My experience was different. http://www.tiltforums.com/t/tournament-ruling-pump-and-dump-disabled-machines/2641
Interesting, so they counted time spent repairing the machine as time spent in qualifying…
I agree with that as a concept as well; and I think most people do agree with this.
However I see that there are 2 time components: 1) functionality time and 2) qualifying time.
While the game in question may been flaky on and off, (again, I have no data, it is gone) thereby affecting the 50% functionality time component, it seems to me there comes a point in the tourney where the variables should not be allowed to greatly change.
That’s the part I am confused about.
I can only assume that the game was not functional long enough or could not be fixed to reach the 50% functionality clause. OK, fine, I fully understand that.
However, it seems that information had to be known before hour 17-18, or at least there was a hint based on Friday that this could happen.
To be clear, it is not that on the start of Saturday this became known, the situation changed after 3-4 hours into Saturday with only a few hours left to qualify.
My thought is: The history of the working state of the game at the end of Friday night had to have been known.
Anyway, I am probably beating a dead horse.
Next time, I am going to make sure I play all the games and do well enough on all of them early enough so that it won’t matter 
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The rule is above. It has nothing to do with machine up/down time. If this event was using PAPA rules, it should have kept the scores. If the rule was meant to address your issue, it needs rewritten.
I also heard that deleting all of the entries from the tournament software was tedious and had to be done one-by-one. So it’s possible that the decision to remove it from the tournament was made long before the standings were actually updated online.
I do not see any indication of what rule set is to be used, at least on this page? Anybody see anything else?
re: SPC… I believe that the Circuit rules simply state (events) “4. Must use IFPA/PAPA rules to determine stuck balls and malfunctions.” Though was Classics not separate from the main Circuit event?
edit: sounds like it was up less than 50%, so may not matter
This was not the case. I have a script I run to void all non-voided scores and refund those entries.
Removing the scores was my #1 priority for the beginning of Saturday as I knew it would happen once I saw the machine was still non-operational Saturday morning and since the machine was operational for less than 50% of qualifying up to that point. I had to wait for TD verification before doing so. Timing was solely based on when he arrived.
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Thank you for some clarification.
As the tournament official supervising Classics in this instance I can say that there was a very faithful attempt late into the wee hours of Saturday morning to get it working and the patient could not be revived in time to make it to Saturday’s opening. Therefore the game was disabled.
The 50% rule here would have definitely applied to uptime. It certainly was not up for 50% of the tournament, which is too bad because a lot of people thought it was fun. Better luck next time, I guess.
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I understand that the game must not have been working correctly, and I am sure people were working on it. That never crossed my mind.
To me, what prompted my question was when the decision actually registered that is the issue.
Based on what you wrote and what Karl posted, it sounds like a few people knew it was coming well before the affected people found out.
This was my own assumption based on my observations from Friday, nothing official which is why I waited until Saturday morning.
The rule might need reworded, because as written, it has nothing to do with machine uptime
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Understood. I was not paying attention to what was going on over there; I was just looking at my standings while trying to qualify in the Main and seeing if I needed to do anything in Classics.
10am-11:59pm on Friday - 14hrs
10am-6pm on Saturday - 8hrs
Lets say a game arrives late on Friday at 9pm which gives folks 3 hours to qualify. The game breaks and is being attended to at 5:30pm on Saturday and at 6pm it is deemed permanently disabled. You’re going to toss out 10.5hrs of scores because its less than 50%? To me I would use the “permanently disabled” timestamp.
Given those qualifying hours, if I’m the TD and a game shows up at 9PM it’s not going into the tourney, period. I don’t even like to add a game at all after the official start time. I’d rather just have less games than deal with a late game arrival that I can’t be sure the condition of.
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Easy fix. Don’t do pump and dump. 
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A “late game” can be considered a replacement for a “permanently disabled” game too.
For example, your the TD and the game is in at 10am but is deemed “permanently disabled” at 8pm and a replacement is found and put in at 9pm.
Based on the feedback below I agree with PAPA and am just providing a couple of additional examples.
Yes, replacement games are options too. I’m sure that would have been acceptable if enough time were given to qualify on the game (sticking with the 50% of the available hours theme). There was one brought in for finals.
There still has to be some moment in the tourney that is the “point of no return” for significant changes. The “operational tIme” is just one component.
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Clarification in the rule could help, I agree, because the word missing from the rule is “contiguous”. Reading between the lines, the 50% assumption certainly assumes contiguous uptime. I believe the spirit of the rule is: If the machine is turned on and played failure-free for less than the first half of contiguous qualifying time and then suddenly fails the machine is considered eligible for disablement.
When a failure occurs, IFPA has been very liberal on instituting a repair clock. I think given the nature of our sport and our aging technology this generally works well (at least until someone feels it doesn’t).
In NASCAR, for example, a pit crew is given 6 minutes to recover from severe damage to a vehicle. If they cannot resolve the issue in 6 minutes, that driver’s car is deemed disabled and they cannot reenter the race. https://www.nascar.com/news-media/2018/02/07/nascar-damaged-vehicle-policy-updates-qualifying-format/. That driver is considered “DNF” (Did Not Finish). The difference in pinball, of course, is we are all operating the same machine, not different ones. A single machine’s failure affects us all.
At FPF, the team made every effort to prioritize maximizing contiguous uptime on a machine others had already successfully played. Unfortunately, the machine met neither the 50% uptime or clock time thresholds on Friday. (Again, Classics was my primary responsibility.)
At the time of the machine’s ultimate demise no one could foretell the future and see that a timely repair was impossible overnight. If repaired successfully, then 50% uptime was certainly possible on Saturday. But even that threshold was not assured. (e.g. What if it failed again on Saturday with just an hour to go in qualifying and 50% could not be met? It’s too late to declare the machine permanently disabled, replaceable, etc.) I understand people’s frustration here.
I would be willing to see IFPA meet this problem in the middle as follows:
- As a general rule, a minimum of one tournament-ready replacement machine should be identified prior to the start of a Herb-style or PAPA-style tournament.
- A machine must maintain 75% contiguous uptime over the course of qualifying to be considered eligible.
- To achieve this 75% goal, a cumulative “repair clock” should be instituted. The repair clock extends no longer than 25% of qualifying time. Material repairs lasting 5 minutes or more should be counted toward the repair clock. (A material repair involves drop targets, non-registering scoops, etc. We’re not going to count stuck balls or other instantly resolvable issues.)
- When qualifying time is paused (e.g. overnight), the repair clock stops and the repair crew has free reign to try fixing the machine. When qualifying time begins again, the repair clock continues to count down toward a maximum of 25% of calendar qualifying time.
- If the repair clock expires before 50% of the calendar time in the tournament has elapsed, the machine is considered permanently disabled and may be replaced with the replacement machine, all previous scores wiped, etc. (This ensures the potential to play at least 50% of the tournament on a working game.)
- The replacement machine must remain eligible to play for the remainder of the tournament with no failure lasting more than 5 minutes (because the entire repair clock was consumed by the previous machine). If a material failure occurs on the replacement machine taking more than 5 minutes to repair, then the machine’s place in the tournament is considered permanently disabled, all scores wiped, etc. (It is as though there was never a machine in the first place. The entire machine choice is voided.)
I believe this meets the basic goals of uptime, fairness to players, and drives TDs and hosts to provide solid, reliable machines.