Should NC, GP and EC require minimum ranking to qualify?

I am writing this as a point to discuss because as the game grows we get a lot of new players which is on one hand good, but on other hand it can also lead to problems.

The problem I mention is that it has became somewhat common that people will bring a friend who played VTES one time or two times literally to these important tournaments.

These players often don’t even know the rules of the game sufficiently to play. For example, I experienced a game where a new player, on a big tournament, during the game had to be explained difference between stealth and intercept, and basically whole table was coaching or telling the player what to do because they were even not used to always replacing cards after every card is played, or misplaying governs etc.

The reason why I find this problematic is that;

A) VTES is a multiplayer game. A player like this doesn’t hurt just themselves like in a magic the gathering or Star Wars unlimited or other 2 player game, but also both cross table players. But ok one can argue you are not entitled to good cross table buddy, but this brings me to point B

B) this rule explaining takes a lot of time on the clock. In VTES roughly 1/2 of all games ends up in time out, which is already incredibly high compared to most other games. If a table has to collectively spend 30 minutes explaining rules to new player it is incredibly frustrating.

My suggestions is that important or large international tournaments should have some minimum token requirement for registering.

For example, everyone gets 5 tournament points for just attending any VTES event so the number of points required to qualify could be just 10 meaning the player at least played on 2 local tournaments and played through 4 or 6 games at the minimum (depending on rounds).

This would in my opinion both reduce frustration not just on the part of veteran players but also new players as well as when veteran players get frustrated with new player and start to talk about ousting them cross-table just to speed up the game et it also doesn’t create friendly and welcoming attitude.

What do you think?

PS: as a side note, what is a proper handling of a situation where new player on a tournament does constant (almost very action/turn mistakes). I mean I don’t believe that new player does that to cheat, I am giving benefit of doubt, but how do you handle that properly because it’s not fair to deal with that on table either.

Long time ago there used to be qualifiers for national and continental tournaments. I don't recall exaclty how it worked, but you had to have something like 1 GW in one of those events to qualify to the big tournments. Here in Brazil we used to have "paralel" tournaments on our national and SA Championship for people to attend if they didn't qualify, as well as Last Chance Qualifiers (a tournment 1 day earlier than the main event).

In that time it worked well. I believed the big tournmaments lost these entry level tournments when the player base diminished after WW stoped printing it, but I'm not sure. But me, personally, like the idea of having entry level tournaments and small ones. I just don't know if the community as a whole agrees with that.

It would make sense for people to know how to play before participating in a tournament. Though, that can cause people who do know how to play to think perhaps they aren't good enough.

I'm leery of trying to use more and more rules to fix problems. They can produce unintended consequences. I doubt would find much in the way of "I haven't played in 5 years and only have time for this one major tournament on this trip." situations among players who know how to play, but it just seems a lot more reasonable to have people use some common sense and disqualify themselves from tournaments when they struggle to understand basic mechanics of the game.