Days of My Life: Whose NPPL am I sucking on?

[TJ 2]

Simple?

>>>Some people have a product that works. Why change the product for the few who don't like it at the risk of upsetting those who do?

And that's where it falls down - your starting point should read:

There is only one product and because up til now there has been no rival, people keep going back.

I may know that McDonalds burgers taste like **** and have all the nutritional value of a uranium sandwich, but if McD's is tha only place in my one-horse town where I can buy food then that's where I'm going 'til something better comes along.

Vegas and World Cup did not 'work'.

 

[Wadidiz]

right... it's simple.

Originally posted by raehl
Why change the product for the few who don't like it at the risk of upsetting those who do?- Chris

Wow! This really takes the cake. As if changing cow-pastures to flat, green grass lawns is going to upset someone! Or adding a reasonable amount of toilets or refs (not the same thing, mind you) is going to cause an outrage. Get real!

Robbo was right a long time ago, what we have here is an impossibility of reason or a fay-ya ta ka-myu-nah-kate. THis guy ain't gonna do any listening, much less thinking. He sounds like the Detroit executives when the Japanese first started making a dent in the US market. The makers and marketers of better products make such thinkers their legal prey. Producers of inferior products can only thrive in a non-competitive, monopolistic environment. Only ignorant consumers stomach such rubbish.

One can't help but wonder what the motivations are for the continual defense of the preposterous. Has this user name been hijacked? This is supposed to be the same guy that runs a very successful college league.

Steve

 

[duffistuta]

I don't understand

why people are so busy telling all and sundry what Chuck won't be able to do and how hard it's all going to be - proof of the pudding (no Piper, not you) is in the eating so why pontificate about how hard it's going to be for NPPL to do X, Y and Z...we'll all see for ourselves how he gets on soon enough.

It amazes me how many people are nay-saying and kicking the guy before he's even started.

And even if he ****s right up but his actions force PSP to raise their game, then we still all win.

 

[Buddha 3]

I also think that Chris is looking too much at what's on the surface.
Yeah, WC has gotten more and more entries each year. Sure, looks good. But imagine how many more entries there may have been if they would have gotten their act together, and would have provided proper facilities, quality (or at least adequate) reffing, and what have you. There's a reason why competetive leagues like the PanAm series are on the increase. If PSP would have done a good enough job, many of these teams would have been playing PSP too, instead of PanAm.
Don't just focus on the surface dude, or you might end up doing a Titanic, because most of the stuff is hidden underneath the surface.

 

[Baca Loco]

Chris is just thinking about the future

his future, and laying the groundwork with the PSP for gettin' a real job. So far's he's done a much better job of explaining and rationalizing their inadequacies than anybody else.

 

[raehl]

Heh, no....

What I'm trying to convey here is that it's not as simple as many people think it is, for PSP, or Chuck, or anyone else. It's a difference in perspective - a few people leave world cup pissed off at the few things that don't go right, some people (myself included) leave amazed that it's not utter total chaos. Having been in that fight with utter total chaos running events that were much smaller, I sympathize.

I don't believe it's the conspiracy/money gubbing people make it out to be. You have people who have real jobs who also are trying to run a national league, dealing with lots of different people who all want different things, putting their own money on the line.

I'm not excusing PSP over NPPL - I'm defending promoters from players who expect more for the same price. (And keep in mind that Chuck is doing his change with $100k of WDP's money - unlike the players, at least WDP understands that change costs money and is willing to pay for the change they want. Go WDP!) No one is more pleased than I am to see Chuck trying something new, but just like it doesn't go perfect for PSP, it's not likely to go perfect for Chuck either. If NPPL is going to succeed with what they're doing, they're most likely going to need a bit of understanding as this gets off the ground - not this "It's not perfect, and it might of if they'd spent all of their money on it, those *******s!" attitude.

That's the thing about event promotion - you can minimize the chances of it happening, but ultimately you're in a position of having to accept responsibility for a lot of things you just have no control over. I still have people bitching at me about not having enough air at College Nationals last year - even though it was because of a car accident that knocked down a power pole - followed by ANOTHER car accident that knocked down ANOTHER power pole, leaving the field without power until ConEd got stuff fixed. Could I have done anything about it? Of course not. Are people still pissed about their 2200 fills? You bet.

Players think the promoters OWE them something. They don't. They'll spend money when it's going to make them more money than they have to spend to do it. Why? Because if they don't, they're giving their money away. Because they're already running events for you at much less revenue than they'd be making doing something else with their time and money, and they don't see why they should give YOU even MORE money so YOU can play. You want better paintball? YOU make it happen. You pay for it. You make other options (like S7) viable. YOU get off your asses, get the captain's together and form a player's league and actually go to player meetings. YOU pick up your own garbage so less money can be spent paying people to do it and put towards more refs. YOU stop giving the refs **** on the field so we don't have to pay people an extra $100 to make dealing with player BS worthwhile.

And honestly, I don't get all the bitching about the potajohns. I used them several times and I didn't have to wait in line for one once.

Ok, so maybe after making sure there was enough netting, and poles, and parking, and employees, and garbage cans, and security, and food vendors, and vendor space, and tents, and everything was up on time, and Disney as willing to let people play there, and all the sponsors were happy with which teams got to play x ball, and where they got to set up their trailers, and there wasn't too big of a PR mess when there was a cutback on lewd behavior, and the media knew the event was going to be there, and the insurance was paid, and all the government permits were done, and the local law enforcement was reimbursed, and that they have refs who don't want to actually play the biggest event of the year who actually have a clue how to ref, who are paid crap for their time, actually get their airfare reservations and their rooms and don't get too drunk to show up in the morning, and all the other crap gets done, by a handful of people, most of whom get paid **** (like Lane and Rosie and Emily) because there just isn't the money to pay them the $80k a year they deserve (which would cost PSP $100k+ with all the benefits and taxes), maybe they ran out of time to get the right number of portajohns in the right spot. Or maybe when the cosulted the crystal ball that predicts where and when people are going to want to take a dump they read it wrong. Big deal.

Let me leave everyone with a thought: The kind of people who are able to pull off a millenium-quality event are easily worth multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per year - because that's what that kind of person would be making doing something else. No paintball promoter makes that kind of money doing paintball events promotion. They're all underpaid. They don't owe players ****, they're giving enough as it is. I have a tough time being pissed at someone for not giving up their money the way I want them to, or not giving up more so I can have what I want. You should all be kissing Jerry and Chuck and Laurent's asses for giving you events at all, even if stuff doesn't go right all the time. Are some promoters better at giving you their money than others? Sure. But players can't even show up to meetings, or get their entry fees in more than a week in advance so the promoters know how much to spend on facilities.



- Chris

 

[Baca Loco]

Heh, no....

Originally posted by raehl
Let me leave everyone with a thought

Promises, promises.

PS--Rancid, what about charging rental space on the forums?

 

[Beaker]

Chris

You are arguing against points none of us are making.

We are all painfully aware that there are times and instances that promoters fall victim to circumstances outside of their control

What we are saying is there is a whole lot of things that are well within their control that US promoters are NOT doing because of the perceived lack of return for them.

Simple example

Have you ever seen an NPPL draw published 2 or 3 days before a tourney? telling each team who they are playing and in what am/pm round? Surely you've seen the posts on here for every Millennium.

And why is that? it's because the PSP let teams enter right up to last minute without having definite cut off times, in order to get the most possible teams. The Millennium cut off entry the preceeding week to give Beard enough time to get things done. Sure there are exceptional circumstances, but rarely.

That is just one example where the Millennium has got it's act together - this costs nothing and blows your points of money out the water. It gives team infomation they want, and makes the whole things much better from a players point of view!

A promoter needs to get what's inside their control right - it's that simple.

 

[raehl]

And that's just stupid.

Here's our obvious point of disagreement:

"What we are saying is there is a whole lot of things that are well within their control that US promoters are NOT doing because of the perceived lack of return for them."

You think that's a bad thing, and you're wrong. A business can not do what the customer merely says they want. They can only do what the customer WILL PAY FOR. There's a word for a company that spends money that will not make a return: Bankrupt.

Do you want to pay higher entries to make up for the lost revenue from the teams who can't make the earlier deadline? Do you want to make up the difference from the vendors only being willing to pay 70% of their fees because attendence dropped 30%? Do you want an event with fewer vendors there because it wasn't worth the trip for them with the lower attendence number? Did you even think about any of these things? Probably not, but the promoters have to.

Now, maybe PSP is wrong and if they pushed up the entry deadline and got schedules out earlier they'd make more money. But since it's their money on the line, and they're the ones motivated to spend it responsibly, they get to make that call.

But expecting any business, PSP, NPPL, Kraft, whoever, to spend money they don't think they're going to make back is just plain stupid, because the money has to come from somewhere. A business can't just keep spending money if the customers don't want to pay for what the money is spent on. That's an economic fact of life that most paintball players seem to have difficulty understanding.

When you say PSP isn't doing something because they don't think it will make a return for them, you're either stating the obvious or proving you don't understand.

PSP isn't going to do it, Chuck isn't going to do it, and Laurent isn't going to do it. If they do, they won't do it for long, because they'll be out of money fast.

- Chris

 

[Tony Montana]

Beaker -

Unlike Raehl, I'll argue the points you are making.

You have no idea what you are talking about. You are making an assumption as to why the schedule is not posted and it's obviously based on what you hear others say about PSP.

PSP doesn't set deadlines. Lane Wright does. PSP doesn't let teams into tournaments late, Lane Wright does. And, I guarantee that in each and every instance that a team was allowed to enter after the deadline, there were "exceptional circumstances". And there were many more teams denied late entry than there were teams allowed late entry.

The fact of the matter is that the biggest obstacle in getting a schedule done is getting the teams into the CORRECT classification. Being that no database was ever provided to determine with any certainty who belonged where, and the teams were obviously not willing to govern themselves, a huge undertaking had to take place in the week between deadline of registration and the start of the event.

As for having deadlines earlier, it was discussed and the proposal was put to some team captains. The answer was that all but the richest teams were having a hard enough time getting the entry fee scraped together in the time between tournament 1 and deadline for tournament 2 as it was. Shortening that time would have meant many teams couldn't have participated in the events.

Just a side note, and keeping it within the confines of the arguments that you made. Why did I have to wait in that bar on site in Amsterdam for 4 1/2 hours waiting on my schedule? I never complained. Because I do understand what it takes. But, now I ask why? I'll ask the question and wait for an answer BEFORE I pass judgement.