SAN DIEGO – MahjongTime is into customer relations and tries to promote playing on the web server. Therefore, the past years various national and European championships were built up.

In addition to this, ‘monthly madness’ were organized, which were attendedby hardly anyone because of the high subscription fee. Then there were ‘free roll’ tournaments. Free subscription, with prize money. The free roll tournaments knew varying success. Little by little, the prize money was diminished. Since April,  they have not been organized anymore. Recently, MT has introduced ‘Guild’ and a new Free Roll structure.

Actually, ‘guilds’ are just teams, consisting of twelve players at the most. Twitter has been added as a feature, probably because of a contract, but for the time being this is absolutely superfluous.  In actual practice, someone takes the task as a ‘leader’ and notifies MT in an e-mail, stating a guild name, the mahjong variant to be played and the names of the participants. That’s all there’s to it. For each variant, a player can participate to a guild.

The positive scores of the participants are added up. This happens in real time at the very moment a session is over. This can be watched at http://mahjongtime.com/Mahjong-Guilds-Score.aspx.

Discussion

Discussion is still going on whether this is fair. After all, the ‘professionals’ in the cash games usually play a game, while the others use to play a complete session. If the case is the latter, actually losses are subtracted.

Subscribing to the guilds is free and is hardly any trouble. Still, one can win money prizes. Each week, the members of the best qualified guild all receive 5 US dollar and a one month free subscription to MahjongTime. Besides, extra possibilities are offered to play in Free Roll tournaments.

The structure of the FR tournaments has been revised. ( http://mahjongtime.com/Mahjong-News.aspx?newsId=622&PageNr=0&catId=1 ) In the past, one could apply for free and the tournaments were played at a fixed time. Initially, the winner received 250 US dollar and there were also prizes for lower qualified players. In the end, the money prize had decreased to 100 US dollar or, for some variants, a mahjong set.

Since July, vip members can play for free in a qualification game to a FR tournament four times a month. Winning guild members have an extra chance on free qualification.

To say the least, the procedure is rather awkward. Four players have to find each other on MahjongTime, decide to play a qualification match and to announce this to PS (personal service). Subsequently, PS will install a table and invite the players to take their seats.

Tournaments

Afterwards, the scores must be reported. This is necessary since PS cannot find out this itself. The winner can play in a FR tournament in the weekend. Until now, this has not happened, since setting up the qualification games is so time-consuming.  But, if it happens, a money prize of 50 US dollar can be won. You did not qualify? You can still play if you pat 20 USD. After all, MT is a commercial site.

What is to happen in the future is that tournaments will be organized between guilds. So, if mahjong clubs will form guilds, this might mean that matches between clubs are possible. But, that’s still in the future, because it looks like MT lacks capacity to arrange this.

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