Well part of that is slow vs fast games and that can happen in unlimited pump & dump as well.
More games on faster playing games vs slower ones.
also in an pump & dump with an big game pool and say take best 5 games per player
you can have people who say are really good at maybe 5 games in the pool make finals next one with put an good score on 10 games
what about pin golf where you may have more then one course and you take top scores from all courses as one?
Here’s the uncropped version that shows all the different formats. Group elimination brackets (and gold brackets) are broken into their own value
In unlimited pump and dump, each player is choosing which games to play – not assigned.
And the more games able to be played on faster games does NOT mean that you get to now have your best X+1 games count toward your qualifying rank/metric. Whereas with FF, each additional game played counts.
Exactly! Players who play more skillfully make finals, being measured on the exact same # of games as every other player attempting to make finals.
And if a player enjoys some type of familiarity/style advantage on a certain portion of the Arenas in the qualifying – that alleged advantage will be part of any qualifying format.
In this example, if there are two different courses, you only play one of the courses, and only get compared to other players that played on that course.
If we’re comparing the uneven # of games measured aspect of FF against a PinGolf format, the more appropriate metaphor would be 1/2 the players getting measured on a 9-pin course, while the other half are measured on a 10-pin course, etc.
Uneven # of games that count. This is the key flaw of FF, in my opinion.
A bit curious: why go try hard at the end of what is a fun and not overly serious format? If the format is fun why not extend the time of the FF and let everyone play a bit more?
My man
I mean, gobbling dog turds for wpprs would be super popular if it was sanctioned.
popularity =/= competitive merit with all the wppr min-maxing of the rules.
I mean, yeah, ifpa should just only allow certain formats imo, and only “good” ones. But for now they aren’t in the business of creating or modifying what formats people choose to run. Onus is on people running FF to make a better format or modify it. 
and holy shite Josh’s office space meme made me lol so hard 
I disagree that this is even a necessary goal of a single night of competition. If you always want the best player to win, might I suggest chess.
I’ll go even further and say that a flip frenzy requires metagame skills above & beyond your bread & butter pinball skills, and is a pretty good measure of who’s good at flip frenzies. Play fast, abandon long grind strategies, know when you’re far enough behind that quitting is +EV compared to the time you’ll waste most likely still losing, and perhaps more importantly, know when to quit while ahead. If someone catches you anyway, your gamble didn’t pay off, them’s the breaks.
Is it a perfectly balanced format where everyone is guaranteed to play the same number of games and same caliber of opponents? No. Is it a fair format? Absolutely. The queue is agnostic. I know a couple Chicago players who crush flip frenzies. I don’t think it’s luck.
And finals? Schminals. You played great and came up short, so what.
It’s one tourney, probably won’t even make your active ranking sheet. Try another frenzy. Or go sit in the queue of a major event, watching netflix on your iPad all day while some guy with gloves and a towel grinds through an epic GOTG qualifying game.
Those of us who think a 2-hour frenzy is ten times more fun than a 2-day pump & dump will continue to sing its praises. To no avail, it seems, but I’m okay with that.
It’s actually a workout. You may not realize how much time you spend not playing in a traditional format, until you compete in one where you’re playing nearly half the time for 2+ hours. If you haven’t broken a sweat, you’re doing it wrong .Any frenzy beyond three hours would require those gatorade cup tables like at a marathon.
The queue may be agnostic but you can absolutely game it since the queue is visible to avoid playing certain players based on when you submit your result to the queue. Just watch for any players you want to avoid to drop out of the queue and then pop by the booth to submit. Especially easy if you have a more rookie opponent, just tell them you are going to go submit and then that player wanders off awaiting their next match, they’ll have no idea that you waited an extra minute or two to dodge a player. At some point in this epic odyssey someone had said you can hide the queue as well but that…doesn’t seem to be the case:
I don’t really get all the grumbling over the Frenzy nerf. The format isn’t going away. If your player base wants them, they’ll continue to happen. While I don’t run any tournies, I can almost guarentee they will continue to happen in my area.
Will they be less fun once they are appropriately valued?
Lot of language too around these changes like Josh took FF out back and beat it to death with a shovel, mourning the loss of a truly fun format. It’s still there, just worth less points, keep running it if it’s so much fun for you and your players. Or maybe it’s not really the fun factor that was such a big draw in the first place?
Now what about Critical Hit? If we are cutting points in other events for things then cards in Critical Hit Thread need to be removed or we need to cut the points that it can give out.
There’s already restrictions on the cards allowed for critical hit tournaments to be eligible for WPPRs.
but should there be more due to the new rules?
No.
I’ve TDed multiple FF and uncountable other tournaments. If getting to 100% TGP etc is to much work in a FF why on earth are you even choosing that format?
Because it’s fun?
This thread is great. I wish there were more reactions to posts available other than “Like”
Just in case that was a response to me: it’s heaps of fun! If I was to host an entry level tournament then I would choose FF every day of the week and twice on Sunday. But I would never have finals. You want there to be a start and a finish so the noobs can see who won, where they finished and see any price ceremony.
If you OTOH care about WPPRS and the integrity of the tournament then 4 group match play all the way!
this was me, I had the low game count (20) because I’d never played FF before and had two massive Excalibur games I could have stopped early, among others.
FF was fun and I really liked the no waiting around bit. I think it would be fine as long as there’s a big finals afterward to catch whatever oddities that slip thru. Ours was only 4 of 29; I’d say it’d be better to take 30-50% to finals. If that happens, I don’t think the format should be nerfed.
Correction, we took top 6, top 2 had byes, single elim 2x4p matches to finish up.
