At the risk of continuing to be an a-hole on a site that prides itself on civility, here goes…
If you’re spending all that time & money to play 100+ events a year with the primary goal of seeing your name climb up a list on website, perhaps you’re doing it wrong. Maybe as an experiment you should ignore your rank entirely for some period of time (3 months? 6 months?) and just play events you enjoy. Don’t even look at the TGP for a tourney. If it sounds fun, play it. I would LOVE to play in that Kentucky Derby event.
Using myself as an example, this year I stopped playing in our local big monthly simply because it’s not that fun for me. I generally do okay there, and won it a few times, but I got tired of having to play machines I don’t like, simple as that.
It’s fun to make state finals, and I have no shot at it without that monthly tourney, but I would rather play games I enjoy alone in my basement (or beers & dollar games with friends) than compete on games I despise just to grind points for some arbitrary list. At some point I will probably miss the competition enough to return and see if I can find the fun again.
Long winded point being, let the pure enjoyment of playing & competing drive your choices, not a rank number that’s meaningless to all but a tiny handful of people in the world. Maybe this new system is doing you a favor.
Winning is fun to me. I am not going to “not try” in a tournament. That’s disrespectful to the people I’m playing since I “don’t need to try” to beat them. I’m not going to apologize for being good or putting time and effort into something. That’s why I compete. I want someone to put up 2 billion and I put up 2 billion and one. That’s more fun to me.
I take the WPPR system very seriously is because it gives me and others access (or doesn’t) to state and IFPA world’s tournaments. (Year-end rank also affects seeding in these tournaments.) To me, this discussion is really important, because changes will affect who will get invited to the IFPA World Championships, the invitational ones
Every change has to have some impact analysis to determine how much time it will take to implement, the impact to the existing system and whether it really provides value.
I’m also weighing this against my time and to be honest, I’m no longer interested in wholesale re-writes of the ranking system.
WPPR 6.0 wasn’t even a slam dunk, but it turned out it was easier than expected to add.
This is a fascinating discussion, but I gotta say, it’s really hard to argue against this:
Basically, the question is: should the IFPA value quantity or quality? Josh is choosing quality and considering we’re talking worldwide top 1000, I agree with the decision. You throw enough darts, eventually you’ll get the bullseye, but that doesn’t mean you’re good at darts, just persistent. Playing to improve your rank should include the risk of dropping rank. If there’s an event you want to play (for enjoyment) but don’t want to risk your rank, just play incognito. I support these changes for accuracy in rankings.
Curious, does the IFPA award points to events with oddball requirements like that stool rule?
I would be more concerned how this format is played for IFPA points and would challenge my local TD.
Glad to see that Josh is already looking into this, since this definitely should be a “for fun only” format.
Please don’t unsanction this event, you will be signing my death sentence, Elizabeth will kill me lol.
Just had Eff% explained to me, I thought that if you finished 1st in one tournament and last in a second tournament, your overall Eff% would be 50%. I was way off. I think it is total combined tournaments WPPR compared to how many you actually collected.
I really do think it is great that you keep evolving the system and are continuing to improve it. Using myself as an example I do still think I will be traveling less. If you look at the numbers you ran for me I would be ranked 1006th without any D82 play. With my D82 play I will be ranked 947th. If I’m understanding the way WPPRtunity works, I have put myself in a huge hole by traveling. Yes it moved me up 60 spots but my WPPRtunity is so high it will be a long time before I can try and improve my Eff%.
I will still be going at least once a year because I love that place and yes I definitely play pinball for fun. However, part of the fun for me is being able to try and climb the ranks and realistically the way i’m understanding these changes are that practicing at home a lot more, playing local, and letting some of these large events fall off my WPPRTunity is the best way to do that
Triple Drain Pinball Podcast Episode 36: Josh Hates Tom
Hosts: Joel Engelberth, Tom Graf, Travis Murie and Josh Sharpe
Going to post this here. Last night Travis, Joel and I interviewed Josh about the proposed changes. You can watch the video on YouTube or you can check out the podcast. Links are below.
Big thanks to Josh for coming on.
Tonight we asked Josh Sharpe to join us and explain why he personally hates Tom! Tournament talk fills roughly the first 50ish minutes if you guys don’t care about WPPR’s and math, but I personally found the conversation really interesting as we dove into some of the 6.0 rule changes. We then discussed Pulp Fiction and Cactus Canyon Remake with Josh, as well as our thoughts on the new Whirlwind 2.0 kits and Haggis selling a Fathom Classic+ upgrade option. Enjoy the laughter!
How do WPPRs decay over time? I was using the API to check my numbers and the calculation of WPPRtunity was significantly higher than the spreadsheet. I’m pretty sure it has to do with decay but the values for the historical tournament results don’t seem to reflect the decayed values like they do in the player results.
Oh I see the difference. I was summing the actual points available from each tournament, where the spreadsheet is merely using WPPRs gained/eff. So those two numbers don’t match.
