Just because it's that way there, doesn't mean it's like that everywhere. That's like saying everyone says "Ya'll" because it's done around here. Just because a "LOT" of people switched there, it does not reflect everywhere else.

So if I go to a City Championship in 4 months, will you give me all your cards?

Wow, you obviously need to read a little better. I said it was a REGIONAL thing (which implies not everywhere). You were telling Volcom that that's not how you saw it. I am saying that's how he sees it here, because that happened HERE.

My cards will be sold long before then ;)

On a lighter note I only ask UDE to reconsider the pro level events and try to "spread out the love" More 50K events intead of PC's would be a great start. Or even 25k that are frequent but spread out.

Do you believe that a $100,000 PC will not inspire competitiveness?

I believe it is some people's almost unshakeable belief that no one will play VS for less than a $1 million pot of gold that leads to the perception that some players (and these are not all pros or even exclusively pros) are preoccupied with prizemoney.

I also enjoy following Vs as it is played at the top level ... but there will still be a top level and I believe the decks and competition in general will be just as good as it was before. Maybe some of the faces will change, but that's a price I'm happy to pay to be able to continue enjoying Vs.

I do hope that an adequate level of mid-range tournaments are established (I personally would love to see a regional-states-nationals system, but living in Australia might mean my gaming "needs" differ from players in other countries). From Jeff Donais' posts it appears that UDE is now aware of the importance of this level of competition and will make it a priority to address the need. PCQ-Lite do not have to be money tournaments ... they just need to exist in some form for the sake of community building, I think.

Well, for me it's very simple. Give my local game shop a reason to have a Hobby League. Set them up for free on the first one and let them advertise it. Outlaw toolbox decks. Make the formats teams vs. teams (Avengers vs. JLA) etc., or DC Modern or Marvel Modern to get new players in and they don't have to worry about buying a bunch of older cards to be competitive. Make it a different format every week. Then i'm back to buying a minimum of 6 boxes per set plus whatever i buy for booster drafts. The game is no harder to play than magic is. Although the judging in the early days was horrendous, ask 2 judges the same question and get 2 different answers at the Origins 10k. I had a meltdown on that one. But it did get better. And why can't hobby leagues and City Championships be competitive? I hear a lot of you keep saying it fills the competitive need. The only difference is there is no money at these and i keep hearing money isn't what its about. FNM is very competitive without the money involved. Vs can be just as competitive at that level also. So no more hiding behind the fact that you don't want the money but you need the PCQ's for the competitiveness. Most of the "pros" want the money.

A Modest Proposal

After thinking about this for over a day, I can't help wondering if it isn't fair--and smart--to reduce the purse at PC Sydney by $45-50K and add 4 more $10K events throughout the year to the schedule. Yes you promised a purse of $307K for Sydney, but you've broken lots of other promises this week, so that's not an issue. Yes people have spent a lot of money in order to travel to the event, but a 15% reduction in prize money is really not unreasonable given all the other far more drastic things you are doing.

In exchange for doing that, you would get 4 more events to offer the most competitive players this year, and that might be enough to keep a substantial number of pro and semi-pro players interested during this period in which you are trying to rejuvenate the game. I know and understand that you are adjusting your focus to try to reach more players and regrow the game from the ground up, but it seems to me that the drastic cuts to the OP program are going to have such a devastating impact on sales that your new initiatives will not have time to work. As it stands, you are going to be losing hundreds of players in the short term who are in the habit of buying multiple boxes of a given set, and that is going to have an enormous impact on sales of MTU and Hellboy. Sales are going to plummet, and upper management is going to want to stop the bleeding. If reallocating some OP money could stem that outgoing tide a bit, I would think it would be more than worth it.

It's worth serious consideration, in my view.

Well I live in NJ (Southern half) and attend the HL in Berlin on a fairly regular basis (sometimes work and doctors take priority). We get anywhere from 4-12 people down there on a given Friday. And yes I atteneded the last pcq down there as well. I would have attended a few of the ones if December if they hadn't scheduled a pcq every Saturday of one of the craziest months of the year. There were 6 pcqs in December within an hour's drive or train ride for me I skipped most because I couldn't justify the travel expenses or the time during holiday shopping season. I work a 9-5 job well this time of year 9am to 9:30 pm job and I don't get alot of free time. I try to give the game as much time as I can. The store owner who got me hooked on the game stopped buying Vs boxes after xmen because he said they didn't sell as fast for him as magic did. I've been trying to convinence him to order more and show that the customer base is gaining a little ground and boxes would help, but he'd rather focus on magic and yugioh players buying the products. We have been teaching people how to play on his open gaming night and most of them are excited about the game and want to build decks. I just need to convince a stubborn owner into making some money with some of these new customers.

And what about cities that cant get Leagues or Championships going? How do they raise their ratings?

1) As I posted before, I never said eliminate or not create other lesser known teams, I merely think they should make more big-name cards. Almost everybody knows who Superman, Spiderman, Batman, X-men are. There are plenty of other teams too, that are well known. Why not focus on them a little more, so people would recognize the packs? The origins packs focused well, and I recognized alot of characters. As did my other friends. When's the last time a Wolverine card hit tier1 status? Do you deny Wolverine as a tier 1 superhero?

2) Again, I never said eliminate all complicated costs/effects. Just make more simple effects that aren't as powerful as more costly effects. Yugioh has 3 basic costs: Discard a Card, Pay LP, Tribute a monster. Yes, there are other costs, but those are the main three. Usually, no more than one cost for an effect. VS tends to have many different costs that make it difficult to follow, such as "Exhaust a non-defending character, stun another character, remove all attackers form the attack." simple enough, yes, but to combo with anything else takes alot of time to think of. It especially takes time when many ATK/DEF pumps only work during either attacking or defending, noth both. Simplify some costs/effects for newbie decks. Make costs/effects ratio increase with the threshold. I use Acrobatic Dodge as a good example. It has a cost (-3 ATK), and effect (+3 DEF), and the only thing you really have to remember is that it's only when defending.

3) So what if another card game has a uniqueness rule? VS is already complicated enough. I believe from the beginning uniqueness should never have been considered as a rule, rather as an effect for some more powerful cards, but we have it now and it isn't going away. So why not help newbies learn to look for uniqueness by stepping up the need to check at every drop? My Spider-Man example was used because it would show that Spider-Man's agility allows him to "be" in two places at once. Such as shoot a web at one enemy (exhaust lower drop Spider-Man, exhaust an attacker), and avoid taking a big hit (Exhaust a lower drop Spider-Man, take no overflow).

Some people seem to think I'm advocating re-writing the rules, or ignoring the rules, when I'm doing no such thing. The costs/effects are used to make the game interesting, right? Then allow a newbie to learn on a sliding scale, instead of having everything up front?

You can raise (or lower) your rating through sanctioned hobby leagues.
Ask your local store owner to download the mantis software and look into sending in the results each time. If they're unwilling, you can do some of the work for them.

Increase the simplicity level. Again - why do people think I keep saying we have to get Enemy of My Enemy banned? For my health?

Fantastic Fun, Evil Medical School, Rigged Elections, Fat Bat. All pre-Enemy and all complicated decks. Heck, Titans is a complicated deck.

The difference is that these decks pre-Enemy were also much harder to play, and had better chances of falling apart even in expert hands. There are a lot of decks that exist in truly bothersome forms only because of the power of EoME to enable their reliability. Further, it stymies creativity and design by making the sharing of affiliations a liability rather than a benefit and requiring trickier drawbacks or requirements to prevent Enemy abusiveness.

In the near future I plan on writing a few articles for Metagame and other sites, even here VS Realms. The articles will focus on Hobby League. It will also demonstrate how my HL works in my area and how I tried to improve it. It takes dedication and if you can't do it alone, ask for help of your other players or player in small HL areas.

I do not think the game is dead. I think going away from competitve is the smartest move right now, though I loved going to events. I always did well with my jank and I often beat some of the big names so no one is unbeatable. I was never afraid of opponents and honestly going to these competitve events gave me confidence to play better over the years.

"Pro" players are dishearted by less money, less events and so forth. I can understand if I felt the same way as you did. The game runs much deeper for me. This game has touched my inner child again and I simply love how every set, I have new jank to play with my superhero and villians.

The set could 'suck' and yet I will always find something in the cards to play with. I actually liked LOS. I think it has so much potential that people are overlooking it because it only has Mobilize as its money card. That is near-sightedness and hogwash. You can't have decks handed to you on a silver platter, go out and make them happen.

My HL is in central NJ. You may have heard of the store...TOGIT, as many players from there did well in MTG a few years back. Also, one of the designers for VS used to frequent the place. The store has a rich history of competitive play AND players. Then it died off to just me and one other for awhile...it happens. But I continued to push the game, despite everyone wanting to play the latest fad. Anachorism...how that game died...eh?

If you live in the area or don't stop on by. I know the owner very well and he lets me run it as I see fit (HL that is). You know how you get new players into the game....I will give you a few ideas....but come on by, I will be glad to show you why your HiV means nothing to me and your Titans deck should hide in a dark corner. (Yeah, thats a challenge, are you up for the competition ;}.

This may sound blasphemus, but HL should not be about whom has the 4 EOME and Mobilize to win. I can create those decks, but I don't. I can beat most of the players with little effort...do you know why? They dont have tier 1 decks. They have patched up starter decks, no search and a horrible curve ratio. I help them when they ask or when they don't if they keep losing. I build decks to have fun at HL and build tier 1 decks for tournaments. You CAN do both and still enjoy the game, money or not.

Improving Hobby Leagues...(short term fixes)
1. Allow players to proxy the rare cards. (or give them rares that you will never need and they want...who wants Dangerous Experiment anyhow?)
I do this now and its never been abusive. No one brings netdecks and tries to plow through the kids. They know better. They know I will smack them down if they tried. Instead, the use the enemies for decks that they could never get to work in the past. No search, now they have it. I even print color copies for them.
2. Run fun formats other than Golden Age. No one likes to get squased by Titans every week. Or tech against it either. I have at least 25 unique and new ideas ready to go at a momemnts notice. I have run with great success at least 10 so far. The response is awesome. I have never had problems with people building decks just to compete. I give them 2 or 3 weeks and I get gold out of lead. I am always impressed.
3. Get the poorer players together and have them buy a box. Tell them to share and agree on teams ahead of time. Open packs with them, divvy up the cards and TADA! They have the new cards AND a team they wanted. Give them your extras to fill out their curve. Are you really going to need that 2 drop uncommon?
4. Spend time with the players to develop and improve their decks. Explain why they should make those changes. Don't tell them to put in Mobilize without a reason. Dont tell them to take out their favorite location without support. Show them, then let them practice. I have done this in the past and I always see improvement, usually on their own. I provide a basic working template and they go from there.
5. The game is complex. But not impossible and if you have good and patient people, they will learn quickly. The ones who claim that this is the reason for failure underestimate people. Half full glasses for you. But, the best way to ensure complex card interactions is to stress the chain. First In Last Out. Last In, First Out. Slow the game down, show them step by step what happens. Don't be a snot and use 'just because thats how it works'.

I am going to be writing full articles continuing this line of thinking and support. I am going to be listing you the numerous HL formats. I am going to show you that HL is not about sharks hunting goldfish. Its about community and fun. I can beat the best players in the world and have done so. And? I have never been to or won a PC. I would love to, but often it's not convenient to do so. I play this for fun. I play it well. And one day maybe I will turn in my PC points to go to a PC. Maybe even Indy. I hope the pros don't show if I go then. I would love to play in an environment where people hold your hand instead of biting it.