WPPR v5.8 sneak peek

General
562

I don’t understand the hate for the Flip Frenzy (FF) format. If anything, it’s a more pure repsentation of competitive pinball than the rest. Why is that, you ask??

…because if pinball is ever going to become a “real” sport, like hockey, it has to be exciting to watch, aka fast! There is nothing more boring during competition than waiting for some guy to trap up before every friggin’ shot. It’s like what basketball would be without the shot clock, or golf without the… - nevermind golf, bad analogy!

Any clown can make their shots if they take all day to do it, even me! That’s not real pinball, it’s a gross perversion of the sport. It’s like saying you can play “Eruption” on electric guitar and then taking 30 seconds between every note. NOT MUSIC!

Anyway, FF is super fun and rewards not only playing well, but also playing well quickly - aka less time for all you “extremely disciplined” players to waste all of our precious time, and more chance for guys like me that just like to flip (like, a lot!) to do well. Perhaps the IFPA WPPR rankings should be more heavily based on LESS time played, vs. more. Think aboutit…

(kidding / not kidding)

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563

I’m gonna ignore the rest of the stuff about flip frenzy and just ask about this part. What is “faster” to watch? A player who traps up and has a higher shot percentage, or a player who doesn’t trap up and has a lower shot percentage?

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564

The 2nd one. More shots, more potential reward and more risk. Ideally, the flow player that also has a reasonably high shot percentage (paging Andrei Massenkoff!). What’s fun to watch is someone lighting up a game, exhibiting amazing ball control skills, and making difficult shots. What’s not fun to watch is a player who spends 3/4 of the game time waiting for every shot to settle down on a flipper so they can make their next shot. Not to mention the soul-sucking cost to the other players waiting for their turn.

Even curling has a total shot clock time that each time cannot exceed navel gazing about what their next shot should be (can you tell I’m Canadian, eh?).

EDIT> Forget to mention that flow play is a skill like anything else and can be developed with practice. So today’s flail-fester can be tomorrow’s Andrei if they have an incentive to change the style of their play. Currently rewards go to the stop and control every single shot method of play, which is not fun to watch, wait for, and overall bad for pinball IMO.

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565

@cayle may enjoy this part more than actually winning :smiley:

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566

flip frenzy has more overall action and less over all waiting and say moving cameras game to game adds more slow down.
With non flip frenzy one game may go 1 full round with no players

In flip frenzy games get played more.

also

for viewing do you want to stick with the top groups only and show lot’s of long games or show more players?

567

IDK, I brick shots from a trap all the time. Does this only work if you’re wearing the makeup and floppy red shoes? :clown_face:

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568

I said can, not shall! :slight_smile:

569

No offense to Andrei, he’s a friend, but I’d much prefer to watch a surgical player like Neil Shatz take a game apart. You can usually see where Neil is going and while Andrei also has a strategy in mind, it’s harder for the viewer to discern where he’s going due to his playing style. Both great players, but I prefer watching control players methodically taking a game apart.

If IFPA cared about the overall hobby, not just the sport, tournaments and leagues held in public locations would get a bump in points. I’ve suggested this in the past and it went nowhere. I wonder how many of the WPPR farms are on coin drop, but I suspect I don’t want to know the answer.

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570

Here’s some ideas to improve flip frenzy tournaments.

Instead of a standard first-in-first-out (FIFO) queue use a priority queue. When someone enters the queue they are placed above anyone that already has more games than them, but below anyone that has less games. For example, when a game ends, P1 gets paired with someone from the queue then P2 enters the queue. If the current players in the queue are

A (7 games)
B (8 games)
C (9 games)

and P2 just finished their 7th game, then P2 get placed between A and B. If P2 just finished their 6th game, P2 goes to the top of the queue.

This doesn’t guarantee there are an equal number of games at the end of the tournament if it’s timed. Two players could theoretically play a single long game for the entire tournament!

And this would eliminate the rush to finish or concede and get back in the queue.

Another idea would be to do something a little more sophisticated. When P1 finishes their game each waiting player is assigned a number based on a few factors and P1 is paired with the waiting player with the lowest number. The number is calculated based on number of games played so far, how many times they already played P1, and win percent compared to P1. Each of these has a weight in the formula. The idea is to favor pairing P1 with someone that has less games so far, someone P1 has played less so far, and someone that is doing about the same in the tournament (kind of like Swiss pairing).

For each waiting player

N = (number of games played) + X * (number of times played P1) + Y * (difference in win percent)

(It could be that the difference in win percent would not be factored in until players have at least a certain number of games.)

Now by assigning weights to X and Y you get a number for each waiting player. P1 would be paired with the waiting player with the lowest number N.

For example, let X = 1 and Y = 3.

Now if P1 is 5-0 and a waiting player is 0-5 and played P1 once then for this player

N = 5 + 1 * 1 + 3*(1.0 - 0.0) = 9

If another waiting player was 5-1 and played P1 twice, then

N = 6 + 1 * 2 + 3*(1.0 - 0.83) = 8.5

and the algorithm would pair P1 with this player over the first player.

Now someone has to code this up and try it! Or someone can improve on these ideas.

I think (or hope) that if it’s done right then no one would get stuck in the queue for too long. And even if they do have a longer wait time it’s only because they are skipping getting paired with someone they already played a lot or someone of extremely different playing ability.

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571

Some are on pay fee to enter and games on free play places and some people do list that as (coin drop)
and some (coin drop places have time play arcade cards)

572

I’ve run a few tournaments using a similar method in a spreadsheet and am currently developing a rough web app to do it. My calculations are a bit more complicated, but similar idea. Instead of a FIFO queue I take the time the player has been waiting, the number of games they’ve played, the number of times they’ve played the other player, the difference in win count, and the number of times they’ve played the machine into account, modulated based on the averages of these across all the players. The weights I’ve found so far to work okay are:

  • minutes in queue * -0.5
  • wins * .45
  • games played * 1
  • times played this player * 1.5
  • times played this machine * 1.1

It’s a bit weird to reason about but I mostly just try to think of it by comparing to the ‘minutes in queue’ as a measure of 'how long am I willing to make a player wait (beyond ‘normal’) to avoid X situation? I might end up ramping the ‘games played’ weighting higher to try and discourage conceding more, although the ‘play counts’ I’ve ended up with this have been pretty similar so far so I think it actually is mostly working

So far reception has been mostly positive, although I still had some people conceding or not understanding why they’d been sitting in the queue longer than another person. Hopefully explaining it better and getting them more familiar with the idea will solve that though.

Also, I made sure to stop calling it the ‘queue’ since it’s not a queue any more, to try and separate the idea of the FIFO ordering more

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573

This makes it seem like machine is being chosen before the player? Which would only seem necessary when the number of matches is equal to the number of machines?

574

image

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575

also what happens when you need to redraw machine?

576

But like, that metagame makes the format special.

I’d actually prefer our whopper overlords nerf flip frenzies to dust than watch people try to graft all these bastardized “fixes” onto a format that’s perfect just how the Aussies created it, and is super fun for 99% of pinball players. Just so happens the other 1% of poindexter hand-wringers all reside here.

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577

I’ll start this by saying - I’m not a luddite.

I introduced the FF format in to the UK by using pen and paper for scoring, and theor score sheet also marks their place in the queue. I take a break at the halfway stage and reassign the order based on the number of games played so far. Those who have played the most (usually only 2 or 3 games more) go to the back of the queue. This has the benefit of not only evening up games played, but breaks up any loops of players playing the same people over and over.
At the end of the qualifying there is a PAPA style 4 player final (after semis of required)

An easy fix to guarentee even number of games played is:

Each player has there own score sheet with 25 lines. Once they’ve filled their sheet their qualifying is over. This takes away the need for rushing through a game and conceding as there is no benefit in playing more games.

I will add that every single time a FF has been ran it has produced an ‘expected’ group of finalists, with the cream always rising to the top.

I’ve played group matchplay and won where I haven’t played other top players, unless you’re playing a round robin format there is no guarentee that everyone plays a fair spread of players. In fact seeded group matchplay is actually worse for ‘fairness’ as the player just below the top group has an ‘easier’ chance of picking up points against lower ranked players.

I’m sure someone with programming experience could easily work this into matchplay or someother electronic format, but there shouldnt be any shame in using pen and paper!

578

Unless I am mistaken, Frenzy/Pinball! Pinball! Pinball! was invented at Neverland Arcade (RIP) in Tokyo. The first one was played in 2010 and it was one of their annual tournaments until 2015.

Also, we ran a 101-player Frenzy in 2019 in Borås. That was really the upper limit of what the format could handle since you can only use one computer. We did one other really large Frenzy since, but then we seeded everyone into two groups with two computers. The format has generally not been used for large tournaments in Sweden recently. Mostly, I have seen it in monthlies, pre tournaments, or consolation tournaments.

579

If it is super fun, then none of the WPPR conversation matters people will play it because it is fun, like the other non-WPPR formats people continue to run.

The format has pretty mixed feedback from players of all skill level. It is actually the more casual players (who are not here) that I have heard dislike it most. Many find it too much. They don’t get a chance to stop and chat with people, there is no time to go outside for some “fresh air” as we call it. They are confused and don’t know what is happening. Some do enjoy the non-stop play, but it is not 99% of our local player base.

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580

The updated definition of “super fun” implicitly includes “it better be maximum TGP or you can fuck right off”.

Every comment about “fun” makes far more sense to me once I learned of this updated definition.

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You jest but it’s the truth really. For many of the people the pinball tournament thing gets its hooks into, the thing that’s fun, and the thing they seem to love, is simply seeing their name in the rankings. This absolutely, unquestionably, without a doubt and any wavering of confidence, drives attendance to events. And it doesn’t take long for these people to start picking and choosing the events they’ll attend based on how many points they might get.

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