"Last week at the World Championship awards banquet, I announced that the IDPA Board of Directors has elected to increase the Point Down penalty from a half second to 1 second. The BoD is comprised of two MA shooters (both Founders of the sport) and one EX with a combined total of more than 57 years of IDPA experience. This decision was made to keep the sport aligned with the founder's intent of valuing accuracy over speed. As concealed carry holders, which many of our members are, we are responsible for every round that leaves our gun, and IDPA needs to reflect that in our practices. I met with some of the Area Coordinators recently to share this information and the feedback received from them was very positive. There is no hard timetable for this change. Classification scores and other areas will need to reflect the change, and we are already working with some of our scoring vendors on this change. More information will be available as the work progresses and we will make updates on this via the Tactical Journal and Tactical Brief."
So instead of multiplying points down with 0.5, now it will be recorded as just points down. If you have 4 points down, it would be 2 added to the time, but with this change it will be 4.
This is not exactly something new. During the creation of IDPA, there were discussions about whether penalty should be 0.x or 1. The compromise was 0.5 we have now.
There has been quite a few opinions about the proposed penalty change. Some saw this as attempt to close the gap between top shooters and bottom levels, others saw this as attempt to keep USPSA out, or trying to help old shooters. Or maybe just a focus on accuracy as the statement says.
