Seriously. Read the UK Pinball Open page, have a small aneurysm, and then tell me that it doesn’t make the NWPAS format look like a breath of fresh air. The classics tournament the year I went made even less sense. Something like you had to have the top score on one of the machines in the qualifying bank to advance, so putting up 2.2M on Embryon meant nothing because Franck Bona had 2.3M and 100M+ on Class of 1812 meant nothing because someone else had 110M. It looks like they’ve gone away from that format towards something more typical but still…it seems like that sort of stuff has a foothold there that is going to be hard to shake.
Edit:
Looking back at the post this could come off as a little more negative and less playful than I meant it to. I really do want players in the UK to have a better chance at being competitive in the world rankings. Both of my parents are UK citizens and I’ve spent roughly a good 2 years of my life there (so almost 10%). It bums me out to see that there’s just not much of a tournament scene around and I’m not sure what can be done about it. I do think that the popular formats are hurting the situation there, though, and I think that a shift to more conventional formats would help increase competitiveness vastly.
Even if you played at the exact same level you’ve been playing at the last 3 years, here is where you would be ranked if you played the ‘average’ of a top X player in the system:
top 500 - 379.59 pts (64th)
top 250 - 446.95 pts (43rd)
top 200 - 466.51 pts (39th)
top 150 - 499.47 pts (34th)
top 100 - 527.73 pts (27th)
I’m gonna get “Don’t blame the system, blame the player” tattooed on my chest
Almost every person over the last 10 years that comes to us with and idea for “a better rankings system” has it based in the idea of “I can be ranked higher even though I play alot less than others.” It’s also amusing that we’re like 0 for 15 from hearing back from those we’ve given data to for them to test their theories.
Similarly, we’ve heard “your system sucks, look at low is ranked!” But they mostly fail to realize it’s true for all rankings systems. Ya gotta play to be noticed.
Brian
I dont see anyone upset about the # of tournaments in Europe who actually go out, travel and play in the events within 4500km like some players in the USA.
I always chuckle at that comment because lumping the “USA” as if it’s a local area with all this opportunity is so far from the truth. The global issues people mention about lack of opportunities is no different compared to large pockets of the USA that have the same lack of opportunities (large cities versus smaller country towns).
When you look at the size of Europe versus the size of the continental US . . . it’s about the same. Players that are interested in competing at a high level across Europe have the exact same challenges as players that want to compete in a high level across the US (except Euros need a passport and we don’t)
In looking at the top 500 ranked players, 55% are from the US and 45% are from the rest of the world. Not quite 50/50, but close enough that it’s safer to say there are areas of the US where it’s “easier” to play in more tournaments, just as there are areas in Europe where it’s “easier” to play in more tournaments.
The bigger issue is about making the most of those opportunities. My favorite example is always the Hungarian Pitbull:
The guy has played in 15 events over the last 3 years, at a clip of about 1/2 the participation level of a top 500 player . . . and he’s ranked 70th (and 1st in Hungary by a large margin).
The one new thing I’ve learned from this exercise is that if you’re gonna complain about not having enough opportunities to play, you better at least be playing at the level of a random top 500 guy. Anything south of that and I don’t really know what to tell ya.
First, many leagues are attendance-based, so those of us who can’t attend every month or week get sh*t results that don’t match our play. For instance, I’m in the OC league; last season, I played 6 months out of 12 with three 1sts, one 2nd, one 3rd, one 6th. I came in 26th due to attendance; if I’d been there every month with comparable results, I’d have been first. Looking around at other people’s results, I see some high-ranked people who clearly have similar things going on. Things like that shouldn’t hurt your position; I can accept it not helping you, but it shouldn’t hurt you.
Second, sometimes you’re at an event just briefly and you choose to put in a casual entry or two to contribute to the charity / prize pool / support a friend who’s the TD / goose the WPPRs for it for the benefit of the others playing or whatever. Again, I don’t think your being a nice guy (or gal) in situations like that should hurt you. Life isn’t meant to be taken seriously 100% of the time.
Actually, if it was tweaked a bit, and other things fixed, it could be a good change.
In Golf, they use average points per event, but
they don’t have top players crossing tours / event levels: if Rory played a few weeks on the Web.com tour, it would hurt his rank, but that doesn’t happen in golf.
they have a “minimum activity level” of 40 events, i.e. if you don’t play enough, too bad.
they don’t have NYC Super-league like things that distort the rankings. If 50 of the PGA guys get together for a pot game, it’s a big goose egg.
If you’re gonna consider a participation adjustment, I’d want all the other crap fixed first.
If your opinion is that the change isn’t a good one, I just need to make sure that the correlation between people moving down in the rankings because of the change vs. having negative opinions about the change is strong
Speaking of . . . Shepherd only hates the change because he goes down 13 spots
I have made decisions like the one’s you have as well Bob. However, surely ‘charity/supporting a friend/goose the WPPRs for it for the benefit of the others playing or whatever’ should not be considerations in terms of making the most accurate ranking system. I agree that life isn’t meant to be taken seriously 100% of the time, if you want to play with your mates, cool, do that. If you want to play in half a league, cool, do that. But what other sport are you able to play shit and not be accountable for the way that you play in terms of its rankings?
In the landscape of competitive pinball, there are very very few places that can get 64 players together at least a few times a year. Drop that number down to 1 time a year, and I imagine it’s still a fraction of the total number of events. This is the kind of thinking that seems common amongst players/TDs that live in an area with a large and healthy scene and the kind of thinking that frustrates the heck out of players/TDs that don’t, and are indeed trying. It always has this tone of “just add water!” as though it’s as simple as starting more leagues and running more tournaments. I can post all day long on Facebook or print $1000 worth of flyers and paste them all over the city, but that doesn’t mean people are going to come when there are a million other things vying for their attention. I tried the Facebook route and got a total of 4 players to come play in a selfie league.
The way I see it, until there is enough money in pinball to make it worthwhile for people to “go pro” or spend all their time and money traveling to events all over the country/world, the system should try to balance the effects of access in some, even if it’s small, way. I don’t know if what Josh is porposing is the best idea but without some sort of compensation you wind up with a ranking system that works pretty well for the top 50-100 or so, and then a ranking system that mostly handles players in NY, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and maybe a couple places in Europe.
“Works pretty well for the top 50-100” seems to be a popular easy statement to make, but if we’re going to talk about average participation rates, let’s actually talk about THAT.
Is it fair to expect a player to be ranked in the top 250 to be participating at the average rate of a typical top 500 player?
That’s the crux of the problem people have. People want to be ranked in the top X, by averaging a participation rate of a typical top Y player.
If I say I want to be ranked in the top 10, by participating at a rate of a typical top 10,000 player, everyone would be like THAT’S STUPID.
Solving for X and Y is the key here.
“Just adding water” doesn’t take into account that the average of players in the top 500 are already including areas where there is no water.
For an average competitive player, and what participation rate is a player expected to play at before they can complain about being not properly ranked?
Every person I’ve looked up that has felt the system has let them down is not even participating at a rate of a typical top 500 player.
Most sports. Golf, bowling, tennis, etc. all ignore non-tour events in their rankings. The golf pro-ams the day before most tournaments don’t count. Monday qualifiers don’t count, although they matter a lot to those playing in them. Bowling sweepers, pro-ams and leagues don’t count. In most individual sports, there are tons of competitive events, but only a tiny faction of those are used for ranking purposes.
Six or seven years ago I lived in Seattle, and the competitive pinball scene was essentially nothing. Now it is one of the strongest in the country. The same is true in Portland. Both these scenes grew in different ways, but in both cases it is because players stepped up and made the scenes they wanted to see. I can’t point this out enough. Got a favorite bar? Advocate for pinball there. Show how it can grow their customer base. Always wanted to be an operator? Grab a couple games and offer them a deal, then hold events. When NWPAS wanted to run their first year as a major show, they came up with a system through which volunteers drive trucks through the night to and from collectors to build up the game collection for people to play. Portland is not a big city, and we have more pinball machines than anyone. You think this is just because of hipsters?
Step up and make the scene you want to be a part of.
I don’t know the answer about what is fair in terms of participation rates. If you’re using me as an example, I’m going to be low, and that’s because I simply don’t have enough vacation time and can’t afford to travel to events as often as I’d like. Although I suppose I could if I stopped buying pinball machines… HOOPS though!
Agreed. And I don’t want to be ranked anywhere other than where I am based on the points I’ve earned. I really, don’t care whether I’m 100th or 1000th. My gripe with the system was that lack of access to events precluded me from having a reasonable opportunity of qualifying for the SCS without traveling up north where the WPPRtunities are far greater and due to the larger fields, a top 10 position could easily be worth more than beating Karl, Jim and Bob in a 15-20 person tournament down here. Those numbers are made up btw, so feel free to go prove me completely wrong if necessary.
That statement was meant solely to say it’s not as easy to grow events in some places as it’s often made out to be by people in vibrant scenes. Would I love for there to be 64 person tournaments to go play in every quarter? Hell yes. Do I ever see it happening in SoCal? I have no idea, but I think no. There just doesn’t seem to be the appetite for it. People have too many other things to do. It’s not stopping me from trying but I can’t take more than 24 people in my league since the only places to play are people’s homes and even then, it’s tough getting that many to commit.
Again, no idea. I don’t know what my participation rate is and no idea what the right one is, but as I said, I do like the idea of solving for cost of living to some degree.
I know that the scene was nothing and now it’s something, it’s the same story in a number of places. But it’s not because people here aren’t trying. I have no idea if everyone else is trying harder, but it can feel belittling to hear this type of comment when I know that people here are indeed trying hard and are not being as successful for whatever reason.
I didn’t post it to belittle anyone, I posted it to make the point that the system that needs fixing is not the ranking system. Advocating for change to WPPR based on access to tournaments de-motivates people from growing their scenes which is the exact opposite of what anyone wants.
I gree with @jay that it’s incredibly hard to facilitate these large 64+ player tournaments. Even in the SF Bay Area (extremely active tournament scene) there are not many of these:
CAX
Pin-a-go-go
SF City Champ
SFPD league
All other leagues and tournaments are much smaller (20-30 people). I hear everyone who says “grow your scene” and I say the same thing. But! Building spaces for big tournaments is a massive undertaking. In cities like SF there just aren’t physical spaces that will hold 64 people and enough pinballs to run a tournament.
Almost all bars are locked into multi-year contracts with shitty operators making games totally unfit for competitive play. No amount of community building can fix that. Well, can be fixed long term, but you have to convince your great pinball operator to also start operating jukeboxes and pool tables.
Finally, local legislation can make it very hard/impossible to operate enough machines to make tournaments viable. Up until a year or two ago this was the case in SF. Getting that somewhat fixed at city hall is my favourite moments of SF pinball community building.
I say “grow your local scene” all the time, but I say it with an intention to encourage people to grow into 20-30 player events. External factors can often make bigger events an impossible goal.
The classics tournament the year I went made even less sense. Something like you had to have the top score on one of the machines in the qualifying bank to advance, so putting up 2.2M on Embryon meant nothing because Franck Bona had 2.3M and 100M+ on Class of 1812 meant nothing because someone else had 110M. It looks like they’ve gone away from that format towards something more typical but still…it seems like that sort of stuff has a foothold there that is going to be hard to shake.
