Competing encompasses both winning and losing. If this change drives away some players who care mostly about protecting their ranking and less about enjoying the camaraderie of competition I’m ok with that.
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Wow those were 5 . . . not very good tournaments for you.
Current Eff% = 24.26%
Eff% from those 5 events at D82 = 2.30%
Eff% with those 5 events removed = 30.79%
Currently you have no WPPR adjustment under v6.0 as your WPPRtunity value is below average.
With those 5 events removed, you would also have no WPPR adjustement.
So those 5 shitty performances cost you . . . NOTHING 
There are ZERO new players that are impacted by the WPPR v6.0 change. A player needs to play in enough events to be considered one of the best 1000 players on the planet before this adjustment can possibly impact their ranking.
I literally ran your calculation both ways . . . if you removed all the D82 activity you would drop 59 spots. If you removed all the non-D82 activity you would drop 23 spots. In both of those situations you played more pinball and increased your world ranking due to that play.
I guess if you want to say you brought your “A game” every time you won an event, you’d have 16.81 WPPR’s and be ranked 4578th in the world 
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So much dodging of the questions im asking and then leaving backhanded insults. I guess we are opening this can of worms. I’m literally a new player that will be affected by these changes. I started competing January of 2022. You sit back and look at this from a top 100 perspective. You go to big tournaments and plan to try and win every one. I go to D82 and try and take the morning tournaments serious and drink during the night tournaments and have fun. It seems you are trying to find a solution to a problem you dont have outside of maybe the top 100. I’m sitting here trying to tell you why it would make so much more sense for players to only practice and not join tournaments.
I visited Iowa last month and had a lot of fun at the barcades. I was thinking it would be a lot of fun to play an event there but none were on the ifpa calendar. Well guess what, that isn’t even an option anymore. Why would I join a tournament on games I have never played, in a place I am completely unfamiliar with? We have a place here that most machines are broke and people talk about not wanting to put a dollar in a broken machine to try and practice it.
You act like players should have known in retrospect that every tournament result would matter. I wasn’t trying to cherry pick my best tournaments and have you judge those. I was trying to say that there is a lot of players traveling and playing that are not in the same mind set as you.
Lets look at someone you effectively nerfed with this. Neil drops from 6 to 13. So what is your advice on how he could improve. I know what it sounds like to me. It sounds like he should NEVER travel to play. There is easily more than 15 tournaments at D82 with enough points to put him in top contention. He should NEVER play another strikes tournament (of his current top 15 only 1 was strikes and it was 10 strike prog) He could be using that time to practice his home course. NEVER play another side tournament. Why would he risk his eff% in basically a 1 and done format.
Now someone that gets a huge boost, Bowen Kerins. Yes everyone knows he is a GREAT player! He goes from 36 to 17. He played 16 events in 2022! Let me say that again so it sinks in, HE PLAYED 16 EVENTS IN 2022, TOTAL!. I’m not leaving any tournament out. 16 thats it. That’s what is now encouraged? Do you know how many events would die in minnesota if we all only played 16 a year?
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Oh and Josh, if I took all your “A game” results and calculated your 1st places finishes, you would have 0 pts. Where does that rank you?
These are good guidelines for anybody even if they are not confused by eff %. I admit I don’t care about the rankings anymore (and am not near the top 1’000) but IMO it’s completely fair that playing in a competition for “fun and drinks” (if it effectively means you choose to play worse) can have an adverse effect on your rank. (I assume this would be the case in most other sports as well.)
I’ve had some good and bad tournaments and I know it’s quite easy to say afterwards that I brought my A game or didn’t. But going into them, the goal was always to win even when it might have been an unrealistic one.
As for the incentive to play pinball, I hope for most it is simply that they love the game.
I’m with you that points and ranking is part of the fun, but your quoted argument here seems like the complete wrong reasons to play.
We do something you dislike, instead for enjoying what you’re doing?
I can kind of agree with the argument that players that have put a lot of time and money into travelling to A LOT of tournaments might get punished retrospectively, but in the most cases that Josh brought up, it doesn’t look like the differences would even be that big.
Another good point is the rewarding consistency.
Why should a player playing 200 event and only having decent results in 20 of them be higher ranked than a player playing only 20 events and winning most of them?
I would argue that consistency makes you a better player than quantity.
I have also benefitting going to quite few “WPPR farms”, as there was more chances to get some good points.
But on the way you will get the practice and experience, that you wouldn’t get from staying home “practicing”.
And I would also be dropping in rank with the effect of V6.0.
3 Likes
You’re not a new player. You’ve played in 127 events in the last 12 months, which is the 9th most in our entire system of over 32,000 ranked players. You may feel like a new player, but I think you’re missing the perspective of your opportunity and access compared to the rest of the world.
You played in 70 events before reaching the top 1000 in October 2022. It’s only at that point would we begin to analyze how you got you there. The number of players in our entire system that have played half as many events as you have in the past 12 months was 356 out of 25,000. WPPR v6.0 still allows you to capture all the benefits from that insane amount of play, it just limits the advantage you have over a world where players simply can’t play anywhere near the amount of events you get to play (in the spirit of making the rankings a more accurate measurement of skill).
More hyperbole . . . you aren’t looking at the facts.
If I remove all non-D82 events from Neil’s profile, he would have 1191.16 WPPR’s. Adjusting for his Eff% in D82 only events and he would actually drop to 15th in the world from 13th. Part of the reason he’s able to move himself up is by finishing in 6th at The Open World Championship, earning himself over 180 WPPR’s.
You seem to be coming at this from “establishing the highest world rank you can is the most important thing”. I know Neil well enough to know that “actually being one of the best players in the world” is the most important thing, and your world ranking is simply a resource being used to help give some perspective on who out there has some supporting evidence that they are actually better at playing competitive pinball than you are, or than Neil is, or than I am.
LOL yes. The plan is go play in 16 events and show that you’re world class at nearly all of them (Bowen actually has 25 active events on his profile). The encouragement for someone like Bowen is that top 5 or top 10 is in reach for him without the need to play in hundreds of events to get there. He can simply execute at his skill level at a “reasonable” number of events per year and be judged more properly against his peers.
The people that know me best know that I only bring my “A game” to events where I finish in SECOND PLACE 
That would put me 1190th in the world, so definitely room for improvement. Hopefully Germany brings me a bunch of seconds to add to my resume!
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This. 1000x this. This system will never be perfect, but as it stands right now, I think there are plenty of people that don’t actually believe they are top 100, 200, 300, they just like the fact that the current system says they are.
Just play when you want to play, in the events you like, and let things fall where they may.
Wanna be the best? Beat the best, and it will work out.
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Little off topic, but in the spirit of changes, I’d love to mention that I love the new TD pages. For those that haven’t noticed, click the link on the TD of your favorite tournament and see what events they have run: International Flipper Pinball Association
It shows total players, how many new players. Great addition to the site.
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Yeah I saw this recently as well and thought it was cool.
When do we get TD rankings? I need to know if my TD eff % will affect my TDranking in 2 years.
(As someone who absolutely does not believe they are at the “correct” rank I’m all for the 6.0 changes, but then again I actually play in non-IFPA events and “wacky” events.)
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This is where I would say you are missing the perspective of what a new player is. I am a new player, I have been playing pinball 2 years, if I would of stayed home and practiced and only played in 1 tournament a month you would still consider me new. However since I played in as many tournaments as I could I am no longer “new” in your opinion. I can only imagine the astronomical number of lifetime games played you have compared to me.
I am going to try and stay out of the top 100 for discussions sake. You have all the experience in that and I have none. I’m trying to share some perspective of a much lower ranked player than that. Here is an example coming up this weekend. There is an ifpa kentucky derby themed tournament at one of the places I play. You have to sit on a stool and play, if a foot touches the ground you get a strike. It sounds like fun and I would have never thought twice about not playing in it until I found out about these changes. We recently had a chaotic flipper frenzy tournament that was for a bday party and part of the strategy was to forfeit if you got too far behind in a match so that you could try to get more games in by the end of the allotted time. I played a tournament last week that had 7 machines and all had to be used because of the size of the player pool, which meant we had to play on AIQ with the drop targets not working(try collecting your soul gem like that)
This is the reason I bring those tournaments up. There is an entire formula dedicated to how much a tournaments TGP is based off of the format you use, rank of players, etc… Yet as far as I can tell with eff% it doesnt matter if I’m sitting on a stool pretending to be a jockey at the machine or at D82 playing super series. I’m all for continuing to improve the system, just trying to give my 2 cents on the potential flaws I see. I don’t feel like I should currently be ranked 500 in the world but I also dont feel like I should be dropping 400 places
If you take this spreadsheet and sort it by highest percent excess wppr you will see that 49 of the 51 players with over 50% all lose rank and the only 2 that don’t are already in the top 5. 147 of the 154 players over 30% excess lose rank. EVERY SINGLE PLAYER that didn’t make your average wpprtunity threshold GAINED RANK. In fact if your excess was less than 6% you gained rank. I’m trying to get an answer on how I am misinterpreting this because it looks like play less pinball, or at lease don’t play any formats with high variance
Anyone that doesn’t see an adjustment literally has to move up, because we’re only adjusting people down if necessary.
Your misinterpreting this because the WPPRtunity stat has nothing to do with how often you play pinball. I think I mentioned it earlier, but that calculation is based on two things:
- WPPR points on your top 20 card
- Your Eff%
So again, the number of tournaments you played in or the amount of WPPR’s you actually had a chance to earn are NOT included in this statistic. We’ll say it again again just to be clear, “it looks like play less pinball” is 100% incorrect. The amount of pinball you play has NOTHING to do with this stat.
Now playing in formats with high variance is a valid concern. This is where TGP is used to give more value to events with less variance, giving an opportunity for skill to be rewarded by WPPR’s earned.
The true issue isn’t format variance . . . it’s PLAYER VARIANCE. It’s very easy for players to believe that their top 20 card is representative of their skill level, when for most players, it’s simply not a fair representation.
Your Eff% for your top 20 card is 14.97%. If that was your consistent level of play and we applied that to the v6.0 formula you’d be ranked 491st in the world.
If you care that much about being closer to 500th in the world versus 900th in the world, with seemingly the accurate number being somewhere in between in your eyes, then yes, I probably wouldn’t play in events where you are sitting on a stool, or playing with reversed flippers all night, or needing to shotgun a beer before every game, or [insert any other variable that could lead to you not being able to display your proper level of skill at playing pinball].
I want to play in a tourney where I have to do all of these
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It’s something I’ve planned to look at. When? Someday. Will it make it in? 
This is where the confusion is for me. The first half says play as much as you want to improve top 20 card, the second half says don’t play any “for fun” events as they will likely misrepresent your Eff% and that in turn affects your top 20 card
The second half puts that decision on the player with respect to how they want to be judged.
I happen to find ALL events “fun”, but I still happen to try my best at all events, so maybe that’s the perspective I’m missing?
If you want to pull all the “fun” events out of the 120 you have listed, I’m happy to remove those and let you know where that calculation would land. This would of course include any “fun” events you did well at and not just the ones you did poorly at.
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I understand what you are inferring. I get that you have probably heard from a lot of people “well I wasn’t trying in that event”. I’m just trying to say that this adds a rather large aspect to deciding if a tournament should be played or not, no matter how small the event may be. Last week your spreadsheet was used by someone to show me that im “not that good of a player, I just play a lot”. That didn’t feel great. I have had tournaments where a player in my group has complained about a different player saying he “plays every ball like his life is on the line, its just for fun dude”. I don’t think you run in to that mentality much at the high level events you play in but believe me you hear it a lot in small local events.
I apologize if this discussion came across as hostile or aggressive. It wasn’t my intent
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I’m still trying to fully understand these changes and how they will affect things moving forward but from what I can tell, it seems like it is certainly a step in the right direction toward creating a more accurate Ranking System. If accuracy is the goal, it makes so much sense to include some sort of adjustment to account for the disproportionate availability of WPPRs for specific players. I definitely understand how some people might feel like their hard earned ranking that they’ve travelled and played as many tournaments as possible to build is being taken away but if you look at it from the perspective of someone who lives in a less populated area or a place with a smaller pinball scene, doesn’t live near a WPPR farm, can’t travel to many/any of the huge tournaments or even larger regional tournaments, etc. it makes a lot of sense to adjust for that.
Full disclosure, these changes will see my overall ranking go up as my WPPRtunity metric is below the average so my WPPR total will not be adjusted. I’m honestly not sure where my “proper place” in the overall rankings is but I definitely think V6.0 will better reflect my (tournament) skill level in relation to other players. And if I believe my ranking is lower than it should be, the only way to correct it is to travel to bigger tournaments where more WPPRs are available and prove it by having to play and beat people ranked higher than me.
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The standard response to something like that should always be to throw down a $20 bill and challenge that person to a head-to-head best-of-5 match to prove it! After all, direct play is the true test of pinball skill! A ranking system is just a way to try and get as close as possible to simulating direct play, in my opinion at least.
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Off hand, I can think of three different ways to collect your soul gem for the case where the drop targets aren’t working. From easiest to hardest:
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During soul gem, the mystery award will spot a shot for you so long as it isn’t the final shot. An easy way to light your mystery is to make a super skill shot to the tower, otherwise you will need to hit some captain marvel ramps.
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During soul gem, a shot to the right orbit that doesn’t make it all around and falls into the pops, a “flank attack”, will spot a shot for you so long as it isn’t the final shot. It usually isn’t too hard to hit a flank attack shot, but saving it until the drop targets in soul gem could prove challenging.
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Mind Gem. If you win the mind gem before playing the Soul Gem quest, and place it on a shot with a Level 1 or Level 2 hero, then during the soul gem quest, you can use the blue button to spot up to three of the first 7 shots. I recommend you select “Hard” at 10x value if you have the Mind Gem buttons ready to go for your Soul Gem.
Adam
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