One quick additional word on the errant story Facefull posted yesterday and then pulled at the NPPL's request (apparently). Seriously, the sources must have been either NPPL people or bigwigs at KEE 'cus none of the primary PSP movers were present. Missed the story? Facefull was claiming the merger a veritable done deal until told their "facts" were mistaken and they should post haste pull their story. Which they did.
ProPaintball has a follow-up today on the latest rumorology regarding a merger and given the information in their latest missive VFTD will be doing a pre-merger analysis next week after the NJ Open as ProPaintball's sources are sufficiently well-informed (and willing to talk) that I no longer feel under any obligation to keep things under wraps at least in a general sense because plainly some NPPL sources have been talking.
Regarding last weekend's Paintball Festival I am hearing it was sparsely attended pretty much across the board. A couple hundred scenario players--maybe. A dozen teams competing in the UWL event--which is pretty typical. And perhaps as many as three or four dozen of the bread-and-butter field & store owner types which must have been a huge disappointment--but was readily predictable. And I'm not sure you can legally call it a trade show if there are fewer than 10 vendors present. The same people who ran the once mighty cash cow of the IAO into the ground show up a few years later trying to run a variation on the same theme and it is somehow supposed to magically fill up as the little people come from far and wide grateful for the privilege of attending? Really? Debra Dion Who? Oh, sure, apparently there was a decent turnout of bigwig types prepared to be seen and pontificate but it's easy to get them to come. They'll gather faster than you can say open bar. And it seems they were all a-twitter over airsoft which makes absolutely no sense to me at all. (We got into this a bit last week but it's back!) The fact is plenty of local fields already accommodate airsofters but how exactly does that help paintball and the paintball industry? Airsoft isn't a gateway to paintball play, it's a direct competitor to a (supposedly) strong element of paintball. And inviting airsoft in now only provides another non-paintball alternative to the new or occasional player. Unless the paintball industry is looking to morph into the airsoft industry--and last time I checked there already was an airsoft industry--none of their enthusiasm makes any sense. Unless Tom Cole is a master hypnotist too.
Did you see the new Tippmann multi-purpose Tippmann tool? (Designed specifically for Tippmann markers.) It's blunt, sturdy, nearly indestructible and fits in your pocket like a stubby, fat wrench. Am I the only one disappointed that it won't attach to my pickatinny rail system?
This last item is about the sold out, over sold even, final MS event of the season and more specifically about the size of the D2 division. For the 2011 season the MS cleverly disguised a shrinking base and incorporated scarcity into the mix by limiting the size of each competing division. This also helped in determining well in advance the scale of each event, fields required, etc. Consequently each event maxed out in all the divisions except M5 which has been discontinued. (And that one London event division that came up a couple teams shy.) Anyway the demand for Paris-Disney was apparently such that the MS has oversold D2 by 75% and D3 by 20%. In actual team numbers that means there will be an additional 30 teams competing, 24 of them in an enormous D2 of 56 total teams, on the same number of fields as an MS event intended for 30 fewer teams. (Or so I'm told.)
I have no idea if the days are long enough in Paris in early October to avoid playing under the lights or if there was enough scheduling time leeway that fitting an extra 30 teams in won't be an issue but what I do know is there are some teams and players who are concerned about how it's all going to play out. Unfortunately there is nothing VFTD can do for them so I hope they also mentioned their concerns to the MS. (haha) And I further hope the MS doesn't screw up what has proved to be a very good season for them at the last minute because they got too greedy--again. VFTD will wait and watch and see what happens.
Showing posts with label Facefull. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facefull. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Monday, August 8, 2011
Facefull Scoop
Kidding. Seriously, kids? Is Facefull no longer Rich Telford's Wide World of Paintball? Surely a call or email to Rich would'a gotten the insider scoop long ago. (The link to their reportage is in the title.) Oh. Wait a sec. The story is gone. Pulled, apparently.
Here's the dealio. It seems Facefull was reporting earlier today that there was merger talk (and another recent meeting at the Paintball Festival) and a number of sources were confident it--a merge--was likely to happen. Among those sources Chuck Hendsch was named specifically.
I have two questions. How is this news exactly? Didn't VFTD report weeks ago that a meeting between the leagues was gonna happen? Didn't ProPaintball then tell you about the meeting after the fact? Didn't VFTD (kinda, sorta) confirm the rumors and just finish running a poll about the rumored impending merger? Okay, more than two questions. So Facefull finally catches up, talks to some peeps in Pennsylvania, posts a report--and then a few hours later pulls the report.
I was gonna ask if the Facefull story meant the wraps were off the merger rumors and Mr. Curious could unzip his lip--but I guess not. Did anybody save the page before it disappeared? Can't Google regurgitate that pulled story?
UPDATE: Check out this link to NPPL on Facebook. What a hoot! There's also a thread about same on PBN. Didn't Facefull get their story from NPPL sources in the first place?
Here's the dealio. It seems Facefull was reporting earlier today that there was merger talk (and another recent meeting at the Paintball Festival) and a number of sources were confident it--a merge--was likely to happen. Among those sources Chuck Hendsch was named specifically.
I have two questions. How is this news exactly? Didn't VFTD report weeks ago that a meeting between the leagues was gonna happen? Didn't ProPaintball then tell you about the meeting after the fact? Didn't VFTD (kinda, sorta) confirm the rumors and just finish running a poll about the rumored impending merger? Okay, more than two questions. So Facefull finally catches up, talks to some peeps in Pennsylvania, posts a report--and then a few hours later pulls the report.
I was gonna ask if the Facefull story meant the wraps were off the merger rumors and Mr. Curious could unzip his lip--but I guess not. Did anybody save the page before it disappeared? Can't Google regurgitate that pulled story?
UPDATE: Check out this link to NPPL on Facebook. What a hoot! There's also a thread about same on PBN. Didn't Facefull get their story from NPPL sources in the first place?
Monday, April 18, 2011
Hanging with Mike Tyson
VFTD 'rumored' months ago that Facefull (Rich Telford's Wide World of Paintball) was the magazine that wasn't but publications (of Facefull & Jungle) were already infrequent enough to keep most everyone confused. (The X3 kids didn't figure it out until a few weeks ago. I'm sorry but that's funny.)
However, Facefull recently tweeted--it's okay, they're French--that the magazine was coming back. There's also an obscure notification on their website. See it here. There's a lot of blather about restructuring blah blah blah but how long could that take? The new Facefull will be published 6 times a year. (Isn't that what it was before, too, or did they end up behind?)
Anyway, the next issue is supposed to hit the streets mid-May. And in the meantime VFTD hopes they enjoyed their vaca in Bolivian, hanging with Mike Tyson.
Monday, March 8, 2010
On Sponsorship
I was asked yesterday what I thought of an opinion piece posted on the website over at Rich Telford's Wide World of Paintball. (Title is the link.) You may know it better as Facefull. The comments were made by, who else, Rich Telford. It is after all his wide world of paintball. And instead of simply answering the question it seemed blog worthy.
If you're hoping for fireworks you're going to have to set off your own or settle for disappointment. I was asked if I'd seen the piece and if so, what did I think? I have now read it. And it's hard to argue with. Most of it sounds like stuff I've been saying. It offers a suggested path. What's to criticize?
What I will do is piggyback on a couple of points. (I'm also assuming you've read Rich's comments so don't be a lazy slacker and take a minute to check them out.) There are 3 items I want to riff off of here. 1--Rich generously passes responsibility for the current state of the game around and while it's certainly true the facts is that some are more responsible than others. 2--Rich suggests the players need to support the members of the industry that support the pro teams and ignore those that don't. Some might read that as advocating a boycott of sorts--which is how I read it--and while I am agnostic on the utility I'm not shocked by the idea. Collective action in the collective interest (where it can be ascertained) is perfectly reasonable. (But is that in the collective interest?) 3--And finally Rich suggests if times are tough for the pros, and they surely are, it's also no picnic for the lower divisions. Which is true too, as far as it goes.
1--the current state of the game is the responsibility of an industry and major league promoters who have, at times, largely been one and the same. Did some high profile players have input at times? Sure, did their vote count for anything at all at crunch time? When the nature and direction of the game were on the line? Not so much. Without some control there isn't any real responsibility. The only responsibility teams and players bear is the result of an unwillingness to become embroiled in the politics of the game, either individually or collectively. In the present that's neither here nor there, I just want to be clear.
2--if the players and teams have proved incapable in the past of acting in concert in their own self-interest--and they have--I doubt much of anything will convince them to act individually for the collective good--even if they buy into the boycott idea. And then there's the disconnect between the pro teams and the not pro teams. Does the average player see a connection? Other than that's where some of them hope to one day be. It's not that I oppose a boycott or something like it, it's more that I've never seen any evidence to suggest it could be organized, formally or informally.
One reason the needed dollars aren't there is because they can't be justified. Budget cuts don't necessarily dictate which parts of the budget the cuts come from. When sponsorship dollars are targeted it means the value received from those sponsorship dollars is less certain than dollars spent elsewhere. Perhaps one thing teams need to do is figure out a better way to make their case. (Ironically, not unlike what Rich and XSV have been working toward for years. So who would know better what is possible in this environment and what isn't?) One good question for teams is how do we go about building value in our team? And an equally good question for sponsors is what do we lose if we fail to support the pro teams?
3--which kinda leads me to a comparo between the pro teams and the divisional teams. There are a couple of relevant differences. What passes for sponsorship in most divisional situations is really differing sorts of discounts. Are the basis for these discounts tied to pro sponsorship, or the lack thereof? Not so much. Any company that has a product line targeting the competitive part of the game probably offers some sort of discount options to teams, either directly or through retail stores and field shops. Are players really going to ignore those options in order to encourage other parts of the industry to give stuff to pros? Again, not so much, it seems to me. One place (among many) where the pros and divisional players share a common cause is in the costs both incur in order to compete. As divisional players move up ranks the costs of being competitive increase as well so for those players with dreams of playing pro must begin to confront the reality of what it takes off the field as well as on it.
Lastly, while decisions made by industry and promoters have brought us here I'm not pointing fingers and insisting on placing blame--the point is to accurately assess what is so we can all hopefully make wiser decisions as we move forward.
If you're hoping for fireworks you're going to have to set off your own or settle for disappointment. I was asked if I'd seen the piece and if so, what did I think? I have now read it. And it's hard to argue with. Most of it sounds like stuff I've been saying. It offers a suggested path. What's to criticize?
What I will do is piggyback on a couple of points. (I'm also assuming you've read Rich's comments so don't be a lazy slacker and take a minute to check them out.) There are 3 items I want to riff off of here. 1--Rich generously passes responsibility for the current state of the game around and while it's certainly true the facts is that some are more responsible than others. 2--Rich suggests the players need to support the members of the industry that support the pro teams and ignore those that don't. Some might read that as advocating a boycott of sorts--which is how I read it--and while I am agnostic on the utility I'm not shocked by the idea. Collective action in the collective interest (where it can be ascertained) is perfectly reasonable. (But is that in the collective interest?) 3--And finally Rich suggests if times are tough for the pros, and they surely are, it's also no picnic for the lower divisions. Which is true too, as far as it goes.
1--the current state of the game is the responsibility of an industry and major league promoters who have, at times, largely been one and the same. Did some high profile players have input at times? Sure, did their vote count for anything at all at crunch time? When the nature and direction of the game were on the line? Not so much. Without some control there isn't any real responsibility. The only responsibility teams and players bear is the result of an unwillingness to become embroiled in the politics of the game, either individually or collectively. In the present that's neither here nor there, I just want to be clear.
2--if the players and teams have proved incapable in the past of acting in concert in their own self-interest--and they have--I doubt much of anything will convince them to act individually for the collective good--even if they buy into the boycott idea. And then there's the disconnect between the pro teams and the not pro teams. Does the average player see a connection? Other than that's where some of them hope to one day be. It's not that I oppose a boycott or something like it, it's more that I've never seen any evidence to suggest it could be organized, formally or informally.
One reason the needed dollars aren't there is because they can't be justified. Budget cuts don't necessarily dictate which parts of the budget the cuts come from. When sponsorship dollars are targeted it means the value received from those sponsorship dollars is less certain than dollars spent elsewhere. Perhaps one thing teams need to do is figure out a better way to make their case. (Ironically, not unlike what Rich and XSV have been working toward for years. So who would know better what is possible in this environment and what isn't?) One good question for teams is how do we go about building value in our team? And an equally good question for sponsors is what do we lose if we fail to support the pro teams?
3--which kinda leads me to a comparo between the pro teams and the divisional teams. There are a couple of relevant differences. What passes for sponsorship in most divisional situations is really differing sorts of discounts. Are the basis for these discounts tied to pro sponsorship, or the lack thereof? Not so much. Any company that has a product line targeting the competitive part of the game probably offers some sort of discount options to teams, either directly or through retail stores and field shops. Are players really going to ignore those options in order to encourage other parts of the industry to give stuff to pros? Again, not so much, it seems to me. One place (among many) where the pros and divisional players share a common cause is in the costs both incur in order to compete. As divisional players move up ranks the costs of being competitive increase as well so for those players with dreams of playing pro must begin to confront the reality of what it takes off the field as well as on it.
Lastly, while decisions made by industry and promoters have brought us here I'm not pointing fingers and insisting on placing blame--the point is to accurately assess what is so we can all hopefully make wiser decisions as we move forward.
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