I AM NOT HAPPY WITH THE MARSHALLING AT M25 READING.
As a paying customer, i'm very disatisfied with the service.
At this point i'd like to say that the rest of the event was very well run, and i really enjoyed the event.
But the marshalling on some of the fields was really bad!
I have some suggestions Sparklie please understand that this isn't a flame agains you, i'm trying to suggest things that'll help you out.
1. You need better marshalls, and since everyone who's any good would rather play than marshall, you need to make it worth their while. £50 isn't going to do it. Most marshalls could work at a rental site for that kind of money, would get shot less, yelled at less, and would work less hours. If suggest that you pay out £100 per marshall, as this would make it very worth while, and you would be able to have a choice of marshalls. Of course i don't expect you to pay for it, the teams need to pay for it out of their entry.
Say you run4 fields, with 8 marshalls a field. That's £1600 in marshalls pay (currently). if you have 40 teams, you could double the money paid to marshalls to £100 if each team raised their entry by £40. I speak for Campaign Power Red and SPOD when i say that both teams would gladly pay the extra money to have competent marshalls. We would also consider marshalling if you paid that kind of money. Appealing to people's better nature isn't going to work, you need to pay cold hard cash. If you stick to having the PG Chimps marshall, then expect to have teams walk out and not come back in the future.
2. Added incentive for players, make it a proper series so you can award points to teams, for jobs like helping with setup, or Marshalling. I'm sure next year you'll be able to get series prizes from some of the bigger companies. Smart Parts, Draxxus, WDP and Hanger 18 have been at all your events, ask them to supply prizes for the series. Take an extra £5 per team per event on entry and after 6 events you'll have a cash prize pool of £1200.
In order to be able to fairly award series prizes, you need to rank teams. Currently if i enter a team, i could be in division 2, maybe 3, or maybe even division 1 depending on who else enters. Ditch this, give me 8 games but put my team in the Amateur B division. Have an Amateur A division, and a Pro, and a novice and Rookie. Now that you know who the teams are, and where they should be ranked, have 5 divisions, and let the teams play within their own division. Now you say, what if i only get three Pros, well, have them play each other 4 times! Then you'll get to see who the best really is! (i'm aware that this idea might not be so popular, but i think it's worth looking at). Say you enter Amateur B, and there are 10 teams, you only play 8 of them. Now your tourney results go into a table that Actually means something! And at the end of the season, you can religate the bottom team in each division, and promote the top team!
Appealing to people's good nature isn't going to get them to help you out, Paintballers just arn't like that. Charge the players more money, and give them good marshalling.
SPOD suffered because of bad marshalling. It was not Biased marshalling, it was just incompetent marshalling. Field 2 was the worst, one judge even suggested that it took him over 1 minute to remove his thumb from his @ss and check a player (who had ample time to remove the hit from his forearm) because the judge had a bad knee and couln't move very fast! IF YOU ARN'T FIT TO WALK, MAYBE YOU SHOULDN'T BE JUDGING! In fact i could have crawled using only my elbows over the the player faster than that so the judge actually has no excuse. Next time bring your freaking wheel chair dude, or don't bother. And the girl on that field, she must have had a really good daydream, because she sure wasn't paying attention to the game.
Field 1 was on the ball from what i saw, field 3 was pretty good, and i had a few problems with the Infiltrators on field 4 but they had a hard field to marshall, and i saw them make some very tough calls, and they really worked their @sses but suffered because they didn't have enough judges. But the judges on field 2 were totally incompetent. Do not let that group of judges marshall again!
Sparklie, you run a great tournament, and i know you pour your heart and soul into these events, and that's why we respect you so much. You're one of the great people who stop talking about making english paintball great and actually do something about it. Please sort out the marshalling, charge us more, we'll pay for fair play!
See you all at Campaign Cup.
