My answer would still be yes. There are literally thousands of dollars at stake, and since we don’t know that the player would be ranked 2500th (without Josh abusing the database to tell us 
) we have to act as if they are ranked 1st. That might totally blow for the suppressed player, but again no one is forcing them to suppress themselves and it’s necessary to place that player into A Division to ensure a better experience for the other 699 players. Arbitrary judgment calls result in anger at the TDs almost always, no matter how reasonable they are. However, we need to treat all suppressed players equally and since we obviously wouldn’t put, say, Chris Newsom (IMO a top 10 player easily) in a lower division, we can’t put any other suppressed player in a lower division because we don’t have any evidence to prove that they are not Chris Newsom. 
Also, regarding PAPA, AFAIK the closest thing they have to a backup plan other than “the TDs can arbitrarily move players” is a fallback policy where if you have placed Xth or above in Y division, you are restricted to Y+1 division for the next N years. IIRC PAPA actually used to work solely off of this and didn’t take IFPA rankings into account at all; I feel like maybe the first or second year I went to PAPA was the first year of having IFPA-based restrictions.
Playing devil’s advocate a bit, I guess, but…
Why is it not good enough to use the “TDs can arbitrarily move players” rule at Pinburgh to resolve the placement of suppressed players who have fallen into a division below their apparent ability?
Is any subjective rule necessarily worse than any objective rule?
The placement of the player in question has two effects:
- The experience for this player at the bottom of A division might be great (Play against top competition with low stakes and no pressure because there’s no chance to succeed!) or not so great (Play against top competition with low stakes and no pressure because there’s no chance to succeed!);
- The experience of the players near the A/B, B/C, and C/D cutlines impacted by the movement of this player.
Like I said, you make a convincing argument that I can appreciate. If anything, I’m hoping someone can say how actual tournaments with WPPR division cutoffs actually handle this stuff.
Heck, I run a team league where we don’t allow more than 1 top 1000 player to play on the same team, and I can’t say that I’d treat a suppressed player as if they were a top 1000 player. (We don’t have a lot of those here. Probably 3 by the end of the year. Probably 1 right now.)
Whoops, that isn’t supposed to happen. It supposed to be an angry kitten. lol
In actuality though, unless the player told you they were suppressed, you would just assume the player had never participated in a ranked tournament, and thus would not restrict them at all and treat them like and un-ranked player.
One rather draconian option is to require IFPA visibility as a condition of participating in the tournament, if so inclined.
That’s my rule, that IFPA suppressed players are not eligible for any WPPR-restricted division. The only issue I have is if a suppressed player from out of town comes by, and we don’t know who they are, they can pretend they are eligible. Would it be possible to have a list somewhere that is visible, that simply says “list of suppressed players” with no other data about them? At least we’ll know they aren’t eligible.
I’ll leave that to Shepherd although I don’t think the suppressed players would like there being a list on our site that includes their name in any way. That’s kind of what they were trying to get rid of in the first place 
I’m not sure they are trying to get rid of their name altogether. The one person I know who requested name suppression that I talked to, it wasn’t a matter of having their name on a website. It was that they didn’t want the pressure/stigma of their performance to be compared to others. Of course that’s a case study of 1. You can have a page, with a meta tag on it that says don’t search it (so that google name searches won’t pull up that page), but still have it available to look at the list.
a TD black archives of sort? 
I have one suppressed player who regularly comes to events. Name is suppressed for the above reason.
Privacy should always come first when requested. While the people physically present may know who the suppressed players are, the issue is not having that information go into a form where a broader set of people have access to it. Such people should likewise not be barred from any events, regardless of rankings. They can justifiably be excluded from “B” divisions and the like, though, which require positive proof of a player’s skill level to prevent taking advantage of such divisions. One way to word it might be thus:
“Players may participate in the “B” division playoffs if either they have never participated in an IFPA-ranked tournament before, or, if they have done so, if they have a published ranking of over 500. All other players are restricted to the “A” division.”
That wasn’t my suggestion though - I was saying that one option is to simply not allow the player to play at all unless they are WPPR-visible. That’s easy to check too, at registration, you look them up in the system. If you don’t get a hit, you make them agree to be listed or they don’t play.
It’s a bit harsh, but it is an option.
IFPA states tournaments must be “open”. That in theory would make it “restricted to IFPA ranked players”. It does seem reasonable that if you want to play in an IFPA ranked tourney, you will get ranked. I personally would not have offered suppression … but that’s just me. I’m not aware of any sport that maintains stats that allows players to play and not have their stats listed.
The difference is that IFPA is not a governing body for pinball, nor do I believe it intends to be.
Depends on who is interviewing me 