This is kind of how I feel about Niantic, who runs Ingress and Pokemon go. Sure, they had a healthy data set of mined information from Google to start Ingress, but the real meat of locations was all submitted by players. 80+% of portals, and growing, were player submissions which included: GPS location data, a picture, a name, and a description. Ingress flourished on the back of the playerbase, and then all of a sudden Pokemon Go is announced.

Hm....you ever wonder where all those gyms and pokestops came from? Ingress data. 95% of the work of creating Pokemon Go was already done before Pokemon Go was ever a twinkle in someone's eye. No doubt their upcoming Harry Potter game will leverage the exact same data set, which again...is GROWING.... because players are now doing all portal submission reviews for Ingress. Niantic doesn't even handle that anymore..it's been outsourced to unpaid free workers.

Guess how much Ingress I play, due largely to all of this? Not much. I could've hit max level (16...I've been 15 for like...3 years?) a long time ago, but any motivation to play and fuel someone else's profit fire with no compensation whatsoever..that's gone. And that's how I see the fees. In TX, you can almost assure that bigger prize pool is going to one of the following: Colin MacAlpine, Robert Byers, Preston Moncla, Garrett Hays being the most likely candidates. Josh Henderson, obviously, if he ever gets to enough TX tournaments to make state. I'd even give myself a very small off-chance of snagging it. I just don't at all believe in this concept. It's not JUST Wisconsin. Upper middle class white guys *love* the Robin Hood concept being presented here. People that compete because they find competition to be fun, or a challenge, and don't care so much about the money...they're just getting bent over to benefit the top players. Said it before: if IFPA needed to implement a fee to make the system worth the time and effort to maintain, that would've been fine. Wouldn't even care if some of that money was going DIRECTLY into Josh Sharpe's pockets. At least then it wouldn't be subsidizing the purchase of a NIB game by guys that could've afforded to travel to Nationals anyways.

I fail to see the 'benefit' to the other 558 people that participated in TX tournaments so far this year...

Yeah, because you have any right to call me a scrub. Grow the f--k up, Levi.

........

I'm not going to be paying the fee, as I said when this all blew up before. Go check the thread. I still plan to go to major tournaments because it's FUN, likely doing more volunteering for helping than playing, though. I'm not playing in the TPF tournament, for example. That automatically guarantees I can't make SCS next year. Chasing IFPA points has always been for suckers, and I've been a sucker for 6 years, but I know when to bow out. We have local leagues here now that can survive without IFPA. Hell, half the people or more showing up to weekend league in D/FW don't give a dead baby's dick about what their ranking is or the SCS.

This works for leagues and tournaments that already had a prize pool and entry fees, yes. Totally agree there. Not so much with 'free' leagues and tourmanents, or charity tournaments. I know for a fact that the largest charity tournament that gets run annually in North Texas is basically subsidized out of the pocket of the TD, for a total overall loss financially to him. Because the charity is what matters. Not the e-peen points.

It is! I'm a much nicer a-hole to be around without the drama of chasing points, and it also lets me have time to volunteer to help staff a tournament (that's not MINE) instead, which I did for a bit in Austin at BCO this year...and I actually found that I enjoyed the crap out of watching other people play rather than be there with my phone in my face, or a laptop!

That's pretty cool. Probably not enough to change *my* mind, not that anyone cares lol (case in point even this year if we had 24, I wouldn't have needed to play a single event in October to December to still qualify?), but that will help develop the field and let more people get in games with higher skilled players, which is pretty freakin' crucial to keeping a competitive environment lively, IMO.

Pretty obvious. Nobody gets paid out when nobody pays in. If you want to play for money at league night, bring the Sac Rack!

Yeah...I really don't know how you run a big tourney and participate at the same time with something the size of a circuit event or convention. 20-30 players? Sure. I've run stuff like that and played, and even then I still had my wife helping me out a bit. There's also a bit of an ethical quandary IMO from TDs that play in their own large tournaments, for several reasons.

Was referring to guys that run solo (You laugh, but I've seen 30+ player tournaments run basically solo), but even some tournaments that have had supposed multiple directors with just one of them participating in the event have had issues that would've been much more easily addressed had the TD not been involved in playing. When a decision is need urgently and it's dependent on one person, that can be really terrible. I've been lucky that the events I used to run went as smooth as they did, and any issues that came up affected EVERYONE that was there. (someone pulled the fire alarm as a prank a few times.)

*Edit* minor disclaimer... I haven't had any 'bad' tournament experiences in several years. The advent of things like MatchPlay have greatly simplified running tournaments. Still..someone needs to be available that's not on a game.

BWAHAHAHA LMFAO...I actually kind of love this. I'd totally be in to see how much red I could rack up.

YASSSSSSSSS *THAT* needs to happen LOL.

C....can I come play in your leage? :Þ