Has any thought been given to the 3% or 5% or whatever the money transfer is going to incur? 3500 transactions don’t come free.
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Cost of doing business, or I will have to sponsor it out of my own pocket (I’ll clarify this with my tax accountant before we launch).
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Practical Questions:
Are Canadian TD’s required to send 1 USD/player, or will CAD be accepted at par?
If USD, do you have suggestions for which days exchange rate the TD should use, and how we deal with the customer side credit card fees for currency conversion? The current exchange rate would put it at an amount that can’t actually be paid in cash to the TD, thanks to quirks of Canadian coinage.
If I understand correctly the caveats up thread about “opt in/out”, any player that receives points needs to be paid for, so new players in the “first five events” window that don’t count for value of the event for other players still have to be paid for?
Editorializing:
I think this, on top of the “no points for first five events” might put the nail in the coffin of free tournaments as a way to grow and encourage new players to become part of the wider competitive community; But I think it’s been clear for a while that model is a PNW/location play oriented thing that the eastern, primarily private location play, organizer community doesn’t really pay attention to - @PressStart’s certainly made a number of comments to that effect in this thread.
In fairness, this isn’t as bad as the stupid limits on number of recognized events at a particular venue rules used to be, but it comes close.
Anticipation
It could be amusing to watch what percentage of the Pennsylvania state championship players under this system will be locals.
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CAD is accepted . . . we’ll pull the Nationals portion out at USD value. Each province will get the remaining balance of the funds being held.
Correct, unrated players still earn WPPR points for any event they play in, they just don’t contribute to the strength and distribution of the points awarded at the event. They still need to be covered under this endorsement fee.
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Seems like we took all the criticisms of the HERB “Dump and Pump” format and applied them to every tournament at a global level.
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Would this also apply to women’s events with the fees paid out at the IFPA Women’s World Championship?
While there was discussion at the most recent WWC of implementing this, my understanding is that the IFPA fee doesn’t impact lady-WPPRs at this time.
One shitstorm is enough . . . save your stones to throw at me when we implement this in 2021 
YOu may want to keep “Pinball” in there somewhere? 
Well said!
System Handling Another Rewrite (of) Pinball Ecosystem Statistics
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Pinball Agglomerated Ranking Arrangement of Greatly Optional Need
(not like this)
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It’s all about the PAPRS. 
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But Josh just said it’s up to the player to decide if they want to contribute or not.
If you have 100 players enter and only 20 players want to opt-in, then you would submit those 20 players only in your results to us, and we’ll request $20 as the endorsement fee.
It seems like a logistical nightmare. It would make more sense to have all or nothing when it comes to this change.
Josh, I’d love to hear more about your vision for the future of IFPA and the sport in general. You mention how this change will hopefully grow the “prestige” of the game. I’d like to know more details on that as it might help settle some nerves from tournament directors.
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I think Josh said it is up to the TD to decide. If the TD wants to get a sponsor, or set a winners tax that is good. Or the TD has the option of letting players decide (and have a WPPR sidepot).
At my real job we’ve been building the competitive world of Big Buck Hunter for the last 8 years (I think).
The push we have at work is the same as we have in the pinball world. Corporate sponsorship, media attention, social awareness.
The things that you have seen the IFPA do has really mirrored the things we’ve done for BBH.
Stern Army? Go check out our BBH Game Warden program.
As we’ve attempted to reach outside the industry sponsors we put a plan in place to build the World Championship prize pool through raking a fee from all the ‘impromptu’ tournaments that are set up on our location games. This resulted in a much bigger prize pool and in turn allowed us to advertise to sponsors about how “BIG” our community was.
In the last couple of years we’ve landed major sponsorship from Jaegermeister, Moosehead Brewing, Jacks Links among others.
The strategy of acting like “we’ve made it” and “we’re already this giant thing” absolutely made the process of luring in bigger fish easier. It continues to now get easier as it continues to grow.
We’re gonna give that strategy a shot and see what happens. The SCS media coverage was great this year, but it’s almost embarrassing to tell the outlet that the champion took home $100. It instantly turns into “oh that’s cute” rather than things being taken at the level of seriousness I would like to see this go.
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Logistically I’m having a hard time believing how challenging this is. If I have a pad of paper with 18 names on it, and I know I have to type these names into the IFPA website to submit results, simply cross out the names of the players that opted out.
If I had this option for the Circuit event at Pin-Masters for anyone that didn’t want to pay in the extra $5, I would have just put an “(X)” next to their name on the spreadsheet. When it came time to send results to the PAPA crew I would have just deleted anyone with an “(X)” out of those standings.
Big Buck Hunter, you mean that game with the gun? I didn’t know people still played those
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Our sponsorship advertising video is here:
https://www.bigbuckhd.com/sponsors
Something to work towards …
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