Pokémon TCG: Sword and Shield—Brilliant Stars

The big happy European OP (sorry, Play! Pokémon) thread

Tego

Tego

New Member
So, how's everyone's recent tournament series been going?

In Norway, we have for almost a year been suffering from an almost complete draught in official prizes, and apart from Nationals in June every single tournament for the past year has sent players home emtpy-handed without official prizes, BUT people are still actually showing up - so I guess that means our Pokémon community is healthy? Of course the attendance numbers are steadily dropping (we all play to have fun, of course, but the thought of winning prizes in the evening DOES motivate some of us a little extra to wake up early in the morning for two-hour drives to tournaments), but we are hanging in there somehow.

But for how long? Let me put some ugly facts from Norway out there for you, finally:

>>> It's now City Championship season. It's been CC season for almost two months. How many CCs have gotten their prize kits mailed to them yet? 0/8. Zero.

>>> We held 7 Battle Road Autumn tournaments in Norway back in October. How many Battle Roads have gotten their prizes mailed to them yet? 0/7. Zero.

>>> The New Leaugue year started in the US back in October. How many Norwegian Leagues have gotten new kits mailed to them yet? 0/6. Zero.

>>> Battle Road Spring was held back in April 2010. How many stores got their Battle Road prizes mailed to them yet? Zero. These were however handed out two months later to TOs that showed up at Nationals. So in this case, the proud eight year old Junior kid who won his first two packs only had to wait two months before he opened them! Too bad things only got worse after this tournament series.

>>> In January 2010 - June 2010, a lot of nice new League promos were made. How many Norwegian League stores got these new League promos mailed to them? ZERO. They were, in fact, handed out to LLs who showed up at Nationals! So, when a new Junior player finally got enough stamps for his first Arcanine or Dragonite promo in January 2010, he only had to wait five months to get them! Five months, ladies and gentlemen. No less! Sometimes I wonder why Norway's Junior attendance plummeted - we used to have some of the best Junior attendance (proportionally) in Europe - what happened?


Let me move on to my conclusion:
- No League kits were shipped out to any League in Norway in all of 2010. There was one chance all year to get League material, at Nationals - where you had to travel on your own expense. We still haven't gotten any.
- No tournament kits (except for Nationals) have been shipped out between April 2010 and now. Soon TEN complete months. This means the last tournament we TOs received prize support to in the mail was States in March 2010.


Now, I don't want to single out any single person or company or natural disaster to blame. Because really, I am not able to put all the blame in one single direction, and it wouldn't be fair of me either. And I do know that there are different reasons for all of the above problems, some of them even have quite valid reasons. And I know I have been promised that the League kits and the Battle Road kits will arrive soon (meaning we will be getting our October material sometimes 'soon', meaning February?). And I do know that things might become better when new shipping methods, and other pending issues, will be resolved in Norway. But my question still is: How can I as a PTO keep optimism up in a community that's gone through a year like this one? And how can I be sure something like this will NEVER, EVER happen again? Something is very, very wrong with today's situation.

In my years in Pokémon, I've seen a lot of frustrated people. Sometimes they had the right to be, sometimes not. But in all my 11 years in Pokémon, I have never seen as frustrated players as players in Norway right now, and never have I seen players with so much right to be upset. Sadly, more and more of them have moved from being upset and shocked at the circumstances, to just giving up, and accepting that no event they ever go to will have any prizes for them to walk home with.


Thanks for reading! And I'm interested in hearing how the rest of Europe is going, so please share your experiences.

Eskil O. Vestre
PTO for Norway
Webmaster of www.pokemon.no
Pokémon TCG player since December 1999
Worlds Judge 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010
 
Last edited:
In Sweden we get our prizes/league stuff but always too late, league promos usually arrives 3-4 months late and prizes 3-4 weeks late.

Hope something fix this :(
 
Wow, I feel bad for you guys in Norway. I wouldn't say it's perfect in England, our first Cities didn't get their prizes in time, but we do get them eventually. I'm not sure about our leagues though, since I don't go to one at the moment.

I don't see why this is such a big problem all the time, it's not difficult to just send the packages earlier.
 
Uh... didn't know it's that bad in Norway. Did you talk to your LD? What did he tell you?

In Germany, it's quite ok right now. We have prizes for Premier Events, just the new stuff like the HGSS playmat is missing (I'd really like to see it here, but afaik no country in Europe got it yet).

Player Rewards are sent out really late (just got the ones for 1/2010 and 2/2010), but that's something I can live with (compared to the situation in Norway it's no problem).
 
As a Organizer from Norway I can confirm the situation and also add that the commuication with the local distributor is quite bad. you feel pretty helpless when your mails never gets answered. something is seriously wrong in this country nowadays. but the players enjoy the game and tries to keep up their spirits.
 
ShadowGuard said:
In Germany, it's quite ok right now. We have prizes for Premier Events, just the new stuff like the HGSS playmat is missing (I'd really like to see it here, but afaik no country in Europe got it yet).
Click to expand...

They are in the UK. I got one at a CC a couple of weeks ago.

We do get stuff late sometimes but nothing like the problems in Norway. I really hope it gets sorted out.
 
As a "veteran" player in Norway, I have seen this development for a long time, both as a Judge, assistant TO and player. And I totally agree, this is getting more and more frustrating, and the end result can only be negative to our community. I remember the end of the 2006/07 season and the start of the 2007/08 season, when we had an extreme increase in numbers on ALL tournaments. Our Nationals was the second biggest in Europe (after Germany!) and I attended Battle Roads with a 4 (or 8?) K-Value and 40 players! After that, the delays had their slow beginning, and now it is just outright ridiculous. If the situation is not turned around, we will have no more recruting of new players, and the existing ones will slowly fade away, and in the end, we will be back where we were in early 2002, with almost no players, but the will to build a great community by a few people, who led OP in Norway to what it was in its glory days. I love playing Pokémon, I really do, even just for the sake of playing. But I agree with Eskil, you get tired of not getting any recognition for your hard earned results.

Sincerely
Mikkel L

*And yes, I apologize for all spelling mistakes in this message.
 
Makka#1 said:
As a Organizer from Norway I can confirm the situation and also add that the commuication with the local distributor is quite bad. you feel pretty helpless when your mails never gets answered. something is seriously wrong in this country nowadays. but the players enjoy the game and tries to keep up their spirits.
Click to expand...

Do you talk about Bergsala/Enigma?
 
@shadowcard: Were there any prizes for German/ other EU cities? Hats, pencils, stickers, boosters, medals?

If the only item missing is the playmats then maybe the distributor is holding them over to make a bigger splash at states and Nationals?

Obviously that does not seem to be the case in Norway: it must be very bad for Eskil to go public like this :(
 
Hey guys,

i live in Switzerland and i have a complete opposite view. I can almost say that it's the best season we got since i started playing with my brother and my cousins in 2006/2007.

We have a lot more tournaments (8 cities compared to 3 cities in 2006), several new leagues poping up around the country, new players, an increase in participation at tournaments.

We get the prizes for premier events in time. We have the official strucutre of prizes, for example 18-10-4-4 boosters for cities. We got the medals, the playmats, the caps, the binders, the pencils, the stickers,etc.

We got the league kits really early before the season started. I think it was mid spetember when we had a meeting with all the organizers from the country. We analyzed the situation, discussed about tournaments, the new web page pokemon.com,etc. There i got all the league stuff for the entire year. So i have all the promos, scoring sheets and badges( i mean this cool thing we can put on a t shirt or whatever clothe).

The communication with the distributor is not always easy but he answers e mail and try to help when we need.

So for me, we have a really great time with Pokémon in Switzerland with loads of motivated players, cool friends and a nice strucutre of organized play.

I'm sorry to hear this in Norway cause i've always read that they had a lots of players and i even told once Mikkel and Simon i wanted to go to Oslo for a State Championship.

Hope it goes better with your distributor anyway! And see ya at the benelux cup, hm i mean the euro cup!!! for those of you going to this awesome event!
 
Sorry to hear this Eskil. I hope the LD will get the message to contact you and discuss this like an adult.

Keith
 
hampuse1: Sounds bad, but still much better than Norway. Even though we're neighbor countries and share the same distributor! Odd.

nnaann: It's always been a problem in European countries that it can be hard to get prizes in time for the very first City weekend. If CCs held later in the CC season all get their prizes, it sounds like things are very healthy in the UK at the moment - good :)

ShadowGuard: Like others mentioned, not many countries have that playmat yet. Sounds like things are going well! We don't get Player Rewards in the mail at all anymore.

Makka#1: I'm so sorry that your e-mails never, ever are answered, and that you've had to disappoint your players so many times, especially in the last year. Thank you for staying with the game, and making sure the Hamar League hangs in there.

Black_jirachi: Norway actually had Europe's biggest Nationals at one point :) Norway has also for many years, again and again, been the world's #1 in the category of 'highest per centage of national population attending Pokémon Nationals' :lol:

hampuse1: Yes, same distributor in Norway

NoPoke: Not only is it very bad, but it has been bad for a very long time, and it looks like things will only get worse (in fact, much worse!) from now on.

luca: Very interesting to hear how smooth things actually can go, right here in the same continent. I'm very happy to hear how well Switzerland is doing, because I remember you were a relatively small OP country until quite recently. I hope you come to Norway and play in one of our tournaments once we've gotten through this difficult period. I'm never giving up on the Norwegian Pokémon community, and I'm positive that we'll see another golden age again in the future :thumb:

Lawman: That would be wonderful, yes.
 
Norway and Sweden(denmark and finland too??) have the same distributor, Bergsala/Enigma. I can say that we could blame almost everything on them. They are slow, slow and slow.
 
Hi guys

The situation does not look much better in Denmark either. We are having the same problems with league materials that show up to late and we also haven’t received their prizes for tournaments yet. By here I refer to BR autumn 2010/2011. In Denmark everything started to go down in the beginning of season 2009/2010. In 2010 we were 8 leagues in Denmark, in 2011 we are 4 left. Some of the league leaders have given up doe to new rules our LD have made for this season:
Some of the ruling are:

1) Every league has to be connected to a store or other company in other to get any league materials.
Many of the leagues in Denmark are organized by society unions and are therefore unable to get any league material since there are no stores who will do such a favour without earning anything.

2) We now in Denmark from this season and on have to pay for our league material.
Again, since many leagues in Denmark are organized by society unions they may not charge any money for playing, because then they have to pay for their location.

3) We also now have to pay for tournament materials. But in this case we will get the money back when the tournament has been played and uploaded. The problem here is that we again need someone who can lay out money. No store will ever do that without earning any profit. The next step will then be to charge money for tournament, but in that case the number of players will drop even more than it already did.

All in all this make it much harder to recruit new players and also keeping other players and league leaders motivated to keep playing the game.

We share the same LD as Norway and Sweden and I hope a solution will be found soon.
 
We have the same rule in Germany: Any league or tournament location must be connected to a shop. But: Amigo makes exceptions from time to time and even with this rule we have leagues in official buildings: For example, league and tournaments in Bonn are held in a youth centrum and the materials come from a shop which has no playing area but delivers the TO with things like e.g. sleeves.

For Regionals, we are working with the shops to have alternative locations: For example, the Regionals in Koblenz will be held in a conference room of a hospital and in Dortmund we have a big room of a bar. The stores are usually allowed to sell stuff there so it is good for them also.

A connection of league/tournaments to stores is, of course, a massive hindrance, but there might be creative ways around it (paying for doing OP and promoting the game however is silly).
 
SuperE: You're touching upon an essential problem here: "No store will ever do that without earning any profit". That is true, at least for stores that don't specialize TCG/hobby/games/geek products. Specialist stores might agree to receiving League/tourney material on our distributor's terms without any direct or immediate profit, unlike non-specialist stores - i.e. toy stores and other retail stores that happen to stock Pokémon TCG product. The reason, IMHO, being that specialist stores are often more oriented towards creating long-lasting customer loyalty from select niche groups.

In Norway we have ONE such chain - Outland. They're the ONLY chain in Norway specializing in this sort of product. These stores want to be the the place to shop and hang out for all gaming geeks. Only a few cities have Outland stores, and in the rest of the Norwegian cities the only stores selling TCG products are toy stores and similiar, who have absolutely no interest whatsoever in being a gathering place for certain costumers interested in one of their many products.

Sometimes I feel like the whole League and tournament system is designed with countries like the US in mind, who have a sufficient number of hobby/gaming stores like Outland. Or are there really that many stores in the US? I guess my question to any US readers of this topic is this: Does every major US city have a specialist store that knows TCG products well and knows what organized play is, and recognizes the value of it?

Glumanda said:
We have the same rule in Germany: Any league or tournament location must be connected to a shop. But: Amigo makes exceptions from time to time and even with this rule we have leagues in official buildings: For example, league and tournaments in Bonn are held in a youth centrum and the materials come from a shop which has no playing area but delivers the TO with things like e.g. sleeves.
Click to expand...

So it is indeed possible to work out a solution that works better for OP locations like Denmark's and Norway's. With a little effort and flexibility from the LD, and a little communication with the LD, it should be possible. Not just for Amigo. One of the biggest problems of our LD is that the time, effort and enthusiasm they spend on each country's OP program is dramatically low. The communication between the LD and Norwegian TOs is almost non-existant (almost all e-mails from Norwegian TOs to the distributor are ignored), and lately even communication between the Norwegian PTO (me) and the distributor has been limited. In these kind of circumstances, working out alternate solutions like Germany's is virtually impossible. Out of Norway's eight OP locations, only three are connected to a store (the three that are located in cities where there happens to be an Outland store). I am fairly certain that unless something changes soon, five out of our eight OP locations will die.
 
Last edited:
I just know that I've never run a Pokemon event in a retail location (more b/c they don't want it than I don't want to be in there). Everything that I've run personally has been through libraries and community centers. Why aren't those allowed internationally?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top