All the leagues I take part in are currently one or two attempt on each machine, play against the feild and use a buddy scorekeeping approach. Even a lot of the tournaments I have attended this year use buddy scorekeeping.
It would be nice to know what is going to be acceptable. I guess we can nominate 5 or so score keepers at league and get them to record the scores, but it will be a lot more work for them, and I expect those people to have less fun. If membership doesn’t support the change, we may become irrelevant from an wppr standpoint. Without being able to could the 6 months of meetings towards TGP, we become just a small direct play final only. Will need to talk to others, but giving feedback that I find the current language too ambiguous. Maybe that is the point.
My second question is if pinbowling(and other pingolf like events) can qualify for the pingolf rules. I know it would count under 1/3 games played, but could it qualify under average balls played to get that possibly up to 2/3 it the objectives are hard enough?
so if a location let’s someone working at (scorekeeping at) the location verify the score does that person have to actually watch them play to make sure they didn’t death save or play multiball while a ball was stuck etc.? Asking since one location here is open to letting staff record/verify scores, but they won’t actually watch players play the games.
I know in many Circuit events I’ve played at the scorekeepers aren’t looking out for some of those things so I assume that’s OK?
Here’s another idea for an “Open League” that I was considering. Have times when the games are recorded using webcams, and although there isn’t a tournament director present, they can review the footage. Would that work?
You can definitely do that. It won’t be worth anything towards TGP, but me my guest
Think of any normal tournament. You’re able to have a score recorded by someone in an official capacity, and more importantly someone is available to make rulings, handle malfunctions, free stuck balls, etc.
If your event can’t do that, it won’t be considered “verified” activity.
That’s fine as long as someone is available to handle ruling and malfunctions. Even at PAPA I rarely have a scorekeeper do anything other than come up to me when I raise my hand, however Doug and MHS are present to be able handle those rulings and malfunctions that may come up.
It sounds a lot like our league. We’re all self group scoring, and then our League President is always present (or someone he deputizes for the night if he’s not) to handle any rulings and malfunctions that come up.
And yes . . the language is ambiguous on purpose so it’s easier for me to just say “NO” to most people, instead of being explicit, and having people try and probe for workarounds anyway
Thanks to some help from Keefer he was able to find a website that showed the average number of balls thrown based on your finishing score. I’m okay with following something like this, but will deal with those that want to run Pin-Bowling, or gasp, Pin-Duck-Bowling (the better version) on a case by case basis. It’s been pretty rare up to this point.
And if you have a multiple location type super league (like we run up in Seattle), having only “partial” location being “verified” would disqualify the whole qualifier process. Most of our location cannot provide the staff/man hours to do TD/scorekeeping so we are happy to use them only for “seeding” (you know fun pinball time for players and $$$ for operator too) and get as much TGP pts from a long monthly final top16 4 games per round type thing gets you 96% TGP and will make Bowen happy
Im trying to think how the changes to the selfie league help me as a TD and an operator and i cant think of any. I am limited in my hours i can run tournaments which is basically 12-5 or 1-5 on the weekends and not having the TGP of the qualifying makes the monthly tournament with finals worth less points and will probally reduce participation for those with WPPR points being a motivation to qualify.
As a TD its hard for me to say unverified qualifying isnt worth WPPRs but its worth seeding in the final.
Im not sure if folks are exploiting the selfie league qualifying but id rather compromise and set some limits so unverified scores can still be used.
Keep in mind that you can allow as much of the field as you want through to the finals, since the only reason to limit it to 10-50% of the field was to make qualifying count for TGP.
That makes me wonder, what if a player doesn’t play 50% of qualifying games, but makes it into finals and wins? Do they have to be removed from the IFPA submission because they didn’t play enough qualifying games?
Remember that this is NOT the mission statement of the WPPR system. Read no further then the first paragraph of our WPPR v5.3 announcement:
“Since the release of WPPR v5.2 for the 2016 season, the IFPA has continued investigating ways to make the World Pinball Player Rankings more accurate for how we rank players across the globe.”
This is about making the world rankings more accurate, and the selfie leagues are simply overvalued for “what they are”. It’s taking advantage of a system that’s built around events being organized and run by volunteers who spend countless hours, money and energy putting something on.
Compare that to the “effort” it takes to run a Selfie league, which for me is entering a score from my phone at my leisure, and finding a clever comment to post on Facebook along with posting a picture . . . and showing up for 90 minutes once a month to run a final. It’s really a f*cking joke (and I say that because I created it, and I still think it’s awesome, and I still think it has a place in this wide world of competitive pinball . . . just at a reduced value based on the play where that TD is putting in that time/effort/energy like they have to do for every other tournament on our calendar).
If we wanted to help out operators we would value all Selfie leagues at 100 points minimum. If we wanted to help boost the business of JJP we would offer a 5X multiplier in WPPR points for any tournament that uses a JJP game in the lineup. Unfortunately the benefits for the operator from WPPR’s is more of a collateral damage sort of thing rather than the goal of the system.
Right now our SSL averages about 10 WPPR points a month. Anyone that finished outside of the top 4 got less than 2 WPPR points for their performance. Next year our TGP will go from 64% to 24%. The winner will be getting ~4 points instead of 10, and anyone outside of the top 4 will see a drop of LESS THAN ONE WPPR POINT each month for this change. For anyone in the bottom half of the field, we’re talking HUNDRETHS OF A POINT difference.
If that less than one WPPR point difference is going to ruin everything for operators, TD’s, players, kids, puppies, etc, then someone needs to prioritize where WPPR’s fall in their life.
Yes . . . they can’t be included in the submission of results
I would highly recommend that the TD change their format if it’s allowing for this to happen. At that point it becomes obvious that the TD is trying to include way too many games in the qualifying portion of the tournament as a way to boost TGP.
All this talk about how selfie/super leagues are going to be impacted strikes me as a bit strange. All of you can continue to run your leagues exactly the same way you do today. It’s the same amount of pinball and fun as it always was. Quirky “first to multiball” rules (which I kinda like, it’s different) can stay.
Personally, I’m not in it for the WPPRs but I try to maximize them on behalf of my participants while staying within the guidelines set forth by the IFPA. If we can get a few folks who are in it just for the WPPRs to travel to our establishment I’m all for it.
I think Josh’s response was fair and Im pretty sure we can come up with some other ways to reward our participants to qualify. Maybe this will be via higher seeding for finals or we can have some prizes etc…
Assuming you have a Stern or two, you could run TOPs tourneys during qualifying. Some guys play for the WPPRs, but everyone loves cash prizes. First play for cash, then play for points at the monthly.
I would like to see tourneys played in public locations get a 1-2% bump. Not for the operators, but for the good of the whole hobby. The growth in the collector community is outpacing the growth elsewhere by a large margin.
That is actually a good point… We can guarantee top 16 finals even if we get 30 people in that case. Since qualifiers would not count anyway. That would be good for the players and avoid random number of finalist from a month to the other.
Including or not people who did not make the 50% would be interesting. it will be the balance between playing for fun and playing for WPPR I guess? They would be told that they wouldn’t count for WPPR of course.
because a player that gets 1.10 points will be much happier with 1.21 points??
Let’s leave the rankings system to ranking players accurately. We have other exciting things coming down the pipe that strictly focuses on location play. Stay tuned!
In general, if you look at WPPR changes over the last few years, the trend has been that if you have an event that requires very little effort to run and/or win then you’re going to get screwed eventually. This is not because @pinwizj enjoys crushing people’s dreams (mostly) but because there is a very high correlation between effort and quality. Throw together a knockout tourney in Brackelope and run it in three hours? Bzzzzt. Multi-day qualifying event with all days finals? Now we’re talking.
It is kind of mind-blowing that people continue to be surprised by this.
