I have to agree with what Brett has already stated. How do we possibly try and attract more the once per week players to play even more.
If regional and state leaderboards are not enough to get more players to play, what exactly do we do?
With the new leader board system we have seen an more than 10% of regular game players increase their regular games by one more event. That equates to almost 1200 players that are now playing at least one more game per week that they did previous seasons. I know Cougar doesn't like my use of stats but unfortunately it is a factual concept.
That is a huge increase in such a short time and exactly what we were aiming for, as a business.
Of course we would like to see more increase in repeat business, the issue is; how do we go about this, what are our goals and what is the ideal system or promotion without damaging the integrity of the competition.
To Gundog,
There will always be an advantage to Metro players. There is no way around this and it will always cause problems for regional players when we run promotional leaderboards.
But regional players have an added advantage of playing for cash regional finals and/or regional leaderboards, no metro region has this option or return to players.
As to your suggestion of qualification to finals: we will not restructure the qualification process until it needs to be reviewed. State Finals are very popular with players, not just for the prize money on offer, but for the experience in playing a 600+ runner tournament. It is a big day and the showpiece of our season. I have previously asked player's opinion on a large tournament for state finals or a smaller field (harder to qualify) deepstack State Finals. The resounding response was for the former.
Something I am contemplating is making our state finals a two day deepsatck extravaganza, but again this might be a long ways off and even more of a detriment to regional players as it may become fiscally disadvantageous.
Out of our 140 events we run per week, 100 of them are located in the metro regions, we average 52 players per metro event. That leaves 40 events in the rest of regional SA that average 32 players. You can obviously see where we make the majority of our income so we definitely will continue to promote multi game playing quite heavily and we will not put any promotions into place that may see numbers in the metro regions decrease, no matter how slight a possibility this is.
But on another note we are looking to hold one "novelty" event per season in a regional area and a metro area, so at least once per year you will some different format or large tournament in the Riverland, Mid North, South East or Yorke Peninsula. Maybe Barossa Gawler if they behave themselves!!!!
I am open to feedback on the above comments please.
