South Elgin, IL
Quoted from cfh:To me it's simple numbers. Say a show has 100 games, which is pretty typical. And they use 10 games for the tourney. Again typical (at least for shows around here.) now of the show going population, do they comprise 10% of the total population? I would say heck no, probably more like 1 or 2%. Again it's catering to the few at a cost to the many.
Let's examine that a little bit. Take expo, for example. If I counted correctly, there were 169 participants in the main tournament (source). At 1-2% of the population, that puts expo attendance at 8500-17000 people. That's pretty comical to me. My guess is expo attendance is probably a lot closer to 1500 (though tbh I have no idea) which fits a lot better with the 10% model.
Quoted from cfh:My opinion, but I feel the attitude of some tourney players is that the rest of us aren't worthy of the top games. At least that's how it feels to me. I just refuse to sacrifice top games for this. I would rather have the other 98% enjoy the games.
Players have very little control what games are actually used in the tournaments. Plus, to MY knowledge, there is only one show that remotely fits your example, and that is expo. I believe at CAX, for example, they use lots of different games, and show a STRONG preference to games where multiple samples exist so they take away as little as possible from the show. At MPE the last time I went, most of the games were later model Williams games that everyone has seen and played to death that has gone to shows (for the most part). PAPA rarely uses more than 2 of the newest games in a given bank, and then has at least one more copy on the floor to practice on. Pinburgh has 50 groups and 200 games, and again, most of the newer games that are actually in the banks have extra copies available for everyone else to play.
Going back to expo, the show that would seem to fit your Big Problem the most, here is my understanding of how things work: The tournament is run by Trent. Trent is a Stern distributor. Trent therefore has very easy access to all recent Stern games. If the tournament organizer is tasked with bringing along a bunch of well-working games that hold up over the length of a what, like 48-hour (of mostly non-stop play) tournament, you think he's going to bring a bunch of solid-state and EM games? If this gets you bent out of shape, then consider whether the games would even be there at all if he wasn't bringing them for the tournament. My guess is no.
As for considering others not worthy: This is so unbelievably laughable that I think my eyes got cancer from reading it. Believe you me, NOTHING would make me happier than not having to compete in a bank full of Sterns.
Quoted from cfh:I think it's far better to have events like pin burgh for tourney players instead of trying to wrap serious big dollar tourney play into a pinball show.
As far as I can tell, you've given one example of a show that "steals" games from casuals, and even that is highly dubious given the circumstances. You may have other problems with tournaments or tourney players that you're not willing to disclose in public, but I can only go with what you've said, and I think it's ridiculous.
