Pinball! Pinball! Pinball! Tournament report and format discussion

you can definitely make it shorter by just creating a game on an open machine and then it’ll take the next two players in the queue and put them on a game and shorten the queue by 2 ppl

ok, that makes sense. anyway to make the queue longer somehow if it’s going too fast?

Right after a new game has been created, click “arena malfunction” for that game. The machine will be removed from the tournament, the two players will go to the top of the queue and now the queue is bigger than it was

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perfect, tried both way in a test tourney and they do increase/decrease queue length by +/- 2 and it stays at that number! thanks :slight_smile:

Be careful with creating a new arena. As stated it takes the first 2 people in the queue and puts them on a new game, however the end result is that you “cheat” the 2nd person who was in queue because he does not get to play a second game. Instead it’s one and done and then back to the end of the queue.

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That just sounds like a bug to me. It shouldn’t be something TDs need to worry about.

Is the opposite true? If I pull a game and the two players go back to the queue, both players get two new games even though one of them had already played a game? If that’s true it opens up a fatal exploit where people can force a fault on game 2 and get more matches.

I believe that is accurate. Would have to setup a test tournament to see.

This is true, but there’s no general incentive to cause a fault. When you click “arena malfunction” there’s no result recorded for that match. Players are just wasting their own time.

There is a theoretic incentive for a player who is losing to cause a machine malfunction in order to get a quick retry on a different game, but I would hope you have rules in your tournament against machine abuse and would simply disqualify and remove that player from your tournament.

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You can say it’s theoretical, but it will happen and it will impact tournaments.

There are many ways to get a game pulled that aren’t outright abuse and it’s really not possible to always eject a player for suspected but unprovable shennanigans. Critical hit has a Modica plague card for a reason.

Someone always gains more when a machine has to be removed (or a game has to be restarted) after play has begun. The impact in a Flip Frenzy tournament is not significantly bigger than when you have to switch machines on players in some other tournament format.

People are still playing knockout tournaments even though a player who is on their last strike and far behind in score on their current game has every incentive to manhandle the machine in order produce a catastrophic malfunction.

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We started using Win % instead of Win-Loss differential for ranking in this format. Anyone else do the same? There’s definitely pros & cons to either, just curious if other tourneys are using something other than W-L Diff.

Win % could incentivize slow play in certain scenarios, whereas part of the appeal of this format is speed and a higher number of games played.

I had a scenario when playing wins minus losses where I had a big lead on Kiss, knew I needed one more win (in addition to that one) to make playoffs, and time was running low. Drained my last couple balls on purpose, won, started another match just in time, won that one, and made playoffs. I feel like those are the kinds of decisions you’d want to encourage, not the opposite (slow play to preserve win percentage).

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I agree with @yancy that win percentage could lead to some shenanigans.

As far as other criteria for declaring a victor, apparently, the traditional method for this format was just total wins with number of losses being the tie breaker.

I played this way once and it was a lot of fun. Trying to get a lot of points quickly to move on to the next game. The one disadvantage is it does lend itself to conceding some matches.

That being said, Matchplay makes this very easy to run with net wins being the determining factor. I do like the traditional loser stays on the game unless it’s the second loss too. It gives losers a chance to make up wins while sending the winner back into the que. Sort of the frenzy equivalent of Swiss. Sadly there is no way to do this with Matchplay.

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Be sure to upvote https://matchplay.uservoice.com/forums/595996-general/suggestions/36761398-implement-traditional-flip-frenzy-rules if you haven’t already, and spread it around to any other players or TDs that want it - hopefully @haugstrup will get a chance to look at it.

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The main thing I’d like to see from FF on MP is balanced arena draws. I think it’s random at the moment and in the events I’ve played, people are getting tons of repeats while other arenas go unplayed.

Anyone know if that’s been suggested yet?

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We’ve definitely had a ton of repeat games. After running a few of these it seems like arena draws are pretty balanced across the entire group, but it’s pretty common for the same player to end up on the same game 3 or 4 times in one night when they only play 12 games and there are 20-30 available.

Voted for that suggestion. Thanks

There has been a ton of local dicussion to the pros and cons of % vs. net wins. While I agree that it could lead to some shenanigans I don’t really see those shenanigans being a whole lot different then giving up or conceding a match to get back in the queue. Either scenario is not ideal IMO.

What win percentage changes, and I tend to agree with, is the person that goes 14-1 no longer defeats the person that goes 12-0, which IMO is a “better” result. We were very close to having this sort of situation play out at our first Frenzy event with a sizeable field but a couple late losses by the second place player shifted things.

I think in practice, it will be quite rare to see two players with so few losses and I personally ever so slightly prefer the net wins metric but I don’t see why having win percentage as an option would be a bad thing. TDs should try to figure out what their communities prefer or respond to most so having flexibility with configuration is very helpful.