Possible Changes for 08, please read!

Greetings fellow Battleground warriors and gladiators!

Though with the onset of hurricane Ike came many setbacks, we are beginning the process of getting things underway for this year’s event, and as always your feedback and ideas are welcome and encouraged. This year will see many changes, perhaps the most important of which to know about might be the splitting of the arena groups into two leagues. Due to some of the voiced concern the previous year about the legal issues involved (Always tricky) we’ve decided the best course of action would be to divide the games up into two different categories to protect both the players and the convention from future headaches.

This will not be a good change for everyone, we are fully aware of that, however for the event to continue to run smoothly it is an unfortunate necessity and we hope you will bear with us in understanding. The necessity for the split involves the need to properly safeguard the convention and legitimize the sign in and waver process a bit more. What this amounts to is a league of people who have signed verified wavers (requiring a valid state ID, parent, or notarized note) and people who have not or are unable to. The core difference this will bring to the players, is the types of weapons they have access too.

This year, we will be making two distinct weapon types, the Traditional, the weapons used in previous years with their semi-realistic hefts and weights for people who have signed in on the waver properly, and None-Traditional weapons. The newer none-traditional class of weapons will be heavily padded and likely lighter (Think kiddy weapons), but ultimately unrealistic and unsuited for the Tournaments. We may hold a none-traditional tournament as well for those unable to sign the waver, but our main focus will still be the traditional weapon’s combat.

This is all subject to change as things develop and we get closer to the deadline, and we are quite open to suggestions and ideas along the way. We /really/ hate to have to do this at all but due to some unrest at the end of last year’s event by some choice individuals it was decided it would be necessary to protect the convention from sabotage or legitimate accident.

My main intent with posting this so early, is to get the possible need for this out there and known, so everyone who needs to can make the proper arrangements as soon as possible. With hope, we will figure out a way to amend this before the start of the convention because the last… /last/ thing I want is for our returning, hard working players who might not have gotten the memo to be relegated to sub-par weaponry and disallowed from the main tournaments and events. That is a terrible sadness to all of the Battlegrounds staff, and we will do everything we can to come up with an alternative method. As of the moment though, it is best to prepare for this in case.

More news will be on the way, things are a bit slow right now still due to the hurricane. Many of our admins and leads are still without power or even phones. Bear with us.

Oni-Con Battlegrounds Staff-