From the new 2.4.2 tournament rules:

Tournament Organizers and Judges for premier championship tournaments (Regionals, Nationals, and Worlds) are expected to commit their full attention to organizing and judging the event, and therefore are not permitted to participate in their own Regional, National, or World Championship events as players.

I hope Fantasy Flight have plans to reward the judges then (who are usually the better players), if they can no longer participate.

I agree. As an organizer this makes me want to take a backseat. The only reason I organize it to try and build a group to play with.

Note that this is only for the big events - Regionals, Nationals, Worlds. So it doesn't affect local events, leagues or the like.

Just wanted to say thank you to FFG for listening.

I can see that the Netrunner Regionals prize kit that has just been announced includes "1 head judge playmat", which I presume will be standard across the LCG prize kits.

Whether this playmat will actually be different to the other 8 playmats in the kit is unclear, but presumably it will be. Hopefully it's not just an old playmat bundled in - à la the "Asylum prize" for last place (which I'm pleased to see has been done away with this year in favour of many more prizes) simply reassigned to the head judge.