Should the Qualifiers Be Easier?

[2D2Will]

After watching all six regional qualifiers and regional finals, I couldn't help but to feel a little disappointed that only the South East (edit: and North West) finals featured people who were eliminated despite finishing the course. Therefore, 11 10 out of 12 times, all you had to do was finish the course and you would move on to the next round.

This got me thinking, the qualifiers are essentially a race, but if less than the required number of people finish the course, the race becomes a lot easier. With that said, making either course easier could result in too many people finishing and turn the whole thing into the joke. So should either course be made easier? Or should we rely on the competitors stepping up and producing a higher success rate in ANW 5?

Let the discussion begin.

[arsenette]

I'm one of those people who thinks that if they fail they can't continue.. but I understand why they did it since they did "Regionals". I'm for the regional concept despite how it can cause problems with certain regions being heavy in talent and others maybe not. I do however hate the concept of no timer.. that has to change. The mindset changes when you have a clock blaring down your time left on the course... then again.. you get 2 things going on.. not enough clears with people timing out.. or automatic clears with too many because they all cleared. It's a difficult balance to achieve honestly. This happens a lot in other sports (Lord knows I saw it in Figure skating ALL THE TIME).. so it's a difficult discussion .. especially when you are part of the region with exceptionally strong competitors who can't ever get out of their region.

As for difficulty in general.. I HATE doing the course twice.. I don't care.. it's just something ingrained in my mind that for different sections there should be different courses.. not twice with a tweak. But that's my personal opinion and I doubt G4 will give a crap. I've been bitching about regionals for as long as NW hit G4 with ANC1 so I'm happy Regionals exists. Unfortunately there's no "good" solution other than what they tried. When you consider how many people ran regionals for a shot at the final it's a HELL of a lot more than they have done before in the past. It can only get better from here. Now.. if they can fix the debacle in Vegas.. /facepalm That's another thread.

[Deleted]

I think doing the course twice is fine. The problem in my opinion was too many qualifiers. If they had maybe 3 - 4 instead of 6 maybe we'd see 30 clear in each region.

[KinnikuBanzukeÜberAlles]

I think trials should be at least 75% as hard as the final course.

I think there's too much success. I wish trials was like a mini SASUKE or half SASUKE, where you might get 1 person out of thousands, or even none at all, completing a multi-stage course.

[Northern Ninja]

I competed in the NW Regional and finished as one of the 15 qualifiers for Vegas. The biggest reason for lack of finishers/slow finshers this year was definitely the talent pool being so spread out. I finished the Semi-final course with one of the slower times because I knew I could take my time, complete each obstacle and punch my ticket to the final. Good for me, bad for TV. When some of these guys couldn't get past the qualifying course, I wasn't afraid of getting beat by them in the Semi-final. There was no urgency to go as fast as possible and possibly make a silly mistake.

I think that tryouts should be contracted from 6 regions down to 3 regions (West, Central, East) which would double the talent pool of each region. I would also tweak the qualifying numbers for each region to 40 for qualifying and 20 for semi-finals. That would result in 60 Finals qualifiers through tryouts, leaving 40 spots to be filled at the discretion of G4/NBC. I think this would more closely mimic the balance of Sasuke competitions, where you have plenty of quality athletes, mixed with enough joke competitors and celebrities to increase interest in the program.

BTW, the NW region actually had 16 finishers in the Semi-final, not the 15 they showed on the leaderboards. One guy got edited off the final leaderboard. So it was only 10 times out of 12, 2D2Will

[r34gtr]

They could at least move the Quad Steps closer together, think Step Slider spacing... then things would be more competitive.

[thatoneuser]

Jul 3, 2012 21:07:51 GMT -5 Northern Ninja said:

I think that tryouts should be contracted from 6 regions down to 3 regions (West, Central, East) which would double the talent pool of each region. I would also tweak the qualifying numbers for each region to 40 for qualifying and 20 for semi-finals. That would result in 60 Finals qualifiers through tryouts, leaving 40 spots to be filled at the discretion of G4/NBC. I think this would more closely mimic the balance of Sasuke competitions, where you have plenty of quality athletes, mixed with enough joke competitors and celebrities to increase interest in the program.

I like this plan. Also, congratulations!

[yamfriend]

Jul 3, 2012 21:07:51 GMT -5 Northern Ninja said:

BTW, the NW region actually had 16 finishers in the Semi-final, not the 15 they showed on the leaderboards. One guy got edited off the final leaderboard. So it was only 10 times out of 12, 2D2Will

I knew that observation I made during the broadcast was true!

[Lennon]

I like Northern Ninja's idea. If your only going to have three host cities anyway, might as well stick with only 3 regions instead of 6. And that'll definitely get you over 30, or in NN's case, 40 clears.