[Gavnich77]

It’s always been open to the players to discuss anything they want. It just appears that last year, not many players wanted to discuss anything. TT has always been largely a democratic game where the participants have a big say. Last year was an exception as in previous years there was always a lot more discussion.

Below is a quick insight into how the TT changes process works.

Murilo keeps track of any topics/potential changes that are brought up or have caused discussion during the year and includes these items in the first post. These are used as a starting point to discuss any changes and players are encouraged offer opinions on these and to offer suggestions for changes that they would like in the thread (e.g., the ranking points came up when it hadn’t been mentioned previously). He then went through all the responses in the thread and split the topics into sections based upon the responses, i.e, some topics had no responses so no need to do anything, some were minor tweaks that no-body objected to, others had a split opinion and lend themselves easily to a poll.

The 2 main new topics that were brought up were Wild Cards and a change to the ranking points. These would be two major changes to the game and would require further thought and clarification. Wildcards have been discussed to death in the past and voted on with the overwhelming majority being against them. There wasn’t a huge amount of support in the thread for it and no new, concrete proposals for how it would work so we didn’t believe it would be productive to continue the debate.

A change in ranking points to reflect the ATP ranking points would be a huge change to TT so this is not something that could be decided in a week as we would need to fully understand the consequences of any change e.g., how a transition would affect the rankings and how that should be managed/introduced and the reasons for the change. IMO, if it’s just to bring us into line with ATP that is not a good enough reason as it has already been voted upon in the past that TT players did not want the ATP ranking points structure. So, we decided that as there was a bit of support for a change we should carry this over into 2012 to get more opinions from other players.

What we have noticed this year (and last) is that we have run out of time with the discussions and there has been less activity in the thread. Whether this is because less people want change now or because there are less people around during the off-season we don’t know. That is why we mentioned carrying on some discussions on major changes to 2012 to ensure that enough people are aware of any potential changes and can have the opportunity to contribute.

[ibreak4coffee]

Gav - while I realize there are ideas raised in this thread that the majority oppose and its probably not worth discussing further (ex: wildcards) - or ever again for that matter - its interesting to me the Board decided to devote an entire poll and thread to the issue of the start date of one tournament 75% of TT players do not play (worth only 200 points). In my opinion at least - which trust me I'm under no delusions suggesting I think anyone takes it into account - in the grand scheme of things this is probably at the complete bottom of the totem pole of issues that we should be focusing on to continue making TT a better game

[AdeyC]

Originally Posted by ibreak4coffee

in the grand scheme of things this is probably at the complete bottom of the totem pole of issues that we should be focusing on to continue making TT a better game :shrug"

Hallelujah

[Gavnich77]

Originally Posted by ibreak4coffee

Gav - while I realize there are ideas raised in this thread that the majority oppose and its probably not worth discussing further (ex: wildcards) - or ever again for that matter - its interesting to me the Board decided to devote an entire poll and thread to the issue of the start date of one tournament 75% of TT players do not play (worth only 200 points). In my opinion at least - which trust me I'm under no delusions suggesting I think anyone takes it into account - in the grand scheme of things this is probably at the complete bottom of the totem pole of issues that we should be focusing on to continue making TT a better game

What are the issues that you think we should be focusing on?