PinFest Tournament 2018

Events
48

We know that the Match Play event did not run smoothly. This is a personal disappointment because we ran a similar event at the York show and by all accounts that was a great event. It did not translate here to PinFest and we’ll think about either cutting it completely or modifying the format to be a better experience next time. Because we saw that the double-elimination format didn’t work well for Match Play, we pivoted to PAPA-Style Finals in Main and by all accounts the Main Finals were much smoother as a result.

Corey, thank you to you and your team for organizing the tournaments. I played in the Match Play event and had a blast. We had a few hiccups finding games in the early rounds, but your staff helped quickly field any questions and my rounds ran without a problem. I cannot speak to the finals (just missed the cut off!) but I really hope that the event comes back next year for those of us who want to compete but can’t make both days of Pinfest for the main tournament. Thank you again for all your hard work in organizing and running this event!

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49

It was my first time attending the Festival and the Tournament. (And my first time in Allentown!) I had a great time and thought everything went remarkable well.

Thanks to Corey, the officials, techs, scorekeepers, streamers and everyone else for making it such a great event.

And congratulations to Jason Zahler for the big win!

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Although I understand your point and would rule similarly in most circumstances, I disagree with setting such a high bar.

When I am the Tournament Director, if there is consensus among the players in the group as to what happened (ie, “we all saw the score reel skip”), I feel that that is sufficient for me to accept the players’ statements, even without a tournament official witnessing the malfunction.

However, I’m not arguing that that is what happened in this case. And I’d also agree that if there is any confusion, uncertainty or disagreement among players, the score should be voided.

Similarly, I think that players’ opinions, when thoughtfully constructed and respectfully delivered, are appropriate and are an important feedback mechanism for tournament officials. In the hot and heavy scrum of a tournament, there can be a lot of pressure for a quick decision, and I’m sure most TDs would agree that the subtler points of the IFPA/PAPA rules can occasionally be overlooked.

For example, at Pinburgh a few years ago, my machine had a major malfunction which resulted in a loss of ball on a modern Stern (AC/DC). The Tournament Director ruled I’d get a compensation ball on a new game. Because AC/DC is a game where you build toward awards (I had made a lot of progress toward all three multiballs), I asked the TD to consider changing the machine settings from 3-ball to 4-ball in the middle of the game, so I could get my compensation ball in the same game. (This is explicitly stated as the procedure in the IFPA/PAPA rules. It is technically possible on Sterns from LOTR forward.) The official agreed and asked a tech to do so. It made a big difference to my score.

For many years, I meekly accepted officials’ rulings, even when I knew they were half-correct or plainly incorrect, because I didn’t want to ‘cause trouble’. After years of being a tournament official myself now, I’ve learned how to respectfully assert my opinion to an official, making sure to do so calmly and, of course, to always accept the official’s decision as final. I feel that this is as important a tournament skill as any flipper pass.

9 Likes
51

Tournament was great. I was looking through some players scores and of the ones I saw (only looked through some players so there could be more) I noticed three players with 25-27 entries played. Being that the tournament was 24 entries max it looks like there may be a glitch in the never drains software that allowed a few people to play past the 24 entries or maybe a few more entries got added to certain players due to a machine getting taken out really early? Wanted to bring it up in case it was the former so that the glitch could hopefully be fixed before it affects another tournament using the software as it did seem to have an affect in one instance in Pinfest where one of the games past the 24 max entries for a player caused them to make finals and if it had not been played another player would have been in instead.

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Maybe in future streaming of tournaments will add this to arsenal might help glareimage

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One of those players with more than 24 entries was me. I had 25 entries.

A situation arose where someone else’s score was incorrectly recorded under my player record. The score was higher than any of my actual scores, so it gave me points I didn’t deserve.

I brought it up to Corey. He voided the erroneous entry’s score and gave me another entry to compensate.

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I may have to bust out my PAPA sombrero next year.

Not only does it help with glare, it prevents any opponents who are viewing the live stream from seeing that secret move that gets you the big points!

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55

Hey Harry! Glad you had a good time with the event despite the rough start. At our normal PinCrossing League tonight, we’re already cooking up ideas on how to run a Friday event for people who can only make the first day of PinFest. @ericwag was also providing some good ideas from leagues that he’s involved in on how we address long-running games, especially in an event where we’re not trying to max out TGP.

I do love the format, and as of now we’ll attempt it at the York event if there’s going to be an event there (with some improvements, of course).

This…might actually work, ha. Jay is already cooking up engineering plans on how we deal with it next year.

In short, we had the ability to override the 24 max if need be, in situations like the one that Eric mentioned. We had a handful of human errors where people were given incorrect scores, logged against the wrong game, or other issues of the sort that caused them to have a void marked against them that shouldn’t have actually counted as a void, so a bonus game was awarded.

Karl wrote in some awesome code that gave the Reg Desk a view into the number of entries a person would have after purchase. If it would have put them over 24, there was a nice big WARNING with an override option. All overrides were raised by the Reg Desk with me, and I approved them in the cases where they were needed.

For everyone, I was able to get Finals logged into MatchPlay, which will also end up in @haugstrup’s MatchPlay Ratings system.

IFPA standings for both events will get sorted and submitted by Friday.

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You weren’t one of the players I saw with more than 24 but that explains it! Thank you for the clarification.

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During the WiFi meltdown and possibly at other times. Multiple attempts were made to enter scores as “voided” which resulted in multiple voids being recorded for the same “entry” . This should explain all of the totals over 24 . Happened to me.

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Yes, as Ed noted there was a point during the event where our wifi took a nap, and another where NeverDrains went offline for a few minutes.

Many thanks to Karl who I was able to get a hold of quickly and we were back up and running a mere few minutes later. Thanks, @kdeangelo! Multiple voids were given out to people who should have only gotten one, at which point extra tickets were given to those affected.

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IFPA results from the tournament are posted:

Main: https://www.ifpapinball.com/tournaments/view.php?t=24300
Match Play: https://www.ifpapinball.com/tournaments/view.php?t=24301

1 Like
60

Just a post-mortem note on this one-

I think everything turned out really well.

The biggest thing was the 20 game bank. A huge success. Lines were not an issue, ever, and I doubt anybody had any trouble hitting their 24 entries, even those who did the match play event. I was finished with my entries by 6pm on Friday. Didn’t even need to consider using the hour of exclusive time granted to volunteers and people who brought games on Friday night.

I do think, that with so many games and lines not being an issue, might want to dial it back ever so slightly on game difficulty. Some of them were pretty nuts, including the transformers jacked up with wood blocks, and the Iron Maiden with no posts.

Also, might be possible to start the main tournament an hour earlier. We made it with 20 minutes or so to spare but that 8pm deadline looming is pretty brutal. Again, with 20 games, I don’t see lines and getting through 24 entries being an issue again if you do it the same way.

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First, a big thanks to you, Levi, for bringing two of you own games which helped keep lines and queues under control.

Karl has been kind enough to provide some raw data that I’ll be sifting through to see if I can get a view on game times, queue times, and queue lengths. I’ll share with the forum any interesting results that come out of it.

All of this will factor into how we approach it for next year (more or less games? more entries? less difficult games?). It’s a strange balance we’re trying to strike and fortunately we fell on the side of more games, low queues and low wait times and we’ll want to make sure we’re on the right side of the coin next year, too.

Agree with your thoughts here. Starting an hour earlier will buy us more time, and it’s something we’ll consider for next year along with:

  • Quicker transition to getting A-Finals started faster
  • Adjustments to games where needed (i.e. turn off Extra Balls that were left on during qualifying)
  • Getting bank groupings correct enough where bank groups run similar amounts of time
  • Aligning things like bank selections and game choice to how tournaments like Pinburgh run and communicate that ahead of time so people are familiar with the ruleset
  • …and other things I’m sure we’ll think of during the course of the next year

@Funtorium - Good luck this weekend! I’m sorry my schedule didn’t allow me to get up to New York, but the trophies look awesome and I’m looking forward to seeing the recaps of the event.

1 Like
62

I agree the format is definitely one of the more interesting ones for HERB - not just the +100 but a modified structure that pays bonus points to 13th. Also, by far one of the most brutal formats in the circuit - nobody is technically safe until the last ticket is punched.

From a “I’m really curious” standpoint, what’s the philosophy behind 4 scores counting in an 18/20 game bank? Was there a reason you settled on that number and why not more?

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There’s been a evolution over the past few years to how I’ve approached pointing for HERB tournaments. Probably worthy of it’s own topic or expanding the existing topic I’ve linked below, where I took a lot of initial influences from.

First, looking at what’s considered standard:
100,90,85,84,83…etc.

This awards 1st and 2nd Place with Bonus Points
Runs out of points after 87 players

I won’t rehash points that were made in that other thread, but since that thread I’ve been very intrigued and have implemented decay-rate based systems for the HERB events that I’m involved with. The goal for this event was to reward the Top 12 on a machine with bonus points, and not just the Top Two. My thought is that somewhere between the Top 10%-20% should get some kind of bump for being that high relative to everyone else, and settled on bonuses for the Top 12.

The +100 was a reaction to last year, when we used a similar scale but it bottomed out a lot quicker (90% decay vs. the 97.5% decay used this year), and a player was able to qualify for Classics by only playing three games. Stellar work by the player, but we wanted to force players to have to play all four games to qualify.

Dovetailing into your # of machines question, the reason we had four was because:
a) That’s what was done in the past when the event qualifying time was MUCH shorter and we limited players to eight tickets.
b) Because we relied on a number of volunteers for bringing machines, we didn’t know exactly how many machines we would have up and running and I didn’t want to force six machines if it turned out we could only get 10 up and running. We were fortunate to have 18 up and running for the event, and I hope we get the same level of dedication from volunteers next year.

Certainly doesn’t mean we won’t change it up next year. I believe the NYCPC does 5, PAPA does 6, and I think TPF did 8 this year. It would force a player to flex across eras on more machines instead of doing what I did by just sticking to early solid state Bally machines.

3 Likes
64

Just a heads up that because @kdeangelo is awesome, he has already coded constraints into the DTM system that can be used to force players to use pins from different Eras in their aggregate of Best X that count in a Best Game format. This is what TPF has used the past two years, with great results. Specifically, each player’s aggregate of best 8 had to include at least two pins from each Era. Results are still available on neverdrains.com/tpf2018

For example: http://neverdrains.com/tpf2018/playerIndex.php?disp=player&pid=152
Rachel’s TWD 12 points was excluded from her aggregate ranking score because she already had 2 Moderns in her Best 8, and needed 2 EM’s to count toward her Best 8vpins, which then needed to include her 8 points on “300.”

Thanks again, Karl!

3 Likes
65

Could you have moved one of the displays (credit/match) to player 3’s since it sounds like it was the display itself and not the connector?

Regarding the match play, with that format (using games on the show floor) it is a crap shoot - but at least if you have a group of 4 all getting screwed the same exact way, at least it’s “fair”. A lot of issues at Pinfest that people point out and say “people bring machines with weak flippers, etc.” is actually power related. I was helping someone on a bank where instead of the 2x30 amp circuits in each main box were feeding 12 machines (6 on each) they had plugged in 5 or 6 power strips so they were feeding about 30 machines.

I purposely set up my 3 machines in freeplay on a quiet corner that had mostly EM’s on their box, figuring that they would draw less current, and I was right - I didn’t have any power related issues - no one on that corner did.

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Yes. +1.

Neat! We had a lack of EMs this year (except for Dragon) so we’ll see how next year shapes up in terms of available machines.

Tech work is not my specialty, but my understanding is that we would have risked shocking the techs if we tried to live-swap the displays while the game was powered. Old Ballys don’t retain last game scores when you turn it back off and on. We turned the machine off, swapped the displays with the credit/ball count (as you suggested above) and it worked fine for the rest of the event.

Good to note for next year. We had a very “soft” checklist of things to look at, but we’ll be looking to augment that and have a more robust list of things to check on a machine. I’ve had people sending me other ideas that will help with organization (better labeling of aisles, numbering machine with a small post-it or placard, a “map” added to Google Sheets approximating location, removing TOTAN) that we’ll try out at York.

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Hello everyone!

We’re trying to get in touch with the A-Division Top 4 from the Match Play Event on Friday.

We have a few additional prizes that should have been distributed at the event that were not given away at the time.

  1. Rob Wintler-Cox
  2. Tony Makowski
  3. Steven Bowden (contacted)
  4. Nick Hislop (contacted)

If you know Rob or Tony, would you mind asking them to send an e-mail to pinfesttournament@gmail.com? Thank you in advance!