I don’t think it’s about that. PAPA has unlimited qualifying. Which means everyone can “practice” by buying as many tickets as they want. Old format and new. The issue is that while most players at this tourney had to find the shots, it seemed to them unfair that another group of players might have already found them. And known the bounces and seen a drain from something ordinarily safe and played aggressively to avoid it. Limited qualifying is what gave this particular practice the bad feel.
I don’t know if 1 hour of practice session will find all the possible problems with the games–Pinburgh’s 1 hour practice window is the last in a long line of play testing that might catch something that happened in moving the games from the PAPA facility to the Convention Center. If something major comes up, there may not even be time to fix it. What if a game isn’t set right? Random v Tournament mode and that doesn’t get caught in the hour? What if extra balls are on and it doesn’t get caught? What if interlocks aren’t set right? There are so many things that come up that you just don’t know until they happen. 1 hour might not be enough to catch them and then it pops up 5 hours in and what do you do with all the scores prior to the issue? Or are you now playing extra balls?
I think it’s a tough one, really, because you have to balance the bad feel of people ‘practicing’ with the bad result of something big getting missed. I don’t know a good solution.
This is where you are dead wrong. No, TPL is NOT limited to Texas players. It’s on the IFPA calendar and advertised on multiple facebook profiles. The only thing preventing anyone from attending was their ability to come.
I’ve already explained why I don’t agree here earlier. Most of what you are claiming to be important can easily be learned by watching the stream (the games were streamed on monitors) and talking to other players. Maybe they shouldn’t show the streams to those in the room and allow people to talk about their games after they play them to their friends. After the tournament was over I found out several people found some good tips on games. Nobody shared those with me so that’s not fair as they had an advantage of insider info that wasn’t public knowledge and only shared with their small group of friends.
That’s awesome that you caught major game issues that didn’t pop up in initial testing but only after the games got heated up later. Maybe share how you are able to catch weak coils, sticking flippers and flaky switches that we only found after the games got warmed up because they clearly passed those test at initial set-up by running only a couple balls through them.
Wouldn’t that be an advantage for those players that is in contrast to what you are already saying shouldn’t happen? Is that only OK because it’s felt those players wouldn’t qualify anyways? But then the argument above that they could steal points from others.
Problem with novice players is they don’t know what should be happening. For example, the THING flips feature on TAF. Their was an intermittent switch at the small flipper that was caught during TPL. It registered in switch test just fine. One player complained about it after their game so I took a look at it. Sure enough, the sensor had broken off it’s bracket and was laying in the hole thus why it would sometimes register but not others. I replaced the bracket and it was 100% again. A novice player most likely wont know, “Hey, that flipper was supposed to auto flip their.”
Sounds fair enough, will you be volunteering to come in a full day (should be their by 1ish) early to test games and not get into the show until 5pm the next day to test games? If you can find 8-10 or so people willing to do this that are qualified to test games (have the skill and knowledge to put a game through it’s paces) then I bet Colin and Phil would be more than interested in that solution. Being that they struggled to get that many people to offer up just 4 hours of time I’m guessing it would be a struggle.
I truly hope to see most of those in this thread that are concerned about fairness and telling Colin and Phil what they should be doing, to be volunteering to help run the tournament next year. I’m 100% guilty of this. 4 years ago I armchair quarterbacked the TPF tournament. I got an offer to help the next year so I did and I grew a much greater respect for what the organizers have to deal with at this event. I’m quite surprised anyone in their right mind would sign up to run this for free.
Obviously this is not a topic that can be addressed in isolation. It’s a topic that includes scheduling, sourcing of games, etc. you don’t need a dozen people or a ton… even 3 can play through games plenty. I wouldn’t open this to rando volunteers but would be drafting these guys as part of the staff of the event. I know it’s not easy… but it comes with the territory of a high profile event that you want to run as best you can. In our case, the techs and TDs handle this through setup. Staging the games, tuning the settings, and playing through to flush out any anomalies. This is a group of ~6 people in total. We also try to be very selective on the games we bring into the bank… but things still happen. Unknown ball hangups, etc. it’s not practical to expect perfection from an assorted assembly of games, but we try the best we can.
Scheduling of your event is a huge piece of this that is often inflexible (early access to the space, etc) so everyone’s constraints and solutions need to be tailored to their event.
I’ve been half-heartedly reading this thread and have my own opinions of the situation (to sum up: non-material advantage but appearances matter a great deal; TD’s should probably not be playing in their own large events) but this quote above is such an inane argument.
Yes, anyone can go to anything. Texas is a large state. The closest legitimate city to any of those locations is a 3 hour, one-way, drive away. For all intents and purposes, it is limited to Texans.
So their is nothing you (and your family) would enjoy doing in Austin, Dallas or Houston? These are 3 major cities with a ton of family fun things to do. Make a weekend of it. Play some pinball and when finished have some family fun. Icing on the cake is that it’s a great and competitive event that can earn you 30+ for winning.
It is not a limited event and is open to all so stop calling it limited. Qualifying is held on the weekend for a reason vs during the week like most other league events. If you aren’t willing to come then that is on you but if anyone can come it can NOT be limited by definition.
This is true, but I think it’s better to give novices the practice time rather than seasoned veterans. They could even pitch it as something available only to players not in IFPA yet, or those in 5 figure ranks - give true novices a small tourney to enjoy with just trophies and no prize pool.
The goal of this small tourney is to test the games, so I’d expect some TDs keeping a close eye on them during play. Yes, they may miss a thing flips error, but I’d think most issues would be caught. There is no perfect solution, but the current situation is farther from perfect than many others.
To be consistent, you have to expand your argument to any large tourney that uses local pins:
How many people from far away participate in the PPL or Fight Club leading up to PPO or Pinburgh?
How many people from far away participate in Cactus Jacks leagues/tourneys leading up to Silverball Showdown?
How many people from far away participate in Buffalo Pinball’s leagues /tourneys leading up to BPSO?
How many people from far away participate in Lyons Pinball leagues/tourneys leading up to Lyons Spring Classic?
How many people from far away participate in Flipperspiel leagues/tourneys leading up to Nationals/Pin-Masters?
How many people from far away participate in insert locale here leading up to insert accompanying larger tourney here.
It doesn’t matter. And it shouldn’t matter to anyone traveling to these larger events. As I stated earlier, home court advantage at pinball events exists, and anyone traveling to events (myself included) has to deal with that fact. If someone is passionate enough about mitigating the home court advantage, then they can make the additional travel arrangements and participate in the open local leagues/tourneys that are used to battle-test the larger event’s pins.
I’m not going to ask a location to stop hosting events or prevent anyone from playing their pins leading up to a larger event. I’m not going to ask a collector who’s donating a pin to a tourney to stop playing it leading up to an event.
I’m not going to demand that a TD explain to me how they’re preparing pins in advance of a tourney, or who is doing it. She/he is doing me a favor (as a participant) by having numerous pins ready for tourney play. Thank you, TD’s everywhere, and whomever else in your local community that took the time to play and tweak those pins, whether it was part of a local league/tourney or not.
The way to mitigate this perceived – and possibly material – advantage for Match Play and Limited Entry tourneys is by having a period immediately prior to the tourney to allow tourney participants to get at least a short period of play-testing. It’s what Pinburgh does. It’s what Nationals/Pin-Masters does. It’s what Silverball Showdown does. It’s what IFPA Worlds does. Etc. This is what TPF will do for next year. Phil and I already have a reasonable plan of how we will pull this off. We will announce it once it’s confirmed.
I look forward to seeing many of you at TPF2019! March 22-24, 2019.
Why not just give every entrant 1 practice game on each game they play?
The first game they play on each machine is practice and will not count regardless of what they score. This could be programmed into the software and be automatic.
Now everyone has a chance to feel out the setup of the games before they start consuming their entries. While adding some additional plays to the schedule will also extend the amount of time players are playing this can be accounted for by adjusting the total number of games available to play vs. players, reducing the # of entries per player allowed, etc.
You can still use your experienced players to vet the setup of the games the night before, and nobody can reasonably complain they didn’t get an equivilent opportunity.
Have to say I’m very happy with how this criticism was handled by the organizers. It’s all about perception when you’re in these high level tournaments and I’m glad it was addressed/fixed. Hopefully I can make it out next year!
That would be 12 more games in a 20 game tournament effectively needing 50% more qualifying time. Do you suggest starting the tournament Thursday morning and having everyone spending another night out of town and more money on travel and expenses?
I agree with you 100% … so I’m not totally sure why you quoted me there? It wasn’t an argument against using local pins. It was only a reply to the insane notion that people should fly into Texas to play in TPL. Full stop.
Mark and I stopped playing the 24 hour two years ago and only run it. It was a hard choice but we decided it was the good of the event. We end up enjoying the event in a whole different way. I’d love to still be playing in it but C’est la vie. I am all for organizers playing in everything they run if at all possible. It’s an insane amount of work and we still participate in the Pintastic show tournament we run in Sturbridge MA.
This is a bad idea. Every game should be ready as soon as the qualifying starts. You never want people using up limited entries when a game isn’t even ready yet.
We’ve mostly been able to avoid play testing issue by not relying on anyone for games. Mark and I make it a point for Pintastic to only bring our games which are fully vetted and already setup for tournament play. Sure a thing or two needs tweaking when we get it to the show but we aren’t starting with a pile of unknowns. Slight tilt adjustments from its previous sitting spot. Adjusting feeds possibly. All stuff that him and I are usually able to deal with Thursday afternoon/evening with a batting around of a ball or so and giving the games a few good test shakes. We know the games. We know any possibly weak points they have. We can load up parts we know or think could become an issue, etc.
At shows scheduling is a huge issue for these tournaments so things like open practice sessions aren’t really feasible without sacrificing precious qualifying time or cutting into finals running late and upsetting the organizers and they schedules they are forced to adhere to.
I think also as a pinball community we need to be careful what we complain about and how. If we yell at all the organizers too much these events won’t happen anymore. It’s all good voicing concerns about things and helping TDS run better events with good feedback. Posting things publicly tend to turn south and get very negative sometimes.
