EPISODE 4!!
http://www.podcastgarden.com/episode/pretty-big-face_77870
We talk Ghostbusters, GOT, Easter Eggs, Artwork, Tournament Formats, and IFPA points. Butts.
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#Butts
Checking it out now.
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Bowen pulls out one of the upcoming WPPR v5.3 changes! 
Nicely done!
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What change is that? The insistence that we thank you for doing all this work for free?
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Sad… more unlimited qualifying hate. If pinball ends up going to strictly match play, tournament pinball will get really boring, at least strategy wise. No risk-reward, just everyone goes for the safest possible thing all the time because if they drain, they’re tournament’s over!
Unlimited qualifying isn’t tenable as tournaments get larger. The majority of players don’t want to wait in massive lines, and the lines are getting worse as event demand increases.
Big-risk, low-chance-of-success strategies are exactly that … they have a low chance of success. If players want to go for that, they should have to take a risk. Unlimited qualifying removes the risk completely.
I didn’t say that everything should be all match play, but when there are qualifying formats, they should be balanced so that people don’t feel like they’re being raked financially, and that they qualify on merit instead of money.
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I guess that’s the thing, though: for a pinball show, it seems to me like unlimited qualifying is basically the perfect format. With 45 minute+ lines to play games, you can just queue up with DTM and walk off and y’know…actually go to a panel or go play some games or buy stuff or whatever you want to do at the show. For people who don’t feel like committing to spending $60 or whatever the equivalent fixed buy-in would have to be to keep prizes as high as they are with unlimited qualifying, they can choose to play fewer games even if it means statistically they aren’t as likely to qualify. Paradoxically (or maybe not so paradoxically), as more players join the tournament the ability to win by pumping money in (which very rarely happens as far as I can tell from poring over unlimited re-buy tournament results from the last few years) vastly decreases as the maximum amount of money you can spend decreases since time spent “in-line” (which is really time spent doing non-tourney stuff) increases. For example, unless you ground away at the 2-inch-flipper EMs and Jungle Queen at CAX, you would have been quite hard pressed to spend more than…say $120 (this figure is completely pulled out of thin air, but it seems about right) even if you wanted to do literally nothing but play continuously the whole show. This means that the spread of how much players are spending decreases which should hopefully alleviate the concerns about being able to buy your way into the finals.
Granted, you could use that last sentence as proof that eventually everything trends towards effectively limited qualifying, but I think the general idea of limited qualifying is to vastly reduce the amount of games played by most players which at least for me is really unfortunate. Might as well flip a coin when you fly to a different country, play 8 games with 6 great ones and two bombs, then end up not qualifying because someone guessed the bounces on their first attempt on a machine better than you did. For limited qualifying to be good, players need to get at least a reasonable amount of plays to dial into games; how fun is it to walk up to a game and totally bomb because you didn’t manage to adjust to it? Of course I’m aware that adjusting to how games play is a skill, but it doesn’t look great when players absolutely bomb out because they haven’t had any practice on a machine. This always bums me out at Pinburgh: when I win, I don’t feel great because I know my opponents might fare way better if they got to play the machine more than once; when I lose, I don’t feel great because 3 balls on Nitro Ground Shaker aren’t really enough to get a feel for how the game is playing.
I don’t know where I’m going with this really, but I do think that the trend towards heavily limited qualifying is pretty unfortunate. Maybe pinball tournaments are just untenable at too large of a scale no matter what format you use (I would barely call Pinburgh in its current form tenable, and that has arguably the most effort and time put into it by the most knowledgeable crew on Earth). Maybe we need to have more events capped at smaller numbers that cater to various player bases. I just don’t think that the trend towards limited qualifying really helps anyone. As Raymond stated above, match-play is where you see the very safe very boring strategies generally succeed. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but part of the fun of unlimited qualifying tournaments is that you spend two days doing the crazy high-risk stuff which is always fun to watch / attempt and then during finals it’s a test of consistency with safer strategies.
Anyway, I could go on and on but I doubt I will change anyone’s minds with my thoughts (nor should I, necessarily). It’s just unfortunate that as pinball gets more popular we effectively have to randomize tournaments in order to keep the general population of players interested.
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I wish I could say but I’m under a strict NDA 
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WHERE THE BUTTS IS MY GOSHDARN NDA.
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Kevin, I do think we highlighted the fact that the type of play rewarded in a match-play setting is not necessarily the same as what it takes to win a HERB…sorry @bkerins, UNLIMITED QUALIFYING…tournament. What I will continue to point out is that my distaste for unlimited qualifying has nothing to do with the people who spend a lot of money, it’s the people who are priced out of even deciding to enter because the baseline amount of money they’d need to spend in order to have a decent chance of qualifying is too high a barrier to entry. This isn’t something that is solved by match play, either. Someone who can’t buy $60 in tickets also can’t shell out $60 flat fee. But I think unlimited qualifying highlights that issue more than other formats, because there are many lower-priced tournaments in various formats that guarantee an enjoyable competitive experience.
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One thing that’s nice this year is that the 2016-2017 circuit schedule is pretty diversified. Just at a quick glance I think about half are forms of unlimited and the other half are various other formats that are not exclusively ‘match play.’
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I don’t get it. You ran one of the best unlimited qualifying tourneys ever for years (CAX), and now you’re preaching against the format? Why the change of heart? You also overcame the things you say above hold the format back. More games (less waiting), novice division (more qualifiers) and deeper payouts (less people feeling like it wasn’t worth it).
Those CAX tourneys are what sucked me into the competitive side. Thanks, again.
Oh yeah definitely. I should have been clearer in that I was kind of just pointing out the typical arguments that I hear; but you folks for sure pointed out that unlimited qualifying rewards a unique skill set and I’m glad you did because so often it’s just “UNLIMITED QUALIFYING LETS YOU BUY YOUR WAY INTO THE FINALS” which is not what you said. Sorry for derailing the thread a little with that.
As for the matter of cost, I think the biggest problem is actually not the true cost of tournaments but the expectations of players. I would be stunned if anyone could name any other activity/“sport”/competitive event that is the size of tournament pinball where you can literally play the world championships for $250 or the biggest tournament in the world for $200. $50+ tournaments tend to be fairly infrequently periodic (generally yearly in Seattle, at least), and if players aren’t able to lay out $50 or even $100 (which seems to be closer to the mark for “majors”) for a tournament that occurs once or twice a year…well I genuinely don’t know the solution/answer to that. In my experience (and only my experience) the players that complain the most about that are the same players pounding down $20+ of drinks a night at $5 weeklies so it’s clearly an issue of priorities for them, but maybe there is a group of players out there who would like to play bigger events but truly can’t afford to even with saving as much money as they can.
I’m not sure pinball is large enough to sponsor players for tournaments in that kind of situation. Something interesting that’s been going on in the dancing game community (and also the speedrun community, and some other game communities) is that bigger events will often have a community fundraising effort to support players coming from overseas who are clearly not going to win enough money to pay for their trip. I think that kind of thing is cool, but I’m not sure what the best way would be to apply a similar concept to pinball.
Maybe free or very cheap large tournaments with sponsored prizes are the only way to truly resolve this problem. I’m not convinced enough people will ever be interested in watching pinball for that to happen, but then again I felt that way about DOTA and LoL which are both way way way more complex than pinball and completely indecipherable to the average non-player, so who knows. It’s definitely an interesting topic that I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about as an organizer of an unlimited qualifying event.
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It is going to be 50% participation or more to be included in the results at all.
I’m actually not worried as I have full faith in the players to self police (or rather call out the shenanigans when they see it).
Example 1 - Bowen actually going through all those MPNYC qualifying results seeing how many players were participating in how many games. I’ve already had a half a dozen people offer to verify the participation rate of that Super League every month for us (shocking that some of these volunteers are from upstate NY) 
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This will also help give people that guest in other leagues (cough, Colin, cough) the assurance that they won’t be included in the final standings for that league
#don’tkillmyIFPArating
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FWIW, I completely agree with you. I used to dream of traveling to many more pinball tournaments but the shift away from open qualifying and towards extremely long days of match play has definitely shifted my interest away from that. No point in using the vacation time and speding so much on travel expenses to show up, have some house balls, and be complately hosed before I ever got started.
We changed to the unlimited qualifying format at the request of players who wanted a larger prize pool. For a few years (~2002) we were using PAPA-style “run” entries, and when we moved to unlimited qualifying, the prize pools tripled.
At this point we have way more players who want to compete at CAX than we ever had in the unlimited qualifying days. Limiting to 20 games per player (on best 5 “counting”) still gives players enough opportunities to bail out poor games while also giving everyone a reasonable chance to complete their tickets.
We’re still doing more games, novice division, and deeper payouts
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I guess I’d like to understand this better. Some of the match play formats don’t eliminate anyone until a fairly large number of matches has been played (Pinburgh, Cactus Jack’s, Dutch Masters, 24 Hour Battle). I don’t see these formats as killing off players for some early house balls. What kind of format do you mean? Are there specific tournaments you’re less interested in?
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There are a number of things I’m not overly fond of about match play events. I’ll get into them with the caveat that I understand others will disagree.
With the larger match play tournaments over multiple days, I feel trapped by the event. I like to be able to leave if I want, stay if I want, eat when I want etc.
In some match play tournaments, I think the home field advantage is too significant—I’m not willing to fork out the kind of money it takes to travel to an event and find myself playing games against folks that have been practicing in their local leagues on machines I’m walking up to for the first and only time. I spent over a grand traveling to a tournament like this and it was a huge bummer.
I find waiting in line between games less annoying than waiting between balls and for whatever reason, in match play events, I tend to get standoffish and irritable even when I’m playing well. I don’t feel like that’s a very good reflection on myself.
I don’t have time to volunteer to help with a match play event. I find volunteering is a nice way to be involved, talk to people (which I generally won’t do without a reason) and help out the event organizers, who were/are busting balls to get/keep it together in the first place.
As far as non match play, I’m fine with limited Herb :cough: provided there are enough entries such that I’m spending the time I want to be playing doing so on tournament games, not blowing out my entries in the first three hours and being left wandering the show floor for two days feeling bad about playing poorly or wishing I could be competing more.
The only other formats I can think of being run (at bigger tournaments) are Pingolf (LOVE IT) and bracket style. I don’t really care for brackets unless there is a best of scenario for each round. Single game brackelope is no fun at all. I’ve bothered to drive to too many bracket events and go out quickly thanks to a couple tough games or bad beats. And the only reason I haven’t done Pin Masters is because Tim Arnold went mental on me for making a slap save on Neptune many years ago—I have no interest in playing at a location where nudging skills aren’t treated as part of the game.
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