Quoted from ifpapinball:

The fact that ALL your players have played the same amount of games is all the evidence we would need to count all 7.
A more exploitable way would be to select 2 players out of your bunch, and have them play some random separate best of 11 match to add to the game count.
Those are the kind of things we're trying to stop, because it's something we're seeing far more often in the first 3 months then we were expecting.

Quoted from Frax:

Well, then that answered if I run a league this year if it will be IFPA or not. I'm not going to claw and fight and drag these people that barely want to participate in the first place into the system when they're not worth anything until they've already been playing competitively for a year or longer in some cases.

Quoted from Law:

I wouldn't think that's the case, but I may be wrong. In my area there are several upper-tier players that don't generally participate in leagues (from what I've seen, I have only been actively part of that scene for six months or so), at least in part because it's not worth the time or effort compared to a higher-valued tournament on a single day or weekend. I definitely get that. Whatever the IFPA can do to incentivize these players to participate in area leagues (of any size) would be great.
This is tough- how do you incentivize new people as well as the "vets"? WPPR and maybe ephemeral pinball street cred is probably the only thing that's going to convince an upper-tier player to participate in a multi-week or multi-month league. The more advanced players are also going to be harsher on format and ask more of the organizers. Out of the IFPA top 100, how many participate in a weekly league?

Quoted from movingpictures:

FYI: Trying to submit results and getting this error:
Error establishing a database connection

Quoted from epotech:

Ludicrous situation where players had lost after 3 games but still had to carry on playing.

Quoted from Baiter:

particularly if there are 25 meaningful games played each league night?

Quoted from Baiter:

If "meaningful game" is per person, then yes, it would take 5 league weeks to make 25 (5 games, 4 players per game/match each week)

Quoted from Xerico:

If the 32 player double elimination is a single game, then I believe it is 14 significant games.
5 rounds of undefeated players playing heads up -- 5 Significant games
7 rounds of 1-loss players playing heads up - 7 Significant games
2 possible final games to crown a champion - 2 Significant game
Round 1 - 32 players - 16 matches - 1 significant game (1 significant game total)
Round 2W - 16 players - 8 matches - 1 significant game (2 significant games total)
Round 2L - 16 players - 8 matches - 1 significant game (3 significant games total)
Round 3W - 8 players - 4 matches - 1 significant game (4 significant games total)
Round 3L - 16 players - 8 matches 1 significant game (5 significant games total)
Round 4W - 4 players - 2 matches - 1 significant game (6 significant games total)
Round 4L - 12 players - 6 matches - 1 significant game (7 significant games total)
Round 5L - 8 players - 4 matches - 1 significant game (8 significant games total)
Round 6L - 4 players - 2 matches - 1 significant game (9 significant games total)
Round 7W - 2 players - 1 significant game (10 significant games total)
Round 7L - 2 players - 1 match - 1 significant game (11 significant games total)
Round 8L - 2 players - 1 match - 1 significant game (12 significant games total)
Round 9W - 2 players - 1 match - 1 significant game (13 significant games total)
TIE BREAKER (if needed) - 2 players - 1 significant game (14 significant games total)
If every round takes 30 minutes, you are looking at 5 hours of play (with zero breaks)
Marcus

Quoted from dbellAZ:

If 32 people played 7 games each, that's 224 games played. If they did one-game double elimination matches, they'd play at most 63 games games, so less then a third as many

Quoted from TomGWI:

3 STRIKES:
2 players: 5 rounds
3-4 players: 8 rounds
5-8 players: 11 rounds
9-16 players: 14 rounds
17-32 players: 17 rounds
33-64 players: 20 rounds
65-128 players: 23 rounds
129-256 players: 26 rounds

Quoted from ifpapinball:

Personally I have no freaking idea
I know that we got some help from Bowen and from Isaac at Brackelope with respect to the longest path. The biggest problem with the strikes format is that the longest path is literally such a long shot of actually happening that it does end up giving out a bunch of free unplayed rounds.
Here were some of Isaac's notes, but I'm not sure what they mean:
r = remaining players
r = p
roundCount = strikes + 1
while( r > 1) {
r = ceil( r / 2 )
roundCount++}
Perhaps Isaac or Bowen can chime in with how the math works.
The problem with counting the number of actual rounds played is that you get into a situation where it's in a player's best interest to intentionally lose a match or two at the end, strictly for increasing the TGP value by adding in those additional actual rounds played.
The proposals that we're looking into are either:
A) Determining an average number of rounds for each strike, for each player count and going with that - this would be through having the Brackelope guys run 1,000,000+ simulations at various player counts and just picking that number
B) Using the actual number of rounds played + however many strikes the winner has leftover. This helps to solve the problem of someone looking to lose intentionally to increase the number of rounds.
There's a similar issue with bracket tournaments when a 9th player adds a 4th round of play, versus only 3 rounds of play for 8 players. The chances of that 4th round of play being 'meaningful' is only 2 out of 9 (I think) assuming the eventual winner of the tournament was the 8th or 9th seed that had to play that extra round. I'm interested in cleaning this up a bit too to help spread the value between say a 9 player bracket and a 16 player bracket where there's a 100% chance the winner plays 4 rounds in a 16 player field, but only a 22% chance the winner plays 4 rounds in a 9 player field.
This is all 2016 stuff that we'll spend the rest of the year analyzing.

Quoted from monty-:

for the record it was a 42 player tournament, 3 Strikes, Best 2/3. we played 14 rounds vs 20 as dictated by the TGP guidelines.

Quoted from ifpapinball:

The other thing we will be considering is the value of a 3-player or 4-player game played (Match play style) as it compares to head to head games, or single games played. There's a similar issue with time depending on the number of machines available where we don't want to see PAPA style finals go away because those 4 player games take longer than a head-to-head match, but are valued the same as the single piece of game data that it is.

Quoted from ifpapinball:

Have you been copying and pasting from the private IFPA Country Directors forum?
The other piece of the puzzle is how qualifying games or games where you aren't playing anyone directly, and whether those should be less meaningful.
That would help promote events where you are directly playing other opponents, and limit the ability for tournaments to rack up games played where everyone simply 'plays every machine once' sort of thing.
We have almost 9 months to figure out our next steps, but I imagine something in the neighborhood of what you're talking about will be the direction we end up taking.
Those that are not happy with us continuing to tweaks things as the years roll on . . . be prepared to continue to be miserable

Quoted from monty-:

not sure if that was a sarcastic remark, but it took an entire day - ~8 hours with ample break time. there aren't many large tournament events in Canada so i have quite a few out-of-towners. nobody wants to fly in or drive 4-6 hours only to get knocked out quickly. players want a full day event. maybe that's not your thing.
utilization/efficiency is maximized given it's on location at a barcade with 20 pins. there is not a lot of waiting around.
it's a long day but the format certainly shows that the cream rises to the top...