Since this thread is getting long and the edit would get lost, I’ll add this in a separate post:
4310 scoring: 5088 tied matches (remember out of 13,824 possibilities) with 6048 total ties.
1100 (???) is 9216 matches with ties with 21,504 total ties (lol).
We can agree to disagree on this. I think competitive pinball provides a “player vs. player” AND a “player vs. machine” experience.
I think the strategy associated with the common indirect sports doesn’t lend itself to the same kind of situational play. With running I’m always trying to run as fast as I can. With bowling I’m always trying to throw a strike. With pinball I’m absolutely not always trying to put up the highest score on the game as I can . . . there’s the added wrinkle of risk/reward depending on the situation.
I think you saw this with the Kong Off (at least I did listening on the PAPA stream). Usually those Kong Off’s are high score during the day wins . . . but when they put those players in the head-to-head bracket suddenly that pinball style wrinkle presented itself. Nobody was going for the world record score, they were playing a more conservative strategy for a safer score, or a riskier strategy when needed.
The truth is that this is as much of a corrective measure towards indirect style events being able to rack up players and games played for WPPR value compared to direct style events, so it’s not about us trying to argue the point that indirect tournaments aren’t good/fun tournaments, or aren’t true tests of skill.
Some questions and a suggestion:
If Modern had the top 4 players back for a 1 game playoff, what would that event rate out at and is that consistent with the no-change new value of zero?
Why throw out pingolf and high score completely? You’re still competing against people, just not Right Now.
Suggestion: Why not put a maximum TGP value on the Indirect portion of an event, say 1/3, or round up to 36% for pingolf? That would greatly help solve your dilemma while keeping more formats in play. I actually like the 36% rule for Herb, too.
Bob
That would work if they had 40 players or less for the tournament (minimum 10% have to advance to the direct play portion). In reality they will need to get 40-50 finalists to show up, assuming a field of 400-500 players for the month. Should they not get at least 10% of the pool to show up for finals, that month is not endorsed.
It’s NOT thrown out 
The Pin-Masters will be back in March . . . the first two days will be the exact same qualifying format, and the finals format will still be Pin-Golf style, just with the direct play group wrinkle.
The not competing against people RIGHT NOW is the thing that gives the WPPR edge to tournaments that run indirect formats. It’s easier to do just about everything when you don’t require some group of players to be at the same place at the same time. This is to help level the playing field for direct play events.
This was suggested and debated in the Directors forum, and was my original proposal to those guys. It’s certainly the more complicated way to go when you’re talking about segments of TGP that can max out, while other segments of TGP don’t (and TGP is hard enough for organizers/players to understand already).
The idea of forcing this direct play component was then tossed around and was ultimately supported by the majority.
The competitive pinball landscape will survive this change . . . and if it doesn’t we’ll remove the restriction and find an alternative solution that works (or doesn’t work, and then we’ll find an alternative solution for that alternative solution) 
That strategy situation only presents itself because of the direct play element you’re forcing into the game though. I can’t deny it’s an interesting element in head-to-head play, but when I walk up to a game of pinball in a bar I don’t feel that I have to find two or three other players to enjoy the game.
And I’ve also invented a new sport. Head-to-head slalom skiing. With the added strategic advantage where an athlete may decide that missing this gate will save x seconds on the overall run, and be enough take them through to the next knockout round. TV rights available on request. 
I agree that there should be a minimum participation rate for all events. Josh, you even said your league kicks you out of you don’t make 50%. My league is 8 nights and if you don’t make 5, you don’t get submitted for WPPR points. You can keep attending, but you don’t get points and you don’t get to play in the finals.
People have asked me this about my league: “So if I am in first place after the first week, why don’t I just stop showing up until the finals?”. The answer is that I don’t consider you to have played in the league if you only played one night…and I don’t see how anyone could argue that I should be including that player in the results. (I’m ranking by average performance, not total points).
I don’t know why we should shy away from making TDs submitting correct info.
It’s really not that different than you taking my word for what format I used, right?
No idea how Super League is run, but believe me, if they are submitting 200 players each month, they know how to rank those players, and thus they know how many games they competed in. Since Super League is the main offender, it’s easy to talk to them, and make sure they understand the rule changes. If they knowingly break the rules (like submitting people who only have 1 submitted score for the entire month), then Super League events are no longer endorsed for X period of time.
There’s no way you can accept results without some level of trust from TDs.
It’s a bit different . . .
This happens all the time:
Player A sees a format graded out at 100% TGP from the organizer. They contact the IFPA and say, “I don’t think this should have been 100% TGP, we only played in a single elimination bracket with 8 people”. I verify with the organizer as to what happened, and it’s a self policed corrected situation.
For leagues like ours we’re small enough that you can easily look up who has missed too many sessions, but at some point that becomes much harder to actually self-police by the players of that event.
I COULD look up the Expo standings from last year to see how many players only played their one free entry, and then cross reference that list to the results submitted by the organizer, but I can only do that if the results are available online.
I totally get what you’re saying, and the hope is that organizers would take the additional effort to weed out those that don’t “fully participate”, the problem is not having the ability for the players to easily enforce that metric like they can our other metrics.
Good stuff though!
This really connected with me.
Ever given any thought to limiting indirect formats to a specific time period…like say 4 days? I’ve never heard of a tournament longer than that…and if everything is crammed into a short time span, then you are playing in and amongst your competitors…can see their scores…make decisions based on that, etc.
You keep saying we can agree to disagree on this but it’s not a disagreement. There is simply zero direct play in pinball. Nobody is throwing a pinball at you to hit with a flipper bat. You’re playing the game and the game alone, and comparing scores later. Whether that’s with one other person or 100 other people, or after a 4 player game or a day of qualifying, it is and will always be indirect.
Except for when you are dealing with things like lock-stealing
We’ve given tons of thought about it, but this is easier and cleaner for us to manage.
Obviously lock stealing was brought up between players, but there are also other shared software features on games between players where you can raise the value of something that another player can cash in.
If it makes you feel better I will change our verbiage from requiring “DIRECT play”, to requiring “INDIRECT play consisting of 2 to 4 players in a given match where those scores are only compared to those other players and not the other players in the field”. That should be an easy Edit/Replace
The term for it is usually “Dual Slalom” rather than head to head, and it is certainly “a thing” for skiing/boarding/biking etc.
At least for skiing, it does have a very different feel to it than normal races, and you make some different choices. (more aggressive if you’re behind, as you’re more willing to wipe out, as you’d lose anyways, etc.)
Just like pinball, it ads more strategic risk reward trade-offs, and way more exciting to watch.
Doesn’t tend to get used at high levels due to the whole safety issue, which is less of a concern with pinball - pinball players tend to only break limbs when the operator has to have a quite chat with them about taking out their frustrations on the games
Lock stealing, raising jackpot values and any other shared software feature still require a player to compete against the game, in the state it’s in, at any given time. This direct vs. indirect stuff bothers me because you’re placing an arbitrary definition of “direct play” onto tournament requirements. I would much prefer you to use the language above because that’s what is true. And you can take out the indirect play part and just say “play consisting of…” And then you won’t have to have all these extra stipulations for things like single (or even double) player games, which by your definition of direct play, are not direct play, and therefor need an exception to the rule.
As an aside, I HATE seeing games that allow lock stealing, or progressive jackpots, used in tournaments as multiple player games. This was the only thing about Pinburgh that I thought was a change for the worse, rules wise.
The league I play in has say 24 people and top 8 play in A finals and everyone else competes in B finals. You can break it up however you want as long as between 10-50% play in A finals. This allows everyone in your league to play in a finals night, but still count for WPPRs.
For the record, this is now officially the longest thread on TiltForums.
We’ve actually decided to simply do 12 players for the finals. And since a bunch of people have decided not to come for the finals (I sincerely hope this isn’t a trend) all the players who had qualified in the top 16, that would have been cut off, are now going to have a chance to play.
Somehow people are understanding the concept between the “Direct” and “Indirect” distinction, and since that verbiage is already written and I’m a pretty lazy bastard . . . I think we’ll leave it.
I do thank you for the semantics lesson though (And I know this isn’t actually a semantics issue . . . it’s about me just being wrong)
WPPR’s tend to do that. There’s SO MANY PEOPLE NOT INTERESTED IN THEM
/me looks up the release of 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 on RGP2 . . . thread monsters!
And another problem with LA/SoCal is that we don’t have tons of spots with 4+ machines. Not many spots are suitable for regular tournaments.