Bat City Open 2017 - My responses and Thanks

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I want to thank @BuffaloATX, @GarrettHays, Dick and everyone else involved for a very fun weekend. Nice to meet new people and hang out with familiar faces. As I like to do, here is my feedback for the tournament.

  • Venue was amazing. It solves most of my usual venue complaints. It is right in the middle of a busy part of the city, lots around, close to hotels, great food at the venue, access to drinks all day. Then there is the elephant in the room, the floor. Or maybe my stompy elephant feet are the problem. The floor was still bouncy. TAF was the worst spot, others spots were not as bad, but it also depended on who was around you. They put down plywood and I hear it helped, but it was still a problem.

  • Games played pretty well all weekend. Good mix. Loved having Lexy there. The 2 questionable choices in my mind was using Rocket III without a tilt, and the choice to keep using BSD in the finals after the failure (although maybe it is ok).

  • Live stream setup was great. Too bad about the internet day one, hopefully there is a local archive. I hope Marcus’s cell bill is not too bad. I hope the finals were good. I know my wife enjoyed getting to watch my play. I also had fun in the booth and welcome criticism (constructive or otherwise). I’ll say, it was harder than I thought. Thanks to Garrett, Sunshine, Eric and @PinballProfile for working the booth with me during the finals.

  • Volunteers. Thank you to all of the volunteers. The following comments are not about specific people, but more process. I have given this feedback at many tournaments, the volunteers were not trained enough. Many really did not know how to use DTM with queues. People were being removed instead of skipped. There was also additional complication with the queues being so short. I am getting tired of this being a complaint. Print up instructions, have all volunteers review it, have consistent process. Heck, if I am at your tournament, ask me for help, I will train your volunteers (then if I am unhappy, I have only myself to blame).

Also, not enough volunteers during crunch hour. This is hard. Thank you to the people with access to scoring that stepped up and helped with the backlog.

The computer issues at opening was also frustrating. I understand how this happens, but it would be great to have planned to be up and tested earlier. Be ready to go when the start is announced.

  • Rules. I don’t want to take sides on this. There was issues with poorly documented rules, some on the fly decisions, poor communication. As a TD writing clear rules will help avoid confrontation.

(I give up on trying to format this correctly on my phone)

(Edit from Andreas: I made your bullet points look better)

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Congrats on your play this weekend, @gammagoat.

You did very well on the mic. You should do more. (BPSO!)

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It was great seeing you again, and getting to play pinball with you. Thanks for making the trip, and I’m glad to hear you had a good time at Bat City.

I definitely want to echo this. There’s a TON of work that most everyone doesn’t get to see to appreciate what it takes to pull off the event.

So you’re complaining about the queues being too short? Huh.

Glancing at the public volunteer sign-up Google sheet, I don’t see you signed up for any score-keeping slots. If you’re willing to help with the volunteer process, I’d suggest at your next tourney, that you simply volunteer for a slot at the tournament instead of offering to help after-the-fact. Complaints about lack of volunteers from those that choose not to volunteer rings a bit hollow. (I agree that more volunteers would have been great… this is simply constructive criticism of your complaint)

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“Also, not enough volunteers during crunch hour.”

I think we can solve this next year by rearranging the pins. This year’s setup really needed 5-6 scorekeepers. If we arrange the machines around the perimeter rather than back to back then the scorekeepers can see and get to all players quickly.

My goal for next year is learn enough to be a PAPA level TD. Currently I run leagues and don’t know much about how PAPA events run or understand the ramifications of some decisions required. This year I mostly ran the registration desk and deferred to others for TD duties.

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Sorry, that was in reference to volunteers not being sufficiently familiar / trained on DTM. Short queues were great, but empty machines made things more complicated. I certainly didn’t know what the expected process was. Should I confirm with the scorekeeper to let them know? There were some cases where 2 people both thought they were up, luckily they were easily resolved.

I will fully admit that I did not volunteer and I certainly am not going to volunteer for the last hour, since I am usually a bubble player (as I was for the bye this weekend). Yes, I am a hypocrite, and I have not tried running a big tournament. I am just trying to raise the last hour issue so that future TDs think about it. I should volunteer more at tournament, but I travel to play wall-to-wall, which is why I am less likely to hit up limited entry tournaments.

Anyway, good tournament. Hope it continues to grow, because it could have supported many more players.

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As a player, I always try to doublecheck if I’m actually up before I start a game. I pull out my phone and refresh the specific page for that game’s queue…but I know not everyone is doing that. This was my first year helping with anything using DTM (I’m not going to call it volunteering. We were very fairly compensated!) and I thought it was relatively easy to learn how to use. I was in the first morning block on saturday morning though so it wasn’t too busy. I didn’t want to sign up for peak hours the first time out.

As an assistant, I have to say the most frustrating thing for me was that nobody would wait until the system actually verified my actions. Tablets were very slow to respond, while I could typically get instant response off my phone! Every time the tablet looked like it failed, I’d whip out the phone and check and sure enough they weren’t queued up and I had to back up and resubmit it and it always worked the second time…so I adapted and just started backing up when it took longer than 10 seconds or more. But yeah…people would just say “burn and requeue!” and start a game without even giving me half the adequate time to verify the system had done everything and nobody was ahead of them without having to use my phone…and they sure didn’t check it from their end! :grimacing:

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What computer issues did you guys have at opening?

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The plugin for taking player photos on the netbook kept hanging. I should have disabled the camera prior to starting the registration process or done more testing ahead of time. That issue was 100% my fault and won’t happen next year.
Because of that we only had one computer available for the critical first half hour or so of qualifying.

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Great setup for pinball viewing at Bat City!
TV’s on all four sides of the bar with people hanging out, drinking, and eating food while watching competitive pinball

bat city viewing.jpg960×720 73.7 KB

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Hey all, just a quick note to you all, because after the last two weeks of setting this event up my wife will kill me for talking more pinballwhile on vacation now.
Any way I welcome all feed back of this event and will respond to specific criticisms after I return from vacation.
Thanks again for your support and attendance.

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Thanks for the kind words regarding the venue, my staff and I put in extra work to ensure this years event was a memorable one.
As far as the floor goes, I know it was not perfect, but the floor bounce was 100 times better than last year. The addition of the ply wood kept the machines form bouncing due to foot traffic around the main bank, so I’ll take the win there. The specific machine you mentioned, TAF, played exactly the same in the bank as it does in it’s normal spot. I placed it between Lexy and Embryon because both of those machines are HEAVY, and would see less movement than a standard machine. While no one blew Addams up, there were solid score put up on it all weekend, and to be fair, I set that machine up to be a killer straight out of the box
.[quote=“gammagoat, post:63, topic:2467”]
Games played pretty well all weekend. Good mix. Loved having Lexy there. The 2 questionable choices in my mind was using Rocket III without a tilt, and the choice to keep using BSD in the finals after the failure (although maybe it is ok).
[/quote]
I’m happy that all the games played well and held up over the event.
The two issues you pointed out;
Rocket III, I’m 100% to blame for that. I was informed about 3/4 of the way through Classics qualifying that it did not have a tilt. Since we were so deep into qualifying I made the decision to allow qualifying to continue on that machine, and was to repair the tilt before Finals. Unfortunately, after building the brackets for Finals, I was called away to clear a few stuck balls, and tech a problem with GoT. Unfortunately, my short term memory failed me, and I forgot I needed to rebuild the tilt on that machine. Quite honestly, I didn’t remember that I was going to fix it until you brought it up. ( I had the parts on hand)
The choice to keep BSD was made after it was determined that there was no physical or mechanical reason for the auto plunge. After checking the trough and shooter lane switches, connections, and auto plunger assembly, there was nothing there to indicate that the problem would reoccur. The other players in the group and the affected player all agreed to finish the game as it stood with consolation balls to be played by the affected player.

To be continued…

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You are correct, training the volunteers is kind of a fly by the seat of your pants thing. The DTM software is fairly easy to use, but if you have never played with it before, it can be confusing.

If you are willing, type up a training document and share it to pinball threads, I’m sure that TD’s, especially first time TD’s would be happy to have something to reference.[quote=“gammagoat, post:63, topic:2467”]
Rules. I don’t want to take sides on this. There was issues with poorly documented rules, some on the fly decisions, poor communication. As a TD writing clear rules will help avoid confrontation.
[/quote]

Again, I will take full responsibility for this. I had every intention of having all of this printed out and shared with both players and assistant TD’s. Due to several factors, that did not happen as I intended.

Amen brother, volunteers are the life blood of all tournaments. So please, in the future, sign up for a shift or two at any event you play in, it could make all the difference in the world.

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The decision to divide the Classics from the main was made for two reasons.
First, floor bounce. By moving the Classics away from the Main bank that eliminated extra foot traffic from the area. Second, the stream. Having all the games in the Main bank back to back was, and is the best option for @GarrettHays to cam all games with as little stress as possible. ( We brought in a second portable stream rig to run the Classics Finals, but even that took Garrett an hour or two to set up and get running)

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The time zone was entered incorrectly, so when people tries to self que, the software thought that the tournament had not started yet, A quick call to @kdeangelo fixed that in an instant.

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Not exactly the crowd that last years PAPA world championship pulled, but man, that was AWESOME to see!

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Thanks @gammagoat I hope you are willing to come back next year.

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Finally, my thank you’s.
First off, thank you to all the players that traveled to this years event ( Especially Mr.Fujisawa, who traveled 24 hours from Japan to attend this years BCO. ) Arigatou gozaimasu
Second, Snow and Paul, your help through out the entire event (especially Thursday) was invaluable.
Third, Kim V your volunteer hours and support were a lifesaver ( and donuts did not hurt either).
Fourth, Marcus T, Louis M, Matt Q, and Joey G, all four of you know what you did to help, and I can not thank you enough.
Fifth, Space City Pinball club, Phil G, thank you for rallying the H town troops.
Sixth, the DFW pinball guys, I don’t know most of you, but I think a large chunk of you all drove down this year.
Seventh, @YeOldPinPlayer AND @GarrettHays both of you did WORK!
Eighth, Bat City Pinball Club, I do this for all of you.
Ninth, Gerry S, thanks for the 4 P3’s, I hope you got valuable feed back. (Also, please bring another LLEE back to Buffalo Billliards for me to play with soon!)
Tenth, @PinballProfile, Jeff, it was a real pleasure meeting you, and thank you for all your support.
Eleventh, Blake D, your poster was fantastic!

Finally, @trent, your help was beyond invaluable. Without your input and advice I probably would have crawled into a deep dark hole never to be seen again.

While this list is, in my mind, complete, I may have forgotten a few names of people, if so, THANK YOU as well, and I’m sorry I forgot.|

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There is a link to @alwysmooth 2 pager in this thread, and the thread itself is worth a read.

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I’m a little late to the Thank You Party but wanted to say Paul and I had a great time at our first Bat City Open. You all did a wonderful job putting it on. It was great to meet you Jesse. Thank you for your hard work and generosity.

Also thank you to Colin, Dick, Trent, Garrett and Kim for your expertise and volunteered hours. I especially enjoyed chatting up Garrett again about how he pulls off such a large scale stream. That’s no simple task! Gerry’s commitment to being onsite for nearly every hour of the tournament was fantastic to see. I got to hang with him both Saturday and Sunday and loved hearing about his adventures with Multimorphic.

I will say that I found the Texas crew to be especially vocal when they play. Well, it’s probably more like 5-6 people, not the whole state. :wink: And I mean this in a very light hearted way. As a bubble girl, putting in those late night entries during the final hour, the air was filled with such phrenetic energy and near rabid barking. I found it super comical. I’m being a bit hyperbolic, but it was one of my favorite moments. I hope I can return next year.

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Thank YOU Jesse. Great time. Later today/tomorrow, I’m releasing my next Pinball Profile (Episode 54) with MANY of the players from the Bat City Open at Buffalo Billiards @BuffaloATX.

You’ll hear:

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