I think Monster Bash’s were green? This might’ve been post-tournament though but I remember playing it before it started.
It should have had red flipper rubbers. Were you playing it after the tournament? Everything was changed back to whatever flipper rubbers the operators had on there before as soon as a game wasn’t still being used in the tournament. I died a little bit inside 
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Okay - yeah it was definitely green afterward. I didn’t play it during, so I’ll take your word on it. 
Just noticed that the ifpa points have posted. FYI!
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I mentioned some of these items to Eric when he asked me for feedback. Just my opinions, take them as you will.
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The tilts were still too tight on the majority of the modern machines. I witnessed too many instances of tilting out mid-multiball on multiple machines. For myself, I barely would nudge in fear of tilting out at any moment. No agressive flipping allowed! Look at @Bdiv4life on POTC in the finals, tilting out during his multiball as an example. And @jmg, you mentioned to me that a tilty Medieval (or TILTevil as I was referring to it) seems like a City Champ tradition but I don’t think that’s a good tradition.
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The choice for “balanced” player order in Match Play is odd and while this had been done in previous years, I hadn’t truly noticed until this year. Being the tournament is a tiered swiss tournament it’d be better served using “tournament ranking” and sticking to a specific order based on current rank or allowing players to choose order starting with the high seed in the group.
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Bravo for pulling all of the superbands off of the games for red rubber rings! I [sadly] saw the pile of them after the tournament.
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With such a wide variety of machine eras it would be nice to balance the random game draws out, something I mentioned last year. I know, not a simple task via software but what could be done is to move to multiple games per round with banks of EM/Modern and SS/Early DMD games, or any variation of the four eras. I think there was enough variety to pull this off this year. An added benefit would be some time savings which could allow another round to be added. More rounds of match play are always welcomed!
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Thanks for going back to 12 rounds this year from 2018’s 10 rounds. Much appreciated, even though I would’ve been qualified after 10 rounds (D’OH!)
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I noticed the tilt bob display mounted to a block, comparing bobs with and without ear plugs. That was a great idea!
#everytiltbobneedsanearplug
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I think if you go to tournament ranking it puts the highest ranked person as first meaning they have first choice. So yeah, you’d have to allow the players to choose order which could get messy especially when entering results.
I largely agree with your feedback but a couple notes:
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A couple of the tilts were definitely too tight. We were worried about a few of the modern games playing too long and set them up tight. A few of the games were adjusted after complaints early in the tournament, so I think many ended up in a decent place after a few rounds. I tested every game after complaints of ‘flip tilts’. I must not be a heavy flipper because in pretty much every case I was able to take a single or double danger slap save and continue playing with no problem. I’ll have to see if we have some heavier flippers available to test next time.
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Not that it matters to the players, but when setting the tilt on that Medieval, I discovered some issues that made it difficult to set it in a position that was in between ‘huge slide save gives one warning’ and ‘light slap tilts’. We did the best we could to get it to a reasonable place in the time we had, but I agree it should have been a little looser. I do think it was much more reasonable than last year. I saw a few 50M+ games on it, whereas last year 20M seemed like a monster score. Now that I know what the issues are, we should be able to get it fixed for next year. Hopefully a City Champ tradition no more!
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Johnny’s tilt on POTC in the finals seemed reasonable to me. He made three separate moves that all took a warning. He played the game in a previous round (and there was open practice time). He should have known where the tilt was. Perhaps the tilt should have been a little looser, but it looked like a deserved tilt to me.
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I never thought about changing from “balanced” play order. We’ll certainly give consideration to switching to “tournament ranking”. Your reasoning makes sense to me, but I’ll have to think it over.
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I agree that some way of balancing out arena draw between eras would be nice. Banks would be nice, but there are logistical issues with the venue and possible need to rearrange some machines that would need to be figured out. Certainly something that we will consider.
I appreciate the feedback, and am glad that you were able to attend and hope you continue to do so in the future. Our goal is to continue to improve the event. That was a tough TZ score to take third place with in round 12!
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Disclaimer: I only went through the Match Play Handbook and haven’t tested the setting, so I don’t know if it actually does what I would want/expect it to do.
Yes, there’s room for error during reporting but nothing insurmountable. Otherwise, as long as the system places people in a non-random, pre-specified order it should be fine. Balanced is essentially random.
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I always warn people to avoid “tournament ranking” in a swiss tournament. The nature of swiss is that people play other people with the same ranking. So you end up with a bunch of tied players. It’s at best random and at worst really confusing. I’d almost prefer “random” because at least you know what to expect.
I’m curious why you think “balanced” to be an odd choice?
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Just dropping this here
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For swiss, yes, I can somewhat understand Balanced/Random/Etc. Plenty of ties, although you can break those ties by previous round rankings. For tiered swiss there shouldn’t a bunch of tied players lumped together until the final rounds.
Let’s use Andrei’s round 3 as a randomly picked example. At the beginning of round 3, he had 14 points. He was grouped with Eric (8 points) / Darren (10 points) / Matt (8 points). Player order for the round was set as 1-Eric 2-Darren 3-Andrei 4-Matt. Andrei was clearly the high seed for the group. Your system already has rules in place for tiebreakers, and Eric with a 1st place round would be seeded over Matt thus the full seeding for the group would be Andrei/Darren/Eric/Matt. IMO, there are 3 options for proper play order in this situation, in no particular order:
- Ascending order based on seed (Andrei would be 1st)
- Descending order based on seed (Andrei would be 4th)
- High seed has first choice of order, followed by 2nd seed, etc…
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You can always do “virtual banks”. The machines in a bank don’t need to be parked next to each other. You can even configure the banks in an order so as to try avoiding several groups of players being crammed next to each other.
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Doing a very quick survey of the top qualifiers, and then of some of the qualifiers that finished lower than an expectation based off of world rank, it looks like the difference in mix wasn’t huge – particularly if you look at Modern + Late SS vs Early SS + EM. (Note: I treated TNA and Beatles as Late SS for this very non-thorough analysis)
Ironically, Andrei – the top qualifier – had one of the least “favorable” mixes, and the last low qualifier / highly ranked player I looked at had one of the most favorable mixes.
| Qualify Rank | Modern/DMD | Late SS | Early SS | EM | TOTAL | Modern + Late SS | Early SS + EM | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andrei | 1 | 4 | 1 | 4 | 3 | 12 | 5 | 7 | |
| Raymond | 2 | 6 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 12 | 7 | 5 | |
| Nic | 3 | 6 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 12 | 7 | 5 | |
| Derek | 3 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 12 | 8 | 4 | |
| Brian | 5 | 6 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 12 | 7 | 5 | |
| Dave | 21 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 12 | 7 | 5 | |
| Karl | 30 | 6 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 12 | 8 | 4 | |
| Damien | 42 | 6 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 12 | 8 | 4 | |
| Zac | 43 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 12 | 7 | 5 | |
| Will | 53 | 7 | 3 | 0 | 2 | 12 | 10 | 2 |
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Didn’t you have a year?
No
We had a MMr and initially replaced the entire tilt bob assembly because we could never set it right and the replacement fixed it. For the AFMr I wound up using post rubbers on the rod near the hinge similar to what was done using the ear plugs. Utilizing a post rubber to me made more sense since I had them, they slide on perfect and seemed less likely to fall off/move.
You must have missed reading this. 
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Besides, it was actually half a year. 
I love how the locals embrace/welcome a SPC event. I/We experience the same thing. 