Novelty

Last year, when I first ran the TEAM tournaments and other events, the response was amazing. Sure, I had no-shows. I'm not going to pretend that everyone RPed and RPed enthusiastically either, but there was enough RP going on for me to be proud of it. The second iterations, well, the TiT and ToC were still both well RPed-for. Some of the SuperShows have become a bit sparsely participated in, despite the somewhat enthusiastic turnout for people signing up for them. The absolute nadir thus far though, has been this past week in the Dupree Cup. I think there were a total of three or four matches that had participation from everyone who was scheduled to be in the match. For one meet, only one person RPed for only one team in the entire meet. One person!

For me to chide people about not being active would be pretty hypocritical, seeing as my time and energy lately has been sapped pretty bad, but at the same time, to have one team totally no-show and another team only have 1/4 representation is kinda depressing. I asked around and got a few responses. They ranged from the totally excusable (death in the family) to absurd (dropping out of the tournament because they thought they wouldn't be fairly judged), but I still haven't gotten a response from most of the people who didn't show. It makes me wonder whether the sheen is off the rose and they don't really want to come out and say it. I could understand if that was the case. I mean, I wouldn't want to tell someone that I didn't RP because I thought the novelty was gone. At the same time though, TEAM isn't a regular fed. It should always have some kind of novelty attached to it, shouldn't it?

That's one question I really don't know how to answer. On one hand, I love putting on SuperShows, I love running the tournaments, and I love having the interfed titles. On the other hand though, I'm very nonplussed about the lack of participation. It makes me wonder if the sheen is off the rose. I've been sort of fighting with myself over this in my mind, whether I was the one taking the novelty away, and it's been recently confirmed by two other minds. One is Jarret, who on his blog mentions that TEAM may be getting too much like a regular fed, and the other Karl, who suggested the same to me privately. It's not like that was coming from two bumpkins who came in with no idea of how TEAM worked. Both guys are respected RPers/handlers, and they've competed in several TEAM events before. For them to notice the same thing really drives the point home to me.

TEAM has become everything I never wanted it to become.

Seriously, I wanted to do things with TEAM that people wouldn't do in their regular feds, that people COULDN'T do in their regular feds. That's why all the secondary titles are differently gimmicked. I really don't want to have regular RP battles for titles when that kind of thing doesn't work unless you have a history going into it. The CoC, yeah, because you expect the best of the best to come up with stuff out of their asses, and a lot of times, with the sort of Victorian Era European royalty we have in the main-event pool for TEAM, you do get matchups with history. Still though, I can see now how people would get burnt out on the FFA~! Title if there's one every other week.

So, I've already decided to scale back on the SuperShows. Instead of having them all the time, scaling back on them will have fewer TEAM matches for people to feel obligated to sign up for. Having fewer of them means that TEAM matches are more likely to fall on lulls for the regular cards, and people will have time to RP.

The tournaments... well, hopefully that's just a byproduct of too many SuperShows, because if week 3 of the Dupree Cup ends up like week 2, I'll be pretty bummed out. I guess that's my question... has TEAM really lost its novelty? And can I ever get it back? I have no plans of folding this thing anytime soon, but I really would feel bummed out if people didn't get up for TEAM events.

I know this post seems a bit emo, but that's just the mood lately. I'll snap out of soon, I promise.