cheating out of control??

[Liz]

Originally posted by garycarrot
The cost of a few more marshalls isnt that high. Raise the entry fee by £1 per player, problem sorted.

Um, think you need to work on the maths a bit more. Typical domestic tournaments, say 30 7-man teams on 3 fields. Thats £210 extra in entries if you charge £1 per player. You currently get around 6 refs per field (7 if you're VERY lucky) for a 7-man game, needing another 8 per field. For your 3 fields that's around of £1200 (£50 x 8 x 3). So it would be more like £40 per team, or well over a fiver per player (unless, of course, you were willing to ref for well under a tenner a day). It's hard enough trying to persuade players that they have to pay a bit more for arena type venues and sup'air than they had to pay 10 years ago to use a bit of woodland, plus for extras that are demanded like H-PAC (worth every penny though!) without adding yet another expense.

Anyway, as Tommy says it's murder trying to get enough people with the current ratio of refs to players, you might as well forget it if you need half the active players in an area to work rather than compete!

 

[Mazz]

Fair points from all.

Who refs the games anyway? Is there a reffing federation or is it the players from other teams that are competing on the day? If its the players then the games could get biased because of grudges held against them. For example If a ref made a bad call on one player in a game, and the next game their roles were reversed, whats stopping the latter ref making a bad call to get him back?

 

[Liz]

Though there are a few people who just (or mostly) ref, the majority are players who aren't taking part at a particular tournament. Usually it's a team who are asked to ref, and some have very good reputations. However though years ago we had the old EPSF (forerunner of the UKPSF) marshalling course, of recent years there's been nothing to train or approve someone as a tournament ref - this is all about to change as the PA has got together with some of the top domestic refs around to create a paintball reffing accreditation initiative. This will include stuff like having to pass written exams on the rules then practical assessment, and will have levels of accreditation depending on experience etc. Please don't pester me for more info as that's just about what I know, drop Hatts or Rulebook Russel a line if you are interested!

 

[Wadidiz]

1. 3-strikes-you're-out: Suspend any player who gets caught breaking the same rule three times in the same tournament.

2. Use penalties as tie-breakers, i.e. if two teams are tied in a series then the team with less penalties will be ranked higher.

We need to systematically reward clean playing (which is what the REAL game of PB is all about: you get shot and you're out) and up the penalties for cheating.