IMO if I’m having a competitive league season within my community and Escher comes into town and plays in one of the league sessions, you now have this elite player significantly impacting the competition between this community of players.
If was in a group and ‘stole’ a bunch of 1st place games for the week, I could see players within that group being like WTF, this sucks, this dude who isn’t even in our league just cost me qualifying, etc.
I would encourage these top 250 players to show up to league and ‘hang out’, or even do what they do for bowling leagues. This is from the United States Bowling Congress 2022-23 rulebook:
I don’t know why anyone would be allowed to play in a league that they didn’t intent to actually participate in for the required amount of weeks. That’s not what leagues are for imo. Just have them play for fun and not have any impact on that groups scoring for that week if they just want to come hangout and play.
Basically I agree with what Josh is saying. Haha
This way they aren’t included in the IFPA submission.
In this particular league, groups are randomly assigned every round, so a single person would be unlikely to face the same opponent more than once. Even so, I would suggest the onus is on the TD to have a rule about guests rather than enforcing this at the highest level.
Again, I think this rule for top 250 makes absolute sense in the context of a single tournament.
SFPD has had the idea of guest participation for as long as I’ve been involved in pinball. In that league, groups are assigned at the beginning of the night and stay the same for every round — sure, a group might get absolutely shafted when a ringer comes in. But if you’re a good player, you’ll still have a decent night, and it might be your drop week. If you’re an average player, you’ll still have an average night, and it might not be your drop week.
I’d say a “pinball league” should consist of a set group of the same players over the duration of league time. If you’re inviting outside people to play, it’s now an open tournament. Trying to combine the two doesn’t seem to be a good idea.
By the IFPA’s own definition of league and tournament, no. For all intents and purposes, guests are league members if they are included on the results submission.
“A set group of the same players over the duration of league time” is deliberately exclusionary and antithetical to the spirit of competition.
Edit: Please let’s not over-legislate the definitions of league and tournament.
Absolutely. If they clearly aren’t going to be there for the required meets to make finals, then they should be a pacer player only. Rank has nothing to do with this rule.
Good or bad at pinball, guests mess up the league rankings and shouldn’t be counted.
League members must compete in at least 50% of the total meetings/sessions that were held in a season to be included in the results submitted to IFPA. Please note that players ranked in the top 250 at the time of the league season final should be included in the results submitted into IFPA even if they did not meet at least 50% of all qualifying requirements. Any level of participation will count as participating in the event.
I know the rule. If you do pacer players, they don’t affect anything in your league for your leagues standings or scoring, and you don’t submit them to the IFPA. They are just there to play for fun and keep the groups even for league.
maybe they should and be forced to pay $1 per player to the ifpa.
the ranking at the ends leads to them needing to keep track of all guests and hold back funds to cover them in case they make rank.
also can you list them as tied for dead last or do you need to see who did better then the other? say you have 2 people in the rank that both play 1 event but not on the same day?
The last league results I submitted (end date June 8, 2023) included a top 250 player that only played 1 week. I explicitly explained in the note why I was including this player and it was required by IFPA rules. When the results were official this player was removed from the results! What’s up with this? This player was ranked 248 in the results of a tournament on June 10, so maybe they jumped above 250 for a day or something, but I never noticed them being 251+ at any time recently.
My final thought on this is that the rule makes total sense for the top 250 for regular tournaments to prevent gaming the system.
I don’t think that we’ll see this problem (gaming the system) with leagues specifically because most/all leagues already have a function to drop lower scoring weeks, and leagues can also adopt and enforce their own rules to encourage regular attendance and prevent bad sportsmanship.
Do we really think that a top 250 player who regularly plays in a league (let’s say it’s an 8 week season) will play 3 weeks, have 3 extraordinarily bad weeks, and then abstain from league for the rest of the season? If yes, deal with it at the league level by booting players for the next season if they bail without a good reason.
@chuckwurt you’re arguing a completely different point, which is that guests do not belong included in league results. To which I’d also reply — leave it up to the leagues themselves.
Yep. That’s totally up to the league. No idea why you’d want them in the results, but everyone has leagues with different needs/desires. Every league has that freedom already and will continue to have it. Just might not be exactly how the IFPA will want the results submitted to them so you’ll just want to make sure you’re doing that correctly too.
and then the ifpa needs to update the rule to say that Any level of participation will count as participating in the event.
does or does not count guests / pacers
