Whatever Happened to Respect and Co-operation?

[Brian McIlmoyle]

Maybe this time only exists in my head.. maybe it never existed,

but there was a time when Game hosts and field owners would co-operate on Game dates, and not post games that conflict with another Scheduled Game in the same area.

There was a time that it was considered very poor form to post a game to compete with a fellow Game host, or venue.

Sure, it was an "unwritten rule" based on mutual respect and the desire to maximize everyone's attendance, but it existed. and for the most part it worked.

Even today.. some hosts do co-operate and respect one another.. but it all goes to naught when we see 3-5 games posted all within 100Km of each other.

The players.. are not to blame.. I fully expect them to go where they want, where it is most convenient. Why would it be otherwise?

Is there a solution to this problem.. or has it gone as it seems, Let the Market determine it?

or is there a problem?

[pusangani]

Perhaps because there is a bigger player pool to tap from now and so the number of games is increasing, supply increasing to meet demand. Whether all games are well attended would be the true indicator of this.

[deltaop1]

My $0.05 (rounded up since our pennies are now sunset)

Perhaps it would be useful to deploy a central website/product that could be used by hosts and players alike to organize and register for public gaming events. At the moment we rely on threads posted in the Games and Event Schedule forum of ASC and unfortunately more effort is required to lookup information rather then having it organized in a more easily viewable format.

I have seen some "internal chatter" that one of the major Canadian airsoft vendors might be prototyping such a website/product. If all registered games could be summarized on a central page it might go a long way to preventing the scheduling of games on the same date and in the same area.

Of course this is based on the assumption that hosts do want to prevent the scheduling of conflicting and competing games ... if this proves false there's very little we can do.

[Silverthorn]

We had the exact same discussion last year among Quebec organizers and one of the answer was : the player and organizer pool has grown so much that more and more games were organized to satisfy a bigger player pool. There was just so many people and so few week-ends that overlap were bound to happen.

Our imperfect and unofficial solution : It's OK to plan at the same date if the events are different types (CQB vs milsim for example) or geographically aimed at the different player pools.

We also created a thread to post the dates of private games so we know they could conflict with our games.

Again, imperfect but it works for us!

[Curo]

Yes but what Brian is getting to is that a couple of weeks was there was zero Sunday (except splatters) games, all games where on Saturdays. This is beneficial for players like me. I work weekends and if I take a saturday off I might lose 150 in wages, where as sundays are often 80-100 at most.

[Drake]

Yeah pretty much what Silver said. The past 3 years or so, we'd done a good job at diving dates so that games didn't overlap but with the rapid growth in the player base the past 2 years and the arrival or commercially-driven fields on the scene (who want to host much more frequently) we had to adapt.

But with the increase in players came a diversification of gaming styles; the milsim crowd doesn't usually care much for skirmishing and vice versa, now we also have more specialized games like WW2 and Vietnam which are sorta niche markets that don't appeal to everyone... so why would a player be penalized on a weekend because there's a WW2 game on and he doesn't play WW2? There aren't enough "good season" weekends in a year to start doing that.

So we try to avoiding directly competing events (like 2 large milsim events, or 2 WW2 events) on the same weekend, but otherwise it works out fairly well since [example] milsims don't have to be dumbed down to cater to the otherwise skirmisher crowd, etc.

Similarly, asides from special large events, geographically distant areas (namely the Montreal area and Quebec City area) do things individually. The 3 hour car ride each way is really rough, specially since we've been having really hot summers that can make the day really exhausting. I did it twice last summer and I found it extremely taxing.

[dutch13]

Originally Posted by deltaop1

My $0.05 (rounded up since our pennies are now sunset)

Perhaps it would be useful to deploy a central website/product that could be used by hosts and players alike to organize and register for public gaming events. At the moment we rely on threads posted in the Games and Event Schedule forum of ASC and unfortunately more effort is required to lookup information rather then having it organized in a more easily viewable format.

I have seen some "internal chatter" that one of the major Canadian airsoft vendors might be prototyping such a website/product. If all registered games could be summarized on a central page it might go a long way to preventing the scheduling of games on the same date and in the same area.

Of course this is based on the assumption that hosts do want to prevent the scheduling of conflicting and competing games ... if this proves false there's very little we can do.

As much bickering as a lot of the guys around here do, someone developed a website strictly to advertise teams, gun techs, some buy/sell, games and fields. It's ver simple to find and use (uses Facebook for a login).

[Brian McIlmoyle]

Good stuff!..

I agree that the player Pool is larger.. and the proliferation of venues is also a driver.

maybe .. this is just a new reality that has to be embraced


OPS-Center may relieve some of these issues .. or it may just enable managing it better ..

We will see it goes live June 1st from the last I heard

I am fiddling on the BETA version.. and it's cool for certain

[Grudge]

OPS-Center is looking very nice. Already signed up. I really like the map feature that allows you to pick a distance from your location to limit what you see to your location (if you want to)

[ViR]

In terms of brought up issue, I personally do not see a reason for another website. Just because dates will be clearly labeled doesnt mean people won't create games on the same day..

We could have just standarized game names in ASC to clearly state when they are happening. For example <Date> :: <Location> :: <Name>

May 12 :: Finch Field :: Skirmish Game
May 11-13 :: Muskoka :: Force on Force Patrolling Exercise

Besides larger player base, some hosts are not doing it "full time" or with profit in mind. So they do not have luxury of choosing dates. Whenever a field opens up or they have personal time to host thats when the game can happen..

[IceTray]

Originally Posted by ViR

We could have just standarized game names in ASC to clearly state when they are happening. For example <Date> :: <Location> :: <Name>

May 12 :: Finch Field :: Skirmish Game
May 11-13 :: Muskoka :: Force on Force Patrolling Exercise

This seems simple and easy, I actually like it. I mean, compared to how games are posted now, some don't have locations, dates, etc. Although it may not stop people from hosting on the same day, at least it will let people know, hey - there's already a game happening on a certain date in your location.

[ViR]

Originally Posted by IceTray

This seems simple and easy, I actually like it. I mean, compared to how games are posted now, some don't have locations, dates, etc. Although it may not stop people from hosting on the same day, at least it will let people know, hey - there's already a game happening on a certain date in your location.

OpCenter is just enforcing the rules for posting games. If same was done in ASC we would have no problems

[HackD]

http://www.airsoftcanada.com/showthread.php?t=139912 - Post of a similar vein recently posted in the Ontario games sub-forum.

[MaciekA]

Brian and ViR raise some really good points and ask some good questions in this thread. I think ops-center will help a little bit. I also agree that in many cases, organizers are just doing what they can to make use of the time slots they can actually get.

In a big enough market, simultaneous games are just going to happen and to a certain extent I think this is a good thing for a few reasons.

Consider that there are many players have the luxury of organizing themselves into teams and choosing the types of games they will sign up for -- variety is good when you have some folks who are unable to rent a van as a team like our's can and need to be able to play at a venue that is transit-accessible and not too expensive. When my team (F242) plays at games, we generally sign up at least 4 names at once as early as we can confirm the date, and the explicit intent there is to help the game organizer secure their venue and assess their financial risk. We expect more, but for this we're willing to pay more and pay earlier.

So I think that's going to be one source of date conflicts, because venue owners will be planning far ahead of time, and by the time the conflict is detected, it's too late. How do you combat this potential thorny issue? Incentivize early signups so that all conflicting games can make their numbers.

Now on to the issue of "experience differentiation", which I feel is the big one. I am looking for a quality airsoft experience with a smile on my face at the end of the day.

At least in the GTA and surrounding communities, conflicts are going to happen due to the need for product variety. One thing organizers of in-city games as well as the creators of ops-centre need to understand is that even though I live in the core of downtown Toronto, games in the heavier paint-oriented paintball venues are not a product I'm interested in, so if there are 2 indoor paintball venue games in the city on one Saturday, they are effectively invisible to me and not in conflict with a third option. A third outdoor game posts up 45 minutes outside of the city -- now I have 1 game to select. Easy.

The thing is, this sort of product differentiation is also happening for outdoor games outside of the city and based on differentiation factors that are more subtle. Ones along the lines of ethics, aesthetics, or just plain community connections. I love playing with certain folks again and again. You call your hits. You come up and shake my hand. You help us jumpstart our van's dead battery or lend us a spare gun. We trust each other. You all know who you are.

As an example, I am no longer interested in attending the no-signup-required, "open airsoft" games that are happening at a given outdoor paintball venue 45 minutes from the city. These games have acquired a reputation of having a lot of new or young players who do not call hits and exhibit terrible ethics when it comes to MED, are chaotically organized, have unsafe practices when it comes to eyewear, and to boot somewhat on the pricey side. When this organizer decided to throw caution into the wind and try to grow his games into the bigtime, he decided to let the market do its work. And so be it.

Brian says the market may work its magic to cure this problem, and it definitely will -- but it's important to understand that that's all it is. The competing, sometimes datewise-overlapping games which are geographically close to these games are in no way meant as a "F you" to anyone, but simply represent groups of players wishing to organize and differentiate their own preferred experience.

I bet this pattern is repeating itself all over the country.

[MaciekA]

I guess to summarize the more controversial aspect of what I said above:

There are certain game venues and organizers which have soured the milk and if there is some kind of grand non-conflict cooperation between organizers such that a sour-milk game is the only option for my team on a given weekend, well, that is going to suck balls.