Blog

Ben Drago

First off, I wanted to introduce some of the hardworking people that make Organized Play happen. OP is like an iceberg – when you come to the tournament you only see the little bit sticking up out of the water, but you never see the other 90% of the work underneath that makes things happen.

Here in Irvine, CA we have Ry Schueller and Javier Casillas making sure events happen. Ry manages our relationships with hobby stores in North America, making sure events are scheduled and uploaded. He’s also been filling in and helping out with the customer service mailbox as we interview new candidates.

Javier is the man juggling on the schedules, designs, and production for OP programs like Battlegrounds. He also makes sure everything shows up to a Darkmoon Faire. Lucky for me, he’s pretty much perfect at pulling everything together.

Alex Charsky is the OP Manager for Cryptozoic. We both started out as judges and made the switch to industry professionals back about eight years ago. There’s not another guy I want at my back at a big tournament – he’s seen it all, and doesn’t flinch.

Across the pond we have Matthias Nagy and Carl Crook holding down the fort. Matthias just joined us a few months ago, and is already moving forward with the expected Germany efficiency. Mr. Crook is a true veteran of the industry – he’s been around even longer than I have. He was there back in the Wild West days of the TCG industry (read: the mid 1990s). He’s also surprisingly good at games, and I recommend never playing him for money.

Overseeing Organized Play in Asia is Edwin Teh. You might recognize him as the head judge for a number of prestigious tournaments over the last few years, including several World Championships. He’s an expert at rules, and in addition to managing tournaments and judges, he’s been stewarding the rules for the World of Warcraft TCG for the last few years.

We’ve been running these things called Realm Qualifiers for the last three weekends. And simply put – response has been insane. Average attendance is well over double what it was in Spring 2010. It’s actually created a little bit of a problem, as our first shipment of CZE ID numbers are being churned through much faster than we expected. The next shipment has been expedited, and we’re carefully monitoring usage until then.

Last week we rolled out a number of improvements to our Where to Play pages. Here, take a look.

Don’t worry – the map is still there. You just have to click the dropdown arrow to show it. In addition to the upcoming tournaments, we also link to all the previous tournaments from that location. Click on one of them, and you can view a ton of information about the tournament, including the final standings.

Like I mentioned in my blog last week, both Honor Points and Player Rewards are going to key off your tournament history. So you want to check and make sure that every tournament you play in is uploaded and processed correctly. It’s much easier to do this when the event is still fresh, so make it a habit to check in every couple of weeks and make sure all your tournaments made it in.

Inside Look

We’re polishing off our Public Events schedule for the rest of the year, and it’s a good time to get your feedback. So take a look at the DMF Orlando public events schedule in the player packet and reply to this post with comments – what do you like, what would you like to see more of. You can even post suggestions, and if we like them I’ll add them to the events this year and find some cool prizes for you.

Cheers,

Benhameen