Bear with us on this one. After over a year of consistent SWU coverage in this space, it’s time to get seriously critical about an aspect of the game that has wound up being a substantial issue- Organized Play.

Hoo boy. Strap in.

In case you missed it (which is likely- more on that below) the dates and locations of October’s Season 0 Planetary Qualifiers have indeed launched, with individual stores opening event registration and announcements mostly on their own social media. Thanks to one heroic store, a full list of each location and date was posted via the below spreadsheet.

FFG did a decent job of spreading these throughout the country, but several regions definitely drew a shorter end of the stick. There wasn’t much of a way to avoid this when FFG limited the initial run of Planetary Qualifiers to 20 in the United States. Thankfully, this should be better in the future when the numbers triple-quadruple in each region according to FFG’s recent Organized Play Update stream.

The Problem(s)

While information on competitive OP for Star Wars Unlimited was definitely needed, the presentation of this information turned out to be problematic. See…uh….

There was and still hasn’t been a single central announcement from Fantasy Flight Games about this.

If you don’t live in one of the areas hosting one or keep up with the online SWU communities, you probably had no idea these were even announced! I know in our local Dallas/Fort Worth Discord server several players showed up later that night and the next day confused that they had completely missed the announcement and the event was already sold out. Within 7 hours of announcement, the Dallas, TX and Chicago, IL were both out of slots, and over the weekend the Maryland, Florida, SoCal, and Indianapolis events all sold out as well.

And not all regions had equitable opportunities to sign up. Some stores have only opened up sales to their locals and aren’t even allowing out of town players to travel to their event. That meant that poor Johnny from Albuquerque might realize he’s only a few hours away from a PQ in Phoenix, and he goes to register only to find out it’s only being sold to “members” of the store for the first 2 weeks (not a hypothetical- check the graphic from Gamers Guild AZ for reference below).

Even worse, one store in SoCal reportedly sold the tickets privately to their locals and it sold out before anyone else had a chance to register. With how limited these events are and how FFG handpicked these stores, this is unacceptable.

Edit @ 9:43am CDT: We got updated info about this one that makes it certainly less bad, see the 2nd image below!

And yes, a lot of these issues stem from just how few Planetary Qualifiers are being run. In hindsight, running this few events as the big coming out party for the game’s regional competitive play was an unfortunate and, frankly, predictable error. Consistent with the printing issues, it seems like FFG has vastly underestimated just how many people want to play their game.

The Worst Thing Of all

And still, the biggest problem with everything around these Planetary Qualifiers has been the poor communication. It’s been several days since the events started to open, and we still haven’t heard anything from FFG about this.

We saw this coming.

Ever since we heard of Organized Play Program Manager Josh Massey leaving the company back in early March, the community at large has been concerned. Early on in the game’s life, Josh did a great job of giving us a steady stream of information as well as sharing his vision for Organized Play as a whole. And sadly, that concern appears warranted. Since March, communication around OP has been almost nonexistent. As far as we can tell, they haven’t filled Josh’s position.

Where is the place or person where players can go for centralized communication about all things competitive play? UK players, for example, have been able to count on consistent social media communication from Ollie “The Asmodee Guy” regarding tournament announcements, locations, and dates. I’m still not sure why all information can’t also be shared through starwarsunlimited.com, given it’s stated goal to be a a one-stop-shop for all things SWU.

Looking Forward, Living In The Present

It goes without saying that we at the GarbageRollers are obviously rooting for the whole FFG team. We hope they can step up the communication game and do a better job of giving people with jobs and families time to add events to their calendar. Ideally we’d have dates and locations for the early 2025 Sectors & Regionals coming in, like, now. And the bigger fish to fry are even more important- with the first Galactic Championship being open to all players, the sooner they can share the date and location for that the better!

At the end of the day, the main things we find lacking from FFG OP thus far are:

• Not enough competitive events
• Not enough communication
• Not enough lead time on dates/locations of events

Credit where credit is due- the OP team did realize the FFG TEC software they were requiring be used for Star Wars Unlimited wasn’t up to the job, and have reportedly entered into a contract with a major tournament software company to take that over in the near future. This is a positive and much needed step.

But we wouldn’t be doing our due diligence covering SWU unless we called a spade a spade. And right now, communication and execution of OP is the game’s single biggest weakness.

Let’s hope Season 0 is truly just a test run. We have faith that the OP team is diligently listening and responding to feedback, and we’ll all navigate it together. While we do, stay tuned to GarbageRoller.com for up to date coverage, and may the force be with you!