The way our leagues ran was, you pay a one time player fee to the governing body for membership, this is paid only once. Then, for each league that was ran, which was 3 a week, you paid a one time fee of 15-20 bucks for that league fee for you and your team to join the league. Half went to the prize pool, the other half went to the governing body as administrative fees. This was all on top of the standard $10 per player per league night + coin drop for each machine.

It seems to be more then just yes no.

I see it being an issue for free events / charity events.

also for a $5 event $1 is big but for a $20 one not that much. Also this makes smaller month to month events pay in more then a big league that only reports 1-2 times a year.

Just wait for some TD to get over $600 a year where the tax paper work starts and for the sate pool to hit that number as well.

I listed the extreme on both ends. If I was the organizer of your league I would sit down with the player base and talk out the best way to deal with this process.

Submitting every other month cuts the fee in half. Submitting quarterly eliminates 75% of the fees. IMO there's a happy medium here where players are okay spending $2 per year on this, or $4, or $6, but not $12. Each player base values the 'fun' of rising in the ranks differently, so YMMV on this based on the other members of your league.

To turn the sarcasm off, there is NO WAY I would limit the feedback on this to 'Pinside only' as the determining factor.

The one good thing about dictatorships is that they get overthrown. Looking forward to meeting the person that starts the next competitive pinball organization to take things to the next level. As a player I will definitely enjoy the fruits of their labor.

A little OT but stuff like this why the NHL, NBA, NFL, MLB has a players union. they formed years ago.
E-sports is trying to start them https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/16/professional-gaming-players-association-wesa

EDIT

just saying if things get bigger then that is something that needs to be looked at / follow what is happening in other situations. Before it get's levels of BS that the NCAA is.

What I find sad is that *DARTS* can generate a $5-$10,000 first prize and pinball can barely get couch cushion change together.

Pinburgh?

Median would be a far more useful number, and it looks like that's in the low-100 area. That 13,671st ranked player is what statisticians would call an "outlier."

I can think of better places to spend a dollar.

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Well, you can volunteer to pay that couch cushion change for those who can't afford it - that should make you feel better!

(Eagerly anticipating the "well ---I--- can afford it, why should I help those who can't" response)

(BTW it's not so much that I mind the implementation of this fee, it's more that I mind those people who feel the need to say how little of a deal it is to them. Great! F everyone else though amirite?)

LOL at even including the guy from ND that si still not a rated player and played in 1 event in order to qualify for Nationals.

Lets look at the real numbers that matter, the people from Nationals that would take home the majority of dollars with the new plan. These ARE the elite!

Average rank of those that placed 1-8th; 92. Prize pool at nationals = $12500
Average rank of those that placed 9-16th; 127 Prize pool at nationals = $2000
Average rank of those that placed tied for 24th; 672 (tossing out the guy that is not rated from ND) Prize pool at nationals = $3200
Average rank of those that placed tied for 36th; 2224 Prize pool at nationals = $1600

Makes it pretty clear where the money is funneling and also whom is supporting the funding.

Median was rank 186 . . . so I guess this means it is catered to the elites?

We have a group of ~20 Country Directors and 47 State/Provincial reps. I value their feedback more than my own and have avoided implementing things that didn't get a majority of support from the volunteers on our staff.

I mean . . .

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can you say echo chamber?

Odd that WI was totally left out of any conversation or request for feedback... Must have gotten lost in the mail?

Paul Okruhlica is in our Google Group as are all the other State Reps.

odd as we have 3 state reps in WI. You know this already, but we rotate between the 3 main regions of the state to try and level the field advantage as much as possible. As you are abundantly aware, Tom G and myself are the other 2 state reps. In fact, Tom G is the current 2017 rep as he TDs for the fox valley region where the SCS is slated for this season.

I bet you won't.

This was the first year we created the State Rep google group, so I just copy/pasted the list of 2016 reps.

My apologies, totally forgot about your situation up there. Let me get an invite to both you and Tom so you guys can poke around the message board.

Uh. Yeah.

A median rank of 186 out of 50,000. I'm not sure how much more elite you can get.

2 threads of arguing . Somebody merge this crazy thing!

Luckily in this dictatorship you can just like , not participate and still play pinball like normal.

Union! Union!

We all need to start churches of pinball, and start to take donations for our tilt and death save tournament sins!

There was some dumbass vendor at TPF that had signs up saying they would charge a dollar if you tilted their games.

I meant in general - otherwise why is the IFPA doing this?

I am in favor!

My Pleasure tough guy

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That is atleast a couple of dollars in pennies there!

The top 16 in my state are not the elite. They are the ones most actively playing in tourneys and leagues. Rather than charging an extra dollar, I intend to subtract $1 per player from the prize pool. I am confident that the active players in my state will see the value of 75% of that dollar going directly to the state prize pool. Only 25% of that dollar goes to Nationals, of which every participating state has a chance to send a player.

I know that all regions are not like mine. This affects every region differently. I play locally and travel to some events. The number of "free entry" tourneys I've played in over the last several years..... zero.

I play in three leagues per week that are "free" minus coin drop. I also play in a few tourneys a month and never have to pay to enter. If they were pay based it would literally decrease the size of the leagues and tourneys to atleast half!

I think this is something they did not factor in. Seems like many states are pay to play.

In the roughly 160 sanctioned WI events I have played in during the past 5 years I think 12 had an entry fee.

Over 90% of all WI based events are free to enter up to this point. It is a dramatic change in WI.

Yeah. I expect that most in Austin or Houston won't give a hoot about these changes. Meanwhile, I don't think hardly anyone in Dallas would even care if we stopped submitting results to IFPA altogether. Maybe a third of the local players if that. I'm probably the odd man out among the Dallas "tourney regulars" that wouldn't care.

Almost everything in Dallas that happens is free. ESPECIALLY if it's at a public location. We tried for a long time to have prize pots and whatnot and the fact that the same four people kept winning over and over again killed the interest of a LOT of people from playing until things went fee-free. I didn't even ask for any actual contribution for a league that I ran out of my own condo. =|

Oh wait, that's kind of like this whole overall situation.

Not sure where 40 comes from. There are 56 rankings here. The median rank must be about 200. Average doesn't mean much. Its like taking a average salary in the US when you include a few billionaires salary. It skews things alot. Median tells a story here.

Yeah, that 24 should be an 8 and then the numbers will make sense. Although based on this small sample, I think an accountant should double check all numbers before payouts go out to state and national competitions.

Lol

(spoken as as TD... not as a moderator)

This change does *nothing* to promote pinball.
It simply redistribute cash from the average/mediocre players towards a handful of elite players.
I do not even see how this can be good for the hobby.

I asked it in the other thread, and I'll repeat it: if it does not apply to tourneys outside North America, make it clear. As it stands it seems we would have to pay. According to the IFPA site:

"To serve that purpose, starting on 1/1/18, the IFPA is implementing an endorsement fee that will be required for any event that wishes to be counted as part of the IFPA World Pinball Player Rankings."

For the record, the (now defunct) Pinball French national league (LNJF) tried to implement a similar tax (1 € per player / tournament). This was not a good idea.

As a TD, no fu***g way I'll charge a family with a dude, his two kids and the Wife $4 - or 4 euros - to fund this.

Josh/IFPA,

Please clarify if the current $20 fee per player at each state championship goes away under the new proposed $1/player/tournament fee structure. Sorry if this was already mentioned.

Thanks for all you guys do for competitive pinball over at IFPA.

As much as I like that it supports the argument, stop dismissing Dan, aka "the player from ND". Dan is a damn good player, and has put in a ton of hours this year to be one of the best players up here. Granted, we don't have much of a scene, competitive or otherwise. I do believe Dan went 7 games with a prolific poster here in the second round. A pretty damn good showing for someone in their first year as a regular player, competitive or otherwise.

On topic, if this outlier shows anything, I would suggest it shows a possible imbalance of this proposed system. Dan essentially did what Hilton is proposing he will do in the future, pay the least needed to get someone to nationals. This year ND would have done it by chance, not by design.

Sorry, I should have been clear. I meant in no way to dismiss Dan which is why I was referring to him as the ND player. I was merely pointing out how funny it was that Josh was using Dan as an example of a low ranked person that made it to nationals when by default of the system Dan is not even a rated players yet (does not have five events). Josh was attempting to play with the math to bring down th player average perception of those that played at nationals.

My whole point was that over 75% of the funds brought in to nationals was awarded to players with an average rank just over 100.

You are completely correct that the ND example also shows the imbalance in cost of each state to send a player to nationals. ND would have paid a couple bucks. Other states would have paid over 1000.

My apologies to Dan and always happy to see a scene starting up in ND!

Undecided. We will likely keep the $20 fee per SCS qualifier so we can "guarantee" bigger prize pools. All the endorsement funds collected would simply add to the total we've seen in previous years.

Should we generate enough funds to show it's working then we'll dump the $20 fee going forward from there.

Are these coin drop tournaments? Or are the games all on free play?

depends. Leagues are free play which is a good chunk of them.

others on on route with coin drop, but locations are not willing to pay and coin drop is too minimal to expect the operators to pay (we are talking on average under $5 in coin drop for a night of coin drop competition) Take off 50% split and you are at 2.50. Take off insurance and maintainence and you are at 1.25

Asking the operator to give up $1 of the 1.25 is ridiculous. They are already running the event in most cases and now IFPA wants a large cut of the remainder. not gonna happen.

Are people really THAT poor in Wisconsin?

I thought you people owned the Packers! Maybe sell a little of that stock?

Wisconsin is pretty simple, if the players want an SCS and want to be able to send a player to Nationals like this past year, they'll figure it out. I think they'll find atleast 16 folks willing to pay $1 per event to earn WPPRs.

If that's the rule.

So THAT made me spit out my coffee from laughing so hard

I think you guys are missing the point. As a tournament player in WI I don't really care about spending a buck to play in a "free" tournament.-that's basically tip money from buying a beer at the bar. Not a big deal. I don't make it out to many tournaments due to having young kids at home but I can afford $10 a year or whatever it costs me. The vast majority of tourneys in WI are free or for Charity tournaments. Now with the new rule change these would become paid tournaments.-whether it is $1 or $25 to enter is irrelevant. It's really the principle. One of our monthly tournaments is held at a bowling alley and usually there is at least a couple people that have never played in a tournament or just someone that was there for bowling and wants to check it out. it seems kind of petty to have to collect $1 from them vs. convincing them to by saying it's "free and for fun" vs. a form of gambling which is technically illegal in my State.

Not every league thing has to be ifpa? You can just meet at someone's house and play right? And who does free tournaments?! What's the point?

Apparently Wisconsin is the free, no-payout pinball tournament capital of the world! Who knew?

I have to admit I knew almost nothing about America's Dairyland 3 days ago but now I feel like I'm ready to run for Congress there. Or at least edit a Fodor's Guide.