[quote=“Law, post:50, topic:1380, full:true”]
Unlimited Herb with fixed payouts (a’la TPF 2015) is awful. No one has mentioned that yet. That should be right out as a format.[/quote]
Magfest with unlimited qualifying – for free – was perfectly fine. Was kinda weird being able to qualify at 5am, but it was at at least different. From what I’ve read, TPF 2015 issues were not the format 
What about doing limited qualifying where everyone pays $100 and you get 7-10 attempts on each game in the tournament bank? That would eliminate the long lines and people just constantly entering tickets. It should also be plenty of tries for anyone that is good enough to qualify, and enough for a novice player to get close or sneak in. I feel like way more people would play in a format like this at the big shows. At LAX this year, there were at least 20-25 really good players that didn’t put in a single ticket because of the long wait times.
I think a great tracking statistic would be a time stamp history of plays on a game. The data exists with a lot of digging through the player history, but knowing how many plays a tourney game has per hour might also be useful data for TDs in upcoming events.
TPF scheduled 3 attempts/game, and due to registration numbers had to cut that to 2/game to make sure that everyone could complete their attempts. If you reckon that they were close-ish to capacity, 10 attempts/game would require five times as much time for that player count.
Also, that’s a lot of playing. If it’s a 10-game bank, 3 minute games, that’s five solid hours of playing pinball per player. It’s also half-an-hour per player per game, not including downtime. If we have, say, 24 hours of qualifying that limits the player count to 48.
OTOH, at 2 attempts/game TPF got 150 people to buy in and everyone seems happy, so yay?
A couple other aspects that are different about TPF in light of limited vs unlimited entry:
I do realize that many of you on Tilt forums that are long-distance traveling tourney players would share the opinion of Ian and Jason who would have rather had more tourney playing time, and spent all/most their time playing tourney games. We’ll be dealing with that by likely adding an additional IFPA event to the main event for 2017.
I would say so. Have qualifying from 10 am to midnight Friday and Saturday to maximize qualifying time. However if I am going to only ply 2 games per machine, I would want the buy in to be more like 50-75 than 100. I think most Of the smaller shows could allow 5 attempts per player since they probably get 75 or less total players. Cleveland comes to mind. Up the attempts and entry fee per player. More players want in, reduce the attempts per player.
This is unusual. I think this had more to do with Pin-Masters following closely on the heels of the Women’s Championship, more than anything else.
That’s not to say that women are not increasing in numbers and talent… but the female talent was particularly concentrated in Vegas last weekend.
yeah we had a separate tournament Thursday night that had a lot of the State/Province/Womens competitors in it that got bounced out and the #1 qualifier was Robin. She and the other women and State/Provincial champs had fun facing off against each other since they were in separate competitions earlier that day. Me and Danielle were fighting for a playoff spot but we both missed out 
CAX last year did one bank of games across multiple eras. The finals were decided on a game of SCUBA between Jim Belsito and Josh Henderson—great stuff that was.
I agree! CAX was very similar in distribution of eras on the 12 games in the bank. I thought it was cool.
The differences in eras were:
Don’t forgot the newer players. I had an up and coming player, finished 2nd in women’s nationals, tell me she loved the MAGfest free entry herb format specifically because she plays as many events as she can and normal pump and dump herb formats become unreachable/unaffordable to have a chance to qualify. Her feedback is a big reason I feel we’ll keep unlimited entries next year.
I personally love Louisville but also find myself going deep pockets and still not qualifying, so I don’t prefer unlimited herb. TPF was an interesting mix between PAPA and Herb with only 20 entries. I am looking forward to playing in another unlimited Herb format in the future to see if I am able to overcome and do better after TPF. Really loved the tough format this time. AND I got to enjoy the entire show.
It wasn’t, in the end, 2 games per machine, it was 20 tickets to use; if you got a good score on your first try of a machine you could use that extra ticket somewhere else.
The greatest game of Scuba ever held.
Good point. Didn’t think about that. So yeah, I’m cool with 20-30 attempts total per man, 75-100 entry fee. I think more people that seriously want to play and qualify would play. Like I said, there are a lot of people at some of these shows that don’t want to spend the weekend waiting in lines and want to enjoy the show too.
I personally don’t think an average of 2 plays per required number of qualifying games is enough. This seems to provide quite an advantage to those responsible for setting up a tournament bank. It’s a pretty big bummer to go to a big tournament, having spent quite a sum of money just to get there, and find you’re competing against people that have played the exact games you’re competing on countless times in league, or at home, and you get maybe a few shots at best.
I think 20 games was a little too few for 12 machines… if you played every game once to see how they’d play that left only 8 games to improve scores… I think maybe remove 2 games from the bank and have your best 8 of 10 count
The larger number of machines is necessary to make sure enough players can compete. 7 or 8 out of 12 would be a sweeter spot to me, but they said they wanted to be certain any qualifier could compete well across modern / solid state / EM, which is why it was 10.
Which is why most other tourneys accomplish the same thing by offering a Main and a Classics tourney.
They were going for the opposite concept. The idea was you had to be able to be good at all eras of game, kind of like Pinburgh in that respect.
7 or 8 out of 12 with a restriction to ‘at least one/two of each era’ would accomplish the same thing, but @kdeangelo might not have coded that constraint into the software yet.