I accept “donations” (bribes?) here:
https://streamlabs.com/pressstartarcade
Donations (bribes?) can get your results approved much more quickly 
Donations (bribes?) don’t count toward your $1 fee 
3 Likes
you should set up a Patreon with different level for approval priority! 
4 Likes
Here’s what you do:
- Organize to have your office holiday party at an arcade.
- Run five high score competitions with a 4-player single game finals.
- Have everyone compete in a fun group match play tournament for a few hours.
- Make sure the match play tournament is the last one you register on the IFPA calendar.
- Rake in those WPPRs!
Better hurry up and do it this year before the rules are changed to require the five games be from events on different days. 
Frankly it seems like a lot of effort for a few points. This coming from someone in a “small market” pinball scene who typically has to travel for any significant points and frequently TDs events.
If you want league participants to “level up” faster or similar, I get that it might make sense to run something like what I propose above at the beginning of a season, but it defeats the purpose of requiring someone to wait before becoming Rated. Maybe to follow the spirit of the requirement, make it so that only players who have competed in one season already are eligible?
Based on @pinwizj’s comment above, the theory is that someone doesn’t add value to a tournament until they have experience playing in tournaments. It’s not a measure of how many hours of pinball you’ve played.
And it kind of makes sense. Playing at home in your basement or on location is different from competing against someone else. Or many someone elses. There are specific rules you need to follow in tournaments that sometimes take a while to learn.
Looking back, did you fully have the hang of things your first tournament? In my experience as a TD, there’s a lot less intervention required for players who’ve competed in a few events compared to those new to competition, even if they are skilled players. YMMV.
1 Like
One thing to remember is that ll IFPA events must be submitted 30 days in advance and be public on the event listing page for that area. If you make something private in an attempt to limit legit local players from attending, I predict a 100% chance of those players complaining to Josh and the event(s) in question being revoked. So while this is good way to level up a class of players, its not a good way to win tournaments.
2 Likes
Oh apologies Adam I think I might be one of the troublesome chaps who is new to being a TD and didn’t give enough info! In my defence I read all the docs I could find and thought I’d done the right thing! I just replied to your email
Donation made!
Cheers,
Neil.
PS new Metallica code just been dropped!
2 Likes
That wasn’t what I was intending to propose at all, but you do make a good point that it would invalidate the option of limiting the “levelling up” events to players who’d already competed a season!
I used the example of a holiday party with my colleagues in mind, i.e., people who do not play pinball and therefore would be unrated and probably easier to win against.
Since the five high score events would count as their “experience” events, they’d contribute to the value of the match play event, thereby making it worth a good number of points, depending on how many participants you had.
Our holiday parties are usually held in public spaces, so nothing stopping others from joining.
It reminds me of this exchange from the High throughput, easy to run tournament thread earlier this summer:
Btw, I’m not actually advocating for events that skirt the experience requirement, I’ve just identified a way they could be done under the current rules, if someone wanted to go through the effort.
Can you tell us more what happened in Germany? Sounds wunderbar.
Hopping between head-to-head and group matchplay for the finals in order to backload the TGP and grade out to exactly 100%. https://www.flippermarkt.de/community/forum/threads/ifpa-pinball-olympics-2018-bei-bulls-balls-in-fulda-10-5-13-05-18.191366/page-6#post-1541032
Heyho.
My name is Tobias, I am the Country Director of Germany and also the TD of the IFPA Pinball Olympics.
Thanks for sharing our tournament series here. It is really “wunderbar”.
And in fact, we jump between different systems to make the tournaments more exciting. If you mean “exploit” with bug using, that is absolutly wrong.
At the Pinball Olympics we play 7 full tournaments in 4 days. Most of the European top players visit us very often. In Fulda we play 5 tournaments of this kind next year. Including the German Championship Series and the European Championship Series.
If you have any questions regarding anything, just ask. 
️:sunglasses:
Cheers from Germany
Tobias
4 Likes
But that isn’t the point at all. If someone is considering doing this, it’s to get people rated quickly so they count for future tournaments, perhaps for one you’re about to have. The outcome of the fabricated quick “get rated” tournaments are irrelevant. For example…
That is the point. You sidestep the requirement to wait for organic experience to be gained, giving your new players full value immediately.
Yes, this is work (and cost) and most people aren’t going to do this. But it is an exploit (for now) and it does exist for the motivated.
1 Like
To whom it may concern
It has been brought to my attention that my previous post where I was accepting “donations” (bribes?) for preferential treatment with the IFPA approval process was unbecoming for someone of my station.
In hindsight looking back at my post I can see how the potential opportunity for others to “jump the line” so to speak could be seen as biased and unfair to the community at large, so for that I am sorry…
SORRY that I didn’t think of what an amazing source of INCOME this could be!
Forget patron and donations, we are going straight to Ebay with this shit! Starting Bid for preferential IFPA treatment will be $10,000!
I’ll post the EBay link as soon as the auction is live!!
(PS, It was actually brought to my attention that someone thought I was serious and someone apparently doesn’t enjoy my sense of humor and I assume they won’t enjoy this joke either so I’ll clarify THIS IS A JOKE! GET A SENSE OF HUMOR! The END!)
15 Likes
Sounds like a fun event for sure, I am not sure we have something quite like this in the US? several large tournament but the most tournament open to all in a weekend would have been… PAPA with 3x Classic and 1x Main maybe?
Welcome, Tobias. I’m impressed that you were able to run so many large tournaments at full value in such a short period of time. That must have been tons of work! I don’t think you did anything wrong and actually think it’s quite clever, but do think that it’s an exploit/loophole/whatever you want to call it based on the current TGP rules. You didn’t do anything extreme, but based on the current rules I could run the following:
32-players group elimination, 4-player games, 1 game per round, bottom two in each group eliminated until 2-players are left. This would be 8 games for TGP. I could then take the two players remaining and run a head-to-head best-of-21 (or whatever is necessary for max TGP) to decide the winner. It certainly seems like an exploit to backload TGP to me.
Hi. Thanks for your welcome.
Yes, it is a lot of work, but with organising more tournaments the experience raise up. So, most of the steps are automatically and the most exciting point is hosting those events 
In fact, we don’t use such exploits to bring 1oo percent TGP. Normally we play head2head in swiss mode (very nice mode btw), semi final best of 3 and the final in Papa Style (4 players with 3 machines).
So you have different ways to play till the final.
At the Olympics we play several modes to make it as interesting as possible. We have 5 Strike Knockout with a semi final where you take your remaining lifes as points with you. We play with groups and round robin. We have the “normal” classic tournaments and so on. It is getting crazy when we reach midnight and play another Midnight Madness tournament for those who don’t need to sleep.
But (also in fact) we start at 10am and play till midnight and later. But the guys like it.
The only mode no one is interested in is the high score tournament with entrys. 
But with your number of players it would be hard to play other modes.
1 Like
Todd- your baseless accusations are tiring. I don’t understand what you’re trying to gain from this but it’s very childish of you.
2 Likes
If you have an issue with how someone is running their tournaments, you should take it to @pinwizj and let the IFPA sort out whether or not something exploit-y is going on. I don’t want TiltForums to be the place where local or personal beefs get played out, especially in a case like this where it is all just vague and hand-wavey. Keep that stuff to Pinside.
12 Likes
Greg - while I completely agree that baseless accusations and speaking in vague terms is not a good road to go down - I am going to very politely disagree with the premise that these things should only be talked about in private. If there are legitimate exploits going on in the community at large, then the community at large should participate in that discussion - openly. Full stop.
If no one knows it’s going on, and things are just settled in private - how is anyone else to know what to look out for? How is Sam Smith in Somewhere, USA supposed to know if what’s going on at their local tournaments is on the up and up? What’s their measure?
I think, in general, there is a lot of “keeping things in private” and “keeping things quiet” in the community, and I think that’s a bad thing, and I think it’s a dangerous thing. It silences and does not spread knowledge and awareness.
1 Like
I think the point is that as an outsider, not in the Michigan scene, I have no idea what we’re talking about, so there isn’t an open discussion. All I can do is wonder at some exploit. Maybe the ‘exploit’ is no big deal, heck–I’ve gone on record saying outside of a few spots that open up for the IFPA World’s, none of it matters anyhow, but the ‘open discussion’ hasn’t been open. It’s more like, “I’d like to keep this private, but just so everyone knows, there’s an exploit.” Which seems unhelpful to me.
2 Likes
In general I don’t disagree with you, but there are ways to go about it that are productive, and ways that are not.
For instance, challenging a rule is different than challenging a person or group. Here is a hypothetical example. Saying “I think the IFPA should revert back to the per-venue restrictions on tournaments” establishes a starting point that focuses on a solution and is not directed at any person(s). However, saying “This person(s) is exploiting IFPA rules by running an enormous number of tournaments at their venue” directs it at an individual and personalizes it. This type of challenge is not useful, because nobody in this forum has any authority to do anything about it, and it is just going to create a thread of back and forth accusations that don’t go anywhere.
This is why, when someone has a beef with an individual about IFPA rules, I recommend going to Josh. It is not about “keeping it secret”, it is just that Josh is the only one who can do anything about it. If Josh determines that someone has in fact cheated or broken said rules, that is one thing, and there are definitely cases where I think habitual cheaters / bad actors should be called out. However, if he determines there is nothing wrong, then there’s nothing to see and move along. I’d like to have that determination made before we get into it here, because as far as exploiting WPPRs goes, Josh is essentially the Supreme Court, and it is not useful to litigate them on here or Pinside or Facebook or anywhere else. And again, in that case, maybe it leads to discussions of rule changes for the future or something, which is great. I love it. Keep it at that level.
I hope that clarifies my position here: I don’t want a whisper network of who the cheaters and bad actors are. I want to make sure that those people are in fact bad actors first, and focus on the rules that can prevent them from acting bad. I’m actually very interested in how we can make this kind of information more publicly available to TDs, but it is very very delicate area with a lot of nuance. I’m involved in basically the exact same discussion in another community, and it is really fraught. It is a discussion worth having but man, it is a hard one.
6 Likes
With respect to the vague comments from Todd, after getting some detail privately about what’s going on the IFPA has officially classified it as a Nothingburger.
16 Likes