So we are heading into another tournament season. I have my list made out and a booking made to fly home for Gorey. I just need my holidays confirmed now and I am off. This whole travelling home for a tournament though isn’t ideal. While it gets me home for a few days which is always appreciated its expensive. The local tournaments are slowly becoming more and more attractive! There are quite a few around Germany thankfully the only problem is getting a seat in a car as the train is pretty pricey… more than a ryanair flight at the moment! I shouldn’t really talk about Aer Lingus at all as their prices are amazing.
So I was wondering why we are not offering some other international tournaments as ranking events? I know it is done by our Northern Neighbours. We have the Giant Fanatic coming up in Denmark which I am itching to go to but I don’t know if I will have a useable army by that stage. There are a bucket load of tournaments in England that would be fun to attend. However rather than just suiting me I think this could only be a good thing. I know it is difficult to sell to our significant others as they believe we are just heading off for a weekend of debauchery rather than the gaming. However I think that this would be the amazing for our preformance as a team in the ETC. You know it is easy to be a big fish in a small pond. If we can get some serious gaming in against the top players in Europe on a more regular basis it can only be good. The weekends at home that are outside Dublin are pretty expensive and it wouldn’t be really that more more to jet off somewhere. This should hone the team and maybe enable us to once again improve our preformance. One other thing to consider is inviting a team from another country to come over. It would be nice to have four or five of the english guys over for one of our two day tournaments. We could easily subsidise their tickets. Better yet we should just let them in for free. The invites could be extended to a few of the other European Nations that our ETC team have befriended. I am not sure how this ranking HQ thing works. It may be that if the tournaments are in different countries they will automatically combine the results? If not it can’t be too hard to have that implemented.
It also has the benefit that we can concentrate on providing fewer better tournaments at home. One thing I noticed is a two tier tournament system developping. Well it has been there for a while but it seemed to become more stark last year. We have the better (in my opinion) tournaments that are organised by the dedicated gamers from a club with the clubs support behind them. The tournaments I particularly enjoyed were Resurgence and Battlecry. The organisers were dedicated to providing a good fun day out. They knew they would get numbers though and so that provides a safety zone. The second tier seems to be shoddily organised, thrown together at an after thought and then applying for ranking status to get a few more numbers in. As I saw when travelling home to play in one of these events… three people turned up. Well that was a bit of a let down. It would be cool if we could (I could!) really have four premium events organised well in advance, organised well in advance and then we can look further afield to supplement these.
There is a cross Europe ranking and tournament site already. It focusses mostly on Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France but the admins have started to include results and events from all over Europe.
http://www.tabletopturniere.de
It’s available in English too, I use it all the time for planning out my event attendance and finding things going on in my local area.
Why are we not offering international tournaments as ranking events? Because they are the IRISH rankings.
You seem to be falling into the fallacy that the rankings exist to facilitate the ETC team. The Irish Rankings exist to support the Irish gaming community, so it makes absolutely zero sense to have a Danish (for example) tournament count.
Also I don’t see how it helps the ETC team. It may be expensive for you to attend Irish tournaments Phil – but you do live in Germany. It costs most people very little to attend a local tournament, a little more to travel for one, but going to two-day events (such as Bloodstorm or Warpcon) can cost no more than €100 if you plan it well. Whereas attending a UK event after you cover flights, accommodation and beer money would be multiples of that.
This might be one of the uses of the wild card.
Give it to a player with a good international ranking.
The problem with rolling it into the Irish rankings are
1. It’s the Irish rankings – as Lenny pointed out
2. The scoring system for points can differ between countries
I agree with the idea of keeping Irish rankings to Irish only event (including the north).
Rgding ETC selection I think there are massive gains to be had in including players who play aboard. They are a good source for ideas and keeping the team dynamic. They also provide a good metric of how the team might do at the ETC. If player X goes aboard and does badly at German GT but comes back wins every event in Ireland what does that say about the Irish game scene?
In playing against different opponents they are going to gain difference experiences which will contribute to the team dynamics. If it was tried with a home grown team they would have the same experiences so probably reach similar conclusion. I’m doing a lot of team theory these days and most of it seems to advocate mixing the team members. As Jimmy points out its hard to quantify and compare the effects using foreign inputs but it is still worth looking at.