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London and South East League - Dates??? (and also SW league)

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C&C

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Seeing the threads about the Scottish League first event in Edinburgh this past Sunday (15th Jan), and the Midlands League starting on 22nd Jan, and also from the UK Pinball League website, the Northern League first event was also 15th Jan, I notice that there are still no dates published for the London and South East league. Also no dates yet for the South West.

I can understand that all the dates may not have been arranged yet, so a full schedule may not be available, but would it not at least be possible to publish the dates for the first one or two events, then add others as soon as they are arranged?

I'm sure I'm not alone in having a diary that is starting to get populated for the next few months, and it would be a shame if the dates for the league are not published soon, and several people end up being unable to attend due to other commitments clashing, which could have easily been avoided if given a bit of notice for the league dates?

Does anyone have any idea when the dates are likely to be published?
 
I seem to remember this happening last year too. With London & SE being delayed or the dates not being public till later?

As usual all the locations will be too far a trek for us 🥺
 
With the SE league it’s in Dawn’s hands and she’s not on this forum. You’d be better off email her directly.
For what it’s worth I’ve heard nothing but that’s not unusual for Jan.
 
DanLewell said:
Midlands events aren't *that* far from you are they? You know we would love to see you at the league meets.
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We considered it last year as Midlands seemed to fit us well, but it's still a bit far considering often I'll be at work early the following day. Plus we'd have loved to host at some point 😄

We'll keep beavering away at building East Anglia's scene for now 😄
 
For discussion only - wanted to get thoughts on the SE and London league meets only having 5 games. The other regions seem to have far more on the slate, and it seems to work fine. Queues can be very long with just 5 games to play. Also, with only 5 games, one poor effort gives you little chance to recover.

Do people like it at 5 games or would participants prefer more? I know there's lot of history there and people very much enjoy the chat and catching up with friends no matter the format.
 
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David_Vi said:
I seem to remember this happening last year too. With London & SE being delayed or the dates not being public till later?
🥺
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I seem to recall similar.
johnwhitfield said:
With the SE league it’s in Dawn’s hands and she’s not on this forum. You’d be better off email her directly.
For what it’s worth I’ve heard nothing but that’s not unusual for Jan.
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I have emailed Dawn, and will update the thread with any news.
Jackpot said:
For discussion only - wanted to get thoughts on the SE and London league meets only having 5 games. The other regions seem to have far more on the slate, and it seems to work fine. Queues can be very long with just 5 games to play. Also, with only 5 games, one poor effort gives you little chance to recover.

Do people like it at 5 games or would participants prefer more? I know there's lot of history there and people very much enjoy the chat and catching up with friends no matter the format.
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I totally agree - it's also often a long way to travel just to play 5 competitive games.
As an example, the Midlands league seems to normally play 9.
Most of the people who kindly host the London/SE fixtures have more than 5 pinballs, so I don't think that table availability is the issue.

I've added a question about this in my email to Dawn.
 
I think people would struggle to play much more than 5 games in the time slot.
A lot of the other leagues seem to have <20 players.
I think we’ve been up to the low 40s. That adds a lot of time on. There’s almost always going to be a bottleneck game that holds players up.
 
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I’ve emailed Dawn also re dates and locations. I’ve added that Pinball Republic is available for one (or more?) of the meets. She was looking after her poorly parents so maybe had other things on her mind.
 
C&C said:
..

I seem to recall similar.

I have emailed Dawn, and will update the thread with any news.

I totally agree - it's also often a long way to travel just to play 5 competitive games.
As an example, the Midlands league seems to normally play 9.
Most of the people who kindly host the London/SE fixtures have more than 5 pinballs, so I don't think that table availability is the issue.

I've added a question about this in my email to Dawn.
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Requiring nine pins does make it hard to offer a (new) venue, especially in central/inner London!!!

I'd contacted Dawn to offer our house but, as I didn't hear anything, I've taken the fifth pinball machine (Alien Poker) apart for restoration :(
 
VeeMonroe said:
Requiring nine pins does make it hard to offer a (new) venue, especially in central/inner London!!!

I'd contacted Dawn to offer our house but, as I didn't hear anything, I've taken the fifth pinball machine (Alien Poker) apart for restoration :(
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That's a fair comment, and a very generous offer from you.

As I understand it, I don't think that there is a rule regarding the running of the league that requires all fixtures to have the same number of pins.

For example, looking at the Scottish league last year, there were fixtures with 4, 5, and 6 pins, so generally having more pins at most fixtures wouldn't necessarily preclude having one of the fixtures at a venue with less pins (such as yours). The Midlands fixtures last year had 8, 10, 7, 8, 11, 13 machines.

I think the point raised by Yuen for discussion was more related to there being more pins at many of the places, than were used in the competition.
 
johnwhitfield said:
I think people would struggle to play much more than 5 games in the time slot.
A lot of the other leagues seem to have <20 players.
I think we’ve been up to the low 40s. That adds a lot of time on. There’s almost always going to be a bottleneck game that holds players up.
Click to expand...
Fair enough, and as you have experience of hosting events, you obviosuly are more aware of this than I am.

Although increasing the number of machines would no doubt increase the overall time of the event, it did seem that quite a lot of time spent at events was waiting for one of the competition games to become available, and I guess the thought was that maybe some of that time could have been spent playing another comp machine.

One other thought to add to the discussion: how about we reduce the number of balls in every game?
Again, I don't know the history, but why are they all set to 4 balls?
Surely it's a bit of a pain for the hosts to re-configure their machines, when I assume they are normally set to 3 balls (although I guess they already need some config to turn off extra balls etc..).
However, if they were all set to 3 balls, on average, each game would take 25% less time, which could enable more games to be added?
Personally, I also think that setting them on 4 balls (when all other comps I'm aware of standardise on 3), actually gives the more experienced/better players an additional advantage, as it lessens the impact of an unlucky house ball.

Just my thoughts on it, and as I say, I'm not aware of the history/reasons for 4 balls....
 
I think a lot of it is historical reasons. The first season was before my time but I gather the 4 ball thing was decided on then. Possibly as a way of getting rid of extra balls? I’m not certain who set the whole thing up. Dawn, Martin and others?

My understanding is there is no requirement to have 5 games. The minimum is 3.

It would be great to get different people to host as we tend to keep reusing the same places / games. Space is always an issue though with the potential numbers that can turn up.
 
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Matt Vince said:
It is difficult to change from 4 ball games now with such a long history of scores in the bank to compare on the UK pinball league website
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Ok thanks, very good point! 👍
That kills off the 3 ball idea then! :)
 
Optimal number of games could probably be formulated as number of players divided by four. Assuming every group played four player games of course

If you have less machines than that, then waiting is absolutely guaranteed.

It's far from perfect, because not all groups will be four player. And some groups will play longer games than others. But if you're lucky enough to have more machines than (players/4) then it means players can play in smaller groups, and further reduces the chance of having to wait.

Long story short, yeah I've often wondered why the London/SE league doesn't use more machines. It would drive me bonkers having to wait around like I imagine you guys must be.

Our most recent Northern league meet had 38 players and 14 machines in the comp. 38/14 means the optimal group size would probably have been 3 player groups, but it's not enforced of course. Some will have more, some will have less. The group of three I was playing in got through the whole meet with only one brief wait for a machine.
 
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I'm so glad I'm not in the SE league as like Yuen, I would find it very frustarting travelling and then only playing 5 games where one bad one can klll off your chances whereas in the other regions, more like 8 games are played on average which evens out the luck factor of one bad game dragging you down overall.

I've been part of the league since Eddie Mole took it over (hosted the first ever league meet at my old house in Jan 07 and then took over ran the UK league from 08 to 16 before handing the baton to Wayne) and always found it odd that there were only 5 games ever used for the SE league.

From what i've heard, people spend a lot of time waiting and queuing to play their 5 games when they could be spending the same time playing other league games if the number was increased. I can't see that it would then have a detrimental effect on the overall time taken to complete and this seems to be borne out time and time again in the other regions where more games are played, even up to 13 and league meets do not overrun. I'm sure increasing the number would make the whole day much more enjoyable for everyone and may even speed things up as, if there is a backlog on a particular machine waiting players could play others.

If I were part of the SE region, I would be strongly campaigning for an increase in number of machines played.

The 4 balls was Eddie's idea to provide some compensation for lack of extra balls and seems to have worked well over time.
 
robotgreg said:
From what i've heard, people spend a lot of time waiting and queuing to play their 5 games when they could be spending the same time playing other league games if the number was increased. I can't see that it would then have a detrimental effect on the overall time taken to complete and this seems to be borne out time and time again in the other regions where more games are played, even up to 13 and league meets do not overrun. I'm sure increasing the number would make the whole day much more enjoyable for everyone and may even speed things up as, if there is a backlog on a particular machine waiting players could play others.
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The Midlands League fixture 1 from last year had 8 games, and 34 players.
The Midlands League fixture 6 from last year had 13 games, and 26 players.
The Northern League fixture 1 from last year had 14 games and 29 players.
The Northern League fixture 2 from last year had 13 games and 35 players.
The Northern League fixture 3 from last year had 7 games and 37 players.
The Northern League fixture 4 from last year had 15 games and 32 players.

robotgreg said:
If I were part of the SE region, I would be strongly campaigning for an increase in number of machines played.

The 4 balls was Eddie's idea to provide some compensation for lack of extra balls and seems to have worked well over time.
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Well, I guess that this is part of what this thread is about.

Evidence from the other leagues, and the people that run them stongly seems to suggest that it is eminently possible to have significantly more than 5 games, combined with large numbers of players.

The problem I have is that whilst happy to campaign for more games to be used (where the venue has more games available), who does one campaign to, and how can this be taken forward?

Perhaps @Wayne J as UK League Director/Head person/Senior guy in UK Pinball could advise?
Or is @DanLewell the appropriate person to ask?
 
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C&C said:
Evidence from the other leagues, and the people that run them stongly seems to suggest that it is eminently possible to have significantly more than 5 games, combined with large numbers of players.
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I might be missing something here, but for the league to be ’London’ and the south-east, some of the venues need to be in London.

While I sympathise with the sentiments being expressed here, we live in a relatively cheap area of Zone 3 and have a comparatively large house for inner London and, even if we succeed in building a two-person office block in our back garden (which we plan to do at some point), we will still only have room for about 7 pins total.

When we get the TNA, the vast majority of our pins will be in the more expensive price brackets. And the simple reason is that the cost of any pin is dwarfed by the sheer cost of the land it’s sitting on. Put bluntly, our GZ Prem is a £10k pin sitting on a £20k+ footprint. Space is so much at a premium here that the space under our pins is used, variously, for a dog bed and kids’ toy storage.

There a regular complaint on here that pinball pricing is driving the hobby into being only for the very rich. Expecting someone living in London Zones 1-4 to have space for 8+ games is taking that to extremes!!!!!!
 
VeeMonroe said:
I might be missing something here, but for the league to be ’London’ and the south-east, some of the venues need to be in London.

While I sympathise with the sentiments being expressed here, we live in a relatively cheap area of Zone 3 and have a comparatively large house for inner London and, even if we succeed in building a two-person office block in our back garden (which we plan to do at some point), we will still only have room for about 7 pins total.

When we get the TNA, the vast majority of our pins will be in the more expensive price brackets. And the simple reason is that the cost of any pin is dwarfed by the sheer cost of the land it’s sitting on. Put bluntly, our GZ Prem is a £10k pin sitting on a £20k+ footprint. Space is so much at a premium here that the space under our pins is used, variously, for a dog bed and kids’ toy storage.

There a regular complaint on here that pinball pricing is driving the hobby into being only for the very rich. Expecting someone living in London Zones 1-4 to have space for 8+ games is taking that to extremes!!!!!!
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Please don't get me wrong @VeeMonroe , in no way would I expect all hosts to have lots of games, and fully appreciate that many don't have the space. I live in zone 4, and only have room for 2 pins, so completely understand where you are coming from.

I'm not sure that I made that clear in earlier posts, and would be happy to go to a fixture with less pins, your place being a good example (as @johnwhitfield mentioned earlier, it would be good to get more different people hosting).

The point I'm trying to make is that there are several hosts of these fixtures who are in London, and who do already have significantly more than 5 pins, yet only 5 get played competitively. One obvious example is that one of the hosts is Pinball Republic, yet we turn up at PBR, play 5 games (waiting around for the games to become free), and that is the end of the competitive pinball for the day - maybe 25 minutes or less of competitive pinball for effectively giving up a whole Sunday, in a venue with over 50 pins.
 
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johnwhitfield said:
I think people would struggle to play much more than 5 games in the time slot.

A lot of the other leagues seem to have <20 players.

I think we’ve been up to the low 40s. That adds a lot of time on. There’s almost always going to be a bottleneck game that holds players up.
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The North has around 40 players, The Midlands regularly got over 30 players.

By playing all games you take out the queueing for the 'competition games' it doesn't add any more time, other than with the anomaly of an extremely long playing game such as LotR or SM, which often get dropped anyway.
It means that there is very little queuing for a game to become available and doesn't add any extra time to a meet, with almost every meet being finished around 3hrs after starting.

With the fact that the league component will no longer earn WPPR pts from the IFPA (a discussion for somewhere else) there is a little more freedom in the way leagues are ran with only a few basic rules all regions need to adhere to. There's even scope for more than 6 meetings, if there's the availability of hosts and desire from the players.

Playing 5 games may well be a hangover from when there weren't the same number of hosts with double digit machines, smaller numbers attending or no public venues with machines.

Not every meet has to have copious machines, as that would exclude some of the hosts with smaller collections.

The title of London and SE, does not mean that a meet has to take place in London, it is just an historical geographical title. We could quite easily remove the London part and it wouldn't change anything.
 
C&C said:
Please don't get me wrong @VeeMonroe , in no way would I expect all hosts to have lots of games, and fully appreciate that many don't have the space. I live in zone 4, and only have room for 2 pins, so completely understand where you are coming from.

I'm not sure that I made that clear in earlier posts, and would be happy to go to a fixture with less pins, your place being a good example (as @johnwhitfield mentioned earlier, it would be good to get more different people hosting).

The point I'm trying to make is that there are several hosts of these fixtures who are in London, and who do already have significantly more than 5 pins, yet only 5 get played competitively. One obvious example is that one of the hosts is Pinball Republic, yet we turn up at PBR, play 5 games (waiting around for the games to become free), and that is the end of the competitive pinball for the day - maybe 25 minutes or less of competitive pinball for effectively giving up a whole Sunday, in a venue with over 50 pins.
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Totally agree with you.

Completely understand where you’re coming from with larger venues, as well. We turned up for the PBR London & SE league event last year, which had discount on admission. I was running a disease flare and didn’t enter, but my husband did and he’d managed to play one pin after about an hour. It’s was like queuing at Disney World (or similar), and it seemed very strange to be set up that way because the room is literally full of pinball machines!
 
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The one benefit of large public venues with lots of machines, is that they can host more than meet per season without repetition of games. Last Season Electric Circus hosted 2 meets with 10 different games played at each.
 
johnwhitfield said:
I think people would struggle to play much more than 5 games in the time slot.
A lot of the other leagues seem to have <20 players.
I think we’ve been up to the low 40s. That adds a lot of time on. There’s almost always going to be a bottleneck game that holds players up.
Click to expand...
Yep - I took part in the SE League for the first few seasons …. there were maybe 15-20 max taking part. I even hosted a meet here with a bbq. Even if I still was into league or competitive play I’m not sure me, my small house and games shack could handle 40+ pingonks now 🙃
 
well it depends on what you want. A league that's more focused on the quality of the tea bags than the pinball? or a league that's focused on pushing competitive play? We barely have the first but with the IFPA changes (which I support) the league is literally now only about the quality of the tea bags.

The league needs completely revamped and aligned to be consistent and more valuable for players across the country and have finals in a place where it can be properly done with a serious pinball approach rather than squeezed in to Dysentery err Daventary . Don't get me wrong, if you want the teabag league that's cool have one, but when folks outside of the UK ask me about what we do for regional and nationals they can't believe what a ****show it is, its actually embarrassing. Matt makes a point about the stats but they are a nonsense also because you can't compare one region with another given the different local rules, and 4 balls?! really what are we that bad?!

So those keen on the teabag league, please move over and let us run a proper competitive local feed to national finals platform that can put us on the map of pinball rather than on the highest number of claimed discount vouchers for PG Tips.

The UK league should be the primary glory vehicle for epic UK pinball play.

Watch this weekend on Twitch with the US Regional Finals across 20 odd streamers that feed the US state finals and dream that we could have something so cool.
 
Neil McRae said:
So those keen on the teabag league, please move over and let us run a proper competitive local feed to national finals platform that can put us on the map of pinball rather than on the highest number of claimed discount vouchers for PG Tips.
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Nice one to dismiss all those people, past and present that have hosted the League around the country. What you seem to forget is that a LOT of those that have in the past have cut their teeth in the National Leagues....

Not all areas have big venues like yours, and have the luxury of having the possability to play 5/7 nights a week.

I get we should be looking at the Cream of the crop to be able to compete on a world stage, however those people come from somewhere, and thats the whole "having Fun" part of it.

Sounds like (in my head) Pre-talks by the FA and the Prem league.. Even the FA have Grass roots football.. So lets not "just Dismiss" those that cannot hit a ball - those are potentially tomorrows champions..
 
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