Sorry to resurrect a mostly dead thread, but this has been bouncing around in my head for a while.
The concern with WPPR farming by top players finding “easy” locations in a multi-location league and moving around to maximize points and avoiding other top players – is this a thing that has actually happened, or is this a theoretical loophole that’s being closed before someone has the chance to exploit it?
We’ve definitely heard from league members in these leagues that plan attendance based on a strategy that gives them the best chance to finish as high in the league as possible.
Our internal discussions focused more on the fact it’s “not really a league” in the way we prefer leagues to operate. Our preference again being that leagues focus on a community of players getting together socially multiple times across a season to play against one another.
We have no problem with these leagues continuing to move forward in the exact same playing format as they have in the past, giving their league members the exact same playing experience that have come to enjoy. The only thing we are changing is to report results to the IFPA based on the group of players that are actually playing “together”.
This makes sense, and thanks for taking so much time to explain the thought process behind it all. I’m sure these decisions are much more complicated than they appear at first.
For the moment, the regional league around Philadelphia that we were going to try has been put on ice.
From a points perspective since cross-location play is allowed, there’s no difference between running an independent league at three places vs. running sub-leagues at those three locations.
If we did sub-leagues, every location needs to follow the same format, and since there was no pre-existing regional league, the amount of work to coordinate 3-5 locations to adhere to the same format/schedule is too much of a logistical challenge right now.
PinCrossing (Railroad Street) → My League
Overall, my main reaction on all this is to focus less on league play and instead focus on larger, open, quarterly events like the one we ran for New Year’s Day (Match Play Tournament, followed immediately by 8-Strike Fair Strike Classics).
For a round-up of other local leagues:
I appreciate that you and Petey did the analysis on this. But, just to emphasize what you’re already saying, in order to get the 56.42 you need to put in ~3x the effort. Looking at the Google Sheet that Petey shared within the PPL Facebook group:
442 WPPR points were given via PPL last time around. New rules would only give out 207 WPPR points across the three events + Finals. Overall, less WPPRs to go around under the new format. Allowing cross-location play is a positive thing given the restrictions enacted elsewhere, but it comes at a cost of sticking to one primary location -or- investing more of your time to attend multiple locations the requisite number of times.
I can’t help but LOL at playing more competitive pinball being described as “effort” 
Perhaps “time” is the better word, going back to the TGPPH (“TGP Per Hour”) conversation a few years ago about Group Round Robins.
there’s the difference to consider about the number of entries on your player card, though, right? looks like the stats are gone, but it’s a difference of one entry at 41.73 or four entries at 14 (average) each
I wonder if there’s a way to classify super leagues differently than regular leagues and nerf the WPPR accumulation that way. Change the formula for super leagues instead of making leagues change their format.
Last season in NEPL I bounced between two locations all season. A few seasons ago I played at 5 different locations. The amount that being able to do this grew my personal investment in pinball is huge. I got to meet a lot more people, play a wider variety of games, it insured that I was able to complete a season around a work schedule that included a lot of travel. So much so that I went from being just a casual player (excited to play pinball when I saw it at a bar) to now being the RI rep for NEPL in just 3 years, one of which was The Year With No Pinball.
I was never bouncing around in order to play against weaker competition – most of the time I was getting annihilated. But in this new format, I wouldn’t have accumulated enough weeks to qualify at any location. I’m not threat a threat to end up in the final foursome at A division finals, years past I’ve not even qualified for C division finals. So would I get zero WPPRs? (Not enough weeks at any single location, not good enough overall to qualify for finals)
I’m afraid (afraid is the wrong word for this, but go with me) that the goal of these changes is to prevent top players from getting more WPPRs than they might deserve (which I understand and think is a good thing), but it has the knock-on effect of making it harder for new and less skilled players to accumulate any WPPRs at all. The reason I see that as being a downside is that getting an official IFPA ranking, seeing your ranking improve, these are the things that help make this hobby sticky for new people, and we’re putting obstacles there to people who are just dipping their toes in and might not yet have the level of commitment to arrange their schedule around league night.
Related to this dichotomy between top players getting more WPPRs than they should and weaker players getting any WPPRs at all: For the top players, the points you get from finishing 80th or 130th in the league wouldn’t even factor. They wouldn’t be among their top 20 results, they’d be discarded right away. But for a lesser player, that’s a huge accomplishment, and it would be a shame to punish us plebeians because some people who are already good and already devote a lot of time and effort to improving their rankings are exploiting loopholes.
The biggest issue for us is not trying to please or displease any particular group of players here.
The fact is saying you finished 80th in a group of 400 players is just a certain level of ‘not exactly true’ because of the lack of direct competition between a large percentage of that player base.
Taken to the extreme, the IFPA could form a “National Pinball League” that would allow any location to participate (similar to the NEPL rules). As long as we have our schedule laid out and the flexibility of players to play wherever they want, they could play in Wyoming or Wichita, and somehow we’re pretending that those players are directly competing with one another in some fashion. Submitting that National League with 8,000 players would be “within the rules” as they were written previously.
The only rule I could see bending here is that any player like yourself that didn’t qualify for any ‘sub league’ while also not qualifying for the league final, could simply be added to whatever sub league they finished the best in (regardless of their level of participation in that sub league).
That was actually the initial rule, but I liked Becker’s rule better regarding the treatment of each sub league being it’s own entity for WPPR purposes.
I’m not sure where that would place you specifically based on your play history, but you would ‘get credit’ for participating in some fashion with some non-zero level of WPPR’s.