    - If prizing across multiple brackets, you must email us in advance of the event and how the prizing applies across those brackets must be clear in the prizing section.

  6. Refund Policy must be clearly marked in the critical rules

    - The following copy must be added to that section: “Refunds for this event will only be granted to users who are no longer registered at the time the registration has closed.  If a tournament has a registration cap, then any players registered at the time that the cap has been reached will no longer be eligible for a refund. Failure to check-in, participate in or being disqualified for a rules violation in any tournament will not be cause for a refund.Refunds are not automatic and will be refunded manually after the tournament brackets have been seeded and the tournament is finished.”

We also want to give some clarification on how this feature functions with other features.

  • Tournament Registration limit is not currently tied to the Cash Entry feature so it will operate as it does currently and includes a wait list.  Wait-listed players will have to pay but may end up not being able to play and we feel that those people should be eligible for a refund.  If you choose to utilize the wait-list feature then you will have 10¢ per refund processed reduced from the available funds.

  • We currently suggest that if you wish to limit the number of players, that you manually close registration on the Manage -> Setup -> Settings tab of your tournament once you have reached the number of players you are comfortable with handling.

  • In Team Based events, the person who pays for the team is the account that is flagged to register the team.  If you remove this person from the team, they will still be flagged as paid and therefore will be able to register another team without paying again.

  • It is suggested that you communicate with your community to inform them that the team captain needs to be someone that will actually be playing the game.  If you have a high amount of teams that need a 3rd party non-player paying for them, then we would suggest that you leave enough team space in your settings so that the 3rd party non-player can remain on the team such as allowing 6 players on a 5v5 League of Legends team.  This can be set in the Setup -> Setting tab ONLY during tournament creation by setting the Maximum Team Size.

Paid Entry Payout Procedures

We’ve made a dedicated email for all Cash Entry events that is monitored by our support staff.  Once an event has concluded, organizers will just need to email entryfee@battlefy.com with 

  • A link to the final bracket with winners

  • Payout amounts by placement

  • Payout amount to the organizer

  • Organizer PayPal email (if an organizer payout is needed)

You do not need to collect the PayPal info from players as that is already gathered through our system when they pay for their registration. Prize payments will go back to the same account that was used to pay for registration.

Once this email is received the support staff will forward the information to the Paid Entry processor who goes through the payments weekly.  It is suggested that you send this email as soon after the event as you can.

Any of the sections above that require you to email us should go to the same email (entryfee@battlefy.com).  You can also speak to your Community Manager with questions regarding this feature.

Refund Procedures

As the organizer, you will at times be asked by users to refund a payment.  You should instruct the user to unjoin the tournament and to remain unjoined and that Battlefy will process the refund after the tournament has concluded.  Once we have received your payout request, we will refund any players that had paid that were not registered for the tournament.  This is currently still a manual process.

There may also be times that a player claims to have paid and the system is still prompting them for payment.  The best course of action here is for them to pay (possibly again) and then register for the tournament.  Once they have done so, if they see two PayPal charges then you should email us asking for us to investigate a duplicate charge.  In that email please provide the users profile link, PayPal email address and any details they may have provided such as PayPal transaction IDs.  We will verify that they were indeed charged twice and refund them immediately.  This is an oddity in PayPal’s system that reports a cancelled charge but still collects the fee and unfortunately not currently something they have resolved.

In the event that you need to cancel your tournament and already have players registered, you should close registration and set the tournament to draft/private.  This prevents it from being seen by more players.  You should NOT delete the tournament until after you have contacted us about processing refunds and we have confirmed that they have been processed.  Cancelling an event is not something you should do lightly and repeated cancellations may result in your access to this feature being removed.  Generally speaking, you should only cancel an event that does not have enough players to be run.

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