[FSPA] League questions - player opinions wanted

[Wei-Hwa Huang]

Hi Sergio,

I'm delurking because these touch upon topics I've been wrestling with even
though I haven't played in FSPA for the better part of two decades.  The
league I'm running now, the Bay Area Pinball Association (BAPA), is having
similar struggles with striking a balance between the desire to keep things
fun, the desire to keep some traditions alive, and the desire to have
things conform to the constraints that IFPA requires for world ranking
consideration.

I presume the recent change in format is because someone realized that the
traditional ladder format gave certain players an advantage or disadvantage
for qualifying, based purely on initial seeding?

Over in BAPA we don't have that issue because our "ladder" has a much wider
range of movement -- a player could jump all the way from the bottom to the
top.  You probably don't want to use our system (honestly I like the
traditional FSPA system better) but maybe something that allows group
movements of 2-3 might be more acceptable than the initial random seed.

Our issue has been that our playoffs have traditionally been for the whole
league, and IFPA requires playoffs to eliminate half the players. So we had
two divisions for a few years, until we ran into a different issue when our
scheduler scheduled the playoffs the same day as a big regional tournament.
A bunch of top players complained that they would have to ditch our
playoffs and in response we just made our playoffs not be IFPA-sanctioned,
which caused other problems ... yikes.

One thing that we do that you could consider, though, is that our playoffs
is also our end-of-season party.  We use a system (I devised) called Swiss
Elimination, which keeps people playing in the tournament longer even when
they've been eliminated from first-place consideration. If you are having
problems with party attendance, having tournaments in conjunction with it
could be a way to get that interest back. Especially if that tournament is
IFPA-eligible.  Right now our playoffs are not IFPA-eligible, but we still
give out trophies and awards based on those.

We also recently moved towards a two-tier structure for dues: one price for
those who attend the party/playoffs and one price for those who don't.  The
actual implementation is that everyone pays the full price up front and you
get a rebate if you don't show up to the party/playoffs.


On Wed, May 8, 2024 at 8:28 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
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> FSPA at fspazone.org
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>


-- 
Wei-Hwa Huang, onigame at gmail.com
-----------------------------------------------------------
Mad scientists are often wrongfully accused of using science for evil.
We're using evil for science; that's totally different!
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