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On my squad few of the PEs had anything to do with foot faults. Engagement sequence was the biggest PE generator.

I shot the match Saturday and Sunday mornings. Decent range, decent prizes (thanks sponsors!), no big delays, some stages that made you think. If I don't go back, it'll be because of the 2017 rules, not because of the job the match organizers did. On most of the bays the instructions regarding high muzzles varied. In my first two bays the briefing was that you would be DQed for a high/vertical muzzle (with most of the SOs pointing their fingers straight up as they talked about this). It was the 3rd or 4th bay before the verbal briefing included that muzzles were not to point over the backstop. As the backstop was often 30+ yards away it wouldn't take much of an angle to be pointing over the berms (the berms looked to be about 10 feet high). It seemed that your muzzle had to be elevated about 45 degrees before a shooter would be cautioned about it. From the gun handling I saw, if this range rule was strictly enforced, 95% of the shooters would have been DQed. The revolver shooter on my squad was DQed for a high muzzle on his first reload but promptly reinstated after the CSO was consulted. The SOs were quite friendly and pretty efficient when running shooters. I saw no sign that anybody was on a power trip and jumping to DQ competitors. There was one CSO who liked to hear himself loudly exhort squads to patch, even when they were already efficiently patching - that got old fast. The only really bad penalty call I saw was giving a Marksman who forgot to back up twice during a standards stage two PE instead of two FP - it was a huge advantage but they took pity on him. There were a few seated draws where it would have been easy to sweep your thigh and a fair number of DQs were for that. There were also props to activate that made it easy to sweep your arm if you weren't paying attention to your muzzle direction and a bunch apparently did that. If you usually do matches with simple stages where the 180 is realistically the only way to get DQed, some of these stages would be challenging. If you're used to eating pablum and someone puts a lobster on your dinner plate, you're going to be pushed out of your comfort zone. I got a couple of Procedurals for forgetting to do something immediately after coping with 'risky' draws or prop activations - probably because of my extra focus on safely getting through the tricky parts. If the DQ rate was a lot higher than at many club matches, I'm guessing those club matches have simpler stages and/or officials who are ignoring DQable offences. The fault lines were white painted lines on the ground with an orange stick delineating the edge of the fault line. If your foot was on the stick, it was a fault. This worked really well and there was none of the "Did his foot touch down on the other side?" that happens when competitors are allowed to stand on the stick. I asked a bunch of competitors and SOs what they thought of it and the reactions were all positive except for one guy who thought it would confuse USPSA shooters. (I see above that Rowdy didn't like them, but I didn't ask him - nice meeting him BTW) In most of the stages the fault lines were lined up with the last target in an array. With this setup cover is effectively dead. It was amusing watching people slicing the pie while exposed to closer targets that were fully visible. Time to take tactical pretensions out of this game... On the few stages where the fault lines were lined up on the first target the arrays usually had no more than two targets spread across a very small arc. People were routinely losing their balance while trying to shoot the second target while leaning a lot. I also chatted with people about 1 SPPD. Nobody was a fan. It encourages very conservative shooting and shooting slower is less fun. Everyone I asked said they were shooting slower than they would in a gun fight. A few said this may be their last big IDPA match as bullseye in a vest isn't entertaining. Looks like the 2017 rules will be good for USPSA/IPSC...

Observations from the Florida State Championship last weekend. The fault lines were white painted lines on the ground with an orange stick delineating the edge of the fault line. If your foot was on the stick, it was a fault. This worked really well and there was none of the "Did his foot touch down on the other side?" that happens when competitors are allowed to stand on the stick. I asked a bunch of competitors and SOs what they thought of it and the reactions were all positive except for one guy who thought it would confuse those who shoot USPSA. In most of the stages the fault lines were lined up with the last target in an array. With this setup cover is effectively dead. It was amusing watching people slicing the pie while exposed to closer targets that were fully visible. Time to take tactical pretensions out of this game... On the few stages where the fault lines were lined up on the first target the arrays usually had no more than two targets spread across a very small arc. People were routinely losing their balance while trying to shoot the second target while leaning a lot. I chatted with people about 1 SPPD. Nobody was a fan. It encourages very conservative shooting and shooting slower is less fun. Everyone I asked said they were shooting slower than they would in a gun fight. A few said this may be their last IDPA match as bullseye in a vest isn't entertaining. Looks like the 2017 rules will be good for USPSA/IPSC... I won a Glock and spoke with the sponsors from Glock at the awards ceremony to say thanks and ask them to try to talk to IDPA (hoping HQ might listen to a major sponsor). I said this is the last time I'll be spending a $1000 and taking 5 days to travel for a major IDPA match because 1SPPD is neither fun nor tactical.

Is touching a target always equal to "interfering"? As it is written, it seems that touching a target without poking at a bullet hole or removing a patch is not penalized. It says "will not touch" but in the sentence that gives the penalty it only mentions "interfered with"...

With IDPA's recent change to a full second per point down from the .5 second 2016 and before, it may be too slow a pace to have much utility for USPSA 'training'. I've been shooting about 90% Down Zero in IDPA quickly enough to win lots of local matches. With the new scoring it would make more sense to go for 95% Down Zero and slow down the shooting part of stages about 10% to guarantee that level of accuracy. I shot a USPSA match with my IDPA rig (Lim 10 minor) a couple of weeks ago. For one stage I shot at USPSA pace and got a few more Cs. The other three stages I shot at my IDPA pace and accuracy level. The club produced overall results across classes with all of the stages being won by an Open GM. My stage scores were all within 1% of each other. I take that as a sign that hit factor scoring does a good job of balancing speed and accuracy.

Now that we have the new classifier stages we can see that the challenge has changed enough that a simple mathematical function conversion would be of limited utility. The elimination of kneeling around barrels is going to make it easier for those shooters who have bad knees and/or an extra 40 pounds to perform better. Given the IDPA demographic, that's probably a good thing.

I posted this a few months ago on the IDPA Forum but it's still pertinent. Let's imagine a gunfight between Mr. Quick and Mr. Accurate. Quick fires a -1 in 1.2 seconds and another -1 at 1.5 seconds. Accurate fires a -0 in 2.5 seconds and another -0 at 3.0 seconds. Under the current scoring Quick beats Accurate by 0.5 seconds. With the proposed scoring Accurate would beat Quick by 0.5 seconds. Who would you rather be in this duel? I'm thinking that Mr. Quick's two rounds into Mr. Accurate's torso might hamper Accurate's impeccable sight alignment and trigger press. If the two -1 hits on Accurate don't cause him to stop pointing his weapon at Quick, Mr. Quick can fire another three rounds into Mr. Accurate's torso before Quick even breaks his first shot (assuming he lives long enough). The cops I shoot with all want to be first with shots on target and fire until the threat stops. Fast and accurate will just beat more people by bigger margins with 1 second per point down.

For your first match I wouldn't worry about having 'the' vest. Anything that has a bit of weight to it so it will actually swing out of the way when you flick it back with work well enough to get you started. The tropical shirts have a tendency to fall back onto the gun before a novice finishes drawing from the holster. I wear a heavy suede vest from Germany that I bought in a Parisian consignment shop. I'm just not sure what decade it was in style in Europe...