Monday, May 3, 2010

The Monday Poll

Good turnout last week, kids. Thanks. The more the merrier. (The rest of you are still a pack of slackers.)

This week I'm gonna keep the trend going and use an element of last week's poll as the basis for this week's poll question. The aspect of last week's poll that surprised me the most was the big fat goose egg on the Gun Rules option. Nobody--not a one--picked gun rules as the most important factor in choosing a 5-man national event to compete in. Which may not be a big deal but hasn't one of the factors touted by the 7-man crowd always been the whole semi-auto thing? Come on. Maybe it doesn't translate and maybe it's the number two choice of 50% of the voters. Who knows? We will. After this week's Monday Poll.

What firing mode would you most like to use in tournament play?

There it is. Keep in mind when answering that whatever mode you choose is, hypothetically, the one everyone would be using. Keep the streak intact. Keep those votes a-coming.

Monday Poll in Review
Don't know about y'all but I'm not sure how to interpret this one--but I'll give it a shot--and you can disagree. Even though I suggested ways to apply each option I am inclined to associate most of them with one league or the other except entry and layout. How entry got 11% of the vote is a complete mystery unless it's in comparison to the alternatives. (Which means you've already decided to attend a national level event and chose 5-man 'cus it's cheaper. Would love to hear somebody who picked entry explain their thinking.) And layout was a throw away really but you never know. While Vibe could go either way (I suppose) it's the NPPL that pushed the total tourney experience. Venue is similar. Sure, you might think World Cup but more likely HB and all the past NPPL hype, stadium parking lots notwithstanding. Officiating seems to me to be a net plus for the PSP. Doesn't mean it's been better all the time (but is has, by and large) only that the PSP has always done a better job of communicating their effort and desire to make reffing a priority. And coaching in this context is really about who objects to it more than who approves of it--so picking coaching was probably a negative choice. Preferring NPPL because it has no (legal) coaching. Finally format could go either way and some lesser percentage no doubt favored NPPL by format but going by last week's results I'm assuming the majority made a positive choice favoring xball style paintball. If I'm ballpark the bulk of format and officiating reflects a favorable perception of the PSP while vibe and coaching votes reflect a NPPL orientation.
As always there isn't an iota of scientific analysis involved but it's still intriguing--and best of all, like all proper statistics, allows me to manipulate the data however I please.

12 comments:

Don Saavedra said...

Are we going to assume that the type of firing mode is something that is enforcable and enforced? Because I might not select my first choice based on how difficult it is to keep fair.

anonachris said...

Millennium mode seems like a nice compromise. You get semi auto and you have to sustain a constant rate of fire (fairly easily) in order for it to ramp.

That might mean it's easiest to cheat. But if you want to work really hard and risk getting caught for a cheat that gives you 1% advantage compared to the other guy you're not too bright.

It's probably also somewhat tricky to enforce the Mill rules, which I assume means its not really enforced unless they find someone blatantly crossing the line.

Anonymous said...

Mill rules are enforced by PACT-Timers ROF wise, but the ramp restart setting and ramp upkeep is often cheated, but give little to no actual ingame benefits. Even with the real settings you one finger the gun to ramp with no effort. (5bps->10bps)

Personally, I find Mill gun rules worse than PSP, lack of 3 shot is extremely annoying.

Reiner Schafer said...

I'm miffed! Pump didn't even make the list! ;-)

SSRoman said...

Capped ramping because it eliminates players cheating with firing modes. PSP because well, I'm American.

Baca Loco said...

Don
You old romantic fool you (if you want to go with uncapped semi, and I know you do). It hasn't been enforced and as a practical matter it can't be enforced and in actual play you can call it "semi" all day but that doesn't make it so. If it was enforceable I'd vote uncapped semi too but the general integrity of the game is too important.

Reiner
I thought about that one and a couple others but they weren't really relevant. ;)

raehl said...

Missing option:

Uncapped "semi-auto" hopperball.

Don Saavedra said...

No batteries allowed. Boom, semi-auto paintball.

Reiner Schafer said...

Oh Don! What are you thinking? Are you from the 18th century or something? No one is going to go for a simple solution.

Baca Loco said...

Chris
I left out some viable options because they would only obscure the aspect of the poll that I'm interested in.

Don & Reiner
Consider yourselves responsible for the delay in my posting the next promotions post as I'm now going to have to respond to this. ;-)

Mark790.06 said...

I see a lot of local/lower divisional games and I see very little wins due to skill. I see players getting shot just posting a lane. So focused do they seem on their stream of paint, oblivious on anything else. Now if it's a player in a key position, shooting a key lane who gets shot like a petrified statue marveling at his PHAT stream, and the other team miraculously recognizes an advantage, and even more impressively acts correctly to seize said advantage, a win based on something akin to skill may actually result.

Having said that. Count me as among those who believe there isn't a better option than PSP capped ramping.

Having said THAT. I believe that competitive paintball could be better off (participation-wise) if, somehow, the average player would learn HOW to freaking play it. Can a team today ever truly learn anything from a loss? Aside from, "The refs screwed us!" of course.

Baca Loco said...

Hey Mark
I will gladly defer with respect to the volume of lower division paintball you've seen. One of the reasons I favored the tiered ROF. And if they brought it back as capped semi-auto it might not seem so slow and artificial.