Drawing this to another thread to not derail the judge rewards thread
val Holryn wrote:
on the issue of getting more GMs ... I'm all for it.
But I would note that several times I have volunteered to run at Origins and not had a table of players. This includes the first BI at Jappa (Where is your God Now), a slot last year, and both of my Friday slots for this years Hard Point 8 this year. So it seems to me that either I'm just unlucky. Or there is a surplus of judges at Origins - my guess. (Or maybe the slot marshals don't think I'm a good judge...hopefully not, but you never know).
Ultimately I think the issue of rewards is a very minor component of finding or encouraging judges either at big cons or closer to home.
As the person that muster all of the afternoon and evening slots, this probably has more to do with how player timing fluctuates from year to year, where there was one slot that I released two judges (you and another) there were multiple other slots were I was scrounging up judges past the number of tickets sold. (and Thanks go out to Matt Flinn and Tony N for the couple of extra slots I know about)
James Z is already figuring out how to shift slots around a little bit for Origins next year to make the slots and judges match a bit more, I'm sure he will probably throw some other wrench in things so that its not as simple as moving X number of slots around.
However it may just be me, but its seems like there are more and more people that are not getting real tickets and instead just showing up with generics, and I fear that it might not be possible to accommodate them as easily in coming years as it has been in the past. I would point to that as a large cause of strain from the judge pool because some of our judges (bless them) will stand up to volunteer nearly anytime.