Nooooo, don’t do me like that, Ray, you were one of the good ones!
but there is an BIG judgement call on real tilt vs tilting for exploit.
May need to set games with exploits to NOT have an HIGH tilt.
also what about cases like you have little to no bonus and ball heading for an drain?
early stern games with the tilt trough thing where you have nothing to lose by trying to save an draining ball when you have not validate yet
I do admit I did not see that Ray turn coming!
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Damn, now we’ve moved on from “there’s that one guy who wants it, and he has PAPA in his name, so he gets to have it” to “okay, that guy doesn’t do tournaments anymore, but he isn’t dead yet, so…” Guess we’re stuck with it, then.
Seriously, though, here’s my issue with it, and I don’t think anyone has brought that up in this megathread yet:
Fair enough, TDs can make their own rules and replace stuff they don’t like. You know how many tournaments I’ve played in where the TDs have written their own rules? Best guess gets that amount in $.
This isn’t about how it limits what a TD can do, it doesn’t. It’s about how it makes the actual experience of players who care about the rules worse. It’s like this:
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There’s a rule nobody really agrees with, but the situation never comes up, so TDs don’t bother going through the hassle of removing it for their tournaments.
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As a player, it’s still hanging over your head all the time, though. You know about the rule and actually want to play fair? Then you can’t do a beneficial move your opponent will do with impunity.
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With impunity, you say? Why don’t you just go get a ruling? Sure, go cry to the TD about breaking a rule he doesn’t even know about or finds as annoying as you do. This is not done.
This isn’t some hypothetical bullshit, it’s my experience as a player in Europe. Your kilometrage may vary.
The point is that the IFPAPA rules are the de facto default. You’re not little ifpa and little papa who make up rules they personally like, but everybody else can totally make up their own. You’re the institution that defines the default for every pinball tournament on Earth.
If there’s a rule a majority of people do not want to have in their tournaments, or at best don’t care about, why don’t you just remove it from the default and add it as an extra rule to your own IFPA events? I’ve heard TDs can do that.
And I will even reply!
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It does seem like the kind of thing that doesn’t need to be in the global rules governing everything, as it’s infrequent enough that it could be handled on a case by case basis. For instance some TDs may allow tilt for greed letters and some not, but I guess then it would be up to the TD to call out what is specifically not allowed rather than call out what is (I’ve seen this at D82 regarding Mist Multiball starts)
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Aaaaand he’s back. Attaboy.
But that is specifically allowed with an OK and an NOT ok way of doing in the ifpa rules.
Judging intent on tilts is hard and when is an game over? So I can’t test tilt as last player on last ball?
But what about when I just want to get the game over fast? and not have to play out ball saver / validation
Now when there is an plunge last ball after winning rule in enforce does that count as an intentional tilt as some can say I’m just speeding up the last ball ending?
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Joking aside, @pinwizj, do you not see the IFPA as the institution that defines the default rules for every pinball tournament in the world? Because from my point if view, that’s how the world sees you.
If there’s a mismatch in perception, we better do something about it.
To expand on that, earlier in the thread, you said that for you the IFPAPA ruleset is “just guidelines for other TD’s to make their own ruleset”. Do you still see it that way? In my own experience, 99% of tournament organizers don’t see it like that, they see it as the most general sensible go-to ruleset that’s safe to base your tournament on (and maybe add a rule or two if you’re doing something weird).
Also, regarding PAPA: I’ll be forever grateful to PAPA for recording and publishing hundreds of video tutorials and commentated tournament games, and for later pioneering tournament live streams. I’m just a poor European, though, I’ve never been to any PAPA events, and I’ll never see Pennsylvania with my own eyes, so I can’t say any more than that.
I wish them well, but right now, PAPA seems to be a mostly defunct organization that should not hold any sway over what’s in the de facto default rules for every pinball tournament in the world—especially not regarding a rule whose only justification in this 250 reply thread seems to have been “it turned out to be useful at Pinburgh, because it’s easier to explain to players than best effort”.
The IFPAPA ruleset was mainly written for the PAPA team and IFPA team to have a unified ruleset for the events that each of us independently organized.
Pinburgh has exceptions to this ruleset.
The PAPA WC has exceptions to this ruleset.
The IFPA WC has exceptions to this ruleset.
As a TD myself I have no problem announcing “Tilting for GREED letters on Addams Family is fine” before the tournament starts.
I also continue to respect the PAPA team members who helped to create, shape and document this unified ruleset. I’ll simply disagree with you on the statement that PAPA is a “mostly defunct organization that should not hold any sway over what’s in the de facto default rules for every pinball tournament in the world”. I still value the opinion of that group of people, and while they still feel strongly in the spirit of the rules that are currently written, I’m happy to support that and simply make an exception for the events I organize.
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Emphasis on the most general sensible go-to rulesheet. That’s why it was created to give other TDs creative freedom or since pinball is not constant(new mechs on machines, software issues, new games in general) it’s almost impossible to cover every single scenario. So most of the TDs use them as a foundation and generally accepted.
Players will vote where they play based on attending an event. So if they like the TD and how they run things they will attend.
I guess I don’t really know what your question is about it. If we had unlimited funding to always have “An official IFPA TD” then yea sure let’s make it more in depth. But with the variables of playing all over the world, I think they are great.
Thanks for the clarification, I accept that this is a dead-end then.
It’s not about making the ruleset more in depth, it’s the opposite—removing rules that have been put in for very specific reasons that don’t apply to most tournaments, and that most people here disagree with.
At least in 2017 they did, but it looks like all of those people either left or stopped caring, so whatever.
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I use the IFPA/PAPA ruleset as the default if not superseded by amendments, then I have a list of amendments. It’s easiest to start from an existing ruleset (especially one that most people know the broad strokes of) and then change the things that bug you about it, so that’s what I’ve done. IFPA/PAPA is my “common law” and then I have statutes especially for my league/tournaments. These are made available on a clipboard for any player to peruse. Most of them relate to what to do with extra balls (since our public location has them turned on) and one of them is, in fact, that a player is allowed to intentionally tilt their extra ball. (That’s the only intentional tilt given as an exception because it’s the situation in which someone is most likely to have a really good and understandable reason to want to do it.)
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what about dirty pool rules that need game knowledge to know if there is one or not and it may even be on some games only in an tournament rom.
Right now they only talk about an small list of games with some ok and some not ok.
While there are other games that have dirty pool setups.
Let me know what other games have valid dirty pool opportunities and I’ll include them on the list.
also this list is an “Not a Stuck Ball” list
Quick off hand list More to come
Games that can hold balls in kickers for X time
- blackwater 100
- the shadow (but after tilt they don’t clear and mess up the state of the rest of the game for all players) (needs an rom fix)
- others
Moving Target Banks / drops
- Tron (don’t know about the software off hand but up / down bank is there)
- Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball (home brew)
- DeadPool (more of an temp holding spot)
- more to come
- more to come
- more to come
Kind of with magnets
- X-files in the truth multiball and wizard mode? the game will hold balls on the magnet as part of the code
- more to come
Games With captive posts / drop target locks should also be in the list as they are some what like an dirty pool with an quick look at it.
- TNA (also had an dirty pool jackpot added in an update)
- Jolly Park
- X-men
- Godfather
- Breakshot
- Strange Science
- Heavy Metal Meltdown
- post in roller coaster tycoon pinball??
- rick and morty
- others to come
Games with diverter hold points
- Cirqus Voltaire 2.0H has an Diverter check setting in MB (more of an stuck ball thing)
- others to come
Kind of / magnet holds
- X-files in the truth multiball the game will hold balls on the magnet as part of the code
- MET grave marker magnet
- more to come
I mean, it makes sense to do it that way, but that wasn’t really the issue I was talking about. On the continent I’m playing tournaments on, nobody ever seems to do “official” amendments. You’re getting “we use IFPAPA rules” on the tournament website, and maybe you’re getting an oral “and btw plunge your EBs” on site, and that’s it. I don’t know why, maybe you guys have some special affinity to amendments because of your constitution, so you’re fine doing that for every little tournament, but you’re not getting any here.
Here’s the rules section for the biggest tournament on the continent: https://www.europinball.org/information.php?page=Rules
Did they keep the intentional tilt rule in because they agree with it? Probably not the main reason. Would they have put it in via amendment if it wasn’t already part of the default rules? Hell no.
So, the issue isn’t “I’m a TD and I don’t like a rule, what do I do?”, but rather “I’m a player, and I happen to know about a rule that every tournament has, but none ever enforces. What do I do, just break it like everybody else?”
I’d rather not be forced to ask myself that question. I’d rather have rules that are controversial be removed from the “common law” default that in practice everybody uses and nobody ever amends.
I’m basically not even asking for a change to the IFPAPA rules at this point, if that’s a problem with PAPA. It would be enough to just put a “Tournament Rules” page on the IFPA website instead of the direct pdf link, and have it offer links to both the IFPAPA pdf and a new IFPA Default Competition Rules pdf that has the most controversial rules removed. @pinwizj, that last paragraph, would that be an option for you?
I’m not interested in un-unifying the rules that we spent so much time unifying.
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Alright, thanks for the reply, pretty sure I’m out of solutions that involve the IFPA then, so I won’t be pursuing this further.