Time is ABSOLUTELY a road block to value, because it takes more time to play more games to increase you grade. This is help keep the balance of the weeknight events that are designed to last a couple of hours. There's only so many games you can play in a couple of hours, so they will organically grade out lower.

The metric for unlimited qualifying is only for UNLIMITED attempts (your example of playing 3 on each game is LIMITED attempts) so there would be no time metric evaluated. This would grade out to 100% (40 games X 4% each would eclipse the max).

Let's assume you have 40 games, and you simply tell everyone, play as much as you would like for 8 hours! We'll take your best score on each one.

Here's how the time component factors in:
The grading is broke up to 20% time based, 80% games played based
Every hour of open qualifying adds 1%, and every game played still adds 4%

So for this example you would have:
8 hours of unlimited qualifying - 8%
40 games played - 80% max
Total grade = 88%

The unlimited actually grades out less because it's basically impossible to get players to play 3 attempts on 40 games (120 games played) in less than 8 hours. You would need something along the lines of 30+ hours to make that happen, especially with games in multiple locations.

cool. Epic WI bar crawl 2015

I see several DNF's on the horizon, especially if the bars have a good selection.

Are the TVA formulas changing? Just playing with numbers. Also, can the TVA for individual players be negative? So if you have a few players that add a minor abount of TVA, but is negated by a lot of players who don't rank/rate high enough to bring a positive value.

I said thanks?

I might just let the guys organize a league and let them figure it out on their own... if they want to do it on location and pay to play, great, if not that's fine too... but running a tournament is a LOT of work, hats off to people that do it (seriously)

TVA numbers are not changing, and the distribution of WPPR points aren't changing.

We only like changing one major variable at a time, just in case things go to complete chaos and we have to revert back to v4.0.

This v5.0 change strictly deals with base value, and the grading of that value.

Also, can the TVA for individual players be negative? So if you have a few players that add a minor abount of TVA, but is negated by a lot of players who don't rank/rate high enough to bring a positive value.

Anytime I can help get a business to stop losing money, I think that's a good thing

I would absolutely let the players figure it out. We do that with all of our tournaments in Chicago, and have had some of the locations offer to give us free games, and I've said NO WAY. Make us pay to play, because that's what we're there to do . . . help increase the earnings of the machines through competitive play.

TVA is a positive-only thing. Adding more players to a tournament doesn't make it easier to win . . . it may not make it 'much more difficult', but it will never make it easier.

Thanks for all the hard work and continueed tweaking to stuff Josh!

I liked to do it free play since I know most of the people that participate... (everything past the first buy in was 100% towards the pot)

I personally do not participate in tournaments but I respect the people that organize them (a lot) and play in them

Dear OP,

If you ever start another thread about pinball machines in tournaments please send me a PM. I thought it was an interesting topic and was interested in learning more about it.

P.S. You may want to change the topic.

Seriously, It sounds like these changes are being well thought out and discussed. I have not yet participated in a sanctioned tournament but I'm glad the number cruncher s are out there doing their best to make sure everything is as fair as can be. I do think that what qualifies a pinball machine to be included in the larger tournaments is an interesting topic and hope it also gets covered with the same level of interest and detail.

Absolutely. My local place provides for a venue to play games, there are two people who actually hold the event. One guy started doing monthlies and runs the event, or at least is the go-to for decisions on that night.

I started a league. We do coin drop only on location and are there during normal business hours, but I chose to hold things in less busy times. Just being there and having a computer screen showing the points and how players are doing (we use the scottdanesi.com one) has brought in 3 players into the league.

Players are happy to have a place to play and given the chance to take on the organizing, a few will do it. I'm really glad I did. Just another reason to get out and play, meet up with friends, and make new ones.

Agreed. I just wanted to make sure.

Aw maaaan, you guys are killing me here.. I was going to take a break from league for a while, but I might have to stay in it now.

I might have missed it, but how is TVA calculated?

That information is available here (already in the current formula):

http://www.ifpapinball.com/ranking-info

Here is the verbiage from the section on the Tournament Value Adjustment (TVA):

Tournament Value Adjustment

As we mentioned earlier there are two strength indicators that we use to determine the TVA for an event. This includes a TVA based on player RATING, and a TVA based on player RANKING. These values are added to the base value of an event to determine the 1st place WPPR point value for that tournament. The TVA takes into account the best 64 players participating in a tournament for each strength indicator. For the RATING strength indicator, the top 64 RATED players are taken into account. For the RANKING strength indicator, the top 64 RANKED players are taken into account.

RATING FORMULA

The TVA based on RATING can be worth up to 50 additional WPPR points for a tournament. The formula used to determine the WPPR value that each player adds to the pot is:

(RATING * .00109375) – 1.40625

We consider a 'perfect' player to be rated 2000, so based on the formula that player would add .78 WPPR points to the value of the tournament. 64 players with a rating of 2000 would amount to a 50 WPPR point increase for that tournament. Any player with a rating of 1285.71 or less will have no impact on the strength of the tournament.

RANKING FORMULA

The TVA based on RANKING can be worth up to 25 additional WPPR points for a tournament. The formula used to determine the WPPR value that each player adds to the pot is:

[ln(RANKING) * -.105837527) + .729913984

We consider a 'perfect' tournament to include the top 64 ranked players in the world participating. Based on the formula the #1 ranked player in the world would add .73 WPPR points to the pot, the #2 ranked player in the world would add .66 WPPR points to the pot, etc. In total the top 64 ranked players would equal an additional 25 WPPR points in value for the tournament.

Does this mean WPPR points will now be awarded for tournaments where players select what division they enter? ie PAPA World Championships B and C divisions?

Damn there was some serious Dragon action going down at Pinbowl last weekend. Not gonna lie, some people weren't to happy aboot it.

Nope. A tournament still can't restrict players from competing based on age/skill/gender/etc. and expect to be endorsed by the IFPA.

All the rules being implemented for WPPR v5.0 are only for IFPA endorsed tournaments/leagues.

Taking the last 403 Club monthly as an example:

http://challonge.com/403clubsat33

18 players, best two out of three, double elimination.

I managed to win it in seven rounds, playing a total of 16 games, but it could have been as many as 21 games in those seven rounds. I could have won in six rounds while playing as few as 14 games (out of 18 possible) If Taylor had managed to come all the way back through the losers bracket to win the event she would have competed in ten rounds and as many as 30 games. Also, Jason (and many others) had a bye the first round and could have won the event in five rounds, playing as few as ten games and as many as fifteen.

What would be the correct number of games to be reported for this event?

I've heard the latest software update from Stern is supposed to remedy that.

Phil - We look at 'longest path' when it comes to the games played count, so there's no opportunities for a player to intentionally lose and prolong a match in order to increase the value of the tournament.

Here is how the value would breakdown for that 403 Club monthly:

18 players = 9 point base value
TVA = 3.20 points (from the current IFPA results page)
Total Gross Value = 12.20

Grading percentage = 30 games played [longest path for an 18 player, 2 out of 3, double elim tournament is 10 rounds at 3 games played per round]. This grades out to 100%.

Monthly winner would get 12.20 WPPR points (compared to 4.02 awarded based on the current system).

The only difference is every month would be listed separately on your resume, compared to this year where you have earned 19.74 points based on the cumulative total of all the months you've played in.

Ok thanks, I was just curious.

Thanks a lot for your patience in explaining the new scoring. I have it figured out now : 64 or more players playing at least 25 games for the path to victory. Additional points for having the higher ranked/rated players at the event.

An event with the top sixteen players in the world playing a single game, single elimination bracket would be worth only 4.29 points for the winner but an event with sixteen first time players playing a best of seven, single elimination bracket would be worth 8.0 points for the winner.

The days of 38.9 WPPR points being awarded in a three man event will soon be ending:
http://www.ifpapinball.com/view_tournament.php?t=1536#results

Bingo! The days of any 3-person event being worth anything of substance will long be over.

Hi Josh, I wonder if you could break down our last MCPL season to see how it would score under the new rules. We had 25 players who stayed to the end of a ten week season, plus finals night. We play 4 games/night and 5 games on finals night for a total of 45 games played. Last season I won and earned 9.37 points. Thanks!

No problem Chris . . .

25 players = 12.5 base points
TVA = 3.10 points
Total Gross Value = 15.40 points
As with most leagues a total of 45 games played over the 10 weeks + finals is awesome, and will definitely grade out to 100%.

This puts the winner of the league season at 15.40 WPPR points per season, no matter how many seasons you guys run in a year. This is compared to 9.37 WPPR points won under the current system, a 64% increase.

Thanks!

Geez, how could this tournament have passed? I mean, I'm from a country with 202 players ranked (more likely 100+ active once/twice a year), organizing tournaments with 20 [+/-5] players and I almost feel guilty (when submitting) that I only motivated 20% (or listed 10%) to participate.
Compared to Germany with 10x more inhabitants we have twice as much (they only have 996 players)

But 3 guys? And 2nd and 3rd place ex aequo? That just sucks!

See, I'm fairly new to competive pinball. Some 18 months... But what we do here in Austria is engage people to take part, meet others, tell them that pinball is still alive. For example: On 9th of August I'll be showing off my 'pinball skills' in the annual city festival to 10.000+ visitors just to let them know that there are pinheads out there... And to help a local barcade to attract more customers... Just for the fun of it. And to help to get pinball recognized (again) by a wide audience....

Well, just my two cents...

On topic: StarGod (ZZZ) and FutureSpa are excellent tournament machines! Risk/Reward is obvious... Nobody ever complained when I used them in the finals

There is one danger here with WPPR5.0. The data tracking commitment. This is what doomed PARS even though it was a mathematically fair system. It was difficult to keep track of individual match outcomes. Rather than just providing who won and lost, the tournament director needed to also provide the win-loss record. Furthermore, it was tedious to enter all of these win-loss results even when they were provided since there were so many to enter into the system. The end result was a system which failed because of the large queue of unentered results and the large number of situations where win-loss records either were unknown or too exhausting to obtain by continuous requests for this information from each and every tournament director who failed to provide this information.

Enter the original WPPR system: easy to implement and the tournament director just needed to provide the finishing position of each player. Kaboom!! Pinball is now running on all cylinders because of this genius system, tournaments are everywhere and it is now starting to cascade into increasing pinball locations in most large metro areas. But now the pendulum swings toward an attribute (data minutia) which has been incontrovertibly demonstrated historically by PARS not to work as described above. I just hope this does not undo all the IFPA's hard and magnificent work.

I totally get that it is desirable to reduce backyard tournament point inflation and increase accuracy. So I guess there has been a shift in philosophy towards accuracy, rather than the original primary goal of increasing the popularity of competitive pinball which the earlier system addressed perfectly. Time will tell if this adjustment gives the worst of both worlds since tournament directors might just submit results the way they always submit them and get the low point treatment of the new system even though the tournament might have a lot of great players involved, thereby not only impeding popularity but also accuracy.

PARS failed because the submission system was awful. If it was automated by the DTM software, which didn't exist at the time, PARS could have been twice as complex and fully functional. If WPPR 5.0 streamlines the bottleneck of entering data, it will be a big improvement in many ways.

Entering one tournament for PARS required many, many lines of data in a very specific format all submitted as a text file. Something as simple as a typo could cause big headaches. WPPR 5.0 is a web-submission form, and from what I've seen, it doesn't even come close in complexity. Coming from someone who has seen the backend of both systems, the two don't compare with regard to simplicity.

PS... applause for brian

huh? why do you bring up individual results? you just need the format and the players and outcome. The only thing 'new' is outlining the format.. which is the same for everyone.

As a comparison to having to now keep track of # of games played and time spent from beginning to end. I'm just saying that the more metrics (individual records was the stat drag in PARS), the less likely you will be to get accurate submissions (which is the whole point of WPPR5.0).

Great, so I guess we'll be seeing a resurgence of PARS.
Regardless, having to keep track of individual records (versus just whether a player advanced) doesn't change regardless of the interface; and it was a big factor.

I'm hoping the new system is a big success. It's got some big shoes to fill, made by its predecessor.

I just used the new results submission form and it was great. Clear instructions on how to format the player list, and the preview window was really nice. Bravo.

Rather than this simply being a shift towards trying to get things more accurate, we have run into problems with motivating people to run more tournaments under the current system.

Due to the way that we combine tournaments and split values during the course of a calendar year, organizers have started becoming motivated to NOT run additional events, for fear of having to split points with an event they ran prior. This had a huge impact on me, and ultimately pushed me in the direction of needing to create a system that always motivated organizers to run as many tournaments as they wanted without fear of reducing the points awarded at any prior event.

The data collection process for organizers isn't nearly as complicated as you may fear. Back in the 2009 release of WPPR v3.0, which I know you were around for, that's when we started distributing WPPR points for all players. The biggest problem was that many tournaments only kept track of the top 16 standings (by paper), and when results were submitted we were forced to give 16th place "last place", even though we knew 100+ players participated (I'm looking at you Pinball Expo). That was by far the hardest task of making sure organizers kept FULL results of all participants, and over time they adjusted (or faced the WPPR consequences, and heat from the players that suffered from it).

Most recently the biggest changes to the WPPR system that have required an increased workload has nothing to do with the system, and everything to do with calendar/result submissions. Since baby #2 has arrived in the Sharpe household, I've simply had no time to put in the ~20 hours required per week to upload the 40 new results we get, 40 new calendar submissions we get, update player profiles, and answer all the questions in the IFPA inbox, etc. We just released our online interface where tournament directors are now responsible for submitting their calendar entry, and then submitting their results directly through our website. I can now approve 40 results in a couple of hours, rather than taking 10+ hours to do it.

The additional workload required for a tournament director to share their format with us is all that will be requested. Since many of the formats have a known amount of games played, I don't anticipate too much trouble. For example an 8 person single elimination bracket, single game matches is 3 rounds of 1 game each . . . so game count = 3, done.

Hope to see you back on the battlefield at some point

Time spent from beginning to end isn't really the issue.

Time is only a metric for a tournament that uses a format that involves UNLIMITED qualifying attempts. Every other style of tournament and length of time is irrelevant. If we do need the time metric, it's simply the number of hours of open qualifying that is used. We hope that most tournaments have a pre-set schedule of the hours of qualifying, so it should be a super easy metric to count.

For example, I can jump on the PAPA site right now, and check out the PAPA 17 schedule:
A division - 12 hours Thursday, 15 hours Friday, and I can stop counting because we're already over 20 hours
Classics divisions - 8 hours worth of qualifying, so this will add 8% to the eventual grading percentage of the event

As for keeping track of games played, it's equally easy because we always use 'longest path' through any tournament format. This allows us to predetermine many of the game counts simply based on the number of participants involved in the playoffs. Tournament organizers won't have to individually track how many games each player played, and then make sure the eventual winner's count is the number that is submitted. Every bracket will assume the lowest seed advancing through the tournament, using the maximum number of games played in every round they could possibly play.

Is there a chance for tournament directors to submit results that aren't accurate? Of course, and they will see their value reflected in that. Similar to the issues with WPPR v3.0 we hope that over time organizers will get used to the changes. If they are consistently running the same format, it should also become easier to know exactly what the game count will be long before the tournament even takes place (PAPA = 5 qualifying games + 9 finals games for example . . . plus the 20+ hours of qualifying, and I can already tell you PAPA will grade out to 76% for A division).

Interesting that PAPA A division will not grade out to 100%. However, it should still be worth big points due to the TVA, considering the level of players involved, correct? Any guess as to what the grading percentage would be for Classics?

I would think that tournament directors would effort to receive the 100% grade out for their event. Will PAPA shift to five games each round in the finals to pick up those extra six games played for maximum points?

I believe it will be almost identical, at 4% less "grade" than A Div:
- Each Classics has 12 less qualifying hours (than the lax of 20 allowed), so 12% less.
- and 4-pin ticket, so 4% less. (Cum. 16% less)
- but with 24 qualifying (top 8 bye), there is one more round of 3 games (12% more)

Net = 4% less than A Div.

Keep in mind A Div gets 50% WPPR bump for a Major status -- Classics will not.

Definitely still big points . . . here's how last year would grade out for PAPA A, and Classics:

PAPA 16 A
81 players = 32 base points
TVA = 50.65 points
Gross Total Value = 82.65 points
Grading percentage = 76%
Net Total Value = 62.81 points
Major Championship multiplier (1.5X) = 94.22

PAPA 16 Classics 1
145 players = 32 base points
TVA = 53.89 points
Gross Total Value = 85.69
Grading percentage = 59%
Net Total Value = 50.68 points

Yes Classics for PAPA 17 would grade out higher because of the extra round played due to the increase in the number of qualifiers to 24 players.

8 hours + 4 qualifying games + 12 finals games = 72%

This is the biggest shift with WPPR v5.0, and puts all the power in the hands of the tournament directors to grade out to whatever they want (knowing full well that it will take more effort on their part to increase that grading).

Before there was no additional value benefit given to those tournament directors that worked harder to make their tournament a better test of skill for the competitors involved . . . now there is.

No, but this will likely be the last year of only 16 qualifiers, but that's not really related to WPPR 5.0 so much as it's where we've been heading for a few events now.

Div C this year will already be 24 qualifiers.

Bravo.

It's going to be very interesting to see how all of this changes the competitive pinball landscape, the good and the bad.

This seems somewhat contradictory with limiting residential tournaments to one per year. I think a lot of people would love to see that limit lifted to 3 or 4, which would still accomplish the goal of preventing people from farming points. It seems like most people really like the changes overall except this one point, hopefully there is some room for compromise.

We're likely to not limit residential tournaments, but instead require a minimum player count of 16 players for it to be endorsed by the IFPA.

This would allow us to mitigate the risk of nightly family & friends tournaments having a huge impact on the SCS for various states, while still giving a larger group of dedicated players (16 being 'larger') a chance to be rewarded for their efforts of organizing and playing in an event, even if that event happens to be at a residence.

This will of course be closely monitored during the year, and like most things, if we see an area of exploitation start to develop, we may have to re-evaluate our plans.

That is great news, thank you.

Shouldn't PAPA have 12 finals games, not 9? Based on your "longest path" metric you should include a tiebreaking game at each phase.

I wonder if 'shortest path' rather than 'longest path' is both more auditable and also encourages better tournaments. I feel like you could very easily design something complicated that exploits the longest path metric.

True, but I believe longest path is used so that players don't exploit the outcomes of games to make a tourney worth more.