WEll...
It's 5 AM, so I'm not going to go down a detailed list of what world cup costs right now - even if I did, I'd be guessing at a lot of the numbers (for example, I don't know what PSP really pays to have people pick up players' garbage, or what the rental costs this year were. And even if I *DID* know, it's not my place to air PSP's business.) But having crunched the numbers before, I've made the determination that I want nothing to do with promotioning a national series. I *DO* know almost exactly how much we spent on the one X Ball field, and I will say that that number makes me even more amazed that PSP can function as a business.
As for TJ's comment:
Do you have the right to be pissed? Absolutely. Is it possible for it to have been any better? I don't think so, especially not at the price you were paying.
I don't think there is anything PSP could have done to get more refs. At 12 fields and 8 refs per field, you'd need 96 refs who are QUALIFIED to ref World Cup. Where do you find 96 people who are not playing, are qualified to do it, and are willing to take a week off work to do it, for a mere $100/day? Qualified refs are always a pain in the ass to find - in case you havn't noticed, reffing isn't exactly most people's idea of a fun way to spend a saturday - or a thursday to saturday for that matter.
There's another problem: You're expecting World Cup to provide serious athletic competition, when it's run as an entertainment event. Anyone who wants to can pay the entry and play - when that's your target market, you set your pricing to provide the srvices that are gong to maximize your profits. 60-80% of the teams at World Cup are quite fine with the reffing they had, or at least fien enough that they'd rather not pay extra money for something better. The top teams are never going to get the level of service they want and are willing to pay for as long as it's open entry for the bottom teams and they're ruining the equation - a league trying to be all things to all people is never going to be what the top teams want. But paintball folks seem to ahve the notion that everyone should have a shot at playing the best, despite the fact that it's not condusive to running REAL athletic competition.
Want good reffing and services? Stop letting any group of 10 players with $1750 play. not that it'll ever happen, people are already bitching that X Ball is making a paintball elite that excludes the average player, when the whole point is to get rid of the average player!
On the Millenium comparison: It's not a valid comparison. Millenium runs with a smaller number of teams on smaller fields with a smaller number of players per team. When you double the size of the events, you much more than double the cost of the events. You might have a leg to stand on if even S7 was able to do events like Millenium is - but even with those same advantages millenium has, S7 *STILL* has to charge more to pull it off. If you guys were right, and running events stateside the same way millenium does it were so easy, wouldn't S7 be doing it?
I'll admit to not being precisely sure why there's a difference - but it's there. "Millenium does it" is not an argument for why PSP or S7 should be able to do it. You can't compare a 200 team 10-man event with a 130 team 7-man event. Totally different animals - 2,000 players vs. 1000 players.
Anyway, the only way any of this is going to REALLY change is if people throw out all the stupid ways paintball does things and forms a REAL athletic league with a finite number of teams. Not good enough to make one of the finite number of teams? Tough. Then you take your best refs and your best financed teams and you have a real league instead of letting the tournament playing masses water down the top level of competition.
But as it stands, there's more money in providing OK events for a lot of moderate level players than there is in providing spectacular events for a small number of top-level players. So when everyone plays in the same event, moderate is what you get.
- Chris
