Totally didn't see this thread, I was busy typing and editing while this was posted. I very much agree with Tsskinne's take on things. I posted my impressions here:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/official-2015-texas-pinball-festival-thread/page/19#post-2348146

That's part of the problem with the TPF format this year. Even if you managed to get top ten on one day, you had to come back the next day and replay the entire bank (at $2.50 a game) to qualify. If you were *really* good and made top five you STILL had to play the whole bank the next day if you wanted to protect your guaranteed entry seed position.

Basically, you were required to pay and play everything twice, no matter how good you were the first time around. Besides the money, the time waiting in line and playing games that you know are just "filler" or obligatory while there are hundreds of other games out there to play for free is not fun.

Qualifier information is available here:

http://pinballtourneys.com/TPF2015/

It doesn't look like the brackets were actually used though. I believe there were some format changes due to time constraints.

Very much this. I stopped participating because it felt like to do so was just paying my way into a better position to rake in all the points. It didn't feel like it was about playing pinball well or battling it out on a fair playing field or having fun.

Those are my feelings. I'm sure that the people that took home trophies and points very much deserved them and are excellent players. I would have liked to play some games with them outside of the tournament area.

Me too! Thank you so much Ed, the show was fantastic. My wife and I enjoyed the hell out of it.

That information should be mostly available on the pinballtourneys web site, although a pain to sift through as-is.

Edit: looking at my own entries I can see how things got sketchy pretty quickly. Two lines:

Title Tourney Score Points Time
Pirates Of The Caribbean Texas ShootOut Friday 17,885,850 67 17:57:51
Pirates Of The Caribbean Texas ShootOut Friday 17,885,850 58 17:57:53

How are those two entries 11 places apart? Also obviously an entry error.

Thanks Marcus!

I think you know my feelings on the tournaments this past weekend. I really appreciate your responsiveness and hope things will be better next year - these sound like very positive changes. Is this the plan for the Houston Expo this fall as well?

On another note, it seems like it wouldn't be too hard to simulate a large tournament via a bunch of automated entries to see how the software can handle it. Is that something that's possible with the current software?

I think Marcus' intention is that it should be easier to get a guaranteed spot in the tournament on a single day. This is the reason for expanding the top 5 to the top 16.

This doesn't address the issue with seeding being based on both days, but it's something.

I like this idea as well, the only issues I see are the aforementioned "significant games" as well as the possibility that people hold off playing until the last minute just so they can assess the group of 16 that they could be playing against. I guess it's all strategy at the end of the day, but I could see that being a thing that causes issues towards the end of the day.

Coast 2 Coast just put out a really nice discussion of both PAPA and the TPF from a tournament organization standpoint. There are a lot of good ideas there about examining the target audience and thinking about how we're trying to further pinball as a whole. Good stuff!

http://www.podcastgarden.com/episode/episode-152-all-the-wpprtunities-or-lets-go-sharpeshooting_44049