In View from the Deadbox: 50 Cal Update for Mr. Curious, Baca Loco posts up information that he has received from Frederick Rodrigues – someone close to Laurent Hamet. According to Frederick’s information, the .50 cal “revolution” has been strogly pushed to the French market by Hamet’s (?) distribution company ProFusion and the prices would be 50% cheaper than the .68 current prices. That is starting to seem like a tempting offer already. Hamet had also claimed that the Millennium Series is very likely allowing both .50 cal and .68 caliber balls on the fields for the 2010 season.
In his own blog, Brandon Short had some interesting ideas for adapting the game to suit the .50 cal play – including a 1-on-1 tournament format and a reduced field size with less players on the field. I think that the economics in reducing the players – especially to 1-on-1 would not help save the game and the industry, as there would inevitably be less players to pay for paint. Imagine the World Cup and its current amount of individual players that want to play – and then try to think of a tournament format that could offer all the players a satisfactory amount of games – say 3-man or 1-man format – without having to a) extend the tournament duration into forever b) having to build additional fields so the overhead costs would not increase. To me, that’s counter-intuitive but then again I might not see all the implications and effects of such changes, it might still work somehow. In any case, reducing the players in a game will cut down on ball consumption – a good thing for the player, but how will the industry adapt – by increasing paint prices.
By combining the initial ballistic reports, the announcement by Hamet to allow both ball sizes on tournament fields and a bit of Bshort’s scenario, do we see the changes emerging? Since Laurent himself is both endorsing .50 cal and organizing (in part) the Millennium Series, it will be interesting to see if we are looking at reduced field sizes for the 2010 season? I hope not, but it seems to be a clear and logical conclusion to be drawn from this.
If we consider the possibility of reducing the field size we need to think about the field layouts as well. Will there be an imbalance? With the current amount of bunkers, the lanes are already quite narrow and if we compress the borders they will shrink even more. To balance this, would we need to reduce the amount of bunkers? Fewer bunkers, fewer possibilities – possibly longer moves over shorter shot distances – do we see a more stagnant, static gameplay? Will we see the ROF reduced even further to benefit the movers and promote aggressive play? I think the .50 cal can’t (based on the initial reviews) overtake .68 on current tournament fields, but will the tournament series go through extensive format changes to support the new ball?
