Lots of news to cover today and time's a-wasting. No change over at the not so Grand Tour so I'ma skip them this week.
At NPPL 3.0 things continue apace. It's hard to know what the actual state of the league is but registration keeps growing. There are currently 109 registered teams, including 70 7-man teams. Registration has now surpassed last year's participation number of 103. And while I could'a sworn the league sent out an email blast about a full pump division at 16 teams it's no longer listed in the news and pump registration is up to 18. In the news a change to the field layout was announced today--seems a modest fix to the fifties was in order. (Perhaps they discovered the snake side snake was otherwise virtually unplayable.) 5-man registration remain soft with the majority being in the "new" D4 division. Finally, this week Kingman officially signed up as a major sponsor of the NPPL 3.0. In keeping with recent nomenclature changes around the leagues Kingman is not a gold, silver, platinum, etc. sponsor--they are a major sponsor. Kinda like the PSP's new generic master sponsor.
In the MS this week registration has increased by 10 teams over last week to bring the total number of registered teams across all divisions to 60. That's it. Despite the SPL additions of All Russians (who won D1 last season) and Manchester Method in their return to Millennium play. (You must read the announcement at MS website. It's on the home page. Are they models? Are they ballers?) In the face of dramatically reduced registration numbers the MS announced a reduced season schedule by pulling back to 4 events and canceling Turkey. The change reduced the cost to compete and saw Campaign and Mill Cup switch places on the schedule with Campaign playing over the 4th of July weekend and Mill Cup moved into early October. The MS has also updated their sponsors list for 2010 and the list of official sponsors is short and lonely. Stako and Kartel Prime are display sponsors, Paint Xtreme is a gold sponsor and Kingman Group, GI Milsim and Dark Sports are platinum sponsors and--that's it. This leaves a clear opening for somebody to jump in and scoop up the opportunity to place their logo on disposable trash bins.
On Feb 27th the TonTons released a video showing off their new private label NTs. In the background is the Malaga layout--which wasn't officially released until March 5th--and enquiring minds want to know how long the TonTons had access to the layout before everybody else. Oops.
With registration officially closed last Friday today's number for Phoenix is 109, 79 of which are playing some variant of xball lite while 30 teams, mostly D4, will be competing in a Race 2-2 format. That's 13 fewer xball teams and 21 fewer 5-man teams that last year's total of 143. That's approximately a 24% decline over last year in total numbers with the bulk being a 40% drop off in 5-man. Not good news. No telling the impact yet as Chicago will either begin to balance out a weak Phoenix or set a pattern of further decline.
The PSP is still without a 2010 rule book and it's beginning to show as are some of the complications that arise with significant change. Over at PBN this thread highlights a potential problem. Given the new classification rules the PSP (via APPA) intend to seed teams based on some cumulative player ranking formula--which doesn't sound unreasonable. Instead of attaching a ranking value to a team it is possible to do a more precise seeding using player classification values. Unless a team purposefully delays identifying who will be on their roster. (Or unintentionally alters their seed number by adding or removing players at the last minute.) In either case the seeding is skewed. I don't know how aggressively this issue might be manipulated or to what outcome but what I do know is if someone thinks they can gain an advantage by manipulating their seeding place they will try to do it.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
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10 comments:
The field layout on the TONTON field in Marseille was bought to the attention of the MS last week. The response was that it is not the same field. Basically, any similarities were coincidental at best.... apart from the snake layout which was given to them to "test".
It wasn't even worth arguing with them.
"The PSP is still without a 2010 rule book"
Millennium Series has not had an up to date rule book since 2006, so why would PSP need one? Just look how well things are going here in euroland and you would know rulebooks are overrated. :P
OTOH, everyone and their brothers are fed up with MS. This season is not going to go well.
Not really hard to see that TonTon's layout is the exact Malaga's Layout.
Somebody need to do something about this ...
The easiest thing to do is use another layout and swap this one to another event. We shall have to wait and see what happens. I am guessing nothing seeing as the MS have already denied that it is the same layout even though a blind man could see it's exactly the same...
Looks like bog-standard paintball info management- even though it may look the same...
it ain't.
Ok, nothing more to see here, move along, any questions will be ignored as always and everything is going to be awesomtacular this year just like every year. If you argue you hate paintball (link to pic of Laurent with a big tear rolling down his cheek. You don't hate paintball...do you?
An official MS comment on the TonTon field? Why, that's an improvement right there!
The way the locked divisions are looking right now I'd be surprised if Laurent didn't already have a tear rolling down his cheek.
And Baca is pulling his last few hairs out reading the comments that turn 4 hours of writing into a simple Tonton/Millennium affair...
Ah ah ah!!!
How long do you need to play a layout before you know it? If you can't figure it out in 6 weeks, 2 or 3 extra weeks won't help and you have nothing to do in competition paintball.
Back to something more important... Is the decrease in teams at the PSP the results of the affiliate leagues? WCPPL and CFPS last weekend, CFOA the weekend before and AZPPL a couple of weeks ago...
If it is, is that bad for the PSP?
Yes, less team, yes, less revenue from entree fees, but could it be compensated by 1 less field, therefore less refs and all the expenses that comes with it?
I have hear we would have 6 or 7 fields in Phoenix, so my theory goes down on this one... but isn't it the thought behind that affiliate program? Smaller and more selective National events with a larger base to support it.
He
Gonna respond to your comments in a separate post.
Baca,
As always, I can't wait to read it!
I understand seeding teams by player strength for the first event with teams coming from the USPL that do not have any PSP history. However, after that I feel it be should be base on past performance as it was before. Shouldn't the number one seeded team in Chicago be the team that won that division in Phoenix?
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