Better than a time machine . . . I have an Adam Becker! 
All that time not spent approving calendar and results submissions leaves me with just having to answer questions these days.
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(I donât think this corner case of a corner case is very likely at all to matter, but puzzles are fun, soâŚ)
Arenât the top 4 who got byes also not WPPR eligible? They each played between 3 and 6 games of qualifying, not the 7 of 13 required to be in the results.
In this example using unverified selfie scores the qualifying doesnt have any TGP value. Just think of the finals as a regular 12 person tournament where the top 4 get a bye. That is how it should be calculated.
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Good points, @tjuchcin and @ZenTron
Youâre right that that is the sort of complication I was originally concerned about (and the sort of puzzle I was trying to wrap my head around).
But I think Josh settled it sufficiently by saying that we donât have to worry about that sort of thing for âtotal game countâ purposes, since once a player is in the playoff rounds, they are âfully vestedâ as a participant.
I find that a helpful principle.
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I find the thought of someone being in a best of 7 match, if they win it 4-0 they end up not playing enough games to count as the winner of the tournament, so they intentionally lose 3 games to push the match to 7 games, thus crossing that threshold of enough games played to count quite comical
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@pinwizj⌠for how to count players that participate in leaguesâŚ
"For any IFPA endorsed tournament or league with a qualifying portion, only players that participate in at least 50% of the games used in determining those qualifying positions will be included in the final results. "
This would suggest that for leagues where players can drop their two worst weeks (example: if your best 6 out of 8 weeks count toward finals qualification), that any player that participates in at least 1/2 3 weeks of league could be âcountedâ for IFPA results purposes.
But later in the paragraph it states:
"For leagues, this means that players must participate in at least 50% of the sessions of the regular season to be included in the final standings submitted to the IFPA."
This would suggest that in the example above of an 8-week season, a player would need to participate in 4 or more sessions.
I would think that the former is the correct interpretation. Please confirm. Thanks.
The former is correct.
We always go based on whatever data is used for qualifying, so for leagues where you play 40 weeks and keep your best 6, anyone that plays 3 times or more are âgoodâ.
For tournaments like Herb where itâs your best 5 games out of 20 available, anyone that plays 3 different games or more are âgoodâ.
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Curious to see how Modern adapts to the 50% participation rule for 2017 SUPERLeagues.
Two qualifying games per month? Play one and you count!
I noticed theyâre reporting multiple times per month now. Looks like itâs ten qualifying games and only about 10 of the 66 players played all of them. The rest of the players were five games or fewer, most of which were just a few.
Interesting how the player counts dropped from 300-500 last year to under 100 this year when at least 10% had to show up for the direct play portion⌠
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Iâm curious to see how many volunteers I get to police those Modern standings and keep me up to date on whether any players have been submitted in the results that shouldnât have been 
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Iâm sure the upstate players will have the job covered!
I think Francesco is moving to either a weekly or bi-weekly league format. Sort of like the one heâs testing at the end of this year. It will reduce the number of players but will increase in frequency to try to make up for it. Heâll now have to hope that players donât get too burnt out I think.
Has much thought been given to including unrated players in the Base Value Calculation for future tournaments? Itâs my understanding that the decision to exclude these players was made largely to rein in the number of WPPRs awarded at Modern. I note that this is no longer effective: recent Superleagues have seen only one or two unrated players compete.
One issue with the current system is that tournaments in new competitive pinball areas are worth little to no points. Iâd love to see unrated players contribute something to the Base Value, even if only 0.1 or 0.2 points each.
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I liked this feature. I run tournaments in a relatively new public competitive area (Cincinnati). Once we started having the tournaments I encouraged all the players to branch out and play other tournaments within driving distance. Since theyâve taken that advice our points awarded per tournament have jumped up considerably. And theyâve gotten to see how they stack up against players in other areas and theyâve done quite well.
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In my area the trend is to run meaningless tournaments to get people counting. Each league night also run a 1 machine best game side tournament, wth top 10% advancing to 1 game final. Or worse run 5 of these on one night.
The other trend happening here is to overlap the leagues one night of their season so that they play at the same place. This year it helps pad the league numbers. At least 5.3 will prevent this from being as advantageous.
@LCM That change wasnât just in place for super league.
That change also stemmed the tide of shows that ran tournaments and gave away a single entry to every person that walked in the door. So a tournament that would normally have 40 - 50 people in the A division ended up with 300.
That would come back in full force if we repealed that rule
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Yes, much thought has been given to this. No, we donât plan on making a change
New competitive pinball areas are only ânewâ temporarily. Once you climb out of newbie mode, you have a chance to move forward, but I feel good knowing that player base has to prove their interest to become valuable.
I think Adamâs point will be mostly mitigated by the 50% participation rule, unless big shows plan on giving enough free tournament entries for those players to count in the standings.
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Per our IFPA League rules for 2016 and going forward:
https://www.ifpapinball.com/menu/ranking-info/definitions/
Leagues CANNOT hold separate private tournaments for just their members.
If youâre holding side tournaments as part of your league nights, those tournaments should not have been endorsed by us.
Youâre welcome to exploit this in a public setting by running a public tournament where anyone can play, but you cannot do this within a league for league members only.
Iâll leave this to @PressStart to enforce in Canada
Speaking of wppr 5.3, @pinwizj do you have any of the scoring data from the 2016 PinMasters tournament? Looking to run my first pingolf tournament and the neverdrains link from the 2016 championships has âexpiredâ 
Looking for some actual scoring examples, besides the 80%, 60%, 40%, 20% example you use for csi on the website
http://neverdrains.com/ifpaVegas/
Definitely following the rules, they are public tournaments that happen to be in the same venue as a regular league (which are not closed either and are free). @PressStart knows I would complain if I thought people were not following the rules.
Unfortunately I donât have anything on hand.
Your best bet would be to maybe watch some of the stream of each of the games, and maybe the par score will be mentioned:
I can tell you exactly the method we use to set the scores. Weâll take all the scoring sheets from the Womenâs Championship and the National Championship, find out the average of those game scores, then adjust that to â5 ballâ averages for the games that were played on 3 ball.
We usually end up picking a score thatâs somewhere between the 3 and 5 ball average, with the goal being Par 4âs for all 9 holes.
After round 1 if we notice any bottlenecks due to TIME, weâll adjust scores down to try to reduce those bottlenecks. Sometimes the games that were bottlenecks werenât about the par scores being too hard, it ended up being more about the scores taking far too long to achieve.
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