2004 - It's Done- Merged

[Wadidiz]

Originally posted by Robbo
Facking hell, the Universe is unfolding a different way this morning, I actually agree with everything Tyger just said........ .......hmmmmmm...........is armageddon upon us all ?

Robbo, Tyger and even I agree all at once. Maybe not Armageddon, maybe heayen is coming to earth. Peace

Maybe we can get Raehl, Nick, Furby and Bryan Gilchrist all agreeing also. Then folks would suspect there is LSD in the water!

Tyger does have an obviously good point. Question: Doesn't X Ball do just that? Isn't it understandable within 3 minutes? I don't think traditional 5, 7 or 10-player are. Howz about SteveD's format? Don't know, I haven't seen it.

But I am developing some ideas right now to throw into the heap. I might be on to something.

Steve

 

[Alan Smith]

With regard to the format discussion, there is no way I want to be throwing a flag anywhere, paintball has plenty inherent strategy to represent rather than looking to more complicated formats. I'm with Nick in paintball you shoot all of the opposition then get the flag, the flag is out of date replace it with a buzzer at the start gates connected to a central field score board and away we go!

 

[SteveD]

Nick, Pete, et al,

The USPL format does what Tyger suggests: in fact, the Davidson format rulebook consisted of 20 some odd pages - FOR OFFICIALS - and 1.5 pages for players.

As Tyger said - those in the crowd who do not understand the rules only need know two or three things to appreciate the game: get the flag through the up-rights and a score happens, shoot someone and they leave the field, score and everything starts all over.

Chris is wrong about his assessment of the impact of the flags: All I can do is go back to real world experience with the format: the vast majority of goals were 3 pointers, and most of them occurred with approximately 50% of the players left on the field. I don't have actual numbers in front of me this morning, but the number of 3 point scores with 6 to 8 players on the field ran about 80% of all scores at PaintFest.

When a 3 point score occurs, its because both flags are in the center of the field - and that means that the teams are right on top of each other, bunkering and slamming.

Tyger played the format so he can speak from experience.

Nick, I'm not talking 'team sponsorship', I'm talking about prizes. I think that each country ought to be able to kick in one international trip per year. If they can't, then we need to get in there and take a look at what's wrong with that market. I can see Lichtenstein having a population based problem, but other than that, I think the Euros ought to be able to handle it.

Once again though, we're mired in detail. I'm outta here. Figure out what you all are going to do and, if it amounts to anything, and if you want to use the already tried and tested format, let me know.

 

[SteveD]

Well, not quite outta here yet:

Why the hell am I arguing with people over whether my format works or not?

It already has - so the argument is moot. The teams that played it loved it, the teams that played standard format wanted to know why they weren't playing it (which includes the college teams btw) and the spectators loved it, including Craig Miller (who now stumps for x-ball) who said "This (the format) is the way we should have been playing paintball all along".

Buzzers, lights or flags in the middle of the field won't work for the simple reason that they have the opposite effect to what is desired - they force you to go for eliminations first, whittling the field before you make your move. This in turn favors defensive play, which in turn slows things down. It also makes half the playing field meaningless for each team.

 

[Red_Merkin]

Guys;
Format, league structure, rules; these things are all irrelevent without one thing; Marketing!
If you can market 'Extreme Ironing' and get that on TV, you'll be able to get any format of paintball with any set of player on TV. What is needed is a Kick Ass marketing campaign, to promote Professional International Paintball League, the Teams, and Players in that League.

I'm talking from Experince, people will buy anything if you sell it to them right. You need the right product for the Market, at the right time. The real question should not be what kind of paintball game we play, but how do we want this to appear on TV?

The league structure, the rules, the whole format is only relevent to getting this into a digestable Television format.

And all this leads to another question, who's going to pay for this?
At some point someone is going to have to go out and collect investors, with promises of large returns when the format goes to Television.

Using the NXL as an example, the team owners put in a ton of money to start the franchises up. Their initial costs were much higher than the actual cost of running the teams for one year. However with that each of the Owners has gone out with the intent of getting a return on their investment, appart from having prime exposure for their product in the paintball industry. Richmond and the Gardeners in particular have gone to the Media to activly seek out a return on their investment.

So, maybe what needs to happen, is to find team owners who are prepared to invest in teams, but also invest into a campaign to create a Marketable league. The League must be run with one SINGLE intention, to get a return on the investment by getting the league on TV.

Which brings us round back to the main question, who's going to invest in a venture like this? The Millennium Series Promoters? EuroSport? Because without investors, no matter how good the league is, no matter how watchable the formate is, no one is ever going to see it unless someone invests money to get it onto TV.

 

[duffistuta]

Isn't that exactly what Pure Promotions are doing?

 

[Tyger]

Originally posted by Wadidiz
Question: Doesn't X Ball do just that? Isn't it understandable within 3 minutes? I don't think traditional 5, 7 or 10-player are. Howz about SteveD's format? Don't know, I haven't seen it.

I've played in the USPL. It has potential, and I like it. Problem is that it's still high-volume paintball. And that's chaotic. It does shift the focus of the game, and it does make the players re-think what they're doing. I have solutions, but nobody likes them.

X-Ball has excitment, if you're a player. To anyone else, it's just a lot of shooting. "Oh, look, there's another player behind that pyramid. Oh look, he's doing that preying mantis on speed thing again. Oh look, he's been shot. Oh, let's see what else is on the telly."

Try filming paintball once, you'll understand what I mean. It's the same problem we've had since 1991 when people started bringing camcorders to the field. One angle isn't enough to catch all the action, and 5 is barely enough. There's not a lot of movement on the new "small" airfields. About the most you get is when someone hops up a bunker, and that doens't happen often enough to make good TV. We could play on a postage stamp, and still get the same problem.

What makes paintball exciting is the thing that maes it impossible to film. I said it before, but it does bear repeating. The fact that any player, at any time, and make the winning move, that's why paintball is exciting. But this makes it impossible to film effectively. The best you can do it an overall 'idea'.

I'm sorry, I just got done rendering the ESPN footage from '95 a few days ago, then the USPL footage, then looked at "SPPLAT attack" the DVD. I've been studying this stuff for the last month with the WDR vids and so on. Once you sit down, and take a long, hard look at what's been done on video, you see very quickly that it's mostly "Amateur hour". And the good tapes are so heavy in post production that it's not even funny.

Not that it's bad, just that if you need to do that much "post" on a sporting event, you may as well be running a "Strongman" competition and not a 'live' sporting event like NFL or MLB or... (What's the Euro federation for "Footy"? I keep forgetting...)

And to touch on what Steve said, I *DID* play the USPL format (Or whatever we're euphamising it as now...) I would like to do it again. I'd like to do it with a team of guys that I know will show up on day 2, even if they're hurtin. (My team bailed on me because they were 'too tired' or 'too beaten up' to play... I was there... and ended up subbing for a team out of Colarado who only had 5 guys to begin with.) And I know I can get a team together in a few weeks.

And if the USPL comes back, so will the "Wolves". That's a promise, Steve.


EDIT ADD : For Red. You bring up a good point about marketing, but you can't market junk forever. I mean, if it's schlock it's schlock. You can sell it for the short term, but nobody will buy into it forever.

On RSP some years ago we talkd about this. And someone said something tat stuck with me. "Show me something I can't do." Tha'ts why we wach sports. We watch someone who CAN kick a ball 75 feet into a space 2 foot wide. We wach in awe as someone slams a home run. We sit mouths wide open when a guy flys past us at 200+ MPH in his open-wheeled F-1. And we all say the same thing.

"I wish I could do that."

You don't need to market that. If we can do that for paintball, then we would just need to provide the proper vehicle. If you market paintball as something it's not, you'll send the sport the way of the "XFL", 1 season, and it's dead. Make the product worth watchign first, THEN show it off.

-Tyger

 

[raehl]

I think your misrepresenting your statistics Steve.

Saying that 80% of scores were 3 point scores that happened when there were 6+ live players on the field is a bit... misleading. I could also say that 95% of centerflag scores occur with live players on the field too. The reality of the situation is that it's the flag hang score that's important, and it's ELIMINATING ALL THE PLAYERS that marks the end of the game - and it's no different in your format.

Do you score three points in the Steve format by advancing the flag in the middle of the game? NO! I think you've forgotten how to play your own format. A team *ONLY* scores points when they bring their flag through the goal on the opposing end line. As played at Paintfest, if their opponent's flag was still in their first zone, they got 7 points, if it was in the middle, they got 3 points, and if their opponents had gotten their flag to their third zone before the flag was hung, then the flag hang would only be worth one point.

Your system does *NOT* award advancing the flag at the expense of bodies - it awards *NOT* letting the other team advance their flag before you eliminate them all.

It's WORSE than centerflag - a least with centerflag, if you let the other team get the pull first, that's 20 points that are gone forever. In the Steve format, having your flag farther down the field early in a game does you no good - and the only time advancing a flag before eliminating the all of your opponents makes any difference at all is if you LOSE, which sacrificing players trying to get a flag to the other side of the field early is very likely to cause you to do.

Your format favors defense. You get more points by elminating other players before they can advance. You get no points for advancingyour own flag before doing this. At best all you can do is mitigate the number of points your opponents get when they eliminate you.

I also went and reread your patent just to be sure I was remembering this right, which I havn't done in 2 years. I know a lot more about patent law now than I did then, and I can tell you three things:

1) There is no way that X Ball infringes on your patent.
2) There is no way that virtually any other paintball format does or ever will infringe on your patent.
3) You patent is thus borderline worthless, as any near-trivial modification of your format gets around the patent.

You did not have a patent attorny draft your patent, of if you did, they were a bad one - your claims are so specific that they are borderline unenforcable, you'd never make it past summary judgement with that thing.

Well, I suppose it's possible you wrote it that way intentionally, never intending to actually try and enforce it, but just so you could say you had a patent and attempt to threaten the less-patent-savvy with it.


- Chris

 

[raehl]

Eek, more posts...

Red: Right on. And to a certain extent, media partners only want to deal with people who stand to lose a lot if what they're doing doesn't succeed. Much easier to trust other people's greed. They'll be nervous about getting involved if it looks like the people they're getting involved with don't lose much if the thing fails.


Tyger:

One thing Arenaball had going for it is LOTS of movement, which occured because of extremely dense bunker setups. Downside was games only lasted 30 seconds, which was bad. What I think X Ball needs is MORE bukers - maybe more small bunkers - but if you make movement easier (by making it harder for players to post up and cover a lane down the whole field) you will get more movement.

Or make people play Stock. TV might be the one thing that can do that.


Steve:

There's a difference between "Why arn't we playing that format?" and "We want to play that format."

I assure you, there are currently zero college teams who want to play your format, and even right at paintfest, college players who liked the format were outnumbered by those who did not.

If people wanted to play your format so bad, they might have actually signed on for that college league of yours, which as I recall, only one team did. Actually, maybe it wasn't the format's fault...

Much more common questions from college players at Paintfest were "Why is paint $80 when the USPL said it would be $40?" and "Why does our meager 5 person reffing crew weigh over 1200 pounds?"


- Chris

 

[Buddha 3]

In all honesty, I have to say that none of the formats that I’ve seen or read about so far strike me as being “the way” as far as getting PB to become a spectator sport is concerned.
Traditional paintball, as is being played by the PSP, NPPL, Millennium, and a whole bunch of others, is not a real spectator sport. Sure, most of us like to watch it, but we are all players, and enjoy watching things that Joe Schmoe wouldn’t care about. We are impressed by someone’s skills in playing tight, or the speed at which a player shoots his gun. These are details that other people wouldn’t even notice, let alone care about. This game can be shown on tv, as the NPPL has demonstrated, but mostly in a highlights format.
X-ball, which is commonly hailed as the spectator version of paintball, doesn’t really impress me as far as the playing is concerned. Sure, there are great moves, and nailbiting moments, but I get to see the same moves and breaks about 20 times in a row. Fun at first, yawnsville after a while. Maybe if the games were shortened? I don’t know. The main reason I enjoyed the X-ball I’ve witnessed, was because it was fun being part of a mob of people making lots of noise, something that doesn’t really translate through tv. In the end, X-ball is still traditional paintball in a center flag format, played a couple times in a row. I don’t see the big difference.
Chuck-the-ball-around format (for lack of a better name right now) doesn’t sound to appealing to me (in all honesty I haven’t seen it, so my opinion isn’t that informed). In my opinion it turns paintball into extreme handball. And I’m not talking about the handball that Puerto Ricans play in the New York parks, but the girly game that’s basically soccer with your hands. The way I see it, it would only make it on tv as a “Haha-look-at-this” game. Although it does address the center of focus issue that other formats have.

Anyway, why is it so important to get paintball on tv? What would the benefits be? What would I get out of it?
Would it bring more people into the sport? A few, but nothing formidable. As it is, one of the main reasons people don’t pick up on paintball as a real sport is the fact that it’s cost prohibitive. For most people it is just not affordable to be able to go out and train weekly, and get competitive equipment. Any idea what kind of paintbill you’d run up? And let’s be honest, if you want to call yourself an athlete, you have to train at least two or three times a week. That’s what they do in ‘real’ sports. With the prices as they are now, no way this is possible, paintball is just too dependant on consumables, and will forever be, because there will always be a minimum pricetag attached to it. Even if the price of paint went down by as much as 30% (which I don’t think is possible), it would still be too expensive to become mainstream.
The only people that would benefit are a few lucky players, and a few lucky promoters. They will be the ones that own the format, and they will get the tv dollars, very little of that will trickle down. It’ll be more likely that the people that manage the sponsorship budgets willhave to change their ways. At the moment, many smaller teams have little sponsorship deals going on. Forget about that happening when tv comes around! Why? Because every brand wants to get their logos on the teams that play on tv, they want their banners to line the fields that people see on tv. And with that knowledge, you can safely bet both of your kidneys that it’ll cost a whole lot more to become a recognised league or team sponsor. So there will be less money to spend on sponsoring the smaller teams.

The more I think about it, the less benefits I see to this whole tv thing. Sure, it’ll be fun to see, but it ain’t the be all and end all. And if paintball becomes a real televised league with franchises to boot, it’ll have a detrimental effect on paintball’s lower echelons (seen it happen with numerous American Football leagues in Europe when the NFL Europe drove into town in a big Winnabago).
If it ever happens, the only thing sto benefit are the egos and wallets of a small group of people. Luckily I don’t see it happening really, because paintball will remain in the same regions as skateboarding and such, with only highlights being shown on tv, so those big television dollars will hopefully stay away….