New Year's Discord Announcement
2025-06-16 14:43:44
Hi @everyone,
This is an update regarding next year's world championship.
Dates are now fixed! The Minesweeper World Championship 2025 will take place on the weekend from the 26th to the 28th of September 2025.
Also, we know that staying in Madrid is a bit on the expensive side. So, we're taking the following first measure to help out with that - we're going to guarantee a place to stay for at least 10 people for the two weekend nights free of charge, under a few conditions:
- We choose your accommodations.
- You must be willing to share a room with other Minesweeper players that also make use of this option.
- You must be under 20, or a student and under 26, on 2025-09-28. If we end up with extra space, we might fill it with older players.
- We promise that you won't have to share a bed with anyone else.
- We promise that you won't have to share a room with anyone else, besides maybe other players' +1s (see below).
- We promise that the accommodations will be reasonably close to public transport.
- The order in which we hand out these beds may depend on your result in a (tba) qualifying tournament.
- If we get access to more resources, we might expand this offer to more people.
- If you're traveling with someone, we might consider to host them as well, but they'd have to pay their share of whatever accommodation we get, and we'd of course prioritize Minesweeper players. Contact us via DM if this applies to you.
What this probably means is that we'll get a room or two in a cheap hostel and fill it with participants. It would be helpful to know if this would be an option for you so that we can figure out the potential demand!
We also want to note that we hope to expand on this depending on funds. This is what we're willing to pay for with our own money if all else fails, so it's what we can already promise for now.
Next up, we've looked into crowdfunding, and realized that if we don't want people's donations (and other sources of income like sponsorship money) to be taxed as regular income, it would be a good idea to found an association with its own finances. This provides a few more benefits:
- We'll have legally binding statutes. This means that if you donate, you'll get a legal guarantee that your money will be used in the way you expect.
- We'll be able to contact potential sponsors as an organization, as opposed to as individuals.
- We'll have it in place for future events.
- We can try to become a charitable organization, which could lead to more tax benefits.
- We can collect membership fees, which might be a nice way for people to contribute in a low-key way, and for funding for this event and future events to accumulate over time.
- We can use it to represent Minesweeper as an e-Sport in other ways.
We also realized that drafting statutes for an association is actually a lot of work. So, we're not done with this yet - but stay tuned!
Last but not least, some of you complained about a lack of ralokt's face in the photo we uploaded in October. We're not sure what those complaints were about, but here are some photos from that event that also show their face, just in case there's any confusion! (editor's note: this refers to some photos that were uploaded with the announcement post, and an earlier post)
If you have any questions/feedback, #mswch2025 is the place to post 🙂
Happy sweeping and a happy new year,
ralokt and RmwCby