I’m working on putting together the final results for my league and I’m wondering how to rank players given that we had some qualifiers who did not attend the playoff meeting.
My thinking is, any player that didn’t show for a playoff can only finish as low as they had potential to, had they shown up. So a player with a bye, that could have finished no worse than 8th had they played in the finals, goes into 8th in a tie with the player who showed up and actually finished 8th. The only oddity this seems to present is that the 9th place player is now 10th (since I have two 8ths) and everyone below gets bumped down a spot.
Alternatively, should I put everyone that didn’t show up and play behind all the players who played in the finals regardless of qualifying position? So the highest ranked qualifier (regardless of byes and finishing potential) that didn’t participate in the 12 person final, goes to 13th, and so on.
To me, it depends on when you required each set of finalists to show up for finals check-in. If all finalists are required to be present and check-in prior to the first round, then any finalist that didn’t show up is now a non-participant, and gets 13th, regardless of how many byes they had earned. Thus, your “Alternatively…” scenario applies.
If you don’t require finalists with byes to show up and check-in until their first round, then I’d use the “My thinking is…” scenario. But this gets messy, because now you need to have a method to decide who amongst 9-12th moves on to the 8-player 2nd round. Also in this case, I think that the no-show-with-bye player gets 9th. And not 8th. This is consistent to a no-show-without-byes getting 13th, and not 12th.
So I knew that a few players weren’t going to make it so it for sure wasn’t a show up and check in issue. One player was late to check in but I have rules in place to deal with that and it wasn’t an issue.
For the finals themselves, I used what I’ve seen in the typical herb format tournies where everyone bumps up and the last spot is replaced by the highest seed. So if 12 qualified and one of those 12 bail, then the 13 seed moves into the 12th spot. And I actually think your first scenario makes the most sense having read it in your words. It also eliminates any sticky situations with ties since moving a no-show with a bye to 9th and having them tied with the showed player that actually finished 9th, means there’s no 10th and the actual player that played and finished 10th, now finishes 11th.
I just want to make sure I get this right so that the outcome is appropriate for all and nobody gets screwed out of their fraction of a wppr point.
The most common and IMHO fairest scheme is to place no-shows as the highest NON-PLAYOFF finishers regardless of how many byes they earned. In this case, if 12 people, including replacements for no-shows, participate in the playoffs, then the highest ranking no-show would place 13th, next highest 14th, etc. The players who do show up and play in the playoffs get the top however many spots in the playoffs there are people playing in them, and if the top 4 get byes and one of them doesn’t show, then #5 moves up to get a bye. If only 11 people actually showed up for the playoffs, then #5 still gets a bye, those who play get #s 1-11, and the top no-show places 12th.
As a side note, if a player shows up and is unable to stay through the end of the playoffs, they would be placed in the lowest finishing spot of those not eliminated by the round in which they leave. For instance, at PAPA, Chris had to drop out after the quarterfinals, so he finished 8th.
I agree with this very well written explanation. In short, fill up the finals bracket - but give qualified no-show players a fair finish position.
Except. In my view, people leaving after finals have begun should continue in the finals system with a score of zero for any remaining games. And in case of a game in progress, balls should be plunged by the TD and score taken. With the player leaving granted what ever finish position this will result in. This will be fair for the player and opponents. And help to prevent the unfortunate situation where a player could make a last second dropout of a four player game to help a friend advance.
I started a thread on this topic on Pinside about a year ago. We had seen some drop outs in local tournaments and they where handled differently by the various organisers. And led to some disapointment to say the least.
Out here, the Mile High Pinball League does not factor the finals tournament into results submitted to the IFPA. I think it’s a pretty good solution. Wherever you end up at the end of the regular season gets submitted, and then the final tournament is just for winning money.
The leagues in the Bay Area do both. Final results for the season are submitted to IFPA, and then the final tournament is also submitted as a separate event.
League finals as a separate tournament doesn’t sound like it would qualify for WPPR points since (I’m assuming) that the tournament is only open to people who participated in the league.
This is where you get into semantics of what something is called. Leagues are welcome to submit individual sessions as individual “seasons”, or group multiple sessions together to form their “season”, or do whatever they want really as long as the data used for that event doesn’t include any previous activity that already awarded WPPR’s (so no WPPR double dipping).
With v5.2 coming next year, depending on the league format some leagues are now forced to run a finals tournament and including that as part of their season if their regular season consisted of indirect play.
Or we could go back to WPPR v1.0 through 3.0 when we didn’t endorse any league-play at all for WPPR’s
I will start submitting league finals as a separate event, even though this still seems like a loophole to the “no restrictions on who can play” clause.
