Subject: Re: Resignation from Level III
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 1998 10:06:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: mjlewis@cybersource.com (Michael J. Lewis)
To: fkusumot@ix.netcom.com

After reading Paul's letter, I thought it might be interesting to
point out a few more inequities.

1) If I remember correctly, you get more stuff for working at a
qualifier than at the Pro Tour.  It is certainly comparable, and you
don't have to pay the travel/lodging costs.

2) The situation with the Pro Tour strongly parallels the decrease in
judge reimbursement in PTQs.  I have been the head judge at 95% of the
Bay Area qualifiers from when they started with PT2 until it became
necessary to have a Level III certification to do so (now is not the
time to get into why I don't have a level III cert--if you're curious,
you can mail me).  For about the first season of PTQs, each
judge/volunteer got:

1 box Ice Age
1 T-shirt
1 Duelist

and some other trivial stuff I can't remember.  Sometimes you got
Homelands.  I have so many of the black Magic T-shirts with card
pictures on the back that one entire shelf of my dresser is just
shirts from working tournaments.  (And a whole lot of IA/HL left over
if anyone wants it.)  Then, slowly, the stuff you got started to
decrease.  Fortunately for me, I had enough experience by this time
that I could get cash from the organizers for working instead of
taking WotC's payment.  But I know that Match Play (oh, sorry, Neutral
Ground SF) still adds a lot to what WotC gives them to pay the
volunteers.  Just because they're volunteering doesn't mean that they
should be paid less than minimum wage for working 10-12 hours.

3) After being dissed by the Jedge Certification program initially,
the only reason that I became a certified judge at all was to help out
my friends at NG:SF when they didn't have a head judge for a
prerelease and they got special permission to have a Level II head
judge it.  And they paid for my membership.  The idea that judging is
a privilege that has to be earned with money in addition to rules
knowledge/organization skills is pretty dubious.

4) I realized long ago that it wasn't worth it for me to travel to PTs
to work.  I think that WotC, unfortunately, has gotten the idea that
enough people are willing to take significant monetary losses to help
the Pro Tour that when they are looking for ways to save money, the
judging compensation is an easy choice.  I asked a long time ago for
WotC to increase the compensation at PTQs because I knew that a number
of people who would have been very good judges decided to play in the
tournaments instead of judging because of the poor payment for
working, and so I had to use judges in whom I was less confident.
Nothing changed.

I hope this works, Paul.  What would help more than anything would be
for more judges to stop working for negative $100 a day.

As a side note, my fiancee and I worked at PT2.  She worked about 20 hours
over the two days and received: a shirt, a mug, about 15 boosters (including
some Alliances, which was being prereleased there), and a PT1 final eight
deck set, which retailed for around $120.  Boy, it's gone downhill from there.

- Mike
mjlewis@cybersource.com