Doesn’t sound like the player that plays in State N would even be counted in the final standings as not playing in 50% of the meetings . . . so that would render their activity useless.
Much of this falls into the “don’t be an asshole” judgement call that we make often 
I was thinking the state N player is the one who played in every meeting, not just one meeting.
It looks to me like there’s an opportunity to exploit this rule, which is why I brought up the very extreme hypothetical. Don’t be an asshole is obviously fantastic advice but seems there’s never a shortage of people that will look for ways to be an asshole specifically—especially if it provides them an advantage within the predefined rules.
There is, but we haven’t figured out a better way of handling it.
If we make a league like the NEPL choose which state those points go into, you’re left with a ton of players that have no representation of points earned in their own state.
We’re all ears on any potential better solutions 
Divide the total points by the number of states involved, for purposes of SCS point allocation? Not perfect, but avoids the double-dipping.
So here’s the difference in workload for us between states with state-only activity, and states with multi-state activity
State Only:
States with multi state leagues
Both versions simply pull from the points in our WPPR Results table in our database, so even the multi-state league work on our end isn’t too much of a pain in the butt.
The SCS calculation just blindly adds all points it sees in the filter, and it’s done.
This solution of manually assigning points based on some external criteria that our build script doesn’t handle makes for a messy messy situation, and a ton of more work for Shepherd.
In theory it’s a solid solution, but in practice there’s no easy way for us to get this implemented.
In theory could be exploited. In practice in New England I see no issue. NEPL dominates the whole area for play anyhow and you’re probably “in” as long as you make the 16places*6states. Looks like top 100 gets you in somewhere. Are there situations where this is messier, or do people think this is a bad solution for NEPL? I’m asking out of ignorance.
Speaking for myself on behalf of Vermont, it works really well for us. The big value of NEPL should theoretically motivate our local players to participate more in our in-state-only events if they do poorly or can’t participate in NEPL but still want to do well for the VT SCS.
We have two players coming in for the state championship from other New England states, and that is “displacing” two of our local players. Because of the large number of players who qualified in VT via the NEPL but are playing in other states, having these two out-of-state players means we’re accepting seed 70 rather than seed 77 as our cutoff.
As should be predicted, players interested in doing well in the VT SCS and playing in the championship has continued to increase in the three years we’ve been doing it, and I expect that trend to keep going.
Note that we’re far enough from the population center of New England that most or all top players looking to play in a state other than their home state will choose somewhere other than here to play. So I’d no doubt feel differently if I were in, say, New Hampshire or Rhode Island.
I was thinking about this from the “I have very little chance of qualifying in my home state… but if I could maaayyybe get a bunch of league points in another state too?” angle after I heard it went down to nearly 100th place to find players to play in NV. And thinking about that, it seemed to me that if one were playing across state borders, it could be very advantageous to set up a league to claim points in multiple states, thereby giving those players more choices for participating in a state’s finals. I guess this comes back to the “should you be forced to play in your home state” argument which frankly, I don’t think is that big a deal. In fact, none of this is a big deal I’m sure. I just thought it was a curious potential exploit and was even more curious if it would be possible within the current rules which don’t explicitly say don’t be an asshole. 
Re: SCS… keep in mind that I don’t think it was designed to be the most accurate assessment of ranking in a state, but much more so a mechanism to provide local/regional incentive for players to get out and play more and be recognized.
we were wondering with @raydaypinball about the “increasing session % participation” rules:
“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. For events with more than 50 players, this percentage will be based on the number of participants.”
in a best 8 out of 9 yearly league, let’s say we have 60 players participating to 4 or more events, it would bump the requirement to 60% of the session. 60% of 8 out of 9 would mean 4.8 session, which would be rounded to 5 session I assume?
Then all the people that participated to only 4 session would need to be dropped from submission/consideration?
If by “excluding/reducing” non “Meaningful” player we get to 55 players, does the 55%, aka 4.4 events become the new baseline? Will this get rounded “down” to 4 events to be meaningful? Instead of forcefully dropping down to 50 players, a “clean” 4 out of 8 events?
You have to use the number of players that impacted your actual league standings, so that number would be 60, full stop, 60%.
Even if you had 55 players, you need a MINIMUM of 4.4 events played to be eligible for inclusion in the results submitted to the IFPA. That means even requiring 4.01 events to be played means 5 events.
Interesting question came up on pinside. For intergalatic in 2018, I could theoretically get into the finals with only playing 3 of the 4 required games. IFPA says that in order to count, I have to play 100% of the qualifying games. So that means had this happened to me, when I show up for finals to play, I would not be allowed to play or what? Or would I get to play, but I would not get any WPPRs after the fact?
General rule is that if you make it past qualifying into playoffs where you can still win the tournament without 100% participation, you’re in the clear for WPPR eligibility.
Thanks. I don’t read so good.
I’m waiting for someone to mention that Cryss Stephens needs to be removed from the Pinburgh standings based on this exact rule 
There was also an interesting almost problem to Intergalactic that PAPA staff was aware of . . . if there were more than 400 competitors, the tournament wouldn’t have been IFPA endorsed based on only advancing 40 finalists, and wouldn’t have awarded any WPPR’s.
I note that quite a few people didn’t get their 4 games in, so the number of players that will count is more like 270 or so. It wasn’t as close as it looked, although I, too was watching and confirmed that they knew about it.
I thought if that was the case it would mean the qualifiers would not count toward TGP not that the whole tourney would be ineligible?
You need to have at least 10% (but fewer than 50%) of the participants of an indirect qualifying format advance to a direct play phase. Didn’t that stem from one of the Modern pre-nukes?
TD’s could then just backload their finals for TGP purposes and not worry about actually advancing 10% of the participants.
This rule is 10% or bust.