It"s that time of the year again!
The pre season discussion threads often become some of the largest and most interesting threads of the year on the forum and I suspect this year will be no different.
The planning process has already begun and Leigh, Matt and myself would love to hear members thoughts on all aspects of APAT, and what you"d like to see improve next season.
I expect that we"ll largely focus on the live schedule and developments in this thread, but please feel free to put online on the table also if you"ve a suggestion to make. That aside, we will run a separate similar thread for online a little closer to the season starting.
In looking for feedback, you need to be aware of certain limitations of course. Main events need to finish at a reasonable time on a Sunday night, so if you say "can we have starting stacks of 25,000", then you probably need to make that a reasonable option by adding "...and reduce the close to 30m levels" or similar. This is just an example of course.
I"m sure there are lots of things you will want to put on the table, but some of the things that I"m interested in hearing your views on are as follows:-
Buy ins - Stay at £75? Increase? Decrease? Side events?
Festival style three and four day events - good? or too long?
Timing - An event every month, every two months, or four big festivals every year maybe?
WCOAP - Should it extend further with the addition of two day side events and an even larger main event?
Team events - Should we invite multiple teams from same communities? structure?
Formats - Should we be looking to include anything new? Should we run one of the nationals in a different format, outside of the WCOAP and ECOAP?
Registration - Thoughts on satellites, direct buy in via client, generic satellite packages versus specific satellite packages, should satellites packages include a contribution towards travel and hotel?
Seat reservation - Should this continue? If so, why? If we added a Paypal button to enable players to pay the 10% fee upfront, would this work? So players not taking up their reservation would lose the fee element of their buy in?
Locations - Overseas? New locations? For example we could take the ECOAP to Western Europe. Would players come, if destination was cheap and outside of holiday periods?
Commercial - To increase our budgets we might ask you to qualify for events at a third party site, or join us for a crazy night of blackjack or slots tournaments. Is this acceptable, not acceptable, would stop you playing, etc?
Awards - Further develop the medals? More bracelets? Differentiate between live and online event awards? Added value?
Merchandise - Should we sell stuff? Shirts, cards, chip set, card protectors? How deep should the range be? High quality or cheap? Would you buy high resolution pictures of yourself at events, branded with the event name, APAT logo and in an APAT sleeve?
There is a ton of other stuff that I can think of but I don"t want to limit your thinking, so please feedback / debate on any topic and this will help us greatly in our planning for season seven.