TPF2016 Tourney: New and Improved!

I’m sorry for any confusion. I’ll pass the feedback along to the show organizers. Keep in mind that while there is a renewed effort on the part of TPF to improve the tourney experience, the tournament isn’t the main feature of the show. So I don’t know if they’ll want to list the tournament hours on the TPF main home page.

The qualifying hours of the Wizards tournament are prominently displayed in the Qualifying section of the tourney page.
For any that weren’t aware…

Qualifying:
Friday, March 18th: 12pm – 12am and Saturday, March 19th: 9am-5pm.

For anyone with travel plans that facilitate it, I recommend showing up early on Friday or early on Saturday, as the queues for games are typically much shorter than Friday evening and Saturday afternoon.

Oh, totally my mistake, just providing user feedback. Luckily the kind people at Expedia convinced the kind people at Alaska to waive the change fee and I will now be there earlier.

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UPDATED PIN LIST!

Essentially the finalized list of pins that will be used in the Wizards tourney (subject to change, standard disclaimer, etc):

Modern DMD:
GOT Pro
Demo Man
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Star Trek (Stern, Pro)

Solid State:
Frontier
Nitro Ground Shaker
Torch
Whirlwind

EM:
Fireball
Atlantis (Gottlieb)
Campus Queen
Cleopatra

TPF Wizard Tourney qualifying hours extension: To provide more time for all players to be able to complete all of their 30 plays, Friday qualifying times have been extended by two hours. On Friday, qualifying will now run from 11am - 1am (Saturday morning). Saturday is unchanged. We continue to recommend players get some/all of their plays in early.

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158 registered & paid players

Hey Collin. Just returning from the circuit event at LAX. As I suspected, you cannot make GOT too hard. In qualifying, the only thing that was done was the rubber was removed on the outer posts at the outlanes, which has very little effect. Tilt was liberal. Nothing else was changed other than no EB’s of course. The GOT lines were 6-7 players deep most of the weekend, typical wait was 1/2 to 1 hour to play it.

Now comes the finals Sunday. GOT was left exactly like it was in qualifying. After the first round GOT held everything up so they removed the divider lanes post rubbers. Made it a little harder BUT the games still held everyone up. So after the second round they turned off ball saver completely. I don’t know if the game continued to play too long after that as we had to leave about that time.

My suggestions for anyone running a tournament with high level players on GOT:
1.Remove all rubber on outlanes.
2.Needs a tight tilt
3.No ball saver, or at least a shortened ball save time.
4.Set Lord of Light to “once per game”

That should do it. I would hate to see GOT earn a reputation as no good for tournaments because it is such a great game. It just needs to be nerfed a bit to make it viable for big tourneys.

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Thanks for the suggestions and input!
Already had planned all four of what you suggested.
Or did you mean to turn off Multiball ball-savers, too? ( I had planned on no initial ball-save)

TPF this year likely won’t have the quantity of elite level players that Louisville enjoyed due to a variety of reasons, but I want to avoid the exact same things you discussed.

Do you also recommend removing the divider lane rubbers for qualifying?

Last, do you know what pitch (degrees) it was set to?

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I would leave MB ball savers alone, they’re not an issue. And yes, I would remove divider lane rubbers for qualifying. I do not know what the pitch was set at, but it did not feel overly steep, so I would guess it was at about 6.5 to 7 degrees.

Huge thanks to @Snailman and everyone else involved in organising and running the tournament. This was my first TPF, so I can’t comment on how it compares to the past, but I can say from my perspective everything ran very smoothly.

As I sit here in the airport killing time, couple things come to mind:

  • software was awesome. Feature request for limited entry tournaments like this. Could there be something in the standing page indicating players with entries remaining. Maybe bold them. Would help people spot the glare off of deadflip’s sniper scope.
  • WiFi. Maybe there was WiFi that I could have got access too, but I was not aware of it. International data roaming kind of sucks.
  • don’t turn off the lights for earth hour :).
  • play better :slight_smile: That one is for me. Actually, I am super happy and proud to be part of the Canadian representation in the finals. Shout out to Jason for an awesome finals.

Looking forward to checking out the archive of the stream. Met lots of cool people. Say hello if you run into me at events in the future.

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by all accounts I’ve heard from participants, this tournament definitely sounded like a success :slightly_smiling:

Thanks for the feedback, Ian. It was nice to meet you and get to play pinball with you.

  • @kdeangelo 's software is amazing. I’ve probably used up my customization requests for the next 12 months :wink: but your idea is a good one. Keep in mind the software was originally designed for, and primarily used in unlimited Herb formats.

  • WiFi: as a fellow international traveler, I feel your pain here. Unfortunately, the convention center (while a fantastic spacious facility) is ridiculously proud of their wifi. They charged an exorbitant rate per device for wifi, and sadly, this is separate from the hotel wifi. I don’t feel comfortable sharing the exact rate, because this is deal between the show organizers and the convention center. But for just 10 devices for event staff, the wifi expense was in the many hundreds of dollars.
    Hopefully, it was helpful to you to have the two large screens showing all game queues and cycling standings, along with a dedicated scorekeeper who wasn’t taking scores and instead, adding people without smart phones to queues through DTM admin access. I’ll consider adding a guest laptop or tablet (with wifi) that we could have tethered to one of the tables for the future.

  • the lights being dimmed unexpectedly (and other lights kicking on) during the finals was a complete error on the facility’s part. Event organizers had given specific instructions to convention center that the light settings were to be locked down and not able to be changed. We’d been reassured by facilities management that this had taken place, but unfortunately, their process didn’t work. Thankfully, it only happened once, and we were able to adjust the lights back to normal after that round of games while no one was playing.

For anyone that has been to TPF in the past and played in the tournaments, and possibly not returned due to whatever occurred previously, put your fears to rest because 2016 turned out fantastic. Kudos go to all the staff but especially Colin and Ken for putting on such a great tournament. And having Nate and Jack there for the playoffs streaming and commentating just made it even better. Great format, tough competition, stressful qualifying, and too many beers during finals (for me - lol) = AWESOME!!!

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Ditto! The whole thing went off perfectly, and I heard nothing but good things from everyone that played (aside from a few nitpickers). Can’t wait for next year!

suggestion: more screens for the live audience, or at least move the live screens to games that are being played, and elevate them to a height the crowd can see…

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It looked like it went really well! Congratulations to Ken and Colin and all the other organizers.

I agree completely. This was the first year setting up video.
We’d like to generate more live spectators from all the festival goers.
Thanks for the feedback.

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Thanks, Kevin, Phil, and Bowen.
I appreciate the words of encouragement.
My favorite part of the tournament wasn’t my success as a player, but rather the success of the tournament and positive feedback we received from the vast vast majority of players.

Already looking forward to next year, and doing initial planning.

All others: feel free to provide feedback as well: What went well? What could be even better if _______? What would you change? What would you add?

Thanks!

Feedback from the live coverage: Keep the commentators somewhere that people can’t talk to them unless those other people are also miced. Muting the commentator seems like a solution, but now you have dead air. I know people are super excited to tell Jack/Nate about how they did, but the listening experience is like listening to half a phone call.

Otherwise they did a good job.

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Hell yeah, give me a mic next time, even while playing, that’d be fun. As anyone watching could tell, I was having a blast. Fun times

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Thanks. That makes sense. I don’t know if we’d have a place that’s removed. But we could try to have it where they’ve got some barrier around them.

Another key piece of feedback we received (and I can vouch for from being a live spectator at PAPA and Pinburgh) is to have an elevated big screen TV for live spectators to watch.

We had two TV’s set on vertical for live spectators. But:

  • they were at ground level
  • they were tied to camera mounts that were “static” (set up on GOT and ST, and not easily moved)
  • they used fish-eye cameras at an angle instead of up over the top, so it wasn’t the best viewing experience.
    This definitely impacted us in only having a limited amount of live spectators watching the finals.
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