is this just the number spit out by Josh’s “participation” test case in buckets or is this something else?
This is the number split by current IFPA ranking.
What is the Y axis? What is the WPPRs possible?
Potential WPPRs that a player could have received, based on the http://www.ifpapinball.com/participation/ list. This was a really quick and dirty graph; I’ll work on polishing some later.
Ok, so not to discredit the work you did making this chart, but WPPRs possible is sort of a misnomer here. EFF % on all events * points earned on best 20 events DOES NOT represent the points “possible” in any way. In just the 20 events on FLR’s card he has a much higher EFF%. There is a correlation here, but all that pretty much indicates is that there is a stronger correlation on WPPR rank to WPPR points than there is of WPPR rank to EFF %. If everyone’s EFF % was exactly the same, the graph would look very similar.
The Y axis on this chart is WPPR points / (avg EFF % of player in top 500 which is ~24%)
X axis is buckets by 50 instead of 100.
Yeah, this was a lazy first pass, I just have to figure out what is the best way to crunch this data in an informative manner. I wonder why %Eff is seemingly so low at the lower end of the curve?
If you’re at the bottom of the curve you’re going to have fewer WPPR points.
Rank 2000 Spencer ONeill has 26.23 WPPR points and a current Efficiency of 4.7%
Rank 2 Daniele Acciari has 963.1 WPPR points and a current Efficiency of 53.78%
26.23 / .047 = 558
963.1 / .538 = 1790
My sig figs are wrong but that’s what’s going on with the math. Your numerator grows much faster than the denominator possibly can fall (and that’s why there’s really no meaningful information to be gained from these stats yet)
The Total Points on Daniele’s card is 4035.59. The total on Spencer’s is 32.86.
So (and correct me if i’m wrong about what these are displaying) Daniele has been to events in the past 3 years with 7503 WPPRs at stake. Spencer has been to events with 699 WPPRs at stake. The Eff % is just looking at that one stat on a rolling 3 year basis: total earned / total available at all events. The number spit out here only takes your best 20 finishes for now, so I just don’t see why that number divided by EFF % has ANY meaning whatsoever.
Maybe I’m not smart enough or am simply seeing coincidences where the data seems to be showing players that I do see are personally over/under ranked in the system . . . but I think there is something to using both of these metrics as a projection of that player’s skill.
If I look at two people with the same ranking point total, and one player has a higher Eff% than the other player, I can only hypothesize that the player with the lower Eff% has had to play more often to accumulate a resume that would match the other player.
If that’s true, I think this calculation has some merit in showing who has ‘played more’ to earn enough points to be ranked among players of a similar level, and those who have ‘played less’ to be in the spot they are in versus their peers.
YMMV . . .especially if you’re a smart math guy . . . but I like it 
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Originally I thought comparing the pinball ranking system to other ranking systems made sense. Look at how golfers are ranked and figure out what they do right and try to incorporate it into what we are doing (and by ‘we’ I mean the people dedicating their time to this, not myself for a comment here and there). It makes a certain sort of sense, but it also doesn’t.
The reason we know about the golf (chess, bowling, whatever) ranking system is because it is big. Huge. Like, to the point where a professional golfer is able to dedicate him/herself to the craft to the exclusion of another job. Currently I rank at 162 in the pinball world (see later for how I feel about this). If I was 162 in the world in golf, I would quit everything else (or more likely I would have already done so) and spend 10 hours a day working with coaches/trainers to get as good as I could get at golf. And when you ranked my performance it would be the product of serious training and dedication and likely to have some accuracy. And, it would be against others who are doing the same. And we would all be playing big field events as often as possible, because it would financially make sense to get on a plane and travel to them. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Could you imagine a world in which the top tier pinball players didn’t have another job, because playing pinball was so lucrative that their time was best spent honing their skills? Honestly, I don’t think I can, but who knows? If there were millions of dollars in circuit events, maybe that is exactly what would happen.
My point is that, to develop a ranking system that captures and measures pinball skill in the current tournament environment, I have no idea what the best measurements are, but I don’t think the method can be to look at a professional tour and point out how competent they are at measuring their players. Of course they are - there is a big business involved.
On another note, I really don’t see myself as the 162nd best player in the world, I don’t even know what the 162nd best player in the world would look like, but I don’t think it would look like me. That said - it sure makes me feel good to see it - so I pull it up a lot. 
TRU WPPR 4 LYFE! (I moved up!) 
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Hey Greg, we’re practically neighbors on the WPPR page! I’m right there with you at 156.
Hey Josh, the system totally sucks because there are no WPPR points for B division! How do you expect to ever get B players to play in tournaments? 
64 players? Easy. Just had one of those on a Thursday night with 100% grading.
I’ve seen bashing the WPPR system that it’s not fair to locations with less tournaments, then Seattle seems to come up regularly as an example of a city that unfairly benefits from that. When I arrived in Seattle, the 2012 Seattle scene consisted of … 2 annual tourneys (NWPC and Shorty’s), one league that played in homes, and this small dive that recently opened up and took a step at doing a weekly tournament, with perhaps 15 to 20 people showing up. Perhaps another stray tourney here or there, but not much more.
It has been significant effort of the entire community to turn it into one of the primary competitive hubs in the US. The community is not just the players, not just tournament directors, not just collectors, not just operators, not just location owners, but all of them working together. For example, a player on my Monday Night Pinball team gave up his day job as a software engineer to buy a bar; that bar had two pinball machines. First thing he does, buys another half dozen machines to put into the bar, and gets his friends who had machines sitting at home to become operators and put machines in, and within 2 months, he’s got one of the more popular locations with 12 machines. Why? Because running a bar with pinball is more satisfaction to him than a boring software job, and he is dedicated to be a significant part of the community. Pretty much every location in Seattle that has a lot of machines was built from the heart of people who truly enjoy pinball and have themselves been part of the community to build it.
The UK, as well as anywhere else that says they only have a few locations with a few machines each, is only 2 to 3 years from being such a competitive hub, but only if action is taken now. We’ve proven it doesn’t take much more time than that to grow, if the base community works together to make it grow. If those of you reading this just sit back and wait for it to happen, it won’t. Because it’s those of you reading this who are at the core of pinball and need to be the ambassadors who take the initial action to make it grow. The enthusiasm around pinball is so contagious that you only need to help plant seeds. When you mention the list of pinball hubs, every one of them has a core team of enthusiasts who made it happen in their city. Do you think Pittsburgh always had tournaments with 700 players showing up? I remember a day when Pittsburgh had one league with 12 players, at a bar with 2 machines. The large PAPA crew that you know so well made that happen … first one, then a few, then dozens of hard-working volunteers, with some of those volunteers becoming business owners who support the growth. Go to any other city, and it’s a similar story. THAT is the way to make pinball grow in your area. Trying to adjust the WPPR to make a desolate pinball area on par with a large pinball community is like saying the Olympics should award the same number of gold medals to the US and Jamaica, because it isn’t fair that the US is bigger and able to send more players.
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A bit off topic to the thread, but thank you for posting this. I’m working hard to turn Louisville, KY into a competitive city, and I’ve been intimidated reading about Seattle. Knowing that it wasn’t always the supercenter that it is now gives me encouragement to keep working on setting up tournaments (even when the bar wants to cancel them to have a show instead), keep introducing people to pinball, and maybe one day have something more than just one location with good machines.
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I would love to hit up some UL competitions if they are held on the weekends ever. Let me know! The other Cincinnati area players may come down as well.
The next weekend tournament will be on July 10th, at Zanzabar, it’ll be a pingolf event. I’ll have the details posted later today on louisvillepinball.com.
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I figured this might be the thread to post this? Looking at the live standings for Pintastic2016.
neverdrains.com/pintastic2016/
There is a player currently qualified in 2nd spot by the name of Eric Stone. What is interesting about him is his Ranking is 867th, but his Rating is 5th. Talk about getting it done!
Edit: Eight tourneys played. Results, 3 firsts, 3 seconds, 2 thirds.
Eric lives here in Florida. He is a very strong and consistent player. I enjoy competing with him.
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Wow those GB scores… mini flippers? lol
Just an idea to throw out there. Please criticize heavily if you hate it.
Restricting the number of events that can show up from a single location in a given year. For instance, if you play in every Superleague, only your best 3 or 4 finishes (based on point total) will show up on your card. Lower point total finishes at the same venue show up in the “active but not counted” section.
The general idea here is to limit the wppr-factoryness of certain locations without arbitrarily limiting their points per event or discouraging players form attending. Also, to make it more difficult to achieve a high rank without traveling.
I came up with “4” so that to get 20 events that count in a year you must play in at least 5 different locations. 4 events is also PAPA A + Classics 1-3. Figure if you do the work of physically moving games to a new location like Pinburgh, or a circuit like Pinvasion/Magfest that would also count as a unique location, even if it’s still “PAPA” games.