[FSPA] League questions - player opinions wanted

[Wei-Hwa Huang]

On Thu, May 9, 2024 at 10:50 AM Dave Hubbard via FSPA <fspa at fspazone.org>
wrote:

> On Thu, May 9, 2024 at 1:06 PM Wei-Hwa Huang via FSPA <fspa at fspazone.org>
> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> I wanted to comment on this part, because the idea of having a tournament
> at the end-of-season party has been floated here already.  I don't think it
> works, because in order to be IFPA sanctioned, you must allow anyone to
> enter if they want to.  This means allowing non-party guests to enter,
> including people who didn't play league and/or aren't part of the FSPA at
> all, which would seem really weird for what is supposed to be a league
> party.
>

The way we got around this is that the tournament at the party *is* the
league playoffs.  As a standalone tournament, you're right, the IFPA won't
sanction it unless you allow anyone to enter. But league playoffs are part
of the league and the IFPA is obviously fine with those being restricted --
in fact, the problem we have is that we are *forced* to be restrictive and
eliminate half of the league members from playing.  So we dealt with that
by having half of the league be in the official IFPA league finals (which
we called "A Division") and the other half be in a non-IFPA tournament
(which we called "B Division").

But in any case, if the majority of your players won't come to a party with
a tournament because that tournament isn't IFPA-sanctioned, that's a
different problem.  About 80% of our players are in it for the
socialization and love of pinball and couldn't care less about whether
they're getting WPPR points or not.

-- 
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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