Organized Play Reform Idea

Wow, my title sounds like politics from 8th period today...
Anyway, I am not a pro player at all. I am one of the many faceless PTQ players that would like one day to make it to the Pro Tour.

I was wasting my math class today and was thinking of these ideas.
PTQs, as I understand, are the driving force behind the Pro Tour. After 8/9 rounds of Swiss and getting your hands on Tarmogofys and Thoughseizes, you have to hope that you get a X-2 record just to get into the Top 8! Then you have to play the Top 8 to get the plane ticket and Invitation. Wizards just announced that now a Qualified person can play in a PTQ and take that plane ticket away from the PTQ players and maybe the invite gets offered to the loser.

I think that there is need of some revising there. There are many things that they can do. First, Wizards could allow more events to be sancitioned. The events don't always have to be in the biggest cities of the state (country?) w/e.
Second, Wizards could give the Top 8 invites to the event and then you are playing for the plane ticket.

For Pro Tours, Wizards having only having 3 (which I think is terrible and I want the Master Series back...)is a horrible thing. This is where all players want to be and make some money from time to time is by being good and staying on these events. Now, just a reminder, there are other games that all their events are like Grand Prix every 2/3 months and has a good amount of prize support and Wizards could easily fix their crappy event calander and run a GP every 3/4 weeks with event coverage and possiblily now of Independantly sponsered video coverage of these events.
I love the Pro Tour for the culture and for the ability maybe for people to make a living on it and I think that the current Pros of course need the Pro Tours so they can live on this game as they have worked hard to.

(post written during Cold War to Present class very quickly)
Discuss.

-Tree

The idea could be revised. In the past it used to take a phone call just to get an invite a PT event along with Good standings from a high profile event.

But then starting in the 2nd season they began this policy where you had to play in a Qualifier event just to gain the invite to the event.

As I would love to see the count of PT events go back to 4. The Reason why there were 3 again was the fact that nobody wanted to host a team event. In addition to that SA hasn't hosted a single PT throughout the course of the existence of the the PT. Remember that when the PT season was set at 6 it accounted for 2 PTs per region excluding SA, then it went back down to 4 which gave one of the 3 regions an additional event leaving certain areas with complaints. Now we see 3 again one for each region and if SA hosts an event there would be 4 events for each format.

In previous seasons we have seen more Draft PTs than anything else with T2 slipping in from time to time. Times have changed and having too many of one kind of event leads to complaints from one end or the other.

The same situation would apply if the company were to look for a person to host a T2 PT or the first Legacy PT in place of one of the 4 key formats (Block, Extended, Draft, 2HG) for the season. Remember that Legacy hasn't been seen in action through video coverage so if the 2009 season slips in such an event the community for the first time could see what the format is like under the spotlights rather than just some messy text. Yet there would also be a lot of complaints again from the Legacy Community as the reporters, BDM, and Randy still don't know what the format is like along with all the vocab that goes along with all the baggage.

I know because the Ferret and other Legacy Fanatics like me have spent endless hours testing and studying all of the content just to make our points clear over just a person who have been able to figure out T2 in less than 1.5 months. So there could be a lot of changes to go along with your slight change to the policy.

What I'd like to see in addition to what I have just said are the following:

-Getting your Geography Straight (seriously SJ is not next to SF as it is over a 2 hour drive to get from point A to point B)

-Play and Know the formats (If you read Flores's article on Wizards about his review of GP Flash, you could tell right off the bat that he has never played Legacy or hasn't even properly analyzed the format correctly. I even notice BDM trying to dodge Legacy a dozen times in his writing.)

-Learn how to use Camcorder equipment (If the professional people aint around why don't you learn how to do it yourself seriously. Evan can't always be there for you to bring you back the goods so you must always have some backup to do so. Especially GP Coverage, where people want to know what actually happened over messy text.)

-Don't give too much credit to one region of players (each time I go through coverage, I notice that Randy and BDM always give too much credit to the East Coast player than any other group of players in the USA. They have to break the habit as it is a very bad one indeed.)


.....By now I am out of breath and hope you have had enough to swallow.