WPPR v6.0 sneak peek . . .

General
265

So Josh, I’m trying here buddy. Help me understand this. The real effect of these changes on me is to take away 21 or so wpprs that I earned. Because my efficiency rating is arbitrarily too low.

You throw this out there, and the obvious direct conclusion is “now IFPA punishes low efficiency “, meaning “low efficient = bad”. I am a bad player because I am inefficient, and the solution is to take away the wpprs I earned.

I don’t want to be a bad player. I want to be a good player, and keep all the wpprs I expended time and resources to earn.

So how do I do that? Seems obvious to me that if my efficiency was higher, say just 12%, the formula would deem me “good” and leave me alone.

But every example of cutting out inefficient events from a schedule leads to you saying “nah bro you would be worse if you skipped the low efficiency events.”

So what’s the solution? Just keep on as I always have, play whatever, and let the formula take away my wpprs? I don’t find that acceptable. Your new formula says I am “bad” and need to have wpprs taken away. I would like to avoid that, and play smarter in the future.

I’m already trying as hard as I can in DE, so that’s no answer.

People respond to incentives and disincentives. This new system seems like a disincentive to play outside my regular area at a tournament where I am less efficient.

You keep showing folks how they actually gained rank at these inefficient tournaments. So what are we supposed to do? Just nod along and say “ok cool, take the wpprs away and I won’t change my behavior because Josh says that would just make it worse.”

Side note, this new formula is opaque and hard to figure out and that’s part of the problem. I don’t have a good sense of what would actually help, except “finish higher”, which is not in my control.

I have a friend that is pretty similar in skill. We’re usually ranked near each other. But my friend, he lucked out. He took on a new local weekly here and won it a lot in 2023. He didn’t get a whole lot of wpprs from it, but boy his efficiency rating went way up once you average in a bunch of 100% efficiency ratings. He’s on the right side of this 6.0 formula, where I want to be.

266

Ha. I was more asking if you/the IFPA would ditch the WPPR system in favor of something else that was more accurate.

FWIW, coming up with a metric is “easy” compared to the task of actually implementing it at scale. Unfortunately for your retirement, I doubt anyone else is crazy enough to take that job.

3 Likes
267

The context you are missing is that WPPR’s and Eff% and working TOGETHER to create this ‘report card’ of how skillful of a player you are.

You are relying on your strong WPPR finishes to help increase your standing, and strong WPPR finishes are still by far the most important part of the formula in creating your ranking.

The data supports that. You remove Collective activity and you boost your Eff% up by ONE PERCENT (clearly you think that’s where most of your ‘bad play’ is coming from). What I’m saying is all that play impacted you ONE PERCENT. However, those ‘good events’ that you pulled out of the Collective had the biggest impact on increasing your standing.

You are missing the context of your adjustment. It’s an adjustment that is made to EVERYONE. You lost 21 WPPR’s (13% of your WPPR’s). I lost 352 WPPR’s (36% of my WPPR’s).

The solution is to absolutely keep playing, and simply try to keep playing “better”. This will lead to additional events hitting your top 20 card. As you get better, your ‘bad finishes’ will become ‘less bad’, so you’ll see your Eff% rise compared to where it is now. It’s the volatility of your results that have a far bigger impact on your Eff%, it’s NOT the amount of play that impacts it.

Outside of literally showing you how all that Collective play HELPED YOU, I’m not sure what else I can say.

I’ve been playing competitively for 30 years. I’ve been organizing events for 25 years. I’ve been maintaining this World Rankings thing for 17 years. At some point I’m going to have to throw out the “trust me” card and people are welcome to continue to discount the things I’m saying, or not, or create their own system that solves all of these injustices.

4 Likes
268

I question this part. It seems to me that this “Wpprtunity” value is arbitrary, setting it to the average of all the top 1000 players.

Setting it at 50%, the average I mean. That’s arbitrary and debatable. In words, you are saying that anyone above that 50% number is automatically playing “at a pace that far exceeds… most humans “.

I’m in the DC area, and I have access to a ton of tournaments. I play 1-3 events most weeks, but I also turn down another 1-3 events. I’m only attending half of what I could. So it feels inaccurate to be tagged as someone playing too much.

And I note that it’s confusing and not linear at all, this “too much” idea. Because if my efficiency was higher, it wouldn’t be too much and I wouldn’t be penalized.

Why set the number at the average? Setting it at 75% or 85% feels more accurate: Playing slightly more than average should be OK, and maybe the penalties should only start once I’m in the top 25% or even top 15% of wpprtunity value.

269

I mean this is exactly what happened with WPPR v3.0.

We had a system that we thought was fucking awesome! There couldn’t possibly be a better way to accurately rank players. WPPR v2.0 was THE SHIT.

Then this team of Swedish mathematicians said “hold my beer”, presented an entirely new system that included simulations, supporting data, compares/contrasts, reasons as to why they thought it was better.

My response was that they blew my mind over how much better a rankings system they created, so I ditched what we were doing and moved to what they proposed.

If someone builds something they think is better, I’ll support it if I think it’s better.

And yes I understand the implementing it at scale is the really hard part . . . but there’s enough young whippersnappers out there that you never know. I’ll be sitting here waiting for that day to be surprised at someone building a better mousetrap. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again in time.

3 Likes
270

And to do it as a volunteer on top of a day job…unless Josh gets a paycheck I don’t know about :slight_smile:

2 Likes
271

No I don’t think most of my bad play comes from the Collective, it’s not that simple.

But I did go back through all my active results and calculated my efficiency for each one. On my best days at the Collective I still earned an efficiency less than 10%. So my best finish there hurts my efficiency average, and all my usual finishes REALLY hurt that average.

There are other events that I always score low on efficiency at, but I tried to keep my example simple.

A one percent difference in my efficiency average would be huge btw. I’m at 11% today. If I was at 12%, I wouldn’t have been penalized by losing 13% of my wpprs in your sample sheet.

272

You have 145 active events on your resume. I hate to break it to you, but there’s a large amount of Earth where it is impossible for players to even come close to the ability to compete in that many events over a 3 year period.

The fact that you’re also turning down the ability to compete another 1-3 times PER WEEK, and the only thing I can say is to have some perspective.

It’s really hard for those that are privileged to recognize their privilege. I say that because I WAS ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE. It was only coming out of COVID in the race to get WPPR’s that I realized there was a large group of players around the globe that were equally interested in chasing the WPPR dragon, but simply didn’t have the access to do that (based on location, time, money to travel, etc). Telling them “too bad” or “just create 1-3 events per week yourself” or “just build a place that has 100 games and find hundreds of people to show up” is disheartening to a very very very large percentage of this player base.

This large group just wants to be fairly ranked against their peers, and the world is not giving them the opportunity to do that. This v6.0 system is allowing them to have a better chance to be fairly judged.

You go from being ranked 708th in the world to 777th in the world. From what I’m hearing from you, this is some kind of disaster or travesty. You’re clearly far more likely to be the 708th best player in the world instead of closer to the 800th best player in the world . . . because?

The only answer that I’ve seen is that privilege and access to events shouldn’t hurt anybody in any way, but that’s a fallacy. That hurt is already happening, and it’s been happening for a LONG TIME. There are a ton of players hurt by there being no penalty, and it’s those players that don’t have the ability to compete at anywhere near the level of many of the top 1000 players.

Moving the line so you only drop from 708 to say 740 would be ‘fine’? 730? Clearly 777 is ‘not fine’, but I’m trying to find where that line of acceptability is for you.

7 Likes
273

A one percent difference wouldn’t be worth the big WPPR hauls you pulled in during your ATTEMPTS at good events. That’s the piece you seem to be discounting.

Most of my large WPPR hauls are at Eff% values that are LOWER than my current rate.

It’s still a NET BENEFIT for me to have that play analyzed by the system, even if that decreases my Eff%.

I know I’m right on this. I know you’re still at an advantage here compared to most of the world, even if you don’t think so. “Trust me”.

5 Likes
274

Josh is a saint. The hard truth here is, if you have 145 events on your card and you’re only ranked 708, then no, you aren’t a good player. Your primary skill is free time. Continue to enjoy playing pinball, but please don’t lose sleep over your rank. Leave that for the good players.

Spoken as a fellow mediocre player, minus the free time.

19 Likes
275

In the current system it’s quite easy to predict your ranking point gains even before the results are in.

Example: a player’s resume with top20 results worth 40 points each. The player then wins something much bigger with predicted winner’s value of 240 pts. Assuming that no point decay occurs during the update, player nets 200 points. Knowing you get around 200 points you can predict quite closely where in total rankings you end up after the points get updated to the system.

How does this math work in WPPR v6.0? Let’s for example assume similar values than in Josh’s opening post: Eff% 20 and player having double of the average WPPRtunity metric.

1 Like
276

Because I earned the wpprs to be ranked 708th fair and square according to your rules, and now you want to change it after the fact.

I agree completely. No system is entirely fair, and I don’t think 6.0 is more fair than 5.8, just different and more complicated.

Living where I do, if I decided to take up Cricket or Sumo, I would be at a large disadvantage because there just isn’t any of that near me. That doesn’t mean I want to see the Sumo ranks get adjusted to help address this.

That’s actually easy. The line for me is where you go back in time and take away the wpprs I already earned.

I’m not a fan of this opaque system of taking wpprs away from the less efficient, but at least if it only affected future results it would be much more fair.

Going back and taking away wpprs I earned in good faith at the time is that “breaking trust” I was talking about, and that’s 95% of what has me upset with this.

277

Did 3.0 happen to be around the same time that the Swedes took over the top 10? :laughing:

5 Likes
278

To calculate the change in Eff% I would actually need to know the total number of WPPR’s that player actually played in. Since the WPPRtunity value is just a random made up stat, I can’t just use “double the average WPPRtunity metric”. When you say 800 WPPR’s and 20% Efficiency, that is a WPPRtunity value of 4000. I can’t just make that WPPRtunity value 2622 (double the average).

Let’s use @TomGWI because I just love picking on Tom (and I know he doesn’t care). His actual stats are relatively close to your example . . .

He has 766.95 WPPR’s on his top 20 card, and an Eff% of 23.28%.

If he wins IFPA18, and that was worth 240 WPPR’s, here’s what that would look like for Tom:

New WPPR total → 974.35
New Eff% → 25.25%

Tom would move himself up from 104th to 66th.

This obviously doesn’t take into account how the results impact the other 79 participants, but there you go!

279

This is tough but fair

I’m dropping from 100 to 150. Who gives a shit?

This will not affect my life nor the amount I play one iota.

22 Likes
280

LOL it was in 2008. For those with RGP2 access you can read through that evolution.

We posted our WPPR v3.0 plans in August - there was likely a bunch of OH MY FUCKING GOD YOU’RE CHANGING THIS AGAIN? WHY DO YOU CONTINUE TO FUCK US YEAR AFTER YEAR (it had only been 2 years of fucking so far).

Patrik Bodin made a comment in August:

“I’ve been playing around with the following formulas to calculate the multiplier addon for each player (where X = total number of players in the ranking system and Y = present players placement in the
rankings):” along with a bunch of mumbo jumbo that I didn’t understand.

We started providing raw data to Patrik offline to see if he could cook something up that looked better.

Over the years we’ve sent our entire database of results to roughly 10-15 people, and Patrik was the only one to ever respond with some version of “actually I think I can do this better”.

In October 2008 Alvar Palm introduced himself as the person that had been working with Patrik on the Swedish team of people trying to build a better mousetrap, which made sense because all the spreadsheets they were sending us had this value called “Alvar_Sum” that I actually thought was some real life math term for a while.

Looks like rgp2 is still active, just dormant, so send those requests to join if you want to take a trip down memory lane.

7 Likes
281

Those are the rules for the 2023 season. We have a history of changing the rules every single year. Some of those changes have been retroactive in the past, to the benefit and detriment of certain players, depending on the perspective of that player. This is nothing new for IFPA.

We can agree to disagree here. I think v6.0 is absolutely more fair.

All I can do is apologize if there was some version of an indirect contract that you felt the IFPA was providing to players through our WPPR system. The year we broke out Side events from Main events we broke trust. The year we changed rules for launch parties mid-year we broke trust. The year we decided to start charging for the sanctioning of IFPA events we broke trust. The year we no longer guaranteed events a minimum number of WPPR’s (25) we broke trust. The year we changed rules as to how we defined leagues and tournaments we broke trust.

The proof will ultimately be shown through the stats for next year. If the breaking of this trust is such a huge issue for a large amount of the player base, we will see participation rates decrease. If we see this then we’ll use that new data to fuel future changes in the continued balance of accurately ranking players while trying to motivate players to get out there and compete.

13 Likes
282

Just got to win IFPA18.

Life just keeps getting harder.

12 Likes
283

Love those animated data graphs.
Any chance you’d update the graphic to current month?

284

That is exactly what I was told so I did it… Now you are changing the rules come on man lol… I expect an apology the next time we talk after all the investment I made after telling me exactly what I had to do to be a top player.

Bottom line if you end up lower after this new formula then take the steps to improve your game so you can compete at the highest level instead of trying to manipulate a rating system to get yourself there.

1 Like