GymLeaderPhil
New Member
mysterioustrainer said:I have read the penalty guidelines and I think they are well designed for the Pokemon TCG. Mainly because they are focused towards what can be still said the "target audience" for the game which is young children.
Next thing you know, POP will remove prize structure for the 15+ group. Unfortunatly the majority of penalties I assign at any given tournament are not in that "target audience". In fact, there are only around four at the West Palm Beach Gym Challenge this weekend. The Guidelines are crap and the majority of the document's penalties are weak (see page five, Game-Play error, third paragraph). Any this crap about casual and competitive? Crazy. The last time I checked a judge's role in a sanctioned tournament was to enforce the rules and remind players how to play the game correctly as if they were actually in a major event like Worlds. Assigning the weak casual penalty will not make the player or players aware of the potential problem their actions might cause at an premiere event.
I'm not saying that we need to be rule-mongers, sucking out all of the fun of tournaments, but there needs to be strong penalties to reinforce the rules of the game. Warnings do NOT cut it and game/match losses are too severe in some situations. We need the prize penalty and prize swap, in addition to specific Game Error penalties. The whole document is way too simplistic and it does not add anything that we have not been doing since the DCI.
And on a related note... They seriously need to hire a couple of PTOs to fill the roles that certain employees have left blank. I'm sure Magmar from PokeSchool could easily fill the role of the procrastinating web master for the POP website. Of course it might not be this unknown web masters fault, organization within the company is bad. For anyone who has witnessed the mess that is the PTO mailing list, along with the twenty something documents that could easily be compressed into one huge document and the legal action taken against Jon for adding a store phone number, I would think anyone would be bleeding from their eyes. That or if they manage to check their pocketbook, I'm sure my eyes would be bleeding then. Can't wait for Steve to move to League, I'm sure with his track record we'll have awesome promos next year. :X
-Phil