Somebody needs to whip up a web app (or mobile app I guess) to easily do these. Enter player names, start challenge, pick game, record win/loss, select next game, etc. wonder how hard it would be to roll into matchplay.events

I like the challenge stuff. Easy to understand, easy to do.

Is there any thought to raising the number of people in a challenge to 3 or 4, or do we just submit a few pair challenge results?

Pretty easy. We use MatchPlay events for League. Software is great. Saves me multiple heads at league night. Literally saves Eric & I at least a half hour trying to figure out matches and games.

For this it would be just set up a 2 player tournament with best 4 of 7 series I assume.

In the works on our end

I'm definitely open to group play Challenge Matches. We will come up with the official acceptable format, most likely a PAPA style group round of 3 or 4 games (3 game round for 3 player groups, 4 game round for 4 player groups so everyone gets to pick one of the games).

You would then submit the result as first through third or first through fourth place.

Recent discussions at local events here across various groups has shown a lot more resistance to the 2018 plan than I think is represented in Josh's comments. I was actually surprised by how much resistance there is.

Yeah, having around half the players say "F it" will really help grow the sport.

That's precisely why we're excited about our announcement yesterday. We believe we can create something for everyone based on the things we can do with the data being submitted.

The 51% of the players are excited about this plan, and out of the other 49% who aren't we will have to see if we can save any of those people with this secondary system that we will be focusing on next year.

Cool, thanks!

I typically play with two other people, and we just informally see who wins on a few different pins, but this could add a little bit of additional fun to it.

It's a good question. The WPPR is most accurate for players with high participation rates, and specifically for players willing to travel (e.g., PAPA circuit) because the bigger events hand out the most WPPR points as well as drawing the top ranked players so you get apples to apples comparisons when they compete with each other

For everyone else who participate locally in tournaments and leagues, who knows what their WPPR number means. For example, is someone ranked 1500 better than someone ranked 4000? Who knows when the gap between the two has more to do with the number of events attended than actual skill. Also how accurate is a world ranking between local players in Boston and local players in Las Vegas who never compete against each other? It's because of all this the WPPR system is less valuable for most of the competitive players than it is for the top players.

I've proposed to develop a rating system similar to others I'm familiar with. For example Go has 30 levels of amateur ratings, Pool player ratings have between 6-10 levels for amateurs, which are both similar to Chess ELO (which I'm less familiar with). The advantage is that players are rated based on head to head matches, so you can more accurately assign them a rating of skill relative to another player. Those ratings can be used to make tournaments more fair for the players involved. We see something similar with the A-D groupings in big pinball tournaments, but anything beyond the A division is based on an honor system because everyone has to guess where they should be, or want to be... the only enforced restriction forces top ranked players into the A division. Implementing a tiered rating system based on match play would allow enforcement all the way up and down the ladder... but more importantly would let people know where they really stand, FWIW.

My personal ranking has varied between 1100 and 3700 (most recent) but I was a far better player while ranked at 3500+ than I was at 1100. I think it's well accepted that anything beyond a ranking of 1000 holds no significance, which is over 30k players without a useful rating. There is an IFPA rating, different than the ranking, which is probably a more meaningful number for most players, but as it stands my rating and my ranking are nearly identical, as it is simply another way to calculate a world ranking.

I think this problem could and may get solved if people want it, but I think the reason for doing so is tough to come by. Pinball is not as easy as the other competitions to handicap, and as long as most people seem just fine donating money to better players in monthly or annual tournaments, so there is no motivation to fix a possibly non-existent problem. This is why I find it hypocritical to see the complaints of an extra $1 fee for paid tourneys... if you play them, you've been willingly donating many times that amount to the top players, so it's only a slight variation of the same behavior.

I am sorry to read IFPA is having financial difficulties.

If you would submit a business plan with your projected revenues over the next five years,
and projected expected expenses it might help people to understand your financial troubles.

You might consider a Patreon account to find backers to help you survive.

Here is example of a Patreon account

https://www.patreon.com/trnrtips

Appreciate the worry, but we're gonna be okay. We had a $900 loss in 2016 (not the end of the world), and that was mostly due to the timing of when some of the 2017 sponsorship dues came in. Typically we receive those checks between Thansgiving and Christmas so it's recorded in the 2016 calendar year (we run IFPA LLC on cash basis, not enough action to be worth switching to accrual basis). This year enough checks slipped into 2017 that I would anticipate our 2017 revenue will be higher. Of course that all depends on when those 2018 sponsorship dues come on.

As far as posting our business plan to Pinside ... No thanks (no offense to anyone but this isn't the place for that)

I know that this upcoming endorsement fee gives us a kitty of funds that will give us some flexibility going forward. While year 1 we plan on paying that all out 75% state, 25% national, but that isn't locked in permanently.

If we need additional revenue to run the company, I could see us going to 70/20/10 split with the IFPA keeping 10% of those funds for operating costs.

We won't have any problems "surviving" that I'm aware of based on our internal business plan and projections for the future, but I think every company is supposed to say that

Can a TD choose to designate funds towards operating costs?

Assuming we have the sponsorship fees to cover our agenda I see no problem trading out "which dollars are used" towards SCS and which are used towards operating.

Worst case the IFPA can sponsor some of the state pools out of our operating costs to cover that shortfall.

I'm thinking Scott will sleep much better now. It sounded like he was sincerely worried.

Josh, I support these changes, but honestly, I feel like you are indeed already posting your business plan to pinside. Maybe not in actual dollars, but not sure much else has been left to the imagination. I'm sure you're learning from this process and hopefully the future of IFPA will shake out for the best.

Lol yeah I know. I was going with the "overly serious response to a trollish post strategy" from Scott

simplicity wins over complexity every time - sorry but I predict fail on this.

So I have a serious question ... What does "fail" mean? Is competitive pinball ruined? Does IFPA cease to exist after this? What are the consequences the world has to deal with should this "fail"?

fair challenge I think you'll end up having to make it simpler.

but good luck - having run pro events for model car racing its not easy!

Cheers,
Neil

for profit or not for profit??

with the 10% take out for IFPA maybe any leftover funds can go to other events pots maybe even have an us/state open that anyone can enter / have a bigger sate field with an seeded pot.

Love these ideas Joe . . . we'll see where we go down the road.

We are a 'for profit' LLC, but I've dedicated my life to giving back to pinball with the IFPA so we try and pay out as much of our profits as we can, each and every year, keeping a small balance all the time to make sure we have our operating costs covered.

I'm thankful enough to do okay for myself at my 'real job' that the IFPA is a "passion/hobby" style business for me. I don't plan on ever keeping the profits earned in house.

You could do a Kevin Kulik and use the funds to pay FOR a house ....

rd

I actually close on our new house Monday ... Wish I thought of this a year ago!

Didn't pinside's foremost poster accuse Josh of this?

I'm available for financial advice 24/7.

rd

So I finally payed a little attention to this and I have a minor philosophical concern. But let me be objective, competitive pinball is still fun in my town as it's new. We don't do it for money, we play pinball for fun. IFPA points are this magical cool thing that just comes from nowhere and only a few locals are serious about it. I think that what IFPA does is awesome and it can't be done for free and if we charged $1 per tournament entry, or $5/year for membership (insert any number) just to maintain IFPA I'd be deliriously happy with that. But in the IFPA analysis on their site where they state that this is to raise money for prize pools for the very few that can make it to major competitions to compete for big bucks....... I'm not good with that. Its not good for pinball as we are still in the "need to recruit the masses" mode. The fact that the impact analysis had many states where no one was playing IFPA is significant. I'd be totally cool with registration fees etc... but charging fees so the big tournaments can have big cash prizes..... well I can possibly understand that from the perspective from someone living in Chicago, Pennsylvania, or maybe Oregon but those of us out in the wastelands just trying to develop a local pinball culture are still having fun with pinball. This by no means kills the fun, but saying that part of your entry fee goes to support a prize pool that you'll never see is something that I'm not sure people in my local pinball gang is ready to accept and be happy with.

Be advised, I'm the operator of a Stern Army location and I run monthly IFPA events and I'm dealing with nothing but complaints from my locals (i.e. the only people I care about) about how non-fun the IFPA match play events are because all these out of town people show up, slam the machines around, bitch about the tight tilts, bitch about this, bitch about that, break rules then quote rules from some obscure league across the country, bitch bitch bitch, and I let them play for free just to help pinball. I only host them so people can get points, if it's not fun I'm not doing it. Basically, its not fun.

Let me translate that last paragraph. My location is likely cancelling a lot of scheduled IFPA match play events. However, I support a fee to be a member of IFPA. They are providing a service and they should be compensated for it.

Pinball tournaments are like karate tournaments, except without the belts and tons of giant trophies for coming in 3rd out of 3 people in your division. I love coming to your location, Jeff, but I usually stay away during tournaments and busy times. I just don't think tournaments are the way to foster a pinball culture with people these days. As weird as this sounds, you'd probably make almost the same amount of money with half the machines and leave the open gaps between machines so people don't have to worry about getting too close to strangers.

I am in violent agreement with this post. .

<blockbuster cite="#3760997">Pinball tournaments are like karate tournaments, except without the belts and tons of giant trophies for coming in 3rd out of 3 people in your division. I love coming to your location, Jeff, but I usually stay away during tournaments and busy times. I just don't think tournaments are the way to foster a pinball culture with people these days. As weird as this sounds, you'd probably make almost the same amount of money with half the machines and leave the open gaps between machines so people don't have to worry about getting too close to strangers.

More basement space?

DOUBLE!

(I look forward to bitching about being out of room to add more games)

For your specific situation it definitely sounds like running non-sanctioned IFPA events is the way to go next year (or hell even the rest of this year based on the feedback you're posting here). You definitely have the right priorities in mind, which most importantly that everyone should be playing pinball for FUN.

It sounds like it's a very small minority of your audience that cares about IFPA stuff, and that those players are the ones who give your community the biggest trouble. Get rid of the IFPA points, get rid of the problematic players, focus on the fun for those that are there for the right reasons.

how much game room are you going from/to?

Is there something wrong with the IFPA website? Says its unsafe to go to as the security certificate something or other has expired...

edit: ah, it works now, weird.

Old basement I had room for about 22 pins, so of course I had 24 down there (who needs to actually go to the bathroom in the bathroom, that's premium game space).

I haven't done the 'maximum efficiency' basement design yet on the new place, but I should be able to get 40-45.

Gotta host some fundraising tournaments at my place next year to fund that WI SCS prize pool!

Violence will not be tolerated here on pinside.

Skill games still have elements of gambling like that of poker Aside from that it is also gambling for those who dont have the skill level required to get a replay for example, hence they pinball made so much money....

Get your dad to learn poker Josh so that he goto congress and prove its a game of skill thus legalizing it online...

that is not what is holding it up and in NJ and NV you can play online.

I think under WI law you can't do that. Also you are going to have people playing in one state to get cash for an other state pool but the points go to sate 1 with 0 cash to state 1 but cash going to state 2 with out the points?

Jeff,

I'm not sure if you're referring to anything specific with the bitching and rule breaking comments, but I can guarantee you won't have to worry about us giving you any more IFPA points. We legitimately went up there with the intention to help out your event with our points. I felt as though the event was respectful on both sides, and I personally enjoyed hanging out with you and your group very much. I'm sorry you had a bad time with us, but thankfully for you it won't be an issue moving forward. We'll see you in the state finals - oh wait... no we wont.

IMG_4030 (resized).JPG

Jeff, I'm also disappointed in your comments. I too enjoyed playing with your local players and everyone I played with was very nice to me. As you know, we have a small group of locals here in Auburn but we try to support IFPA tournaments when we can by bringing 4-6 players whenever possible. We go to Birmingham and Atlanta a lot and we came to Huntsville as well. The more good players you have, the higher the points that can be achieved. Going forward, if you're receiving that many complaints from your people (the only ones you care about), I think you should take Josh's advice and do away with ifpa points for your events. I believe you have missed the point of hosting an ifpa event.

Keep the comments coming guys, I'm looking for an excuse to cancel the events.

As a complete outsider to this little side discussion, I'm curious: did you expect the people who you accused on a public forum of "bitch, bitch, bitch"ing, to not defend themselves and express their side of the story? For the most part, their responses to your derogatory post were quite tactful and courteous.

It's a shame you're going to cancel events -- that does the most harm to your local pinball scene relative to the harm it may do to out-of-towners that (from the sounds of it) aren't planning on attending anyway due to whatever disagreement they had with you.

Sounds like you have enough support to go ahead and cancel.
What with all the bitching from the people you care about, about the bitching from the people you don't care about.
Add in the bitching about the bitching, about the bitching. Case closed.
Now everyone can quit bitching.

Yes, what you said, I'll just raise the entry fee to $100, all coin drop, no prize pool, and let these tournaments die a natural death.

Edit: IFPA has been contacted, tournaments cancelled

Yes, what you said, I'll just raise the entry fee to $100, all coin drop, no prize pool, and let these tournaments die a natural death.

(contents edited by mod team)

Agree 110%.....

I recently got back in the collecting and playing pinball hobby after a 10 year absence, and also joined a league to play some competitive pinball for the first time in my life about a month ago. The guys and gals in this league have been very warm and friendly, welcoming all the newcomers to the league and have been great to play with and against. They are a diverse group of people, young and old, who genuinely enjoy getting together to play pinball with like-minded enthusiasts, even welcoming and encouraging a young boy and his family into the group so that he can play some pinball while his family watches.

....and yes, it is the same group of people that sandersj is accusing in a highly derogatory manner. I have seen these guys in action in person, and also seen their mostly tactful response to an unprovoked highly inflammatory accusation. Sorry, but I haven't seen ANYTHING that in any way caused these guys to be slandered in such a manner. I haven't seen this type of behavior they are accused of, and I don't see them doing it either based upon my interaction with them.

Based upon the actions that I have seen in person and here in this thread, I know who I will be continuing to play pinball with in the future....

Dude, you're awesome, and proving my point. Thanks!