I don’t remember anyone griping about Todd M playing on his games a few years back. And people with banners earned in Pittsburgh have proven they don’t need an edge to win.
I think what is important here is not whether or not the 16 players actually got an advantage. It’s the perception of an advantage, which it seems like some of the players who attended do feel that way. I was not there, but enjoyed watching many hours of it on the stream. For a high level event like this, you just don’t want any perceived shenanigans, whether they are real or not.
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First, regarding the impact/significance of our decision: There were exactly TWO people who participated in the Texas Pinball League (TPL) finals who made the TPF finals – in any division: Phil and yours truly. We’re also your friendly TD’s – who would have gotten even more play time had we stuck with the prior years’ solution to the conundrum. I’d like to think we’ve earned enough respect through our skill and play (evident in our rankings, and a banner that I look forward to seeing someday in PAPA’s new HQ) that explain why we can make the finals. The other fourteen people? Didn’t qualify.
Robert Byers: he played poorly in the Austin qualifier and didn’t qualify for TPL finals. Same goes for Brad Holliday: didn’t make it into TPL finals. Instead, Brad was working tirelessly on Thursday at TPF from 3pm - 2am fixing switch issues, reviving a dead sarcophagus, cleaning playfields, replacing bad optos, rebuilding a crappy flipper, replacing burnt out lamps… the list goes on and on. Any of those people that played in TPF or watched it online should be reaching out thanking him for his excellent tech work instead of accusing him of cheating.
Second, I apologize for any negative perception this created. Certainly not the intent. For the few of you who’ve posted here that were attending the tournament, thank you for providing your feedback that you didn’t think this was fair. I would vastly prefer people start by talking or contacting me (or Phil) directly with feedback in lieu of starting out by taking to the internet, unfairly claiming we’re cheating or nepotists. We (the TD’s) felt it was the most practical way to get ample play-testing in on 18 games that we don’t get to even see until mid afternoon up through 11:30pm the night prior to having them in two days of qualifying.
Other options to try to solve this conundrum:
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Prior years’ solution of the TD’s plus a couple volunteers getting to play test and set up all the pins. I caught flak on this in the past, and we also increased the # of pins by around 50%, so we decided to spread the play-testing around and increase the # of play-testers.
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Have non-players do all the play-testing. If someone can find me enough non-player play-testers who are both knowledgeable/capable of doing so for tourney pins and willing to work that many hours on Thursday, please send them my way! Even with a show as big as TPF, the people that care about the tourney are nearly 100% the same people that play in the tourney.
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Hold an Open play-testing session: Unless I can change the minds of the TPF organizers, 160 people (non-exhibitors) are not going to be allowed in the expo hall on Thursday. It wasn’t easy to even get the green light to have what amounted to 14 additional people to be allowed in.
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Let the games “play as they lie” when delivered from each collector’s truck or trailer. I think we can all agree this is a non-starter.
What other options are out there?
Thank you to all who competed in TPF! And an even bigger thank you to all the volunteers and those who donated pins for us to use to make the tourney possible.
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- Tournament organizers do not participate in the tournament.
- Bring back unlimited herb and set up games more difficult
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Valid ideas:
On #1: no dice on this one. I’m not at the point where I’m willing to just organize a tourney and not participate. Both Phil and I did choose not to participate in the Classics side tourney, because it would have been too much to handle. It was a wise choice.
On #2: After having run and played in Limited Herb for TPF the past three years, I’m not going back to Unlimited. And the overwhelming amount of positive feedback I’ve received on running TPF as Limited entry supports this. The original intent was to give tourney players the ability to have time to enjoy the rest of the TPF show, which is one the best in the world. We added the Classics side tourney as unlimited to feed the competitive need of those players that wanted to spend all/most of their time competing. Demand for the Classics tourney was very high – too high, in fact, for the 6 games we had in the bank. But that’s a topic/problem for another thread. 
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I am 100% behind Colin on these 2 points. Most tournament are organize by a few people with a lot of passion, i could not imagine not play in the tournament i organize. I do believe our friend @pinwizj follow the same mentality.
Please keep the limited format, all format have pro/con and there is already lots of great herb tourney out there. Like Vancouver Flipout, the combination of one limited and one unlimited makes a great combo!
In any way, it’s great there are so many options out there, people get to chose if they want to attend any particular event.
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You could do a lottery with the 160 competitors? Do it ahead of time and keep going until you got 16 “yes I will be there” responses. Give people 12 hours to respond and move on.
Would this work?
- Find the highest finishing local player in Classics who didn’t play Main.
- Recruit this person to play test the Main bank next year. Free entries for motivation as needed and/or practical.
- Find the highest finishing local player in Main who didn’t play Classics.
- Recruit this person to play test the Classics bank next year. Free entries for motivation as needed and/or practical.
- Repeat the above going down the line until you have enough testers.
It’s a significant DISadvantage dealing with all the distractions of running the event. I didn’t even play in the tournaments and I’m still not caught up on sleep.
I guarantee neither @spraynard nor @Snailman will cheat. If I was competent enough to test games I would have. It seems like way more of an advantage to get lucky and have a title you have in your collection in the tournament. We don’t prohibit the programmers from playing in major events, Lyman has been a top player for years.
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Another idea that builds off the concept of a lottery, but a narrowed scope of @G_Money’s idea (thanks for the suggestion)…
Provide an announced sign-up opportunity window for anyone willing to signup for limited # of volunteer slots for Thursday setup to function as tech/play-testing. And then hold a lottery for those signed up as to who gets them.
We already had two volunteer time slots for two 4-hour shifts on Thursday for pin setup, but that wasn’t enough, and we needed the additional play-testing that we got from the TPL finals games. So we’ll have to think about what the right # is. I’ll also attempt to get capable volunteers who aren’t playing in the tourney to fill these spots, but not sure if I’ll be able to get enough, so the leftover openings would go the sign-up lottery.
Thoughts on the pros/cons of this idea?
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Perhaps some thought could be put into how the game bank is aquired and setup prior to loading into the show, so that the organizers aren’t on such a crunch to try and get such a large number of games ready in a day or two. This has to be exhausting and probably isn’t helping those who are responsible for running the event to enjoy the event as much as they should.
It also seems to me that there are too few attempts provided and too many games to log a score for. Having maybe 21 attempts at 7 (or better yet, 24 for 6) might be enough to have players feel they were given an ample chance to play each game enough times and help mitigate some of the perception that others had an unfair advantage.
A lottery for practice time doesn’t sound great to me. If I were traveling to this event (maybe, some day) I would prefer that the organizers were identifying a few players they trusted to provide good feedback on game setup to help them play test thoroughly before the tournament. Having more things to manage and organize is counterproductive frankly.
In previous years, roughly how many tests plays would the average machine require to set up and dial in for the tournament?
Welcome to the wonderful world of streaming.
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With Stern Pro Events based off WPPR’s it wouldn’t make sense for a high ranking organizer to not participate.
Is it possible to move TPF outside the main event room into a side room? It would solve the issue of not letting people into the show floor before TPF is open and would be a better environment for streaming, waiting in queue, non-tournament people wandering in to play games, etc. Also, lets be honest, 160 people wouldn’t show up on a Thursday to practice for 2 hours. Most people get in late Thursday, to late Friday due to various reasons.
If moving the tourney outside show floor is not possible, move the start of qualifying by 4 hours on Friday, with 2 hours set for practice prior to start. This year, they blocked off majority of the games/floor on Friday, since qualifying started at 9am, but the show didn’t open to the public until 5pm. If a game is found to have a major issue, then before qualifying opens, do not let people queue on it, and fix it in the early hours of qualifying. It also gives you a chance to swap it.
I think this is a great idea also.
Well, there is a difference between Todd playing and setting up his games, and say, Todd having a Seattle players tourney on the games.
As for the banners comment, not sure what that is supposed to mean, most those people I know would take any “edge” they can find.
I don’t have a problem with play-testing (to a point, no full games!)
TDs and players can be checking games, and I am not accusing anyone of any type of cheating or Texas Swindle!
I do think that playing a tournament on the bank that is used for limited qualifying is bad form however.
And it sounds like the tournament games weren’t really tournament-ready when they arrived at TPF.
My recommendation?
1-Go to glass-off, switch and mech. testing, with a couple flips and tilts to finish. NO full games of play!
2-Have better maintained machines to start with.
3-Find another place to do your local finals, not the Limited bank.
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Full games are a necessity in play testing a bank. Otherwise, getting game times reasonably equitable across various eras and manufacturers would be an educated guess at best.
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But isn’t this exactly what @PressStart is doing with his “Come Break my Pins” events leading up to IFPA15? And I applaud him for doing it… even if it means that other players can gain an edge over someone like me who lives WAY too far away to participate in them. Because getting the pins battle-tested prior to multi-day event is more important to me, and I don’t expect Adam to bear all of that on his own. Granted, there are only a few players qualified for IFPA15 that live in proximity to take advantage of this.
Pinburgh uses multiple open local Pittsburgh events on Pinburgh pins to get them battle-tested prior to Pinburgh. And I think this is also a good idea.
I guess my point is that options are limited to get things ready, and pre-events are a viable way to do this, albeit not without trade-offs.
I don’t have a collection like Belsito’s for INDISC, so I’m at the mercy of each individual collector/contributor. And at the mercy of different eras of games in terms of how they hold up. This isn’t too dissimilar from many other shows with tourneys.
From past years when there were 2-4 of us doing what you suggested on (1), we ended up missing multiple issues that cropped up in just the first couple hours of qualifying, with nothing I could do about it since qualifying had already begun.
Thanks for your feedback.
Phil and I are also discussing the logistics of possibly adding an Open practice session first thing in the morning on Friday prior to qualifying, because we’re allowed to have all the tourney players in the front part of the expo hall for the tourney anyway. If we run it for an hour, we’d then shift the Friday qualifying to end at 1am on Saturday instead of 12am.
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DNO,
I was replying specifically to AB’s post about his “year of practice,” not the league thing.
I think the answer is simple. Obviously techs and organizers are going to have to test games…
Just don’t hold an exclusive tournament on those games a day before a high profile limited Herb Tournament that people are playing for $ and expensive travel.
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