Data Review from Victorian Paintball Survey – Part 2

This is the continuation of the paintball player survey recently conducted to help the Paintball Association of Victoria gauge the thoughts of tournament players. We covered the first 5 questions out of 10. If you have not had a look at the first 5 questions results click here for part 1.

Question 6

We continue here with the survey answers continuing from question 6.

“The best day to hold a paintball event” has been the topic of many discussions in many forums and meetings over the past few years, sometimes coming with a certain degree of passion. It would be remiss of us to exclude this question from a survey designed to consider all options and opinions to better the sport and the player’s experience.

As with any amateur sport, passion sometimes has to give way to real life and economic reality especially when your beloved sport interferes with your work, family or other pursuits.The purpose of asking this question was twofold, not only to determine if the chosen game day has a significant impact on attendance but also the degree of importance players attach to this issue in the wider paintball community.

With 90 people answering this question, we believe this gives a strong indication on the issue only to be surprised by the results based on the previous experiences with this topic.The weighted results (Q5) show this issue was almost last when it came to degree of importance, coming a very distant 7th in the top 8 reasons.

With regards to the results, a few things are noticed. Firstly, 43% of people have NO preference when it comes to which day an event is on. Further, it is fair to assume the 8 people who skipped the question also have no opinion on the matter.Next, of the 51 people who DO care which day an event is held, 75% of players prefer Saturday. Stated another way this means 3 out of 4 paintballers who completed the survey choose Saturday as their preferred day to play.

Finally when you add the players who do not have a preference on which day they play, to those who do, you see the following results;
Saturday Event (38+39)/90 = 86% of players have their preferred option
Sunday Event (13+39)/90 = 58% of players have their preferred option

As event organisers, the numbers clearly show by a significant margin, the success of an event is dramatically improved if held on a Saturday. One final point to be made is PAV’s can only hold events with the support of field operators as they supply the venues on which we play. As such PAV’s grants each hosting venue the right to choose which day best works for them, while making sure the venue operator is aware of these results.

We ask players to be mindful of this point. We also ask you to consider these two points as well. Commercial fields lose revenue when hosting an event as they shut their fields to the public in order to do so. Non-commercial fields still have to pack up after an event long after you have gone home. Regardless, the survey results speak louder than us all.

Question 7

I want to say that the graph that I will start with is actually more about the way that the survey software presents the data then it is about the result. For the sake of transparency lets have a look at it anyway…

The reason that the data is a little misleading is because it seems to be counting non responses as a negative and therefore dragging down the average. The original answers were as follows.

 
If you take out the “no comment” answers and rate the rest of the scores generated look like this…

What we learned from this part of the survey is firstly that the safety and reffing are rated very highly. This supports PAVs and Vic5s position that Refs Inc are a massive part of the previous success of the series and are important to the event on an ongoing basis. In fact 61 out of 70 answers were good or fantastic.

Price and value for money were the lowest which did surprise the PAVs committee a little. Sadly paintball is an expensive sport and there is only so much that we can do about that as event organisers. Generally we find that teams are likely to spend around $650 to $700 on paintballs compared to $500 on tournament entry. If teams are entering 6 players this equates to approx $83 on entry and $115 on paintballs. One suggestion that has come up for discussion is potentially the rate of fire capping to limit the paint shot in a day. This is something we will take on board for discussion but will take a significant effort to introduce as a standard. Something that would obviously be ideal is capped ramping but as this would require legislative changes it will be difficult to implement.

The reason that we put both price and value for money was to get a feel as to whether the entry price was appropriate for an entry level tournament and get a feel for the way people thought the day worked out as a cost per game or however else they want to look at it. In the end it is unlikely that the entry fee of the event can be lowered if we continue to provide food, quality reffing and trophies. We would be interested to know how players would like paint to be handled for the event. Currently if paint is suspected of causing staining it is tested. If it stains it is out. Subject to that paint can be submitted for approval. Is there a paint that people want to see represented at Vic5s that you are not seeing?

Question 8

There is no point focusing on this one as it seems that the people who filled the survey did not focus on it either. More people skipped the question than voted for any particular venue so take the results with that in mind. The people who did vote generally voted in terms of the venue that has been involved in Vic5s the longest.

Snipers Den and Adrenalin Paintball Newborough were pretty close with Bass Coast unfortunately receiving less. A factor here is that Adrenalin has a healthy club and Snipers Den has been involved in Vic5s for a long time holding the first ever round in Feb 2010. If we do start to include new fields in the Vic 5s season we will need to find ways to have new venues better supported by tournament paintball players. Bass Coast has also been incredible unlucky with the weather which has probably impacted their ability to showcase the venue properly. To keep it in perspective though 26 people voted for Snipers Den and 36 people skipped the question so we cant really take too much out of the results here.

Question 9

This question is an important one because it was designed to try to point the PAVs committee in the direction that we should try to focus on in 2015. Unfortunately all the options were voted on highly.  We were hoping to see a clear winner here but it is worth discussing in more detail.

Something to consider with this data is that it has a plus and minus component to the voting. What that means is that a rating of 3 is essentially a neutral result. For both “Prizes” and “Centralise Location” the most popular response was actually neutral. Both results were slightly bent towards the agree side but certainly not significantly.

For the “More games” and “Race option” the result was more towards the agree side. Interestingly the results did differ slightly however. Overall “More games” rated higher than “Race option”. This is despite more people voting in the “Highly agree” field. This is mainly to do with the weight of the people voting against race but in support of more games. Something that has been discussed heavily on facebook by players and will also need to be discussed by the committee is the race format vs round robin issue.

There is a lot to take into consideration here. Some of the catch 22 dilemmas that we will face are : –

1. The primary concern that people expressed was cost. Cost and value for money was also the are that people rated the Vic5s series lowest in. How do we resolve the cost issue when implementing a change in format? If we go down the Race format – even a race to 2 – logically the cost of paint would go up by approx 2.5X. This would mean that a team is likely to pay $500 (assuming entry does not need to be raised) and $1750 in paint. There would certainly be more games played so the “value for money” may improve but the overall cost would skyrocket. Yes, implementing capped rate of fire may help but it would require a massive lowering in average paintballs shot per game to be effective.

2. How do we keep Vic5s accessible to new players with the introduction of race format? One of the strengths of the series historically is the ability for new players to join and compete. Race runs the risk of limiting new players entering the sport as they are more likely to be dominated by more experienced team.

3. Vic5s attempted adding Race format a few years ago and it struggled for numbers. Even when the numbers in Vic5s (Then just called PAVs) we struggled to get more than 5 teams to participate in it. Paintball Addiction also has tried to provide a Victorian based Race event in the form of the Vic Champs and it was not supported to a point that it was a financial success. We understand that the entry was higher than a Vic5s event but essentially when a team uses a higher percentage of field time the costs per team needs to go up to justify the expenses.

A few things for players to consider when planning for next year. Please give us feedback on these on the PAVs Facebook page.

1. How important is the BYO option to Vic5s? We aware that teams currently and historically have received sponsorships from paintball suppliers. Would this be affected if this paint was available through the event?

2. How can Vic5s, PAVs, the host venues and players introduce new players to the sport? How do we keep players and teams? How do we encourage teams to continue to support series when they are competing on an interstate and international level?

We have decided at this point to leave the comments off the discussion. I think that it is fair to say that the committee has tried to be extremely transparent recently. The comments really don’t add much more to the discussion. Some were constructive and appreciated, some were negative and that is fine too. The issue we had was that some targeted players, the committee, venues or other individuals. There will be no benefit to releasing these comments and they have the risk of damaging Vic5s and starting arguments that don’t need to happen.

Thanks to everybody who took the time to fill in the survey.