[FSPA] League questions - player opinions wanted

Wed May 8 12:13:59 EDT 2024

1.  The thrill of an end-of-season party is blunted by having it at a
public location.  Doing so makes it feel like a Chuck E Cheese party but
with adults instead of kids.  I think the idea of a big get-together for
all the area's leagues is a good one, though, and the pinball machine
raffle is also a great and valuable perk.  Having said that, though, If
private homes are no longer on the table, then I think it should either be
scrapped, or more effort should be made to make it more of an *event* with
meaningful competitions and prizes and a reason to go more enticing than
pizza and the same games you can play at that location any time.

2.  The revised league format is a downgrade from the old league format.  6
weeks of ladder competition is inferior to 10 weeks from a
competitive standpoint.  Even worse, the first four weeks are inadequate to
determine a meaningful ladder seed, PARTICULARLY in large leagues --
Carpool, for example, had over 60 people at the start of last season.  That
means that over the four weeks of seeding, a person would only play 12
(maximum) out of those 60 people, or 20% of the league.  This adds a
tremendous amount of RNG to the initial seeding, based on whether you had
to play against say Tim Murren and Chris Newsom or not.  The old format was
better both at initial seeding and at sorting people by skill by the end of
the season.

HOWEVER, having said that, going back to the old format is a total
non-starter.  Doing leagues that don't count for WPPRs would be a
disastrous choice, and should not be on the table.

I wish I had the perfect solution to propose, but after a LOT of discussion
and debate on Discord, it's clear that coming up with an IFPA-compliant
format that a) accurately reflects player skill and b) doesn't just feel
like a matchplay tournament stretched out over 10 weeks, is very, very
hard!  I know some have advocated hard for just kinda giving up on the idea
of a ladder league and just adopting a slow-motion matchplay format.
That'd be a bummer, but it might end up being the least-bad option.  Maybe
somehow we can find some tweaks that make the current format better and
more compliant.  i dunno.  i'm sure i'll still play almost no matter what.
I don't envy the headaches that the FSPA organizers must be enduring
because of all this.

3.  I know this is probably considered a back-burner issue relative to
other more immediately pressing matters, but paper scoresheets and
relying on SLOs to manually enter scores by hand is an archaic,
labor-intensive, and error-prone system that should be targeted for
retirement.  Modern pinball competitions generally rely on phones or
tablets for scorekeeping, and increasingly trust the players themselves to
input their scores and results (especially when those players are in
groups).  The benefits of moving to phone-based score entry would be myriad
and would include things like:
- Centrally-stored photo evidence of each score in case of any dispute or
confusion
- Reduction of the number of times a score is transcribed by a human before
it reaches the database (in the current system, each score is transcribed
through at least two human intermediaries before it reaches the database!)
- Instantaneous or potentially even real-time results.
- Instant re-ordering of groups at league start time based on attendance or
other factors, making leagues MUCH more likely to start on-time.
- No need to bring a printer and laptop to league.  (blank score sheets
could be kept on hand in case of some major technical failure requiring
manual scorekeeping though)

A couple years ago I even wrote a working demo of a phone-based score entry
system for FSPA.  It even had OCR (Optical Character Reading) function that
could automatically read the scores in a photo.  You'd just have to click
on each score in the photo, and then select which player that score
belonged to.  It was pretty neat.  I very briefly demo'd it for a few
people, including Matt Wycoff and Joe Schober.  I'd be happy to offer any
assistance I can in this area, if desired, although I know y'all have
bigger issues at the moment.

Dan

On Wed, May 8, 2024 at 11:27 AM Sergio Johnson via FSPA <fspa at fspazone.org>
wrote:

> Hey folks!
>
> As FSPA continues to evolve, we’re reviewing some long standing
> traditions, new format etc. and interested in getting your feedback on a
> couple things. Love to get your feedback either in this thread or sent to
> me directly if you’re more comfortable with that.
>
> 1) End of season party. This started as an opportunity to see other folks
> collections and get to know people from other leagues. With the growth in
> size of the leagues it no longer became feasible to do at private homes, so
> we’d moved to commercial league locations. However, we’ve noticed that a
> lot of folks don’t take advantage of it now. Is it time to lose the party,
> modify it or continue “as is”?
>
> 2) What did you think of the revised league play format? A lot of the
> changes were driven by IFPA rules to allow our leagues to stay compliant so
> that players could continue to get WPPR player ranking points. Do you think
> the new format was better for you or worse? Keep the new format, modify it
> or consider going back to the old format?
>
> 3) Anything else you would like to bring to the execs attention that would
> improve your league experience or want to make us aware of?
>
> Appreciate all your engagement and feedback, we can’t do this without the
> players so please let us know what you think!
>
> Thanks!
> Sergio
> lostinthezone at gmail.com
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
> _______________________________________________
> FSPA mailing list
> FSPA at fspazone.org
> http://lists.fspazone.org/mailman/listinfo/fspa
>
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