Unfortunately runnning that as a “league” would no longer be eligible. You are welcome to run them as individual tournaments for each meet with some kind of finals attached to them and that activity sanctioned.
We definitely recognize there are some quality leagues out there impacted by this rule change. Our hope is that there is a pivot within our rules to still be able to enjoy the same competitive activity level for that community, but simply change the way things are reported to the IFPA if you want that activity sanctioned.
Players just won’t show up for that unf. Pingolf is not worth anywhere near enough for the WPPRITIS crowds out here and so the level of effort to level of participation ratio is ungodly low.
I think these changes are absolutely spot on even though it will be bad news for our league from a WPPR POV.
We have a monthly league 2/4 or 2/5 count per month and we have folks that play once and that’s 50% participation - what league in the world allows 50% participation?
just isn’t right for a league so we will most likely move to 3/4 or 3/5.
OK I’m currently involved with a league which runs out of a single arcade chain (same ownership of all locations) that operates in a single metro area. Currently, the way it works is each week a player can choose to play in one of 3 locations. They cannot play multiple locations in the same week. A session consists of 4 match play games with a group of either 3 or 4 players (or 5 if exactly 5 players show up for that session at that location). Points are earned based on place of finish. The league runs 8 weeks with a players’ lowest 2 weeks being dropped, also the league is separated into A and B divisions (top half in A bottom half in B) after the 5th week (though players can still be assigned to play players from the other division in a session).
After the 8th week a finals is held at the largest of the locations. A division finals takes the top half (rounded down to the nearest multiple of 4) of players from A division and B division takes the top half of B. Playoffs determine the overall league winner.
Am I understanding that his is no longer a valid format because of the use of multiple locations, despite the fact that:
On a given week, a player may only play one session that week regardless of location
A player may play at their choice of location/night on subsequent weeks (but only one each week)
Sessions are always on the same day each week per location (held on different nights so that players can be flexible to accomodate personal schedules (eg my moms birthday is Thursday so I can’t make Thursday at location C, but I can go to Tuesday at B on the other side of town that week instead)
I run the same format and it’s no longer valid to report as one big league. The individual days of the week will have to report as separate sub leagues. The rationale is that the best players may be showing up to different meets each week, never facing each other in the regular season.
So the format is absolutely still valid. We will continue to sanction leagues that are run in exactly this manner.
As @jdelz pointed out, the only thing we’re changing is how the results of the league are reported to the IFPA for WPPR point purposes.
For leagues where the player experience is most important, including the flexibility of members being able to play at their convenience, then we don’t see this as a huge issue - those leagues can continue how they were. For leagues where WPPR points are important and meaningful to the members, then this could impact things . . . this would be the choice of each individual league to figure out that “flexibility/convenience vs. WPPR’s” balance.
I’m curious as to scenarios that non-quality leagues put the IFPA in that led to this decision, as well as the timing of it given 5.7 was announced over a month ago.
The leagues I participate in and help organize are fairly new and we foster a lot of people very new to pinball in general let alone competitive play. It is a fine balance to accommodate those that want the WPPRs and those that are there just to have fun and everyone in between.
I plan to engage the community to help decide how we will proceed as we ran shorter “leagues”, but with the timing of this and given the holidays we will not be able to get feedback until mid Jan at the earliest so we will not be able to pivot with said feedback to get Feb events sanctioned, meaning we’ll have to make some unilateral decisions. Had we known when 5.7 was announced we could have used that time to prepare our members.
End of the day we will adjust and persist but the timing of this does not give us much leeway to make decisions that will best suit our league members.
I think this change is more of a balancing with WPPRS with a side effect to how we have done leagues.
I assume the logic is to change the meta to more tournaments where you assumingely get the top players all together to test their skills against each other.
Like @pinwizj said, leagues were never meant to grant/effect things this much, but as IFPA and competitive pinball grew in general things obviously changed. This does effect a few leagues for me personally, but I believe that will force TDs to change some formats to a more “fair” and consistent experience. It’s hard to take the randomness and inconsistencies out of pinball(Condition of machines, settings etc) but I think this is the right step for WPPR in the future.
@pinwizj@PressStart - apologies, but I am in a side conversation with a friend we’re interpreting this two different ways so I’m seeking clarity:
Leagues must have a minimum of 6 sessions per season, of which at least 4 sessions must count toward a player’s standing.
League members must compete in more than 50% of the total meetings/sessions that were held in a season.
Each Sub League is treated as their own league for reporting and WPPR purposes. These Sub Leagues must report results following the league criteria above with respect to player participation and format rules.
Single League
Let’s assume you have league with six weeks, and best four sessions counting.
“League members must compete in more than 50% of the total meetings/sessions that were held.”
Does this greater than 50% rule apply to the TOTAL session count (six), as opposed to the number of sessions that count towards standings (four), which I believe is the current rule.
If so, am I interpreting correctly that in order for a person to be submitted for IFPA purposes, they need to now participate in four+ weeks, as opposed to right now where they can participate in two weeks and still be submitted.
Taking it a bit further, if you had eight weeks and counted the best four, you would need to participate in five+ weeks in order to count for IFPA purposes.
Is there a reason why the rule is now “more than 50%” as opposed to “50% or more”, especially if the metric is now “total sessions”, as opposed to “sessions that count”.
Multi-Location League
Intersecting the above notes with a Multi-Location League:
Assuming that if it is truly “there are six sessions, and you need to play at four+”
Assuming each location needs to be treated separately for IFPA purposes
…would that mean that a person who went three weeks to Location A and three weeks to Location B:
Wouldn’t count in either Sub-League’s submission
…but has still made the requirements to qualify and participate in Finals
Multi-Location League Finals
Going back to an earlier question:
I’m bringing this up again to understand if the IFPA has any further clarity on how a submission will work for Finals.
Let’s say you have a simple multi-location league. 32 total participants that did the required number of weeks at their Sub-Leagues
Option 1: Finals is 16 in A, 16 in B
Who counts for Finals Submission? Just A? Or A & B?
Option 2: Finals is all 32 players.
Because it’s a “Circuit Final” type of setup, we don’t need to have division splits going into the event and everyone can participate.
Best Game as League Format for 50+ Participants
What is the reason for banning Best Game as a League Format for 50+ participants for the regular season? There is already forced direct-play Finals that has to happen anyway if you’ve chosen to do a indirect format with the 10% to 50% to A-Finals Rule. If you’re following all the new league rules anyway around the minimum number of weeks, I do not understand why Best Game would be disallowed when you reach a certain threshold.
You are interpreting correctly. These changes are about pushing that commitment aspect of league attendance. We went ahead and put as strict of a requirement as we could on this just through our discussions of continually coming back to “commitment” as the word of the day. (Knowing individual tournaments are always an option for communities that can’t hit this level of commitment out of their player base)
You are correct. That player wouldn’t be eligible for the Sub-League submissions because they don’t hit the metrics of participation for any of them, however they would be allowed to make the Finals are earn WPPR points at that final. This would be the choice of the player if they felt that the “flexible scheduling” option of their league experience was more important than earning WPPR points in any of the sub-leagues.
It is expected for any Circuit Final (similar to any event finals that more than 50% of the total participants have been eliminated from being able to win the final). This would be based on the league’s “overall” standings (regardless of the sub-league reporting).
If you have 32 total participants, then your Circuit Final would be a maximum of 16 participants for us to sanction it.
We had an issue where leagues that were operating as “Best Game” leagues were far more closer to a “Selfie League” upon further inspection. Players were able to submit their own results, or pair up without TD oversight to submit results. Pushing this kind of activity to be 7 days or less on the “Tournament” side of things we felt was simply a better move for the system. The social aspect of playing league matches against other players from the league has also been an integral part of league play IMO for years before WPPR’s were even a thing.
So it’s my understanding that the grand finals needs to be submitted as its own separate tournament and be pre approved by the IFPA because it is technically a “circuit final”. Where does the under/over 50 participants thing play in?
If you are submitting a Parent/Sub league situation into us for sanctioning, then we would expect that you would have some kind of ‘master standings’ for the Parent league.
That Parent league final would be submitted at the same time as the individual Sub leagues are submitted to us for sanctioning.
Any league that has under 50 members in total wouldn’t be eligible for this. They could continue to run and report as one “massive league” without the need to be separated into sub-leagues based on any kind of flexible scheduling they have in their rules (either by location or day of the week).
