Major League Paintball on Suicide Watch

There was some action this past week at the not so Grand Tour. (Could be somebody over there has been reading VFTD.) Seems they are making a big push to promote their newly promoted Pro teams; Ranger Warsaw, Kosmos Moscow & RL-Art Chaos. Also registered Pro are the Bullets and Warsaw United. Total registration is up to 17 teams including a couple of Consilium Dei teams. It's slow progress but it's still progress.
As regulars know I'm partial to this event because of the location so I'm kinda rooting for a successful event. And if anyone wants a pro coach I'm there for the price of a plane ticket and I can even kick in a tour of Venice--but only in English.

Still over in Euroland the MS is rumored to be working overtime trying to entice more teams and sponsors into supporting the league. Rumor also has it the league may be offering "incentives" to get that support. Of course that's just rumor but it's heated up a bit after last week's Suicide Watch report. From here it's hard to say but the numbers testify to their limited success.
Total registration for all divisions is at 93. It looks like most of the numbers bump that did occur has come lately from Spanish teams. It's curious they weren't in there earlier, isn't it?
I'd also like to clarify a suggestion from last week that promo & relegation were nearly irrelevant given the shrinking locked division numbers and fact that teams that hadn't earned promotion were getting it. In fact, the MS is (apparently) going down the list of last year's finishers until they get a taker. Which seems to be how Shock 2 got into D1. Everybody above them passed. Still, I don't see how it makes a whole lotta sense. Is the league still limiting "promotion" numbers? In undermanned divisions? What's the point?

NPPL 3.0 is counting down the days '24' style including hours, minutes and seconds. Registration and more importantly paying your entry remains open for 3 more days, give or take. I expect that deadline is negotiable but the clock runs out eventually. Registration is up to 121 teams but according to the league's data no more than 88 have paid in full. And the thing is even that may not be all that accurate because the Pro teams registered appear to have paid but in fact most of them hadn't as of the past weekend. I might be inclined to assume they will at some point but I'm afraid I ain't quite that naive anymore. (If anybody plays without paying I wouldn't hold my breath waiting to collect.)
I've looked over the rules and will have a separate post on them later in the week.
However registration and participation shakes out it looks like we'll be playing some paintball on the beach and since it's not my money that can't be a bad thing. But it is somebody's money whether it's cash in the bank or outstanding debt, mostly the later in the NPPL's case. And unlike the government the NPPL can't print money.

PSP Phoenix went off with only minor hitches and generally the 3-day event seemed to work out okay. I don't know any of particulars of the logistical changes that may have been needed to shorten the event but I'll see what I can find out. The 2010 rules weren't released until the last minute. The 90 second rule seemed to hammer the refs harder than the players though it was a struggle for some to adjust. The Pro field did not adjust to what I thought was rule modification with respect to signaling a flag hang but everything mostly was one in a timely manner. And it seems the new scoreboard wasn't setup to handle pro field penalties and the old scoreboard couldn't handle the 90 second break between points so it was done by hand. In practice that meant the 90 second rule was close to 90 seconds one way or the other rule. Not perfect but not horrible either. I know there were a lot of changes and the league put out notices in as timely a manner as they could manage--there's only so many hours in the day and only so many peeps available to get stuff done--but it wouldn't hurt if the league put all the changes into a single brief and promoted it to the teams and players at least as aggressively as the latest new sponsored gear. Just a suggestion.