I can't believe I missed this thread before. I love to see all the excitement about leagues!

FSPA system isn't really "Swiss style", at least not how I understand that term. FSPA rules don't rank players by either their season total of points nor by your prior meet's point total... rather, you simply move up a group if you win and move down a group if you lose. (Basically a bubble sort.) This prevents the wild swings you can get from the "rank by previous points" systems.

This. Players with lesser skill (whether they're newbies or not) can get frustrated if they play a large number of games against players who completely dominate them, which may result in them just abandoning league play, which is no good. Expert players may be less likely to abandon league play, but they don't get much challenge or enjoyment out of stomping the low-end players.

"Everyone must play everyone" also doesn't scale well. If you assume a typical 8-12 meet season (whether that's once per week for a ~3 month season, or once per month for an annual season), it breaks once your league gets larger than 30 or so players.

One thing we keep in mind is that leagues provide a setting for social competition outside of official league play. So while we don't like the league's best and worst players grouped together battling for league points, we certainly encourage players to come to the location before league starts, and/or stay after league is over, and play for-fun games with others. That gives everyone the chance to socialize, and have the weaker players learn from the stronger ones, without messing up league points.

Several people have mentioned the FSPA scoring software... it actually can run both FSPA and PPL formats now, and I'm adding support for several other league formats. Fully Web-based, so it's accessible from any device with Internet access. (New version of the software coming up also adds HTTP/JSON API support, since I've actually had a lot of requests from people wanting to build custom clients, do specialized analysis of data, etc.) If you're interested in trying out the system for your league, or just have questions about it, please don't hesitate to ping me.

Heck, three machines can run a league. Sure, there will be more waiting and people will get tired of playing the same machines over and over, vs a location with six or eight or twenty machines. But personally I'm OK with having people wait a bit rather than turn away people who want to play pinball! (If waiting is a problem, PAPA Classics should be cancelled forever.

In the FSPA model, the winner of each group (except the very top) gets bumped up every week to face (theoretically) slightly better opponents. That slightly higher level of competition feels manageable to those players... they figure that if they repeat what they did the prior week, but just make a few more shots, they can beat these people. And sometimes they indeed do so, and move up again. The players who make the effort to improve themselves will do so, and work their way up the ladder. Other players might not choose to actively improve for whatever reason, but they may still enjoy a "fair fight" against similarly-skilled opponents.

In practice, everyone does get better. I can tell you that the vast majority of our players, including lower division folks, have much stronger skills (both in techniques like catches and passes, and in final recorded machine score) than just a couple years ago.

Agreed across the board, including my own long-windedness. There is no single format that's perfect for everyone -- I always tell people who want to start new leagues to browse the Net looking at many different formats out there, and select one that works for them. The FSPA format tries really hard to balance "competitiveness" and "fun"... but if we're forced to bias one way or the other for a particular rule, we normally bias toward "competitiveness". My thinking behind this is simple: fun is easy, anyone who wants to play pinball for fun can text some buddies to meet up at a location, and play some games. But providing a formal competitive environment, with fair, thorough rules, is difficult -- and you're right, most people don't want to deal with that administrivia because it can be boring. That's exactly what the league system can provide for people who want it.

For anyone who's reviewing league formats, I'd suggest this page as a quick guide to FSPA rules:

http://www.fspazone.org/players_guide.html

It's far from the full rulebook, but it's what we give players so they understand what's going on. Besides the grouping scheme, the way we assign points is interesting -- it awards losers who "keep it close" as well as winners who have dominating victories.

Actually there were 30 players who completed MMS Spring 2014, and on average, players directly competed against 13.33 opponents, or ~46% of all possible opponents. That seems to me like a pretty decent range of opponents... but I'm biased.

While I did host all the league sites from my personal server for several years, these days we all have to extend thanks to PAPA and pair Networks for donating hosting services for the League Manager system.

Lots of neat new stuff coming to the software for everyone's next season!