San Francisco, CA
I have to say that for me, the crack dealer thing worked with pinball. I was randomly at Slingshot Lounge in PDX when there was some random pinball thing going on. The girl at the desk told me it was a pinball tournament and she could tell I was clueless so she said it was $5 for 3 games or whatever price it was. I was like sure, i'll enter. Then I got addicted and have been super into pinball since, so yes, the $3 to be ranked does work. Most people probably don't know it's a thing so pushing that aspect can get new addicts, er, people, into pinball.
As far as the 50% participation, I'm fine with everyone counting b/c of the same thing. We have TONS of guests that come to drop in at league and many get addicted too and the 'being ranked' thing is a plus. I've even seen "Internationally Ranked Pinball Player" on a resume 
Quoted from ifpapinball:This is an interesting one because the argument here pushes us towards the "fully participating" debate that we've had on our Directors forum for pretty much this entire year.
Is it better to simply wipe those players from existence and require some sort of minimal rate of participation (the most popular number thrown around is 50%).
So you can safely go join a league for a night, or play in a tournament knowing that you won't have this 85th place result sitting as a black eye on your resume because you didn't "fully participate".
The bad side of this are the number of players dipping their toe into the competitive pinball water by spending $3 at Pinball Expo to play ONE GAME, knowing they will then become a "World Ranked Pinball Player". My hope is that the rankings is a tool to help bring them into the fold, but with this rule those players would also cease to ever exist in the rankings unless they jumped in with more than a toe dip.
This is one of those crossroads we often run into of 'promotion of the sport' battling 'accuracy of the rankings'.
Quoted from ryanwanger:Take this with a grain of salt, because I haven't played a herb style tournament yet, but is this really a thing? Someone pays $3 to get ranked, plays one game, and then somehow gets hooked on competitive pinball?
I'm rather certain that having "beginner" tournaments, which would be available only to new(ish) players, would do a much better job bringing new people into competitive pinball *even though they wouldn't award WPPR points*.
From my experience running local leagues/tournaments with newbies, pitching WPPR points to someone who hasn't even competed yet is putting the cart before the horse.
Another cool thing with this is that someone told me I played against the Worlds Best Player at that first tourney (whom I had no clue of then, although I did take a photo of him b/c when I asked who was the best person to take a photo of they pointed to him). I mean how many other sports can that happen? Locally we have one World Champ so it's often fun for brand new folks to play 'against' someone of that calibre.
