Pokémon TCG: Sword and Shield—Brilliant Stars

Trophy?

And now for the rebuttal.

I am the person most responsible for pushing this change. So even though past experience tells me that no good can come of this, I am going to respond to the criticism. I knew that this would not be a popular decision with many of the players. I don’t think that player’s complaining about it is unreasonable. We gave you something big and impressive and now we are taking that away. I didn’t expect that go over without having a few shots lobbed my way. I did it anyway because it is a good decision.

I think it was a good decision because I believe the trophies took up too large a portion of our limited resources for the benefit they provided. The POP team doesn’t get to decide how much money we have to spend but are often responsible for deciding how that money gets distributed. There usually aren’t direct correlations between saving money in one place and spending on another. In this case there is; I took part of the savings and bought new State Championships in Arkansas, Nebraska and Alabama with it. Without this change, those events would not happen this year.

I see posts dismissing the savings as unimportant and I have to believe you haven’t really thought about it. I don’t think that even the people trying to defend us really grasp the scope of the problem. I would love to rattle off some pricing here, but I cannot do that and expect to remain employed. However I can point out some tournament numbers, mention some shipping routes and ask a question to try to bring a bit of perspective.

Firstly, glass is fragile and those trophies did break. In order to combat this we had to pay a company to uncrate the trophies and put them into custom designed padded display boxes. They still broke, so the next year we put those custom boxes into large shipping boxes filled with packing peanuts. Now only a few break, but we have to ship the all trophies from the manufacturer in China to the Ohio box company and then to our South Dakota fulfillment house, before sending them off to the organizers.

Last year we had 125 SPTs worldwide. That is 1500 heavy glass trophies; plus a large volume of packing material that doesn’t ship for free. My guess is that your largest estimate of the shipping and handling costs wouldn’t get them to South Dakota let alone to individual tournaments all over the world. Now for the homework; how much does it cost to ship a 442 pound pallet from Sioux Falls SD to Melbourne Australia? Don’t forget insurance, it is a 442 pound pallet of glass. Oh, and import duties for a pallet of trophies that are considerably more expensive than the estimates I see bandied about.

I look at all that and have to justify those costs against the benefits and the trophies come up short. I imagine that is why you don’t see a lot of other game companies shipping 1500 big hunks of glass to 22 countries. We have wanted to replace them for a few years but didn’t have a better option.

We finally found a suitable replacement in the new medals. Besides being cheaper, smaller and blessedly lighter, I think they look really nice. My guess is if we had started out with these everyone would have thought they were cool and we wouldn’t be having this fuss.

The intangibles brought up by Meganium and others are also true. The glass trophies are not compelling in photographs unless you stage them like a product shot. Even the City medals look great in photos, and the new medals are bigger and more colorful. Somebody called wearing a medal to a tournament bad sportsmanship, I call it a photo op. We are truly excited over the prospect of all the juniors strutting around Worlds proudly wearing their medals. Whether you competitive players like it or not, Organized Play is a division of Marketing. Generating photographs of cute children decked out in Pokémon gear is one of our primary benefits to our company.
 
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Win ^

I like the idea of medals especially if their cool and new. Hopefully they look totally different from the cities medals?

A lot of players will wear these if they are cool.
 
Hopefully we at least got to keep trophies for Regionals, Nats and Worlds. Or at least just Nats and Worlds. Medals for the last two would just seem... really underwhelming. Understandable about States, though. Thanks for the clarification!
 
Box of Fail said:
I still think we should cater to juniors and weigh their opinion over those of the older age groups, even though they are much larger. However, I don't see how juniors don't like trophies ... trophies are something you can keep all your life, and they just have an "important" era about them; they look like something commemorative.
Click to expand...

This I completely agree with, I told my son (8 years old) that the state trophies are now medals...To say the least he was unhappy, he said he has medals from Cities and a second place piece of glass from last year, he wanted to win the first place trophy this year, not another medal. I felt for him, he worships the Garchomp trophy from last year, it is placed prominently in his room, his city medals that are only a couple weeks old? I have no idea where they are.

Pete De Shaw said:
There usually aren’t direct correlations between saving money in one place and spending on another. In this case there is; I took part of the savings and bought new State Championships in Arkansas, Nebraska and Alabama with it. Without this change, those events would not happen this year.
Click to expand...

Now, on to Pete's posting. While I am sorry my son is disappointed that he has no chance at getting a trophy this year, I am glad other people (I am no where near those States) will be getting a SPT near them. If, as Box of Fail stated, we should be catering to the younger ones, then a chance at a State Championship Medal for more Juniors/Seniors is better than a trophy for fewer.

Of course, the best would be to have both.
 
Pete De Shaw said:
I am the person most responsible for pushing this change. So even though past experience tells me that no good can come of this, I am going to respond to the criticism. I knew that this would not be a popular decision with many of the players. I don’t think that player’s complaining about it is unreasonable. We gave you something big and impressive and now we are taking that away. I didn’t expect that go over without having a few shots lobbed my way. I did it anyway because it is a good decision.

I think it was a good decision because I believe the trophies took up too large a portion of our limited resources for the benefit they provided. The POP team doesn’t get to decide how much money we have to spend but are often responsible for deciding how that money gets distributed. There usually aren’t direct correlations between saving money in one place and spending on another. In this case there is; I took part of the savings and bought new State Championships in Arkansas, Nebraska and Alabama with it. Without this change, those events would not happen this year.

I see posts dismissing the savings as unimportant and I have to believe you haven’t really thought about it. I don’t think that even the people trying to defend us really grasp the scope of the problem. I would love to rattle off some pricing here, but I cannot do that and expect to remain employed. However I can point out some tournament numbers, mention some shipping routes and ask a question to try to bring a bit of perspective.

Firstly, glass is fragile and those trophies did break. In order to combat this we had to pay a company to uncrate the trophies and put them into custom designed padded display boxes. They still broke, so the next year we put those custom boxes into large shipping boxes filled with packing peanuts. Now only a few break, but we have to ship the all trophies from the manufacturer in China to the Ohio box company and then to our South Dakota fulfillment house, before sending them off to the organizers.

Last year we had 125 SPTs worldwide. That is 1500 heavy glass trophies; plus a large volume of packing material that doesn’t ship for free. My guess is that your largest estimate of the shipping and handling costs wouldn’t get them to South Dakota let alone to individual tournaments all over the world. Now for the homework; how much does it cost to ship a 442 pound pallet from Sioux Falls SD to Melbourne Australia? Don’t forget insurance, it is a 442 pound pallet of glass. Oh, and import duties for a pallet of trophies that are considerably more expensive than the estimates I see bandied about.

I look at all that and have to justify those costs against the benefits and the trophies come up short. I imagine that is why you don’t see a lot of other game companies shipping 1500 big hunks of glass to 22 countries. We have wanted to replace them for a few years but didn’t have a better option.

We finally found a suitable replacement in the new medals. Besides being cheaper, smaller and blessedly lighter, I think they look really nice. My guess is if we had started out with these everyone would have thought they were cool and we wouldn’t be having this fuss.

The intangibles brought up by Meganium and others are also true. The glass trophies are not compelling in photographs unless you stage them like a product shot. Even the City medals look great in photos, and the new medals are bigger and more colorful. Somebody called wearing a medal to a tournament bad sportsmanship, I call it a photo op. We are truly excited over the prospect of all the juniors strutting around Worlds proudly wearing their medals. Whether you competitive players like it or not, Organized Play is a division of Marketing. Generating photographs of cute children decked out in Pokémon gear is one of our primary benefits to our company.
Click to expand...


THIS! THIS! THIS! I dont really carw about the topic too much but THIS! is something Ive been waiting for forever. Someone briefly explaining the thoughts and reasons behind something happening and letting the players feel like theyre part of it. Please do this more often, many "bad" decisions become much better if we get to know the reasons / thoughts behind it. (Id like to get a statement on CoL or something) Thank you so much :thumb: I wish I could thank you but for some reason I cant but feel thanked :)

Still dont like medals too much but his reasoning makes sence. Just hope they look better then the CC Medals, I dont know why but I think theyre terribly ugly =_=
 
It'd be cool if the medals had these qualities...

Individually etched for the SPT they're representing.
Significantly larger than the Cities medals. All of them, from all years. And, yes, I know that some of the old Cities medals were quite large.
Intricate, likable design that isn't simply a carbon-copy of the SPT logo. Possibly using multiple metals and compounds to create the effect?
Well designed lanyard that will keep the medal in place. (I've seen some Cities medals get dislodged from their lanyards before)

I'm just interested to see what these look like this year.
 
Thanks Pete for explaining the reasoning. I do hope these medals look cool! I remember when I won a cities back in 04 and it had the etching of my state. I'd love to see those come back.
 
I really appreciate Pete's post and reasoning. I honestly was planning on complaining about this in my next episode, but after him shedding light on the subject I feel like it's more of something that I could report as news.

It was nice winning a trophy last year, and being my first one of its kind I displayed it proudly and really enjoyed it. Medals obviously aren't a substitution for a trophy, but they are both something different and I'm at least a little excited at seeing their design when photos are released.

Huge props to Pete though for honesty above all else. I'm sure he said some things that really risked backlash, such as admitting that cutting costs doesn't always mean the money is added somewhere else, and admitting organized play as a branch of marketing. Being an advertising student might be a factor here, but those facts really intrigued me more than frustrating me. Hearing about the process of shipping trophies really does sound like a nightmare, especially when you factor in shipping outside of the US.

I was very young when Wizards still ran this game, but one thing I liked about them (well, before things fell apart at the end) was the constant communication between us and the people making decisions for the game. While I'm sure the people working behind OP are busy and have no requirement to talk to us, but the post by Pete was definitely a breath of fresh air.
 
Pete De Shaw said:
So even though past experience tells me that no good can come of this, I am going to respond to the criticism.
Click to expand...

Judging from the responses in this thread before and after your posted, I think that perception can be scratched out. :thumb:

JWittz said:
I was very young when Wizards still ran this game, but one thing I liked about them (well, before things fell apart at the end) was the constant communication between us and the people making decisions for the game. While I'm sure the people working behind OP are busy and have no requirement to talk to us, but the post by Pete was definitely a breath of fresh air.
Click to expand...

Do you remember the weekly Thursday chats with the Master Trainers? Those were always cool! :thumb:
 
Pete De Shaw said:
I am the person most responsible for pushing this change. So even though past experience tells me that no good can come of this, I am going to respond to the criticism. I knew that this would not be a popular decision with many of the players. I don’t think that player’s complaining about it is unreasonable. We gave you something big and impressive and now we are taking that away. I didn’t expect that go over without having a few shots lobbed my way. I did it anyway because it is a good decision.

I think it was a good decision because I believe the trophies took up too large a portion of our limited resources for the benefit they provided. The POP team doesn’t get to decide how much money we have to spend but are often responsible for deciding how that money gets distributed. There usually aren’t direct correlations between saving money in one place and spending on another. In this case there is; I took part of the savings and bought new State Championships in Arkansas, Nebraska and Alabama with it. Without this change, those events would not happen this year.

I see posts dismissing the savings as unimportant and I have to believe you haven’t really thought about it. I don’t think that even the people trying to defend us really grasp the scope of the problem. I would love to rattle off some pricing here, but I cannot do that and expect to remain employed. However I can point out some tournament numbers, mention some shipping routes and ask a question to try to bring a bit of perspective.

Firstly, glass is fragile and those trophies did break. In order to combat this we had to pay a company to uncrate the trophies and put them into custom designed padded display boxes. They still broke, so the next year we put those custom boxes into large shipping boxes filled with packing peanuts. Now only a few break, but we have to ship the all trophies from the manufacturer in China to the Ohio box company and then to our South Dakota fulfillment house, before sending them off to the organizers.

Last year we had 125 SPTs worldwide. That is 1500 heavy glass trophies; plus a large volume of packing material that doesn’t ship for free. My guess is that your largest estimate of the shipping and handling costs wouldn’t get them to South Dakota let alone to individual tournaments all over the world. Now for the homework; how much does it cost to ship a 442 pound pallet from Sioux Falls SD to Melbourne Australia? Don’t forget insurance, it is a 442 pound pallet of glass. Oh, and import duties for a pallet of trophies that are considerably more expensive than the estimates I see bandied about.

I look at all that and have to justify those costs against the benefits and the trophies come up short. I imagine that is why you don’t see a lot of other game companies shipping 1500 big hunks of glass to 22 countries. We have wanted to replace them for a few years but didn’t have a better option.

We finally found a suitable replacement in the new medals. Besides being cheaper, smaller and blessedly lighter, I think they look really nice. My guess is if we had started out with these everyone would have thought they were cool and we wouldn’t be having this fuss.

The intangibles brought up by Meganium and others are also true. The glass trophies are not compelling in photographs unless you stage them like a product shot. Even the City medals look great in photos, and the new medals are bigger and more colorful. Somebody called wearing a medal to a tournament bad sportsmanship, I call it a photo op. We are truly excited over the prospect of all the juniors strutting around Worlds proudly wearing their medals. Whether you competitive players like it or not, Organized Play is a division of Marketing. Generating photographs of cute children decked out in Pokémon gear is one of our primary benefits to our company.
Click to expand...

^ Win on many fronts:

*The cost argument is beyond compelling.
*They don't really look too aesthetically pleasing unless you're up front and personal with them.
*Starving a Chinese glass manufacturer of business? I'm all for that if it meant less business going into China overall.

So all in all, as long as the travel stipends remain in tact, this looks like a great decision. I think you laying it out in the detail that you did actually promotes the brand image, so keep it up...We don't like nonsense around these parts, and you did a good job dispelling it. :wink:

P.S. Kinda off topic, but should there be an official site announcement about the invite structure before States?
 
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