I believe with Tennessee and Delaware on the ‘of interest’ list for this year we could be up to 42 states out of 50.
What’s the reasonableness test for deciding if a place like San Diego should be ‘alone’ or should be lumped in with Los Angeles? If those aren’t lumped together at 3.5 hours apart, what happens between Milwaukee/Madison/Chicago each of which are in that 90 minute distance (taking Milwaukee as the center point)? What happens as things change over time? At what point do you splinter a developing metro area into a “developed” metro area worthy of it’s own MCS?
The great thing about using States is that SOMEONE ELSE marked the boundaries so I don’t have to. The logistics involved here seem like a massive mountain to climb. It takes something that is currently measured OBJECTIVELY (however unfair for certain percentages of the population), and changes it to a measurement that is SUBJECTIVE (which never goes well politically). I’m all for evaluating the results of an analysis done by someone else if they want to pitch this as a solution . . . but I’m not your guy for putting this data together
Residency gets real goofy and I wouldn’t mess with that. Last year all of our participants were from Utah, but recently our tournaments are getting a lot of people popping in from other states. I would love for them to come back and compete in the SCS if they qualify, and I’m pretty sure at least one will.
Instead of using MSA to split up the SCS, using MSA and WPPR combined to determine the LOCATION where the SCS finals are held would make more sense. Make it a lotto system. If 65% of WPPRs are earned in the NYC MSA, 11% in Albany, 15% in Buffalo, 6% in Rochester, 3% in Binghamton, then put numbers 1-100 in a hat and figure out which MSA it should be in that year.
How big does an area need to be for it to be considered it’s own separate area?
What happens if an area doesn’t have a location to host the finals? For example if Rochester doesn’t, then does their 6% get roped into the next nearest area, or is the whole state now divided up over 94% instead of 100%.
Is the State Rep able to determine if an area willing to host isn’t up to the “IFPA quality level” expected to run a smooth State Championship? Is that a completely subjective thing for the State Rep to decide, or is there some sort of voting process among the players to determine if a potential host should be eligible?
Who is tabulating the WPPR’s earned within each area to the allocate that appropriately? Does that responsibility fall on the State Rep?
When should the hosting location be determined? Before all the WPPR’s have been awarded, or is this waiting until when registration opens for SCS and all the results are finalized? For New York specifically, when should the Buffalo players find out it’s actually in Buffalo, and the NYC players maybe need to focus on playing NJ or a neighboring state instead?
If a state has a process already locked down (say rotating locations naturally every year), should this raffle process be forced upon ALL STATES? If not, who or what triggers when this process should be forced?
If we go back to the pro sports comparison, the things that bring a team to a city or state are: local people willing to fund and support the team, and the league determining that the team could be profitable. Translating to IFPA, I’d say it’d be up to local pinball groups to promote their metro area for championship eligibility, and the IFPA to decide if they can attract enough participants to make it worthwhile. So, back to the state reps for the most part.
It would definitely take some time to build, but I think the end result would work a little better than state lines. Again, under current IFPA system, Idaho gets the same participation potential as California while having far fewer players. In pro-sports world, ID has zero teams while CA has 3 NFL teams and 4 MLB teams. Emulate the pro leagues and put the resources where the interest is.
Another strategy to split up regions might be to look at geographical clustering of sanctioned tournaments (or maybe the WPPRs awarded at those tournaments). It could be pre-determined that say 10 regions will exist, with each region centered on a cluster. Each tournament would count for the regional center it is closest too, with regions being re-evaluated each year.
Assuming we find a way to have these individual areas all worked out . . . how do you track the results to their appropriate area?
I know we have a State field for all calendar submissions that tie any event with that state abbreviation into the appropriate custom ranking, and it’s all automated.
If the “Cincy Metro Area” is included, how do we track those standings in an automated fashion? We don’t have the resources to track it by manually adding tournaments to a custom ranking list.
MCS . . . RCS . . . all I know is I would have a bunch of SCS trophies to throw away
The issue here is who evaluates how these 10 regions will be selected, and with what metrics? What happens with the borders of those regions and running into the players furthest out from multiple region centers? (Similar to the border issues we have now with the state boundaries and communities that end up on the ‘wrong side’ of the border line)
On the tracking side similar to Larry’s proposal, how do we then track those results in an automated fashion similar to how we do it now via the State abbreviation field on the calendar submission from the TD?
These are already defined for us by the US Gov’t. These change sometimes (I recently got folded into the NYC one from a Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown one that they used to define. I would also guess that >99% of US tournaments take place in a defined Metropolitan Statistical Area
Throwing the results out makes sense to me. There would be no way to do “next closest” If there’s no viable/willing area then their results can be thrown out of the pool, the point is to keep the distribution of lotto entries proportional to the WPPRs earned in that area.
My goal is to move away from giving state reps power without any sort of checks in place. I’ll get back to you on this one.
I can try to do this using the IFPA API to grab the tournament location and then Census/google maps stuff to see if I can easily get filters for Metropolitan Statistical Area. [quote=“pinwizj, post:105, topic:3163”]
5) When should the hosting location be determined? Before all the WPPR’s have been awarded, or is this waiting until when registration opens for SCS and all the results are finalized? For New York specifically, when should the Buffalo players find out it’s actually in Buffalo, and the NYC players maybe need to focus on playing NJ or a neighboring state instead?
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This will be done on SCS draft day, the first Sunday after New Years Day the next year. It will be a big livestream event and Philadelphians will be able to skype in to see if their 1% chance of an Allentown final comes true. If that fails they can see if Atlantic City gets one for New Jersey.
I’ve gotten a ton of positive feedback that pre-selecting the area to host has been a good thing for those States that have been using that process.
Players know going into the year before they map out where they are playing where the State Championship will be, and can plan accordingly.
Versus having played a full year, and leaving it up to the pinball gods to decide if where the decided to play was a smart choice or not.
There’s also the issue of the State Rep needing to lock in potential multiple hosts during the year, only to end up using one of them (whichever one is selected). I know the many hosts pride themselves on hosting a “quality” State Championship and take months to prep their collection to be worthy of hosting, and typically go to great personal expense as well. If a potential host puts in all that effort and doesn’t get picked, is that just . . . sorry, maybe next time?
Talk to your State Rep about putting better plans in place . . . I dare say copy me in on that email and perhaps we can get to a place that makes sense for New York specifically (rather than finding a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist in many other states outside of the ‘stuff’ you have to deal with)
Ok I’d like to make a proposal of sorts…To follow up on Metallik
How about you still have State boundaries but you have an event in cities over a certain population worth a bigger amount of points toward SCS qualifying. Provided there is someone willing to host said event in that city. I’m in Ohio so I’m going to use it as an example…
Lets say cities with population of 200,000 or more could host an event (1 per year) worth a significant amount of points toward SCS for that state. I realize people from other states could come and play in these events and possibly qualify for a state they don’t live in …but that’s no different than it is now. SO in Ohio that would qualify 3 cities to have this event. Columbus 850,106, Cleveland 388,072, and Cincy 298,550. In Ohio that pretty much covers the entire State and gives 1 shot to most residents of the State to play in a valuable tournament as far SCS goes.
As it is right now in Ohio, Cleveland has the majority of events which is great and they have done a great job in promoting pinball in their area. Also the only 2 pinball shows in Ohio are up in that area. Columbus is starting to catch up as they have several locations and have multiple tournaments there as well. People from Columbus can also travel to Cleveland in a reasonable amount of time (2 to 2.5 hours) to play in events there as well. Cincy has a decent size base of players and there are some good players here as well. We have had a league here for 5 or 6 years but not many locations. There is at least 1 now that has regular tournaments and I have also tried to have a few others at times. I have held the Cincy Pinball Championship at our house the last couple years to promote interest in this area as well. Cincy is 2 to 2.5 hours from Col. but 5 to 5.5 hours from Cleveland. So in comparison it takes me 5.5 hours to get to Chicago, so if I want to compete I could go to Cleveland or Chicago in about the same amount of time…
Many people in Cincy go to the LAX show and play there which is 1.5 hours away for us. Which is easier than going to Columbus or Cleveland. I know the KY folks frown on people from outside the State playing in their SCS, but for those of us here in the Cincy “wasteland” it is the closest and best option for us. There for a couple years KY didn’t have a location to hold the SCS finals so I held it here at my house in Cincy. and I helped them coordinate the location that they hold them in now and they hold weekly tournaments and leagues there. If we were really wanting to we could go there and play weekly, but it is still a 1.5 hour drive and I don’t know about everyone else but I don’t have that much time on a weekly basis to travel and still have a life outside of pinball. We did travel down one weekend to play and when we arrived were told it didn’t start till 10 pm…and we didn’t have a hotel room so wouldn’t be able to stay so we ended up going home. We were actually on a pinball road trip and trading a pin while we were there but we couldn’t stay that late and get home and go to work the next morning.
We actually haven’t even played in the tourney at LAX the last couple years for various reasons, mainly because of the time it takes since it is a circuit event and the lines are long. We have other responsibilities that we have to take care of and we like to spend time with friends we don’t get to see often except there…Although I might qualify in KY this year since I finished 3rd in a tournament that was held in NKY (Thanks Erik for holding it! )
Back to the original topic…maybe holding an event in cities with certain populations worth more toward SCS qualifying would allow more people from around each State to qualify.
Just a thought I’m throwing out there…
(LOL Hey Josh don’t you miss me being the KY State Rep… )
Are you talking about artificially applying some additional value to a specific tournament, outside of our normal WPPR calculations? Right now “the formula” handles the value for ALL 3500 events that exist, with the exception of the 4 Majors. There’s no other manual manipulation of value that we do.
What happens if a city wants to hold more than one really big tournament? To me this sounds like you’re trying to create an “Ohio Pinball Circuit”, where you have a specific predetermined list of event that could specifically for this thing, while all the other events in Ohio simply wouldn’t count towards this thing?
The idea of individual State Circuits is definitely a cool idea, but is kind of a different animal compared to how/why the SCS was developed. The idea being that anyone could literally start an event from scratch and have it instantly associated with the campaign.
The ECS out in Europe is kind of structured this way. We have the regular ECS standings which is for those that travel around to multiple events to qualify (similar to the PAPA Circuit). In addition, we reserve spots for the ECS Final for every individual country that is running their own Championship Series.
For example, the UK is currently running the UKCS. The winner of that automatically earns a spot in the ECS Final as a ‘wildcard’ regardless of whether they actually traveled and competed in any ECS events during the season.
This is a very good point. I liked h_flex’s idea of keeping the roster for each state confidential until the response deadline passed, but I hadn’t thought of this problem. It doesn’t work because of the people who aren’t guaranteed in but might still make the cut in one state or another.
The one issue I have with the current SCS selection for Oregon is it is virtually impossible for a Eugene player to make it into the top-16. I think expanding to a top-24 would make it possible (though still difficult compared to a Portland player) to make it into the SCS tournament. I think this would be a big plus for Oregon overall, but certainly a plus for the growing pinball scene in Eugene.
Yes there would be some additional value for these specific tournaments outside of regular WPPR calculations…Yeah I know that screws up the WPPR calculations, but maybe these events should be worth more for being a larger city championship. And everyone would have the opportunity to participate (even out of State) so all would be eligible for said WPPR’s.
I’m saying only one event like this per city that qualify s (population wise) for the elevated points. I realize this would have to be coordinated through the state rep, so that these events don’t overlap or are too close together and should be spaced out during the year. So for instance 1 could be held in Columbus in March, 1 in Cleveland in June, and 1 in Cincy in Sept. These dates would be announced as early as possible so that anyone in State or out could make plans to attend if they desire too. Possibly these could be combined with Pinball shows in the specific area so more could attend.
I realize I’m using Ohio as an example and that other States will have more cities that qualify and that will be harder to coordinate.
Also all other events in Ohio would still count as normal, these 3 events would just be worth more points toward Ohio SCS.
Originally when SCS started there weren’t many events in the State. So our Cincy league and leagues in general actually counted for something. If you want to take our Cincy league for instance, if you won the league you had a chance to qualify for the SCS Championship if you participated in maybe 4 or 5 other events in Ohio. I won our league the first year of the SCS and qualified in Ohio, but I ended up going to KY to participate…for 2 reasons, 1 because my drive was either 5+ hours to Cleveland or 2 hours to where the KY SCS was going to be held. The 2nd was because my husband and a few others around here qualified and we all rode together and went to KY SCS. At that time our league actually meant something points wise. Now our league is pretty much useless point wise. I know we could change the way we do our league to suck up as many points as possible…but we enjoy the way our league is run and we have a good time.
I don’t know maybe the individual State circuit sounds interesting. All events in the State still count there would just be a few that were more valuable. Maybe this would make it more of a total State event rather than a this area has a shitload of events and that area doesn’t event…
How many additional points would you see being artificially added to the “Cincy” event?
If a normal ‘big event’ via the formula is worth somewhere around 50 points, I’m wondering how you can make ONE EVENT meaningful for a state like Ohio.
Right now the cut line for 16th place is 127.71 WPPR points. For the winner of this Cincy event to be able to instantly make the cut for the OH SCS, you would probably have to make the event worth 150-200 WPPR’s to guarantee that.
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