WBO Organizer's Guide Updates May 2019: Entry Fee, Prize, Passport Updates & More

Outlined below are several important new updates to the WBO Organized Play Organizer’s Guide. All Organizers are required to be familiar with these updates.



Updates Overview
  • IMPORTANT All Events Temporarily Free-To-Enter
  • IMPORTANT Prize Reimbursement Temporarily Suspended
  • IMPORTANT Blader Passport Subscriptions Temporarily Suspended
  • Updated, Relaxed Requirements for Unranked Events Spreadsheets
  • Introducing the WBO Challonge Community
  • Simplified Warning Guidelines for Failure to Submit Tournament Information
  • Discontinuation of Blader Rewards/Credits Campaign
  • Sections Added for Inviting Players & Pre-Processing Events
  • BeyDays 2019 Delay and Consolidation with Beyblade Remembrance

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IMPORTANT All Events Temporarily Free-To-Enter, Prize Reimbursement Temporarily Suspended & Blader Passport Subscriptions Temporarily Suspended

Until further notice:

  • All WBO Organized Play events will be free-to-enter. (This does not include convention/venue-related entry fees, if applicable)
  • Prize reimbursement will be temporarily suspended.
  • Blader Passports will not be available for purchase.

Currently active Blader Passports will be extended accordingly once this period has ended based on the number of days since this announcement (for example, if it lasts for 30 days and you have a Blader Passport, the original end date for your Blader Passport will be extended by 30 days).

The reason for this is two-fold: there are some new requirements by our payment processing system PayPal that we are working to meet, and we have also been considering a restructuring of how we manage event fees, including removing the Passport Bit entirely in an effort to streamline our work load. But we will need to evaluate other alternatives for tracking the start/end date of Blader Passports in order to do that.

Currently, users who subscribe to a Blader Passport online are automatically added to the “Passport” usergroup which indicates they have a Blader Passport, but does not show when the start date was.  The Passport Bit displays the start date, but needs to be manually awarded by a Committee Member … which is highly inefficient.

When the WBO first started this was not much of an issue due to the low volume of events and players, but over the years this has steadily required a greater and greater investment of time and it would seem that now is a good time for us to find a better way because as a volunteer organization, our time individually is limited and would be better spent on more valuable things for the WBO.

In the meantime, enjoy the free events. Smile



Updated, Relaxed Requirements for Unranked Events Spreadsheets
The results spreadsheets for unranked WBO Organized Play events now do not need to include a full recording of the match results if you post a link to your Challonge bracket in the tournament thread along with the link to your otherwise complete spreadsheet. This applies to Club Format events run using Round Robin Deck Format as well.

If you are running Club Format using the Winning Streak Format, you do not need to include the results themselves at all in your spreadsheet or otherwise (as that format cannot be performed using Challonge).

We realize that we ask a lot of our Organizers. We do so in order to maintain a standard level of quality and consistency across all of our events worldwide, but we also realize that over the years maybe  too much bureaucracy has accumulated, so we’re happy to start by relaxing the requirements for unranked events where ultimately, including results in the spreadsheet does not matter because they don’t need to be copy/pasted for processing in to the rankings.

We hope that this will make it a bit easier for you guys to host unranked events like those using the ongoing experimental Burst Classic Format!



Introducing the WBO Challonge Community
We are happy to announce that we have now created a new official World Beyblade Organization Challonge “Community” page!

New Organizer Requirements:
1. All WBO Organizers are required to post their Challonge username here.
2. All future WBO events hosted through Challonge must be hosted through this page.

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Organizers, once you have provided your Challonge username, we will invite you as a “Collaborator”. From that point onward, whenever hosting an official WBO Organized Play event, all of your Challonge tournament brackets must be created within the WBO Challonge Community.

Challonge Communities carry a wide variety of features useful for competitive communities, but we are implementing it into our process solely for the ability to capture all WBO Challonge event pages into one central repository.

Currently, all WBO Organizers create tournament brackets within their own personal Challonge accounts. By having Organizers create their tournament brackets within the WBO Challonge Community, it will be easier for us to track the results of events after they happen.

Communities on Challonge also allow you to integrate “Events”, which is useful for events which take place over several days such as BEYBLADE NORTH 2019.



Simplified Warning Guidelines for Failure to Submit Tournament Information
Some time ago we introduced new guidelines for warning Organizers who did not submit their tournament information on time. While well-intentioned, we’ve realized over time that the multi-stage approach was too complex for us to enforce as a volunteer organization. As such, we have decided to simplify them.

Effective now, WBO staff reserves the right to issue warnings to Organizers using their judgment based on the general Low-, Medium-, or High-Impact guidelines listed under “Organizer Violations” on our Community Rules.





Discontinuation of Blader Rewards/Credits Campaign
For reasons similar to the above issue with the Blader Passport, we have also decided to officially discontinue Blader Rewards. All outstanding Credits that have not been awarded will not be awarded.

Any users with existing Credits on their user profiles (under “Credits”) may exchange them for any of the remaining physical items or Bit Boosters on the list by July 1st, 2019 by PMing ~Mana~ and myself. On July 2nd, 2019, all Credits will become void. If there is any physical prizes on the Blader Rewards list remaining after this date, we will use them in a future giveaway.

We’ve also added in several of the newer and limited Bit Boosters–like Bit Booster GENERATIONS I–to the list of redeemable prizes, so take this chance to bolster your Bit collection!

This has been on the back-burner for a long time due to our focus on catching up with actually processing results into the rankings first and we’ve come to the realization that we simply do not have the time or manpower on staff currently to continue managing it.

Awarding Credits had to be done manually by staff, and also created more work for Organizers who had to calculate/record them in their spreadsheets for every tournament. Then, all prize requests had to be manually tracked and ordered …

While always challenging to manage, like the Blader Passport, it was easier to do so during the early years of the WBO when it was first introduced. We’ve grown so much since then that now seems like a good opportunity to re-evaluate how we can best and most efficiently offer prizing for WBO events and players.

Having to manage the ordering of prizes on an intermittent basis for things such as BeyDays or our anniversary is one thing, but having to manage this on an ongoing basis is beyond what we are capable or willing to commit to at this point. We ask for your kind understanding in this matter and thank everyone for helping to make Blader Rewards more successful than we ever imagined it would be.

We hope that with the discontinuation of this campaign, staff will have more time to focus on other areas of the community and the work load for Organizers will be lightened, if only a little bit.

To go along with this update we have also updated the WBO Results Spreadsheet template to no longer mention Credits. It can be found in our Rules & Resources folder or by clicking below.





Sections Added for Inviting Players & Pre-Processing Events
We’ve added in sections to the Organizer's Guide for the previously announced Player Invite and Pre-Processing features to ensure all new Organizers learn about them!:

Post-Tournament Responsibilities – Pre-Processing Tournament Results (Optional) Wrote:After you have completed your results spreadsheet, you can easily pre-process them on the page for your event so that the Organized Play Contributor team can more quickly input them into the rankings when it is time.

This is optional, but a huge help to WBO staff who manage the queue of events to be processed into the rankings. Learn How to Pre-Process Here.

Tournament Management – Tournament Invites Wrote:Once you have created your Event page, click the “Join Tournament” button to access the  "Invite Players" section. Type in up to 25 usernames at a time and instantly send invitation PMs and notifications to the chosen Bladers.



BeyDays 2019 Delay and Consolidation with Beyblade Remembrance
As many of you may know, around the end of May each year is when we hold our annual celebration of Beyblade called “BeyDays”. Regrettably, due to some of the issues described at the start of this post, we do not feel we would be able to do it justice this year in terms of offering the prizing BeyDays has become known for.

As a result, we’ve made the decision to delay BeyDays 2019 until later this summer. In addition, we will also be taking this opportunity to consolidate BeyDays and our yearly “Beyblade Remembrance” event (which typically happens in the summer) into one.

We feel that through this consolidation we’ll be able to focus our efforts a bit more and deliver a community event that everyone can be excited about! Please stay tuned for more.  



Feedback?
If you have any feedback on these particular changes, or any questions or suggestions for further adjustments or additions, please post your thoughts below or in the WBO Organized Play Rules thread.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support of WBO Organized Play! We appreciate any and all feedback and are always looking to improve and clarify things where possible.
I hope everything's alright behind the scenes. The players don't want to see the organizers undergo undue strain; please take care of yourselves.

It does make sense to streamline things if the number of players and systems gets too high.
Everything is fine, don't worry!

The PayPal suspension is unfortunately one of those cases of exponentially growing over the last year, which has made them want to do some security checks on everything...which prevents funds from coming in or going out during this time. It sucks, but it is what it is.

When it comes to some of the removals or consolidation; some things (like Credits & the Passport Bit) have been long overdue a removal anyway due to how much manual work goes into doing those.

With Credits, we have to manually edit every user and add on their new amount to their total, so after 40-80 participant events, it becomes really time consuming to do, hence our want to remove them. Passport Bits are similar; we have to manually add and remove them, which eats a lot of our time which could be used on site improvements, event planning or format discussion, haha.

You can think of most of this as a rework of our internal processes really, just to make sure we do have time to do the stuff we want to do, while also making processes simpler for our Organizers and Contributors as well.
ok thanks mana Smile
It sucks that y'all have to shut down the shop but I hope everything goes well with this whole PayPal thing
(Oct. 27, 2019  1:28 PM)antonie32 Wrote: Is the shop closed right now?  happy wheels pro

Likely until the paypal access is restored.