Monday, November 23, 2009

The Monday Poll (sorta)

Aight, this week's poll isn't exactly a poll. It's an information gathering device masquerading as a poll but despite that ominous sounding characterization I promise it will be far less intrusive than Amazon and the results will be insufficient to allow me to put the data to nefarious purposes--unlike pretty much everybody else collecting info about you these days, on the net and elsewhere. And besides, you're a risk taker, right? An extreme sportsman even (I can't even type that with a straight face) so it's really no big deal.

This week's not quite a Monday Poll is actually a clever attempt to get an idea of who is reading VFTD. Not who specifically--just who in a general way. What part of paintball do readers self-identify as their particular (or peculiar) niche. See, harmless. But now that I bring it up your kinda curious too, aren't you? Of course you are.

Which of the following options best describes my place in paintball--

Monday Poll in Review
Last week's poll wanted to know how best to "fix" competitive paintball given that the conventional wisdom insists that something (or even lots of things) are wrong with it but mostly that not enough people are playing. Two weeks ago the poll decided it was the economy stupid and a demographic skewed to the young (and as a consequence) frequently broke. Unsurprisingly 48% of this week's votes went to options that could be interpreted as cost saving measures though only 37% of the total vote has a clear application to cost savings. 12% suggested limited paint. 12% also suggested shorter events and 10% were willing to accept anything that made events cheaper. (Though I think its safe to say that the percentage would drop as soon as the "anything" option was defined in specific terms and that this vote actually reflects a degree of desperation and an uncertainty about how to actually make events cheaper.)
On the other hand 32% were hoping for no more change and suggested leave well enough alone--which may or may not be cost neutral in this context. In any context cost matters but it seems reasonable to conclude the leave it alone vote doesn't see a benefit versus current costs in more changes.
Finally, while one might conclude that if 68% voted for some kind of change that the majority isn't averse to some change I wonder if that's really true given that the majority of the options were fairly specific. For example, the limited paint vote won't necessarily be in favor of a format change or switch to 50 cal small balls. The open ended options that focused on change alone only collected 11% of the vote and, as noted above, 10 of that 11% went to the make events cheaper option.
In any event it will be interesting to see how competitive ballers respond when the league(s) announce the changes for next year.

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